The Withdrawal

It is not abandonment, and not total retreat, but it is withdrawal. Washington has raised Afghanistan to the rank of a major non-NATO ally, which is something like the Nobel Prize of American politics. There are 14 other countries, including Israel, Japan and Egypt, that have already enjoyed that distinction. But the announcement marks the end of a cycle, which started with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan itself.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wished to sum up the future of the United States in three words: Fight, Talk and Build – The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. It will take divine intervention, because to date the results have been very modest. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran (author of “The War within the War for Afghanistan”) said, the United States Army “fights one war, the Marines another, and the British a small and ineffective third.” In 2014, the front-line troops of the U.S. and its allies, including Spain, will leave. A contingent from Washington will remain, of course. It will include between 10,000 and 30,000 troops tasked with protecting installations and supporting forces. It is possible that there will be an emphasis on aerial forces, which will be needed to crush Taliban forces if found, as was done in Van Thieu’s Vietnam 40 years ago. But there will be no more ground wars. It will be like the English empire of the 19th century.

The situation is different, no doubt, to what transpired in Southeast Asia. They are not fighting Communism, although in some ways the extreme version of the Islamic faith is an accidental substitute. There has never been half a million American soldiers at risk of hundreds of casualties a week. The enemy is not affected by the mess at its rear flank, North Vietnam, who crushes with impunity. And finally, Pakistan can hardly compete with China to feed and shelter insurgents. But despite these, Afghanistan remains a miniature replica of Vietnam. The United States withdrew in the early ‘70s, confident that aerial forces would be sufficient to prevent the triumph of Hanoi, but the Congress then prohibited the continuation of the war from the air. This contributed mightily to the collapse of Saigon. It is possible that Washington now expects that, in the absence of initiatives to destroy the Taliban with major force, it can do the same with the stealth of drones (unmanned aircraft).

It all started in Indochina, and can even be attributed to the so-called Vietnam Syndrome where Americans rejected other overseas adventures. For a time it was argued that victory, initially easy, in the two Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003) had eliminated this post-war trauma. But today it is better to view Iraq and Afghanistan as relatively minor relapses in that long convalescence. It is these two conflicts that ended the Vietnam Syndrome, but ultimately the Syndrome won out. Here is where the Pax Britannica comes in.

In the 18th century, England built the largest navy that the world had ever known, to offset an extreme reluctance to get involved in land conflicts. Until the War of Spanish Succession (1700-1715), with the victories of the Duke of Marlborough, there were no important British contingents on the continent, and Gibraltar took the Admiral Rooke rather than a general. The very victory at Waterloo (1815), said to be by Wellington, was obtained with more Prussians and Belgians than Englishmen. No draft was instituted on the Islands until 1916, midway through World War I, when it was decreed by the liberal David Lloyd George. One of the great wonders of the history of colonialism was the British control of the Indian subcontinent, 1.5 million square miles, for much of the century with only 36,000 officers and soldiers – an enviable model for Washington.

In Australia, on Nov. 18, when President Barack Obama announced the reorientation of U.S. strategic interests in the Pacific, he stressed without directly mentioning the virtual abandonment of Iraq and the shrinking of U.S. interests in Afghanistan. The United States will never be able to reduce its ground presence in the area as Great Britain did a century and a half ago, but in the next few years more than two-thirds of its fleet will be concentrated in waters that Beijing considers its exclusive property. The withdrawal from Afghanistan represents low tide for the great power, which is now already a little less of an empire.