The August 26 bombing by the Islamic State Khorasan province outside Kabul airport that killed nearly 200 Afghans and 13 Americans, at a time when the US was scrambling to evacuate its citizens from Afghanistan, was a tragic end of all. There was evidence that went wrong in America’s war on terrorism. . After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban regime. Twenty years later, when the US pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban, which had never completely severed its ties with al-Qaeda, was back in power in Kabul and the country as the Islamic State’s new base. I was emerging.
US President Joe Biden has said that the war on terrorism will continue. But America’s options are limited. It has lost its base in Afghanistan. Its alliance with Pakistan, which goes back to the Cold War, is over. Afghanistan’s neighboring countries have refused to host the US base. This will have an impact on intelligence activities. If the US wants to launch a drone strike in Afghanistan (which is not an effective counter-terrorism strategy anyway), it will have to fly machines from the Gulf based on intelligence gathered from afar. If the US could not defeat terrorism after two decades of fighting with Pakistan in Afghanistan, how would it fight bases in the Gulf in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?
regime change war
After the 9/11 attacks, the US saw a flood of global support and sympathy. There was a legal and moral argument in favor of its military action against al-Qaeda. But the fundamental problem with the US-initiated war was that it was not strategically focused on defeating al-Qaeda. Instead, America, inspired by the Bush administration’s neo-conservative pride, launched a regime change war to rebuild the Muslim world. President Biden now says the US went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda. But the ground reality tells a different story. In 2001, the US toppled the Taliban regime and destroyed an al-Qaeda base in Afghanistan. But instead of going after the al-Qaeda network, the US launched the next regime change war in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq, based on false intelligence or falsehoods that President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, not only focused US attention in Afghanistan, but also created conditions inside Iraq for al-Qaeda, which Afghanistan was forced to retreat. Establish a new branch. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, rose from the ruins of post-war Iraq to become the deadliest branch of the global jihadist organization.
If the Bush administration did not learn from the mistakes of its Afghan invasion, the Obama administration did not learn from the mistakes of President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In 2011, NATO launched another regime change war in Libya. America believed that with its superior military force, it could topple the regime, rearrange the political system, and rebuild the world. It toppled regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but it remained ignorant of how to deal with the instability that followed. Jihadists thrive in the midst of anarchy and anarchy. If post-war Iraq provided a new base for al-Qaeda, Libya’s collapse into chaos, with various militias and governments fighting each other for control, allowing terrorists to spread to other parts of Africa Gaya. In Syria, the US withheld direct military intervention but supported armed rebels against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The Islamic State emerged from the ruins of Syria.
The regime change war, which helped terrorist organizations flourish in many countries, also strengthened both Islamist and Islamophobic politics around the world. Repeated attacks on Muslim-majority countries and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of local people, mostly Muslims, in these wars helped to strengthen the jihadist narrative that the ‘Christian West’ was starting a ‘crusade’ against Muslims. Islamic State repeatedly referred to all Westerners as “crusaders” and circulated videos of US attacks on social media aimed at recruiting young Muslims. Anti-Americanism emerged as a major political theme in Muslim-majority countries, which Islamist fundamentalists sought to capitalize on.
The wars also triggered mass outflows of refugees from affected countries to neighboring countries and the far west, where the populist far-right, already on the rise after the 2008 financial crisis, turned it into a political weapon. The Libyan and Syrian crises during 2011–15 saw hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers make dangerous boat trips across the Mediterranean to Europe, with the far-right harping on Islamophobic rhetoric to drum up support. This narrative was further strengthened by Islamic State-inspired terrorist attacks in the West during this period. In the end, the regime change war, which failed to defeat the terrorists, returned in a different form to divide and trouble the West.
geopolitical setback
The most unexpected blow to America was in geopolitics. While America was busy with the Muslim world, China was growing steadily. By the time the US realized that China had become its biggest rival since the end of the Cold War, it was too late. America had already lost the war in Afghanistan; Al-Qaeda had split into separate branches (what President Biden called a metastasized threat); Divisive, ethno-nationalist and Islamophobic politics had become stronger at home; And the moment of unipolarity had passed. Faced with these enormous challenges, President Biden decided to end the war in Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to win. This made the War on Terror precarious and caused a shift in America’s strategic focus towards a resurgent China (the policies followed by President Donald Trump). On 31 August, Mr Biden said the era of wars to reshape the world was over, marking the official end of the neo-conservative regime-change foreign policy.
This does not mean that America’s global hegemony is over. America suffered a setback in the past and made a comeback. The 1970s was a particularly bad decade for America during the Cold War. It had to withdraw from Vietnam in 1975, allowing the communists to conquer and unite the country. In 1978, communists took power in Afghanistan. America lost Iran in 1979. Nevertheless, by the end of 1979, due to Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the US was back in action.
Mr. Biden’s US, after suffering a crushing defeat in Afghanistan, may be reluctant to launch another direct military intervention in the near future. Certainly the perception of America’s retreat and its weakness will encourage its rivals like Iran, Russia and China. But the US, which is trying to return from neo-conservatism to realism, can wait for its rivals, especially China, such as the Soviet Union, fueled by America’s defeat in Vietnam, in 1979 – Or seize other strategic opportunities.
Afghanistan is not the end of American power; This is the beginning of the new US-China Cold War. In the meantime, terrorist organizations will continue to operate from the safe havens they have already found.
stanly.johny@thehindu.co.in
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