Au Revoir Afghanistan

Odd historical synchronicity (or maybe not) that the US withdraws from Afghanistan just in time for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. There's been a lot of ink spilled about what this all means, but the thing that's stuck with me the most has been the piece in Vox about the "death of liberal interventionism".

I didn't manage to read the whole thing (I try to keep my morning sweep of the news short), but one point that stood out was that, with the US riding high after the end of the Cold War and the successful intervention in Kosovo, we thought we had the moral high ground locked up... but there was nothing preventing us from doing "nation-building" were there wasn't such a clear danger of crimes against humanity. This is exactly what we ended up with after 9/11 and the rush to war in Iraq.

There are arguments for and against interventionism, but I lean toward the side that says we, as the world's superpower (at least back then), should put a stop to the most egregious crimes. I was suspicious of the motive to going to war in Iraq, even though I agreed with the idea that the world was better off without Saddam Hussein in charge of an army. I just didn't believe the arguments put forward in support of the Iraq War.

The rest is history. We quickly lost more soldiers in Iraq than the number of victims who died on 9/11, sank a crap-ton of money there to create ISIS, and lost a huge chunk of our international standing. Afghanistan wasn't as flashy a disaster, but it lasted longer and we end our involvement there with the Taliban back in charge, ready to roll back whatever notional gains we made in these two decades.

I'm not unmoved by the arguments that the US presence in Afghanistan bolstered women's education and participation in society, though. In fact, that's at the heart of what I'm talking about here. The liberal interventionism of the 1990s, as I remember it, was never only about projecting power, even if those being bombed by us at the time might remember things differently. The neocon nation-building projects of the following century, however, were absolutely about projecting power and scaring unfriendly regimes into not messing with us.

What the argument about intervention misses, and presumably that article in Vox, is that we've also become very bad at soft power. Not just since 9/11, but since Vietnam (or probably earlier, like Korea). These last twenty years of attritional warfare have sapped our ability and resolve to find non-military solutions to global problems, but it seems we never had much resolve for that approach... only now we don't even pretend to care.

One of my biggest complaints about the Obama years is that his administration oversaw US pullbacks from regions where we've been a presence for years. It may seem strange when I've just mentioned soft power, but several countries in Southeast Asia have seen cause to regret the withdrawal of US naval forces from their regions, because now China's throwing around its weight and claiming their territorial waters. US forces being there seem to have kept things calm, but now it's unlikely that the US can go back to keeping the peace there without a confrontation with China.

Africa is another example, more appropriate to talking about soft power. China is investing heavily in the continent, bankrolling infrastructure so that it can collect raw materials to feed its factories and markets. The US, on the other hand, is nowhere to be seen: I'm not saying we should be exploiting Africa's resources, but because it has little of what we want, we don't have any interest in engaging with the place. Meanwhile, China lets Africa's despotisms do what they want.

I don't see anyone in US politics who looks willing to engage with the rest of the world, and that frustrates me. Bernie Sanders, for all that I agreed with him on a lot of his platform, just seemed unengaged with the world - which may seem okay if you think that American power is exclusively a bad thing. But I do still believe that America has a positive role to play in world affairs, if it would just get itself together to do so, and if it could actually do so sensitively.

I keep coming back to initiatives like the Marshall Plan or the rebuilding of Japan. Both of those came with negatives, like the fact that the eastern half of Europe languished under the Soviets for fifty years, or that South Korea was a US-backed dictatorship until the 1970s, but Western Europe and Japan are stable, prosperous societies that grew with the help of the US. They may seem lost in the current multipolar era, but Japan essentially created the technological world we now live in, and Europe is a huge exporter of culture (including my beloved football).

This is all relevant for Afghanistan. When the US toppled the Taliban, it claimed it wanted to create a stable, open society like Afghanistan apparently had until the 1970s. If it had actually tried to help the country, rather than spending all its money on destroying Iraq and arrogantly presuming that the Afghans would be eager to turn into Americans, then the cultural gains that women, liberals and LGBTQ people have made there in the last two decades wouldn't be threatened now.