History will judge
Despite bungling its exit, US policy on central Asia could eventually be judged as rational and right
Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the US pull-out from Hanoi, may come to be seen as wise Ambrose Evans-pritchard
It is not easy to defend anything about Joe Biden’s tragically bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, nor to argue that the long-term damage to both America’s strategic interests and Western credibility is probably negligible. But I will take a stab.
One thing you learn covering foreign affairs for more than 40 years is that quick judgments based on emotional scenes invariably lead to false geopolitical conclusions.
The president told White House reporters on Sunday night that “history” would vindicate his decision to wind back decades of imperial overstretch, cutting American losses in an intractable corner of the world, and ending a 20-year war that has diverted $2trillion (£1.5trillion) of taxpayer money from more pressing strategic priorities.
He also stated that China and Russia will view the US withdrawal with some concern, belying the reflexive Schadenfreude of their press.
He may be right on all counts. In the short run there is almost nothing that can be done to reverse a diplomatic disgrace of the first order. The West can at best retrieve a degree of honour by delivering on its promise to evacuate those Afghans under its direct responsibility.
The long run is another matter. It was conventional wisdom in 1975 that the infamous Saigon helicopter lift was the final humiliating blow for a spent hegemon in ineluctable decline. Instead the US retreat from Vietnam had the unexpected effect of accelerating the end of the Soviet Union.
It tempted Russia to overreach with its own invasion of Afghanistan and with arms-length revolutions in Latin America and Africa, which were to become ruinously expensive.
The US rearmed. Its economic and technological depths came through. Within a decade the Pentagon had 14 aircraft battle groups and was preparing its Star Wars missile defence. It was the Soviet Union that fell apart, ushering in a quarter century of US world hegemony.
On the face of it, the Vietnam War was a far greater reversal of fortunes than a 20-year failure in quixotic state-building in the Hindu Kush. It occurred during the Cold War in a struggle with a Communist ideology of universalist appeal. Taliban obscurantism is a niche taste.
In the mid-1970s, America had just smashed the Bretton Woods financial system and was already struggling with the Great Inflation. It faced two Opec oil shocks that exposed a critical energy dependency. Today the US is the biggest combined producer of oil and natural gas in the world.
The oil “intensity” of GDP has in any case fallen by two thirds since then, and will go into free fall as electrification accelerates. Oil supply is no longer a primordial concern for the US. Semiconductors are more important, and the US dominates the global ecosystem of chip technology – even when wafers are made in Taiwan.
Yet oil supply does still matter to China and rising Asia. The anomaly of the last decade is that strategic and military positioning does not yet fully reflect this. In a sense the US has been doing China’s work for it by trying to uphold stability in the Middle East (badly, you might say) and patrolling the oil supply routes.
China and Russia both face irredentist Islamic movements on their soil – unlike the US – and ultimately have more to fear from the Jihadi destabilisation of central Asia. Is a Taliban victory really in the interest of any of the surrounding powers?
The chorus of vituperative attacks against Biden over recent days mostly ignore one large salient fact: the US sold the pass 18 months ago when Donald Trump signed the Doha withdrawal agreement giving the Taliban everything they wanted, with fig leaf conditions that cannot plausibly be enforced. The US gave up its chief bargaining chip.
The errors compounded as the months went by. The Trump administration yanked away US air support. It compelled the Afghan security forces to adopt a punchbag defensive posture that left it passively vulnerable to attacks.
The Taliban exploited this impunity to murder off-duty military, judges, lawyers, and government officials in a systematic terror campaign. Is it any wonder that the governing system melted away? Europeans now complaining so indignantly were right to object in February 2020 at Trump’s pretence of a peace deal, but they have since had 18 months to prepare the evacuation of those under their care.
There have been no Nato deaths in Afghan action since the Doha deal, but that is because the Taliban had no interest in disrupting an arrangement that was so perfectly to their liking. All they had to do was to run out the clock.
Had the Biden White House torn up the deal there most certainly would have been a fresh wave of attacks. It would have required yet another troop surge by the US military, and another open-ended strategic commitment.
America’s democracy had no conceivable appetite for this. That is not to acquit Biden for the sins of this episode. It may well cost him his presidency, and perhaps it should.
The Biden doctrine is that the US is today confronted by a wolf warrior regime in China openly bent on world domination – the modern equivalent of Khrushchev’s “we will bury you”.
It is a contest between two incompatible systems and philosophies. All else is essentially irrelevant. Side shows are a distraction and squander scarce resources.
If he is right on that elemental point, history may just judge his Afghan withdrawal to be “the logical, rational and right decision to make”, as he put it. Edifying, it is not.