Form of words:
TeaUS decisions to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan, announced by Barack Obama in 2014, formalized by Donald Trump in 2019 and implemented by Joe Biden in 2021, have sparked anguish among political, security and media establishments across the Atlantic Is.
Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations summarizes widespread opinion among foreign policy elites condemnation of biden as in “catastrophic, tragic, wrong.” Tony Blair relaxed me The US decision “stupid”, claiming that Western troops were sent to Afghanistan in late 2001 when he was prime minister of the United Kingdom, should remain to defend his “profit”.
Never mind that poverty and violence have ravaged Afghanistan at an ever-increasing rate over the past decade, despite the transition to Western cash and troops – a situation so intolerable for the ruled and so intolerable for the rulers, that Islamic stat found a stronghold and the Taliban were able to Capture The whole country seems to be fast and effortless.
In fact, criticism of a long-unavoidable American retreat, confusing as brutal as it is, suggests that the real threat to Western security and credibility stems from any regrouping of al-Qaeda in the Pashtun countryside or Doesn’t happen, but comes from. Most of the Beltway has to think about what has passed.
Today’s young generation may have forgotten the grand plans of the Anglo-American leaders announced in 2001. Blair spoke of bringing salvation not only to the Afghans, but also of the “starving, the miserable, the deprived, the ignorant, the deprivation and the miserable”. In the slums of Gaza, the desert of North Africa.” BOOT argued In October 2001 “Afghanistan and other troubled countries today scream for the kind of enlightened foreign administration that was once provided by the self-confident British in Jodhpur and Pith helmets.”
While reading these neo-imperialist fantasists in 2001, the words of Hannah Arendt grew deafeningly in my head. The “white man’s burden” he wrote in the 1940s was “either hypocrisy or racism” and those who took it seriously always exposed themselves as “the sad and grotesque idiots of imperialism”. .
In 2001 it seemed that many Western elites had learned nothing from the past, neither about the disasters perpetrated by the self-confident British, nor about the deadly legacies they left behind.
Even the simplest lesson of colonialism – the central event of the 20th century – had passed to them: the non-white people of the earth would no longer tolerate, whatever their countries, invasions by white people. and possession. This core resolution was summed up by at least one imaginable like the Taliban: Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi, who launched a campaign against Britain during World War II, request To make them leave India for the sake of God or “chaos”.
It turns out, in 2021, some Western elites are not only completely oblivious to their long past of inept rule and humiliating return to the non-West. Drunk with immense power and immaculate prestige, they have learned nothing from the present, either: the series of catastrophically failed military interventions in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya that helped spawn new monsters Like the Islamic State which made the Taliban relatively moderate.
They cannot see that, predictably chaotic and violent (though nothing on the scale of the murderous anarchy unleashed by the British departure from India), America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has a significance not that of any previous imperial disintegration. Was.
First, it is supported by popular will. Large majority in the West long ago turned against the catastrophically failed forever wars of their leaders (Blair, for example, could not appear in public without the risk of civilian arrest). In America, a rebel candidate disastrously rises to supreme power, promising to end excessive foreign interference launched by apparently innocent DC elites.
A more serious factor behind the withdrawal of American troops is the changing nature of the war. in his power new book In “Humanitarian: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reconstructed War,” legal scholar Samuel Moyen demonstrates how, beginning in the final years of the Bush administration, and increasingly during the Obama and Trump administrations, traditional military missions replaced the commando gave way to operations and drone and missile strikes.
In other words, the war dear to so many foreign policy elites is far from over forever; They simply have a different, less visible function, and call satellites instead of robots, jodhpurs and pith helmets instead of boots on the ground.
As far as nation building is concerned, no serious economist after 20 years of continuous failure believes that it is too much uneven flow Foreign aid that largely vanishes into the pockets of urban-based military contractors and corrupt warlords can build a modern economy, let alone democracy.
“Give War a Chance,” Thomas Friedman wrote In November 2001, as the US military invaded Afghanistan. But the neo-imperialist wars and the humanitarian crusades in the early 2000s were extremely bad times. The racial hierarchy and military techniques of the 19th century cannot and will not be recreated in the 21st century. It was indeed an extraordinary folly to invest American prestige, security and credibility in such patented projects.
No doubt the reappearance of the ruthless Taliban will rekindle a masculine fantasy of the West’s righteous fight for the reformation of violently backward natives. But the West needs to be saved, no less than Afghanistan, from the cynical idiots of imperialism.- bloomberg
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