When the US Hasn’t the Will

Five years ago, the U.S. refused to talk with the Taliban. Today, the Taliban refuses to talk with the U.S. It speaks volumes about how the balance of power in Afghanistan has shifted, according to columnist Gideon Ranchman in The Financial Times on Tuesday.

“The West has lost in Afghanistan,” ran the headline over Rachman’s column; it is hard to disagree with that.

Several days earlier, the New York Times’ influential columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, delivered a similarly angry and dejected litany over the state of affairs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt — in other words, the whole of the Middle East.

The liberal Friedman had been inspired by another well-known American debater from the opposing political camp, the conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson.

The article by Hanson in the National Review, which Friedman took to heart, was introduced by the following:

”Americans — left, right, Democrats and Republicans — are all sick of thankless nation-building in the Middle East. Yet democratization was not our first choice, but rather a last resort after other methods failed.”

To intervene militarily, to not intervene, to support dictators, to support popular uprisings against dictators, to give developmental aid and encouragement — nothing seems to work, states Hanson after a sweep through the 1980s onwards, from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Pakistan and Iran through to Saudi Arabia and Syria. “Keeping clear of maniacal regimes leads to either nuclear acquisition or genocide — or 16 acres of rubble in Manhattan.”

”Brutally clear eyed,” is Friedman’s judgment. What ails the Middle East is a toxic mix of tribalism, sectarianism, fundamentalism and oil — “oil that constantly tempts us to intervene or to prop up dictators.”

One might object to the idea that the U.S. bears responsibility for developments in the Middle East over the past decades, for fanaticism, for the prevalence of misrule and violence; it is about this that Hanson and Friedman, broadly speaking, are also in agreement.

That right-wing Hanson and left-wing Friedman came to the same conclusion in this way says something about the mood in the U.S. at the moment.

This was reflected in an opinion poll in the New York Times recently: 69 percent of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan, while 23 percent are in favor. When similar polls were taken in November, 37 percent responded that they opposed the war and 53 percent said they supported it.

After 10 years and only meager returns, battle fatigue is hardly a surprise. Thousands of young American men and women have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions upon millions of dollars have been pumped into these wars and into other unstable and undemocratic nation-building projects around the region, which has contributed to the U.S. tottering dangerously close to the edge of economic ruin.

Isolationism lurks around the corner.

For all those who by reflex assume that the U.S.’s end game is, in the pure spirit of imperialism, to control the world’s oil assets, such a development must seem unlikely.

However, where there are buyers, sellers can also be found; this is also true with oil. Military means may be needed to secure transport routes and thus availability, but hardly intervention, occupation and nation-building.

The political power vacuum which would arise should the U.S. withdraw is going to be filled by someone, that much is clear.

But who wants to see nations like Russia and China, or for that matter Iran and the petrodollar-flooded Saudis, make even greater inroads onto the geopolitical arena?

The idea that the European Union, which for two years has fought impending euro meltdown and which is afflicted by stagnating economy, growing unemployment, demographic imbalance and civil discord over direction and objectives, should be able take over the U.S.’s role even in part cannot be taken seriously.

These developments ought to worry all those who believe in democracy and human rights and realize that these values must always be defended.

And don’t even bother to mention the UN.