ANALYSIS: All that blood and treasure and for what? The war in Afghanistan now reaches its tragic – and some would say inevitable – conclusion.
The Taliban – a fundamentalist theocracy – is back in power. The Government is scrambling to evacuate the estimated 53 New Zealanders there, plus Afghan nationals and their immediate families who helped the New Zealand Defence Force, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Operation Burnham inquiry. Chief of the Defence Force Kevin Short estimated that hundreds of people could potentially be rescued.
On Monday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would not be drawn on reflecting how the 20-year failure – in which 10 New Zealand soldiers lost their lives – had happened. She warned the Taliban that the world would be watching how it conducts itself. But the world probably won’t, and the Taliban probably won't care.
Let’s be brutally honest, once all the necessary people have been evacuated, how much prime ministerial time do you think Afghanistan will take up?
When then-prime minister Helen Clark committed troops in 2001, it was for the right reasons – both politically and morally. Her comments to Stuff yesterday were the best summary of the dreadful situation.
“It's just sad now to see the situation and think of so much blood and treasure that was spent, and we're back where we were,” Clark said on Monday. “It's like a medieval theocracy has just returned to power and that's what was driven out 20 years ago and here we are again.”
A week after the invasion began on October 7, 2001, US military analyst and erstwhile neoconservative intellectual Max Boot wrote a significant essay in the now defunct Weekly Standard called “The Case for American Empire”.
In it, he argued for a more muscular America abroad and that the biggest US mistake in Afghanistan was its withdrawal in 1989 having defeated the Soviet Union, instead of staying and rebuilding the place as it had with post-WWII Germany and Japan.
He said the withdrawal then, in 1989, was classic realpolitik. The US had defeated its enemy and was now going to clear off. “And if the consequence was the rise of the Taliban – homicidal mullahs driven by a hatred of modernity itself – so what? Who cares who rules this flyspeck in Central Asia?”
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Yet this attitude, in his view, was precisely the problem. Instead, he argued: “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” That view, of course, has been discredited since.
So began years of foreign policy adventurism that would diminish the reputation of the US abroad and give birth to, among other things, Isis, also known as the Islamic State. Direct defence spending on Afghanistan alone was US$822 billion to 2019 (NZ$1.42 trillion).
The problem with this view – and it was a problem that was writ large in the invasion of Iraq as well – was a basic misconception of democracy and unrealistic view of the nature of the American republic.
The slow and then very sudden collapse of the Western-backed Government in Afghanistan has confirmed, once again, that democracy is not in fact an export commodity. Deposing a Government, purging it a bit of some less democratic elements and holding some elections is not how it works.
Embedding democracy means most probably occupying a place for a long period, investing heavily in institutions and infrastructure, and not leaving for generations until those things are accepted and bedded in – and even then it might not work. To Boot’s point: to be done properly, an empire is needed.
The problem with that (quite aside from its moral dimensions) is that the United States has a distrust of empire hardwired into its psyche. Despite its various excursions abroad, it has been bound by the domestic political constraint of Americans not wanting to be imperial adventurers.
It is no coincidence that both US presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden ultimately agreed with the US getting out of Afghanistan. Trump promised withdrawal, and Biden finally took the final steps to make it happen. Too much life, money and effort had been expended and the US public – initially enthusiastic after 9/11 – had long since tired of the conflict.
While hearts and minds may have been won along the way, there were not enough of them to organise resistance to the Taliban, which has proven repeatedly good at providing one very important thing: law and order.
Just shy of 20 years after it was driven from Kabul, the dictatorship is back – and determined to reinstate its version of Islamic law. If the last time is anything to go by it will mean no women outside the home, no human rights, no democracy, just a theocratic dictatorship.
There are, of course, the stories of the individual heroics, human development, halting democracy and corruption – some lives made better and some worse. But taken overall, it is undoubtedly a 20-year failure.
