Two Readings on the U.S. Being Routed in Afghanistan

The impending Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has two readings. Those who defend the U.S. empire lament the loss of U.S. credibility. 

That’s the New York Times’ take as expressed in today’s article “Afghanistan’s Unraveling May Strike another Blow to U.S. Credibility.” The Time’s writes: ““What made the U.S. strong, powerful and rich was that from 1918 through 1991 and beyond, everybody knew we could depend on the U.S. to defend and stand up for the free world,’’ said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.”

How can the NY Times uncritically quote such a statement? How does the U.S. stand up for the free world when it is buddy-buddy with governments of the ilk of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates, Bahrain, when it stands idly by in the face of fierce repression by governments it supports such as Chile (under Piñera), Colombia (under Duque) , Ecuador (under Lenin Moreno), when it just gently slaps the wrists of Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines and Duda in Poland while imposing crippling sanctions on Venezuela, and engineers coups against democratically elected governments that result in repressive, corrupt and reactionary regimes in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) Chile (1970), Indonesia (1967) and those are just a few names.

The second take is that the Taliban’s triumph has to force on the U.S. a long-overdue introspection with regard to its interventionist foreign policy. Just because the U.S. is “democratic” and our adversaries Russia and China are not does not mean that our foreign policy is designed to protect democracy. Throughout the Cold War this was not the case, and now even less so. It’s no more the case than it was with Rome in Biblical times. Yet this is the basic assumption of the champions of U.S. interventionism.

 For two decades since Bush’s invasion in 2001 we have been defending a government of war lords which is no better than the Taliban that we have been combating. Now people in the U.S. have to ask the obvious question: all that destruction, all those lives lost, all those people displaced, why has the war dragged on for so long? The only argument that the hawks who dominate both the Democratic and Republican parties have come up with (and was Biden’s talking point) is that we have knocked off Bin Laden and so our mission was accomplished. Does anyone really believe this? Does Biden believe it? First, Bin Laden was bumped off in 2011and so why did the intervention continue for another ten years? And second, Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, and so why were we in Afghanistan instead of Pakistan? With such weak arguments, people in the U.S. have to wake up to the real explanation of U.S. interventionism. It’s to assert U.S. power throughout the world to defend corporate interests. It has nothing to do with “making the world safe for democracy” any more than World War I did, Woodrow Wilson notwithstanding.