The Three Mistakes of the West

The USA is negotiating with the Taliban. The war in Afghanistan is lost.

After almost 10 years of war, the United States is negotiating directly with the Taliban. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has now confirmed this. With whom the United States is speaking and what they’re speaking about remains unknown. This is not a coincidence, because the Taliban is an efficient, polynomial and shadowy movement. Who represents them, who could even forge an agreement — to this there is no answer. Therefore, Gates’ announcement doesn’t have much of a contextual meaning — rather, a symbolic one. And it is disastrous: The war in Afghanistan is lost for the West — and not measured against its own high standards but instead against the realities on the ground.

The Taliban can now view themselves as victors. They don’t have to negotiate; they only have to wait until the Western troops withdraw. The withdrawal is a decided matter; it’s irreversible. The first 10,000 U.S. soldiers will return to their home country in July. The job in Afghanistan will come to an end in 2014. Afterwards, the Taliban will substantially determine the fate of Afghanistan. In the best case, they will forge a very unsteady compromise with the forces supported by the West, which will keep the country halfway stable.

One recognizes the strength of their influence in the anti-Western tones that Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai strikes nowadays, which one normally hears from the mouth of a Taliban member. In the worst case, there will be a regression back to the 1980s. At the time, the country was torn by civil war. There is no Afghanistan without the Taliban in either of these scenarios.

Does this mean that these 10 years were futile? A “yes” could quickly pass one’s lips, and it would sound convincing. Yet, one must pose the counter-question: Was there an alternative to an intervention? Al-Qaida was a real threat in 2001, and Afghanistan was the hub for their plans. No president would have remained in office long if he had not acted after the attacks of Sept. 11. In this case, acting meant waging war. No NATO ally had the option not to take part. Germany and many other NATO partners could be left out of the mission in Libya; it didn’t work that way with Afghanistan.

The mission in Afghanistan was a mistake, but an unavoidable one. That was the sinister thing about Sept. 11. It lured the superpower to the open eye of the Afghan quicksand. One knew exactly to which country one resorted. Ultimately, it had been one of the central battlefields of the Cold War. In Afghanistan, the United States had inflicted a bitter defeat to the allies of the Soviet Union. One knew Afghanistan — not only its chapped mountains, inhospitable steppes and blistering deserts — one also knew the strange personnel. There is astounding personnel continuity among the Afghan warlords. In 1989 the Soviets negotiated their withdrawal, in part, with the same people with whom the Americans must now come to an agreement.

It’s Now About Cleaning Up

The first crucial mistake of the West lay in its arrogance. In 2001, it felt so rich, so powerful and strong that it believed it could accomplish everything. This was blindness.

The second mistake was that it held tightly to its feeling of dominance and continued to wage war, even after it had long since reached its goal: to annihilate al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

The third mistake was that the West could only see itself as a force for good. Imperialism might be dead, but the imperialistic myth of the civilized mission of Western soldiers played a role in the mission in Afghanistan. The West was never capable of taking in the viewpoint of many Afghans. Increasingly, they viewed the Western soldiers as occupiers. Whoever is unable to see through the eyes of another is doomed to lose.

It’s now about cleaning up. It’s time to pitch the ideological ballast, which led the West astray in Afghanistan. Democracy, human rights, a constitutional state? Of course, always and everywhere, but can they be planted with bayonettes? Intervening? Never purely as a matter of principle. Ethics demands the impossible, but in real life it is tolerant. It commands us to do what we are capable of.

And what we can do is not insignificant, even in Afghanistan. This begins with the fact that this country, even after the withdrawal of Western troops, must not disappear from the spotlight of the public sphere. We should look to it and, furthermore, even help — only without soldiers.