Will Taliban victory mark the beginning of the end of the Western empire?

To count the cost of the West's intervention in Afghanistan in US and UK military lives alone is the ultimate proof that we are a civilization in decay

by David Hearst

Part 5 - Blunt truth

There is an alternative to that mad logic of thinking that you are promoting democracy by dropping drones on poor people thousands of miles away. Just imagine if the US had spent $2 trillion on the Afghan people themselves. Just imagine if it had sought to influence religious conservative movements like the Taliban, not through warfare, but by engagement. Not through drones, but through dialogue.

Just imagine where Afghanistan would be now, and just imagine how much soft power the West would still have.

A US in retreat cares even less for the people it abandons than it does for the people it occupies. There is an exodus right now at Kabul airport. Where will these Afghans end up?

Certainly only a fraction of them will arrive in the UK or the US. They will head for Turkey and Europe as they have done in the past. Instantly they will turn in the western liberal consciousness from refugees fleeing Islamist oppression into unwanted migrants.

The scenes of panic at Kabul airport on Monday are mirrored throughout Europe’s capitals today.

The French President Emmanuel Macron said Europe “must anticipate and protect ourselves against major irregular migratory flows”. The German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said he expected up to five million people to flee Afghanistan.

Germany accepted hundreds of thousands during the migrant flow in 2015. The German Christian Democrat leader Armin Laschet was adamant that “2015 should not be repeated”. The very nations that contributed troops and generals to ISAF are now unwilling to accept the human consequences of their actions.

The blunt truth is that the West can no longer dominate the world by dropping bombs on regimes we do not like, but nor can we withdraw. You can leave the Middle East, but it will never leave you.

The war in Afghanistan was lost by a bloated western alliance that thought it could demolish the Taliban and build a new country from scratch, all the while being ignorant of its history, its languages and its peoples.

The West succeeded only in spreading the brutality and misery of war over two decades, the majority of which was borne by the Afghans themselves. To count the cost of this intervention, as we still do today, in only US and UK military lives, is the ultimate proof that we are a civilisation in decay.

The tragedy is that in retreat, the US will not learn the harsh truth that force has no utility. Nor will it learn the lesson that it is a declining power. It will retreat into victimhood and isolationism, as indeed it has done in the past. The narrative will be that the world is an ungrateful place.

If it learned the lesson of its military defeats, it would start doing the right things in a world that is truly facing a common existential threat. It neither came from communism nor does it come from Islam.

***

Source, links:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/afghanistan-us-taliban-victory-end-western-empire

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