Afghanistan: An inconsequential anniversary
One year after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the worst predictions for both Afghanistan and the United States have not happened. It is true that human rights and development under the Taliban have gone backward for many people, mainly urban women and girls, and that Afghanistan’s economy is a shambles. But most of the population is pleased the United States and its allies are gone and is resigned to life under yet another incompetent and self-serving government. For the majority, the past 12 months have been more about continuation than change.
In the United States, television images of the military withdrawal provoked widespread criticism of President Biden, but Afghanistan already had become a side-show by the time the last military elements left Kabul. Fears that U.S. prestige and influence would be irreparably damaged by the undignified withdrawal proved vastly overblown. NATO’s rally in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine did not happen spontaneously. Biden orchestrated it, and U.S. power, prestige and diplomacy made it work. What happened in Afghanistan was and is irrelevant to continued U.S. preeminence in global affairs. Afghanistan itself is largely irrelevant to the rest of the world as evidenced by the reluctance of any country to formally recognize the new regime.
There are, however, worthwhile lessons to be learned from the Afghanistan debacle, but the U.S. is not in the mood to learn them. Instead, military and intelligence officials likely will focus on the technical or tactical aspects of the conflict and will tweak doctrine and training that may elevate field performance but almost certainly will not improve the kind of decision-making that launched, expanded and prolonged the mission in the first place.
Reluctance to learn from the past is a national trait. It is built into the U.S. psyche. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War there still is no long-term goal or aspiration, no grand strategy, shaping U.S. foreign policy. Political leaders do not believe the U.S. needs one. Instead, a grab bag of congressional priorities and campaign rhetoric tends to shape U.S. external engagement into an extension of domestic politics, often with the same haphazard results. Presidential leadership becomes most obvious and consequential when it rises above the noise, as happened in Afghanistan last August.
The messy departure from Kabul revealed another uncomfortable truth about U.S. foreign policy, the tendency to equate it with conversion therapy. U.S. dogma demands institution-building and empowerment initiatives as the necessary components of almost all foreign assistance, even when delivered by force. It approaches heresy to suggest that values and interests sometimes diverge, that stability, for example, might be a more important outcome in a specific time and place than inclusion, or that elections might produce more suspicion than transparency. Self-awareness is not a high priority among U.S. politicians and policymakers.
But the flip side of U.S. self-confidence, no matter how misplaced at times, is that it works. Despite the setbacks, missteps and sniping of wannabe cynics, the United States remains what Madeline Albright infamously termed the world’s indispensable nation. It is the presence that always matters, the opinion that always counts, even without a coherent foreign policy. What happened in Kabul did not change that reality. Dysfunctional domestic politics and its celebration of division and ignorance, however, might.
Ambassador David Robinson is a retired emissary to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Guyana.
Source: TEST FEED1
