Imperial overreach from Carthage to Kabul
The scenes from Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan that filled screens across Canada and the U.S. over the past month were both disturbing and disheartening.
Once again, Western nations had failed in a long-distance effort to impose peace and Western values on an impoverished tribal society. And once again, we had left those who tried to help us — translators, road guides, domestic help — behind to face our enemies.
The Canadian effort justifiably came in for particular criticism here at home with the editorial board of the Globe and Mail reaching new heights in the harshness of its condemnation of Canada's half-hearted effort to rescue our friends and helpers from the Kabul airport. As the Globe's editorial board observed: “The world is awash in aircraft waiting to be chartered.” Surely, we could have done more.
But despite this very concerning show of Western impotence and its rhyme with the fall of Saigon — who can ever forget those harrowing scenes of desperate Vietnamese civilians hanging onto the rails of the last helicopters ascending off the roofs of the American embassy? — it is not clear that the necessary lessons have been learned.
The United States is not the first, and perhaps not the last, mighty power to stumble and fall in Afghanistan. Not for nothing is it known as “the graveyard of empires.” No need to list here the long line of arrogant generals who thought they were a match for Afghanistan's harsh terrain and warrior tribes, from Alexander the Great to the recently departed Soviet Red Army whose tragically inflated hubris led only to a theatrical and false claim of “mission accomplished” as they hurried home with tails between their legs.
Mighty Rome should have warned us. A rich, powerful nation that fails to realize, as that sage philosopher Clint Eastwood wryly observed in one of his spaghetti westerns, that “a man has to know his limits,” is a nation courting disaster.
In both the case of Rome's three military campaigns against its ancient rival Carthage, and America's three lost campaigns in Asia, the real costs were borne at home. Rome lost its citizen army, its republican institutions and its proto-democracy. Things look frightfully similar south of our border.
When American filmmaker Michael Murphy stood outside the U.S. Congress with volunteer enrolment forms for American congressional representatives and senators, not one offered up his son or daughter for military service in Iraq or Afghanistan. When Donald Trump bragged he could commit murder in broad daylight in Manhattan and get away with it, few doubted that was possible.
Fast-forward to Jan. 6, 2021, when the U.S. and the world got an “epiphany” they could scarcely believe as Trumpinspired mobs stormed the halls of government and brought the confirmation proceedings for President Joe Biden to a halt.
The hard lessons of Carthage, Vietnam and Afghanistan are not that we should avoid defending our values and the cherished Western belief in the value of each human person. But in a world that is now, as ever, subject to the slow, inexorable turning of the wheel of history, where Western military and cultural influence may well have peaked, we simply cannot afford foreign wars we are not certain we can win.
Brian Joseph is a regular Saltwire contributor living in North Sydney. He studied at St. Francis Xavier University, the University of Toronto and Harvard. He was special adviser in the Office of the Privy Council under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.