Let Afghanistan be the last liberal crusade | Dominic Lawson

As we finally extract ourselves from one of our longest wars, we need to begin learning our lessons and learn them quickly.

The Afghan debacle provides very real and painful examples of what happens when foreign policy is directed by ideological arrogance completely removed from both the facts on the ground and the truths of human nature and civilisational conflict. To understand this, we need to return to the original casus belli of the conflict. 

We were told that the original intention was to destroy Al Qaeda and deny them operating space. 

  If our elite had really wanted that, they could have used international policing infrastructure, special forces and intelligence agencies to disrupt them and ultimately render them unable to operate.

The truth of the Afghan war is that it was used to demonstrate the civilisational superiority of Western liberalism over the traditional cultures of the world.

The liberal Anglo–American regime believed their own delusions of an “end of history” following their defeat of the Soviet Union and sought to demonstrate that they could remould the world to do it.

With this mentality, mission creep was inevitable. The Afghan war evolved from one aimed at denying terrorist groups operating space, to liberating Afghan women and destroying the opium crop, eventually into a full nation building enterprise and liberalisation project.

This was done to make Afghanistan the model child of the supposed universality of Western norms.

This meant that billions were spent on exporting mainstays of the modern West, including gender studies programmes (costing US taxpayers close to 800 million dollars), modern “art” and even the concept of the nation state itself.

All of these things are utterly alien to Afghanistan.

Western European countries which birthed national states were ethnically homogeneous and had geographies which encouraged centralised political rule. Afghanistan is the exact opposite, it’s populated by fifteen different ethnic groups and is split down the middle by the Hindu Kush Mountain range. Hardly a cohesive nation.

The liberalism we attempted to spread was even more distant. Western liberalism is the product of societies whose navigable rivers and access to the ocean provided a degree of wealth and individual enterprise. Afghanistan is a frontier country sandwiched by multiple empires, this naturally produces a culture of rugged nomads, warrior codes and collective rule.

This meant that no matter how much money we committed to altering Afghanistan into our image, any changes would just be a thin veneer that would topple as soon as the money stopped. This is, of course, exactly what happened. As the Taliban swept the country, they exposed how hollow the state and society we constructed really was.

Many have been surprised at the speed of the conquest (including me), but it was obvious in retrospect. The Taliban didn’t really conquer the country, the artificial Afghan state simply melted away. Afghan soldiers had no incentive other than American money to fight for their government, as soon as that dried up, so did any will to resist the Talibs.

A western regime with a socially conservative worldview would have understood this.

At the root of conservatism is an understanding that civilisation is a fragile edifice which is produced to match the condition and character of the society which has adopted it. Rapid jarring change, therefore, is to be rejected in favour of slow organic evolution.

The Pashtun warrior culture and the Islamic values which define modern Afghanistan took centuries to develop and embed themselves in the country and to think Afghans would abandon them for modern Western ideals (which are hollow anyway) was just naive.

The Victors and Losers

The question of who won has been floated to pundits and politicians constantly, so far I’m yet to hear an honest answer.

So far, the greatest winner appears to be China. Beijing was able to watch for two decades as their rival slowly bled out money and political capital in a guerrilla war. All the while growing their influence in the areas of the world that the West was ignoring.

Now, they have already moved to normalise relations with the Taliban, securing contracts to rebuild the country’s urban areas, and gain access to its wealth of industrial materials. It is also likely that Beijing will be able to access the military hardware that the US left behind and reverse engineer them (the ones they haven’t already gained access to from spying).

Another victor has been the Western military–development complex. This international “blob” made up of a nexus of defence contractors, international development agencies and consultants have netted a cool several trillion from the war.

If you had invested 10,000 pounds at the start of the war in defence stocks, you’d have 100,000 in your portfolio now. NGOs and the global development industry have also enjoyed a profitable war. Many will be surprised to hear charities and NGOs grouped with defence contractors but the truth is they have become just as bloated and voracious, and both entities feed off each other.

Now, the losers. Obviously, the US. It is hard to emphasise how humiliating the evacuation has been for Washington. The sight of chinook helicopters lifting off from the roofs of embassies, or having to beg the Taliban to allow safe passage will never be forgotten.

The position of a declining superpower is a delicate one and the logic of geopolitics does not forgive weakness. I have no doubt that this defeat hastened the US’ fall from hegemony and probably made a potential invasion of Taiwan or attack against the global dollar system more likely.

This is grim news for the UK, as well. If one good thing can come out of this, let it be that our politicians finally accept that the “special relationship” no longer exists and that London must direct our own foreign policy in the interests of our own country. What does it say that Biden couldn’t even be bothered to answer the phone to our Prime Minister during the evacuation?

Of course, this will do nothing to console the hundreds of British families who have seen fine young men and women robbed from them, the thousands who will have to live the rest of their lives with disfigurements or lost limbs and the potentially, tens of thousands suffering with severe mental anguish. 

Never mind the rippling effect that this war has had, there are untold numbers of people who have lost loved ones to the Afghan opium trade, or have seen their lives adversely affected by mass movement from the country.

And what was it for?

Nothing.

We can no longer ignore that fact. It’s a painful realisation but it’s one we have to make to ensure something like this never happens again.

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