A seismic shift in US foreign policy
US President Joe Biden’s address to the American people on Wednesday was his most comprehensive justification to date for withdrawal from Afghanistan — a withdrawal attended by chaos, bloodshed and the abandonment of military equipment. But that is what defeat looks like.
His address will not have satisfied those who question the wisdom of a deadline that handed the initiative to the enemy or of using Donald Trump’s deeply-flawed 2020 deal with the Taliban as a basis for withdrawal. It will not have satisfied those who wonder why the great military base and airfield at Bagram was abandoned so early. It will certainly not have satisfied the British Government and Nato allies who stood shoulder to shoulder with America in its hour of anguish after the 9/11 attack in 2001, invoking for the first time Article five of the Nato treaty, which deems an attack on one is an attack on all members of the alliance.
Biden’s address had not one word of appreciation for the sacrifices made by Britain and other Nato allies in Afghanistan. So much for Article five being a “sacred commitment”, as Biden put it in June.
Yet, Biden has done us a favour. Foreign policy works best when, stripped of illusions and overblown rhetoric, it is based on a hard-headed calculation of national interests. The real significance of Biden’s words on Wednesday is an apparent recognition of these home truths. There are even the first signs of a Biden Doctrine, which, if implemented, would mark a radical break with the past.
The Pax Americana, sometimes piously called “the rules-based system of international order”, has prevailed since World War II. It is now starting to fracture, above all from the competitive impact of China. Throughout America’s long dominance of the world stage, presidents, Democrat and Republican, have seen it as America’s mission to spread Western-style democracy and values around the world.
It has been the hubristic belief that Western values should be universally applied that has led to the folly of nation-building and the ignominious calamity in Afghanistan. A punitive expedition against al-Qaeda in 2001 was one thing; but to seek, against the grain of history, culture and religion, to rebuild the country from the ground up, in the name of Western democracy and human rights, was doomed from the start.
The British should have known this had we bothered to study our own history. Britain intervened in Afghanistan twice in the 19th century and once in the 20th century. None of these interventions turned out well, none was of lasting benefit to Britain, none changed Afghanistan.
A veteran of the First Afghan War warned on the eve of the second: “A new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country . . . an advance now, however successful from a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be politically useless.”
Reporting in 1898 from the borders of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, a young cavalryman and journalist writing for the Daily Telegraph, Winston Churchill, described what he called the “riddle of the frontier” — you could subdue and disarm the Pashtun of Helmand province, the forefathers of today’s Taliban, but you could never beat them. In Churchill’s words: “Their fanaticism remains unshaken.”
To these we can add the failed Soviet intervention of 1979-89 and America’s own experience. Biden seems to have taken their lessons to heart, saying: “The decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” In other words, America is done with nation-building from the barrel of a gun. It is an implicit repudiation of many of his predecessors.
This is not isolationism. It is a doctrine intended to align intervention abroad with American interests and achievable goals, such as the punishment of terrorist acts. Only time will tell how Biden chooses to apply it more broadly. He could make a start by sending Tony Blinken to discuss with some very bruised allies what the new direction in US foreign policy actually means.—