AFGHANISTAN AND THE FOLLY OF FOREIGN INTERVENTIONS

It has been almost a month since the US government made good on their intention to cut their losses in Afghanistan and flee the central Asian hellhole.

It will be 20 years tomorrow since terrorists – Mostly from Saudi Arabia, flew into the Twin Towers in the New York and the Pentagon to trigger the “War on Terrorism”. At the time the Talban were in control of Afghanistan and suspected of aiding Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

US President George Bush wasted no time in not only setting the cross hairs on Kabul and cobbling together a coalition of nations to invade Afghanistan, topple the government there and bring Bin Laden to justice. At least that is what he told the world. A claim, which came under question when he decided to throw Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the mix under the pretext that he had weapons of mass destruction.

Bush declared victory in Iraq but not Afghanistan, his successor Barack Obama got Bin Laden and it was left to Donald Trump to negotiate an exit plan and current president Joe Biden to execute that plan.

Thankfully the US has not tried to claim victory in Afghanistan. It would be a pyrrhic victory if they did – it cost 170,000 lives and $2trillion dollars. While the US has emerged smelling more of manure than roses, a few billionaires have built their fortunes upon the rabble of Afghanistan...

It was always going to be a clumsy close to this chapter of US history. This had been their longest war the US has fought , the duration meaning they had put down some semi-permanent roots that could not be uprooted at a moment’s notice. As a result, they have had to evacuate many of their collaborators and support them for the foreseeable future at great cost to the blissfully ignorant US taxpayer.

Whichever way you look at it, this a misadventure, like Vietnam, the US will be anxious to put behind them as soon as possible.

Analysts have in past weeks mulled over why the US had to beat a hasty and messy retreat from Afghanistan, even if it was to great embarrassment to themselves.

Some thought in the current depressed global economy it is an expense they can barely afford – they spent $300m daily to execute the war; some think that it was a distraction from trying to contain China, which over the last two decades has grown to be the second largest economy after the US and threatening to overtake it within the decade; the more charitable ones think the US has seen the error of its way and this signals an end to their meddling ways abroad.

That last one should be dismissed out of hand, if only because the US has the world’s largest military industrial complex that has to be kept sated – the US’ defence budget is larger than the combined budgets of the next 11 biggest defence spending countries.

I think the first reason that the war was too expensive, falls on its face in the light of the huge military industrial complex’s needs.

There will always be money for war especially if it supports local industry. Bullets don’t rot on the shelf, they need to be used to be replaced....

Which leaves us with the China question. Before our very eyes China has risen from the ashes of Mao Tse Tsung’s cultural revolution to challenge US in economic might and world influence. After the collapse of the USSR in the 1980s and 1990s the US became the unchallenged super power, running rough shod over everybody else with their liberal economy and multi-party democracy prescriptions for all the world’s ills.

Now China has inserted itself into the vacuum, which came as a surprise, not because the US never saw it coming than out of arrogance, the thought that the Chinese would never amount to much.

Bombing Afghanistan into the stone age, while a lucrative distraction had to be put on hold to contain China, which is flexing its muscles – literally and figuratively in everywhere from the South China Sea to Africa and Europe.

I tend to believe this last theory more. After the better part of a century playing big brother in the world, the US would not know how to or countenance playing second to a resurgent China.

So in coming years look out for more economic wars with China – Trump was just the beginning; proxy wars – the US does not go to war with a country it can’t win against and invariably a new world order – fundamentalist terrorism will fade into the background, with the US and China playing the elephants and the rest of us serving as the hapless grass.