Afghanistan and the West’s Failure

“Whether America likes it or not, the unipolar moment, Pax Americana, is over.”

Today, Tuesday, August 31st, the last American soldier left Afghanistan. This concluded two decades of war, and the country that Americans and Britons bled for is now under the control of the Taliban. Again. The West poured blood and treasure into a bottomless pit of violence and corruption, and the only thing we have to show for it is a country back where it started before we invaded in 2001. This is a failure for all the world to see.

It was right that the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies invaded in 2001 in retaliation for the September 11th attacks. The Taliban had been sheltering Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, thus providing Afghanistan as a terror training ground. However, the failures started almost immediately when Western forces held back from using overwhelming force and allowed bin Laden and his allies to escape through Tora Bora into the Badlands of our glorious “ally” Pakistan, from where they could conduct their affairs unimpeded. Meanwhile, the Taliban melted into the high hills and “cathedral-like mountain ranges” of that geographically riven land.

The second failure was the setting up of the replacement Afghan state. The West, wrapped up in post-Cold War triumphalism, could not see that its way of governing was not suited for everywhere and always. The particularities of place and people butted up against and broke apart the abstractions of liberal universalism. Constructing a Weberian state around 14 different tribes and other groupings led by a centralized leadership class was always a recipe for conflict and corruption, especially once the money flowed in and the competition for spoils began. The Americans refused to consider the reinstitution of the Afghan monarchy, which might have provided a non-political symbol of authority that could have offered a unifying institution around which the diverse and divided population could coalesce. Another alternative was to break up the state to reflect the tribal and ethnic make-up. But no, America knew best. And in her post-Protestant, messianic fervor, the United States constituted a government rank with corruption and crippled by incompetence.