When The World Changed

Elite Self-Interest and Economic Decline in Early Modern Europe 

Richard Lachmann 

Why does the leading economic power of its time lose its dominance? Competing theories are tested through a comparison of four historical cases-the Florentine city-state, the Spanish empire, and the Dutch and British nation-states. Institutional context determined social actors' capacities to apply their polities' human and material resources to foreign economic competition. Specifically, the dominant elites in each polity established the social relations and institutions that protected them from domestic challenges from rival elites and classes. But these relations and institutions had the effect of limiting elites' capacities to adapt to foreign economic rivals: Elites acting locally determined their capacities to act globally. From comparative historical analysis to “local theory”: The Italian city-state route to the modern state Many explanations have been offered for why the dominant city-states of Italy declined, giving way to the larger, national states of Western Europe. Some, like World Systems theorists, have seen the decline of the Italian city-states as the result of the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, while others, like Richard Lachmann, have focused on institutional arrangements that rendered these systems less resilient when faced by external threats. This article focuses on the relations of local institutions with the interests of capital, and on the role of contentious politics within the city-state that developed as a result of this interaction. Taking as my starting point the comparative historical analysis of statebuilding in the work of Charles Tilly, in Coercion, Capital and European States, the article places contentious politics as a bridge between the Tillian categories of capital-domination and statebuilding, using the case of Florence in the late 14th and early 15th centuries to etch the skeleton of that bridge. With Tilly, I argue that the class interests of the urban elites that were built directly into the mechanisms of city-state politics worked at cross-purposes to the collective requirements of statebuilding. Next, I argue that Tilly pays too little attention to the specificities of the Italian case and gives short shrift to its internal political processes. Finally, I argue that class domination working through institutional conflicts led to periodic outbursts of conflict and built a lack of trust into the structure of governance. I conclude by suggesting why the Italian city-states, at least, were inhibited from taking the nation-state route to the modern world until quite late in their histories. 

Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300 to 1700 

Philip S. Gorski

 In recent years, the sociology of religion has been consumed by a debate over secularization that pits advocates of a new, rational-choice paradigm (the so-called religious economies model) against defenders of classical secularization theory. According to the old paradigm, the Western world has become increasingly secular since the Middle Ages; according to the new paradigm, it has become increasingly religious. I put these two images of religious development to the test through a detailed examination of religious life in Western Europe before and after the Reformation. I conclude that the changes in social structure and religious experience that occurred during this period were considerably more complex than either the old or new paradigms suggest and, indeed, that the two paradigms are neither so opposed nor so irreconcilable as many of their defenders contend. It is possible, indeed probable, that Western society has become more secular without becoming less religious. I discuss the limitations of the two competing paradigms and sketch the outlines of a more adequate theory of religious change. Medievalists for some time now have been about the business of questioning the traditional boundaries between the medieval and early modern periods. What these scholars have wrought in the areas of cultural, political, technological, and religious history,the eminent historian Christopher Dyer (University of Leicester) has accomplished in the area of English socio-economic history. Originally delivered as the Ford Lectures (University of Oxford, Hilary Term 2001), this book's fundamental thesis is"that many of the tendencies of the end of the Middle Ages had their roots in a much earlier period ... [and that] the advance of commercialization, as towns grew and markets multiplied in the thirteenth century, has led to doubts about whether the changes of the long fifteenth century were of much significance" (p. 3). He continues on to assert that "Just as the commercial growth of the thirteenth century prepared the way for the structural changes of the fifteenth, so developments before 1500 can be connected with the trends of the early modern period" (p. 3). Prosperous rural yeomen, wage laborers, innovative farming techniques, occupational specialization, and the rise of a consumer economy were not the turning points of the early modern period but rather quite typical of England before 1500. These scholars have produced ground-breaking evidence of a rapidly commercializing economy in thirteenth-century England -- a trend overlooked in the past because it was hidden in the local and regional economies of towns rather than documented in multiple metropolitan areas as one finds on the continent. Based on this relatively recent scholarship, the picture of England's socio-economic development looks much more matured before 1500 than previously believed and the crisis of the fourteenth century proved to be a period of economic innovation and advancement by the lower ranks of society even though the aristocracy experienced decline

Cities, Constitutions, and Sovereign Borrowing in Europe, 1274–1785

This article investigates the politics of sovereign borrowing in Europe over the very long run. I consider three alternative hypotheses regarding the sources of borrower credibility. According to the first, European states with constitutional checks on executive authority found it easier to obtain credit at low interest rates than did states that lacked such constraints. My second hypothesis focuses on state type (city-state versus territorial state) and the way in which this may have influenced the balance of political power between owners of land and owners of capital in a society. This hypothesis suggests that after controlling for other factors, one should observe that city-states in Europe found it easier to borrow than did larger territorial states, and that these city-states paid lower interest rates on their debt. Finally, my third hypothesis suggests that borrower credibility depended on the simultaneous presence of both constitutional checks and balances and a city-state. When one considers a broad sample of cases over a long time span there is strong support for the proposition involving city-states and merchant power, but less support for the argument that constitutional checks influenced credibility regardless of state type (city-state or territorial state). There is, however, some empirical evidence of an interaction effect whereby constitutional constraints on rulers made city-states particularly credible as borrowers.

'Republics by Contract': Civil Society, Social Capital, and the 'Putnam Thesis' in the Papal State

In the decades after 1506, and building largely on pre-existing institutions, Bologna developed what was arguably the most extensive network of social service institutions in Italy. Some of its benefits were similar to what we find emerging elsewhere in 15th and 16th century Europe, and have been described in studies by Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Gianna Pomata, Lucia Ferrante, Luisa Ciammitti, Massimo Fornasari, Gabriela Zarri, myself and others: extensive organized food distribution to poor on the basis of a preliminary census of need; a large foundling home; 7 orphanages for girls and boys that work actively to educate, train, and return orphaned and abandoned children to society as workers and parents; shelters for battered women and for prostitutes seeking to leave the profession; 2 major hospitals; a shelter for the mentally ill, a syphilitics hospital; a large centralized shelter and workhouse for the poor; a large public pawn bank, the Monte della Pietà, giving low cost loans to the poor; and a system of city doctors who are paid only upon completion of a course of treatment, and then only if there is a cure.

These institutions are not all unique, though I would argue that the level of benefits seems higher here than elsewhere in Italy. Beyond these institutions, there are other elements as well, particularly services for the working poor who constituted such a large part of the urban community. A key area of need for this group was dowries, and here we see that Bologna developed an innovative dowry fund from 1583 that was unlike any other in Italy. It was open only to small investors and gradually developed into something like a credit union or savings bank; deposits doubled in about 10 years. Here again, Mauro Carboni’s work provides relevant statistics and analysis.

Whereas Florence's Monte delle Dote was a public enterprise, run by its oligarchy and offering an attractive investment to wealthy families, Bologna's Monte was privately operated by the investors themselves, and attracted mostly small deposits. Families of modest and moderate means accounted for about 1/3rd of all deposits. The remaining 2/3rds were employers, private benefactors, and institutions that offered dowries to servants, or to needy girls out of charity.

Bologna’s Monte actively discouraged investments by wealthy families by imposing a relatively low ceiling on deposits. Only Bolognese residents could own Monte credits. The minimum amount to open an account was set at 25 lire, a sum equal to about two-month’s salary of a menial worker, and the maximum deposit was 500 lire, raised to 800 lire in 1627. From 1583 and 1620, 847 accounts were opened on behalf of young girls belonging to 649 families. We know the father’s profession for 182 of those families. None represented leading aristocratic families, 21 were urban professionals (notaries, doctors); 157 represented modest mechanical trades (hemp weavers, silk weavers, carpenters, tailors, porters, bricklayers and so on); 4 were sharecroppers.

Beyond the scope and level of benefits, what was significant about Bologna’s system of civic charity was how it balanced broad administration with close ties to the civic government to create an interconnected network that focused deliberately on the urban population. All of the charitable institutions were run by large confraternities or companies who cycled scores of volunteers through administrative positions for limited terms. Moreover, some of the key charitable institutions deliberately aimed to recruit their boards across representative categories, ensuring that these include nobles, gentlemen, merchants, and superior artisans. The senatorial oligarchy promoted this. It kept its finger on charitable institutions in a period of reforms of the 1550s, when most of the key institutions wrote or rewrote their statutes along a roughly uniform model that other charitable institutions subsequently adopted in the decades that follow. A key feature in the new statutes is that these charitable confraternities all chose their governing Rector from the Senate. There emerged a core of Senators who rotated from one institution to another, giving it an informal co-ordination. This was precisely the period when the Senate was establishing its assunterie to expand its administrative capacities, and when it was bleeding power from the Anziani. At the same time, the Monte della Pietà became the financial administrator of a number of the key charitable institutions.

These two factors – Senatorial rectors and centralized financial administration – took the plethora of individual charitable institutions and consolidated them into a working civic network of charity: Bologna deliberately chose not to follow other cities like Florence that entrusted these social charities to smaller and often hand-picked administrative boards serving life terms. Power was shared and decentralized though a broader mass of the citizens who rotated through appointments, increasing the level of civil engagement. A further key characteristic is that benefits were largely for citizens only – not for transients or visitors. This was commonly found in statutes elsewhere, but seems to have been policed more rigorously here.

Moving from charity to employment, we find that Bologna’s guilds retained more authority in regulating professional behaviour and directing the local economy. An earlier economic historiography saw guilds as brakes on early modern economy, but this is being revised by the current generation of Italian economic historians. Alberto Guenzi finds that guilds certainly defend their interests, but also often push innovation in methods and production techniques. Raffaella Sarti has shown that the guild model was so strong locally that it moved beyond productive industries into the service sector: in the 17th century, servants formed a guild to defend their interests, and managed to keep it operative into the 18th century. This suggests that the model of collective organization and a regulated economy was still compelling locally.

Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam.

By Anne E. C. McCants (Urban, University of Illinois Press, 1997)

From Civilitas To Civility: Codes Of Manners In Medieval And Early Modern England Argues that to see the contrasts between late medieval `courtesy books' and early modern manuals of manners as markers of changing ideals of social conduct in England is an interpretation too narrowly based on works written in English. Examination of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature shows that the ideal of the urbane gentleman can be traced back at least as far as the most comprehensive of all courtesy books, the twelfth-century Liber Urbani of Daniel of Beccles, and was itself underpinned by the commonplace secular morality of the much older Distichs of Cato.

Peter Scott: Ethics “in” and “for” Higher Education

The university first developed as a distinctive institution in Southern and Western Europe in the high Middle Ages. The qualifier ‘distinctive’ is important in two senses. First, there had been ‘academic’ institutions in Europe before the emergence of the university (or stadium general) - in 7^th century North Umbria (Bead) or at the court of Charlemagne (Albumin). But they had been monastic or court schools, organizational elements within much larger configurations. Second, ‘academic’ institutions also flourished in the Byzantine east, where institutions close to universities did emerge, and in the Islamic world, where the unity of religion and state made it more difficult for distinctive institutions to emerge. So, although the structural differentiation of the medieval university was decisive in terms of future evolution, its significance can be exaggerated in intellectual and normative terms. The university did provide a separate organizational basis for the emergence of a distinctive value system, scholasticism. But the degree to which scholasticism could really be distinguished from the wider culture of medieval Catholicism and feudal society was limited.

Only with the coming of the Renaissance - and especially the Reformation - did the organizational (semi) independence of the universities become significant. Once the unity of medieval Europe had been shattered, universities played a crucial role in state-building. They educated new (and more secular) bureaucratic elites, bridged or brokered between mercantile and court cultures, and promoted new intellectual values by providing ideological justifications for the new politico-religious order and proto-scientific culture. Many universities, of course, were founded between 1500 and 1700. One indicator of the importance of universities during this period is their social penetration. In England the so-called ‘Long Parliament’, which was first elected in 1641 and went on to wage war against King Charles I, contained more graduates than any English (by then United Kingdom) Parliament before 1945.

Yet in some respects this second flourishing of the European university was a false dawn. From the mid 17th to the late 18th centuries universities stagnated both in terms of student numbers and of intellectual engagement (- this statement remains broadly valid despite recent studies that suggest universities were not as stagnant during this period as was once supposed) (Porter 1996). In fact the new Academies of Science, ‘practical’ engineers, Enlightenment illuminati, the first stirrings of the dominant media and publishing industries, radical thought and revolutionary politics - these were the channels through which intellectual and scientific innovation flowed for more than a century. While the university played some part in the scientific revolution, its role in the Enlightenment was tangential, even accidental and value systems evolved independently. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that by 1800 the university had become a threatened species, at risk of being superseded by other more ‘modern’ academic institutions (de Ridder-Symeons 1996).

AFGHAN NEWS

Women’s rights and the US’s ‘civilising’ mission in Afghanistan

The US imperial endeavours in Afghanistan and anywhere else in the world have never benefitted women and their rights.


Belen Fernandez
Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
21 Aug 2021

Women with their children try to get inside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021 [Reuters]

In July, former United States president and war criminal turned portrait artist George W Bush bewailed the impending withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, nearly 20 years after he ordered the invasion of the country.

Afghan women and girls, Bush warned, would suffer “unspeakable harm” on account of the American departure – an ironic assessment, to say the least, coming from the man who kicked off a “war on terror” that has thus far killed more than 47,000 civilians (including women) in Afghanistan alone and displaced millions.

KEEP READING Is the Taliban’s treatment of women really inspired by Sharia?

To be sure, the plight of Afghan women at the hands of the Taliban has from the get-go offered a handy pretext for US military devastation.

Long before the 9/11 attacks even transpired, US politicians, celebrities and self-declared feminist activists had been pushing for a “liberation” of women in Afghanistan that conveniently dovetailed with imperial geostrategic interests. As if “B-52 carpet bombing”- to borrow the New York Times’ terminology – has ever been good for female humans, much less any other organism.

In November 2001, the month after the launch of Bush’s invasion, then-First Lady Laura Bush charitably took to US radio waves to assure listeners that the “fight against terrorism” was simultaneously a “fight for the rights and dignity of women”, and that the plight of Afghan women and children was a “matter of deliberate human cruelty carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control”.

Never mind that the same thing can be said of invading US forces who carry out “matters” like bombarding a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz with a Lockheed AC-130 gunship, incinerating patients and decapitating medical staff.

In her radio address, the first lady went on to righteously affirm that “civilised people throughout the world are speaking out in horror, not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan but also because, in Afghanistan, we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us”.

As for the world that the global superpower itself had already imposed on everyone else, there was no mention of international broken hearts on behalf of such civilising endeavours as the US sanctions on Iraq that had as of 1996 reportedly caused the deaths of some half a million Iraqi children of both sexes.

Indeed, the US’s transparently Orientalist civilising mission in Afghanistan – of a piece with age-old colonial rhetoric in the Middle East and beyond – becomes even more nauseating when one recalls the US track record of transparently uncivilised treatment of women worldwide.

To pick one example from an endless multitude, there was that time in the 1970s that the US gave the military junta in Argentina a carte blanche to go after its own “terrorists” – in this case, some 30,000 suspected leftists who were dropped from aeroplanes to their maritime deaths or otherwise dispensed with.

The BBC notes that the Argentine military “drew the line at murdering pregnant women”, who were instead “allowed to give birth in prison – only to be murdered a few days later”.


How’s that for women’s rights?

Then there is the perennial US carte blanche extended to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese women and girls, in addition to men and boys.

Incidentally, the institutionalised US-backed Israeli terrorisation of regional Arabs played no small part in fuelling the 9/11 attacks. As the late Robert Fisk – the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden – presciently wrote on the occasion of 9/11, “this is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days”.

It was, he wrote, also “about US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 … and about a Lebanese militia – paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally – hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps”.

This final reference was to the three-day massacre of up to several thousand people in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut in 1982, the immediate aftermath of which affair Fisk witnessed first hand. In his book Pity the Nation, he described scenes such as the young child in a white, mud-stained dress who “lay on the roadway like a discarded doll” because the “back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain”.

A female corpse meanwhile “held a tiny baby”, also dead, and someone had furthermore “slit open the woman’s stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child”.

As Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi reiterates: “The United States was responsible for the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Beirut.”

So much for “civilisation”.

And yet the West never grows weary of its civilising missions – or all of the lies that sustain them. This grand exercise in deception is aided significantly by a mainstream press that tirelessly peddles recycled rhetoric to a public consciousness seemingly impervious to worldly reality.

One need look no further than the decorated foreign affairs columnist of the US newspaper of record: the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, poster boy for imperial hubris and exact embodiment of the brand of paternalistic, sexist condescension with which the US relentlessly lectures the Arab/Muslim world on gender equality and women’s rights.

In his book Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, Friedman entered into a state of Orientalist rapture recalling a scene at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda POWs were being treated to a “mind-bending experience” courtesy of the US military. This unparalleled educational trajectory allegedly saw the al-Qaeda members go from “living, as James Michener put it, ‘in this cruel land of recurring ugliness, where only men were seen’”, to being suddenly “guarded by a woman with blond locks spilling out from under her helmet and an M16 hanging from her side”.

After all, nothing says women’s empowerment like having ostensibly gender-enlightened New York Times columnists trip over themselves in ecstasy over the weaponisation of blond locks.

Mind-bending experiences aside, it goes without saying that a military that kills and otherwise punishes women across the globe – while also notoriously suffering from an epidemic of rape and sexual assault within its own ranks – is no blueprint for women’s liberation.

Flash forward to the US withdrawal and the rather mind-bending conviction, among certain concerned parties, that what is needed is further Western intervention to save Afghan females from the situation they are now in, thanks in large part to Western intervention in the first place.

Beyond the fact that the US war on its penultimate preferred existential menace – communism – directly set the stage in Afghanistan for the rise of the “terrorist menace”, there are plenty of other indications that the US was never actually in the business of improving the lot of women in the country.

As Rafia Zakaria – author, most recently, of Against White Feminism – comments in an article for The Nation, white feminists in the US decided from the outset that “war and occupation were essential to freeing Afghan women”, no matter what those women themselves thought.

Obviously, it requires a distinct level of imperial delusion to think that you can bomb and occupy women into a variety of freedom that they do not want to be bombed and occupied into.

Zakaria goes on to specify that hundreds of millions of dollars in development aid that the US “poured into its saviour-industrial complex relied on second-wave feminists’ assumption that women’s liberation was the automatic consequence of women’s participation in a capitalist economy” – an expected yet terribly misguided assumption given the oppressively patriarchal nature of capitalism, imperialism and all that good stuff.

Undoubtedly, it is immensely useful – from an imperial standpoint, at least – to have a bevy of self-identifying feminists on hand to whitewash US military barbarity.

Call it white-women-washing, if you will.

But, as the likes of George W Bush continue to decry the “unspeakable harm” that will befall Afghan women in the wake of the US military withdrawal, it is also worth reflecting on the harm done to US women themselves by a patriarchal capitalist society that spends trillions of dollars on wars abroad – rather than on healthcare or childcare or anything else that might benefit the average woman or human rather than, you know, the average US military contractor or corporation.

Such a reckoning, in the end, would be a real civilising mission.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.


Belen Fernandez
Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
Belen Fernandez is the author of Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine, and has written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications.

Afghanistan Withdrawal: Adam Weinstein counters criticism of America's "standing in the world"

Issued on: 24/08/2021 - 

Contrary to some of the scathing criticism the precipitous US withdrawal has received across the world, Adam Weinstein, a Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, takes issue "with the argument that it has been a big stain on US credibility." Mr. Weinstein offers a completely different perspective on the rapidly unfolding events in Afghanistan, applauding President Biden for ending what has been deemed "an unwinnable war." Nevertheless, Mr. Weinstein does support the widespread criticism that "throughout the Trump and the Biden administrations, there could have been more communication to keep NATO partners in the loop." Speaking to France 24, Mr. Weinstein sums up the stunning turn of events in the following terms: "I don't think remaining in protracted conflicts that last two decades is a way to enhance US credibility or standing in the world."

AFP/FRANCE24

A Trillion Dollar Illusion

The Entirely Predictable Failure of the West's Mission in Afghanistan

In early July, I met with a leading Taliban military commander. I asked when his fighters would arrive in Kabul. His answer: "They are already there." How the Afghanistan mission failed and what happens next

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Taliban fighters in Kabul 

Foto: Rahmat Gul / AP

LONG LONG LONG READ

By Christoph Reuter
20.08.2021
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DER SPIEGEL


In early July, before the great storm broke over Afghanistan, Kabul was already surrounded by the Taliban. And nowhere were the Islamist fighters closer to the Afghan capital city than on the shores of the Qargha Reservoir, a popular getaway on the western edge of the city. People were saying that the Taliban had gathered in the villages behind the nearby hills. The last frontline, it was said, was on the shore of the reservoir at the amusement park

During the day, families were still taking their children to the rides and the restaurants or going out on the water in swan-shaped paddle boats. A small, six-member special forces unit even enjoyed a picnic in a wooden pavilion on the shore. One of them had to stand guard at the gun turret of their armored Humvee as the rest smoked hookahs and drank colorful sodas.

The next day, I met one of the Taliban’s leading military commanders for Kabul, who received me in the middle of the city in an unremarkable office building. When asked how far the Taliban had to walk to get to the lakeshore, he responded: "Not far at all." He seemed perfectly calm, a clean-shaven emissary of fear. "They’re already there, after all. They are the security guards at the restaurants, the ride operators, the cleaning staff. When the time is right, the place will be full of Taliban."

Six weeks after our meeting, in the middle of August, the same man drove to the Presidential Palace along with 10 bodyguards and the senior commander responsible for the conquering of Kabul. He hadn’t lied when he said that his men had already infiltrated the park at the reservoir. What he had failed to mention, though, was that the Taliban were also already in the heart of the city.

DER SPIEGEL 34/2021

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 34/2021 

(August 21th, 2021) of DER SPIEGEL.SPIEGEL International

Numerous witnesses in various neighborhoods of the capital following the fall of Kabul had similar stories to tell. "It started in April," says a longtime acquaintance from the western part of the city. "More and more outsiders were suddenly in the neighborhood. Some had beards, others didn’t. Some were well dressed, others wore rags. Completely different. That made them difficult to notice. But all of the locals realized: They aren’t from here." They had silently infiltrated Kabul. The outsiders also appeared in the northern and eastern parts of the city, telling those who asked that they had come to Kabul for a new job or for business reasons.

Then, last Sunday morning, "they came out of the buildings holding white Taliban flags, some of them armed with pistols," says a resident of an eastern district of the city. It was the ultimate victory over America’s high-tech military, whose air surveillance proved powerless against this army of pedestrians and motorcyclists that would overrun Kabul from within and from outside in the ensuing hours. Later that day, they would drive through the city streets in captured police cars – from the air, an image of perfect confusion.

How could such a thing happen? How was it possible to lose Afghanistan to exactly the same group that was defeated – destroyed, really – in just two months back in 2001?

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An anti-Taliban protest in Kabul on Thursday: The Taliban rolled in like an avalanche. Foto: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images


For 20 years, the U.S. – together with Germany, Britain, Canada and other countries – maintained a presence in the country with its dominant military superiority and, at times, with over 130,000 troops. The Afghan army and police were trained and outfitted over and over again for a period equivalent to an entire generation – only to ultimately capitulate almost without a fight to an offensive of pedestrians. The takeover happened in the morning hours of last Sunday, with the Taliban suddenly appearing in Kabul like a ghost army.

It seems as though all of the efforts made in the last two decades – all of the roads, schools, wells and buildings that were built, all of the over $1 trillion that flowed into the country – were not enough to decisively sway the majority of Afghans to the side of the country’s financial backers.

It was like an avalanche from the north, beginning with the loss of several northern districts only to ultimately crash over the entire country, crushing the established state within just a few weeks. The first districts to fall were those with names hardly anyone in the West had ever heard before, but they were followed by entire provinces. Day after day, cities surrendered to the advance: Kunduz, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar. The more dramatic the collapse grew, the quieter it became as resistance faded away – until Kabul, the capital city cowering in fear, simply gave up within a matter of hours.

The shock was followed by panic. Tens of thousands of people rushed the walls of the Kabul airport in a desperate effort to escape the city and the country. The Taliban had long since closed down most of the overland border crossings through which people might have been able to escape to neighboring countries. Soon, the metal fences at the airport gave way. The guards vanished and masses of people forced their way onto the tarmac.

If images from the fall of Kabul have been burned into the world’s collective memory, it will be these ones: Men running alongside a slowly accelerating C-17 military cargo plane, desperately clinging to the landing gear of the taxiing jet. And then, a short time later, small figures losing their grip on the plane and falling to their deaths from hundreds of feet.

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People at the airport in Kabul climbing on a plane belonging to the Afghan airline Kam Air. Foto: Wakil Kohsar / AFP


And then the triumphant victors driving through Kabul in pickups, their Kalashnikovs thrust into the air. Sauntering into the Presidential Palace and posing there as if it had always belonged to them. Ensuring the Afghans that they had no reason to be afraid, that they should carry on with their daily lives and nothing would happen to them. All they had to do, the Taliban insisted, was adhere to their rules.

Who is to blame for this disaster? Is it U.S. President Joe Biden, as his predecessor immediately trumpeted to the world? "It will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history," Trump said, ignoring the fact that the deal he signed with the Taliban in February 2020 paved the way for the U.S. withdrawal.

Others saw the fall of Kabul as the "result of a large, organized and cowardly conspiracy," as Atta Mohammad Noor, the warlord and former governor of Mazar-e-Sharif, raged on Facebook following his precipitous helicopter escape. Ashraf Ghani, now the ex-president of Afghanistan, complained in an interview with DER SPIEGEL back in May of an "organized system of support" operated by Pakistan that was destabilizing his country. "The Taliban receive logistics there," Ghani said. "Their finances are there, and recruitment is there."

The list of accusations could continue. But the causes of this failure stretch back to the beginning of the invasion. The grumblers of today were themselves involved in this debacle, the most expensive act of self-deception of the century so far. Only those who understand how this disaster came about will be able to understand how things are likely to progress.

The term self-deception isn’t often used in its plural form, but it should be in the case of Afghanistan. The misconceptions from the West started at the very beginning of the intervention, when Washington thought the military would be sufficient to pacify the country, to the end, when Berlin was still asserting that it would only take just a bit longer to reverse the situation. Another fallacy was the assumption that a nation could be built and protected if enough money was invested and enough training undertaken. The Afghans, too, were guilty of self-deception, with the government and a large share of the population believing for two decades that the U.S. would never pull out.

Some lies served to obscure the true state of affairs in the country, others were the product of ignorance, and still others were truly believed. It was a fatal, collective delusion that ended up costing a six-figure number of Afghan lives along with those of more than 3,500 foreign troops. A fallacy that unintentionally sent Afghanistan on a 20-year detour from one Taliban reign to the next. Meanwhile, an entire generation grew up in the country’s cities under the assumption that the freedoms guaranteed by the foreign powers would be theirs forever.

More on Afghanistan

"Takeover of Kabul Unlikely Before 9/11": A Chronicle of German Failures in Afghanistan

Local Hires Stranded in Afghanistan: "They Don't Care About Me. They Don't Care About My Life!" By Matthias Gebauer, Muriel Kalisch, Steffen Lüdke und Laurenz Schreiner

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Fears Justified as Taliban Secures Power in Afghanistan An Analysis by Christoph Reuter    

These lines are born of the experience of having traveled to Afghanistan repeatedly over the course of 19 years and of having lived in Kabul as a correspondent for three of them. And they come from the sad realization that I wrote of the predictable failure of this project back in 2009. "If you take a look at the progression of the last eight years in Afghanistan, the following conclusion is unavoidable: The longer the international engagement there has lasted, the worse the situation has become," was my verdict at the time, "no matter how many thousands of kilometers of roads have been built, how many schools constructed and how many wells dug."

Nobody planned to stumble into this situation. The trigger for the mission was the shock of Sept. 11, 2001. Even as smoke was still rising from the rubble of the Twin Towers in New York, the masterminds of the biggest terror attack in recent history were discovered in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden and his followers had developed a state within the "emirate" controlled by the Taliban. Washington’s primary goal was revenge and justice, not nation-building. Then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder promised Germany’s "unlimited solidarity."

It was a different era, marked by the successes and horrors of the millennium that had just come to an end. The aftershocks of the euphoric events of 1989, when the Eastern Bloc managed to escape Moscow’s iron grip and Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary returned to democracy. On the other hand, the atrocities of Rwanda, the slaughter of 800,000 people as the UN stood by and watched, reinforced the idea of "never again." The NATO mission in Yugoslavia, which was controversial in Germany, managed to stop the Serbs in Kosovo. The Islamist Taliban movement, which ruled over most of Afghanistan following years of civil war, had been merely a side note to the horrors occurring elsewhere.

That was the situation immediately following Sept. 11 when Washington issued an ultimatum to the Taliban, demanding that they arrest and extradite bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qaida leadership or face the consequences. The Taliban said no. Whether they really meant no, and whether they might have been open to a face-saving plan whereby they would stand aside and allow Osama and the other leaders to be captured, as some from Taliban leadership would later claim, remains unsettled. NATO invoked Article 5, the collective defense mandate. The UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1368, legitimizing the coming attack as an act of self-defense.

The attack began on Oct. 7 with ballistic missiles, warplanes and B-2 long-range bombers targeting Kandahar and other targets in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance, which joined the U.S. in the fight, arrived on horseback wielding Kalashnikovs. Kabul fell without a fight on Nov. 13 and Kandahar, where the Taliban got its start, followed on Dec. 7. The victory had taken just two months.

At the time, during this winter of fury, neither the voting public nor the government apparatus asked about plans for the future or the mission’s goals. In December 2001, the first Afghanistan Conference took place, an assembly of victors, some of whom dreamed of a return of King Mohammed Zahir Shah, who had been deposed in 1973. Missing from that initial gathering, as they would be from all subsequent meetings, were the Taliban. Nobody wanted them there.

I arrived in Afghanistan in the scorching hot summer of 2002, just after the U.S. Air Force had bombed a wedding party in the countryside. At least that’s what survivors said. The U.S. military spokesmen countered that gunmen onboard the U.S. aircraft had fired in self-defense after having been targeted from the ground.

That sounded so absurd that we went there ourselves, traveling unchallenged through the provinces of Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan, the cradle of the Taliban. But they were no longer there. "You know," an Afghan man said one evening around a fire at a rural rest stop, "I was also with the Taliban! But they’re history now." His tone was laconic, and he didn’t sound particularly disappointed, since he could now plant poppies again, something that had been strictly forbidden under Taliban rule.

In the bombed village in Uruzgan, it quickly became apparent that the story behind the wedding bombing had unfolded rather differently. The Americans hadn’t just attacked from the air, but had rolled in with a convoy of heavily armed infantrymen. It hadn’t been self-defense at all, but a planned attack. Members of a Kandahar tribe had accused allies of President Hamid Karzai of being members of the Taliban.

If you couldn’t defeat the Americans, you could apparently use them for your own purposes. It was a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, and which would contribute to the abject failure of the intervention. The great tribal council meeting in Kabul in June 2002 "was the moment when it failed," recalls Thomas Ruttig, who was a UN official from Germany at the time, but who later co-founded the Afghanistan Analysts Network. "The moment when U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad brought back the warlords." They were the men who had destroyed the country in the earlier civil war, but who had helped the U.S. government of President George W. Bush in the fight against the Taliban.

Khalilzad and others forced the tribal council to include 50 additional men on top of the elected representatives – militia leaders who had ruled with fear and aggression before the arrival of the Taliban. They were men like Mohammed "Marshal" Fahim, a Tajik leader who stood accused of perpetrating massacres and kidnappings. And Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek leader who murdered several hundred imprisoned Taliban and later had his opponents raped with bottles. Both of them would go on to serve as vice president of the country. The new holders of power remained uncompromising. They immediately set about exacting revenge on their former enemies and plundering the new government.

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A U.S. soldier trying to clear the tarmac at the Kabul Airport on Sunday. 

Foto: Wakil Kohsar / AFP


Billions of dollars earmarked for construction projects, roads and power plants would vanish in the ensuing years. Court verdicts could be bought, and rampant corruption corroded the state. Farmers, at least in the Pashtun provinces, remained poor and were bullied by the militias of the new rulers. The fighters would show up to hunt down the Taliban, but would then cut down the farmers’ almond trees and plunder their villages.

American and German politicians justified the eternal continuation of the military mission by claiming that the Taliban were "still there." But that wasn’t true. They slowly reappeared after several years of absence, first in the south and then in the north. Starting in 2007, I spent months with a former mullah documenting the Taliban’s slow return in his home district of Andar, south of Kabul. "The ill will toward everything foreign, toward Americans, toward Tajiks, toward police, was seamlessly nourished by real wrongs, exorbitant excesses and invented slights," we wrote at the time.

In the north, the German military rhapsodized at the time about the quiet in the provinces under their watch. When a new police chief was then appointed and he established a regime of horror in Kunduz, beating farmers and destroying their market stands when they didn’t pay sufficient protection money, the German troops stood by and watched from their hill overlooking the city. They were, they pointed out, only there as the "International Security Assistance Force" for the Afghanistan government. That presaged the return of the Taliban in Kunduz, with the Islamists taking control of village after village, until the Germans didn’t even dare to make forays six kilometers from their base. In September 2009, the German military called in U.S. airstrikes in Kunduz that killed 91 people who were looting fuel from two hijacked tanker trucks. The German commander thought they were insurgents.

By then, Germany and the U.S. had invested so much capital, both financial and political, that they had become hostages of their own project. For the lack of other achievements, the international aid community in 2009 sold the mere holding of elections as a great triumph. But when more and more evidence began emerging of election fraud orchestrated by Karzai’s entourage, the West found itself stuck in an insoluble conundrum. If they recognized Karzai’s fraudulent election victory, they would be supporting an illegitimate government. If they did not, they would have to force out a government that they had spent billions of dollars supporting.

In the search for a solution, Washington overrode Karzai’s objections and pushed through a second vote, one that would be monitored by UN election observers. What then took place is among the darkest examples of the opportunism exhibited by the U.S. government and the UN.

At daybreak of Oct. 28, three attackers launched an assault on the UN guesthouse in Kabul, shot the guards to death, pushed their way into the courtyard and set about slaughtering the almost 30 UN employees inside. But they unexpectedly met resistance. Louis Maxwell, a former U.S. soldier and security officer, was able to hold back the attackers from a rooftop for one-and-a-half hours. No help came from the Afghan police or the army – right in the heart of Kabul. Once the three attackers set off their suicide belts, Maxwell staggered out, while four other UN employees were calling others on the outside telling them they would also emerge from hiding.

Just minutes later, they were all dead, the four shot from the front. Maxwell was hit as he was standing on the street between two Afghan soldiers. Neither of them batted an eyelash. They then dragged his body into the courtyard. Months later, internal UN investigators only managed to make progress with their inquiry thanks to a chance video of Maxwell’s murder made by a German security officer from a rooftop several buildings away. But it was all supposed to remain confidential.

In summer 2010, an FBI investigator asked to meet with me in Kabul. When I asked what would happen next, he just shook his head. There would be no further investigations. Washington, he said, didn’t want to expose Karzai. Following the attack, half of the UN staff was pulled out of the country and the second election was cancelled. Hamid Karzai got the victory he wanted.

When Joe Biden announced a concrete date for the pull-out in April, many in Afghanistan still refused to believe that the Americans were leaving.

The Americans and the rest of the NATO allies consistently let Karzai off the hook, along with his corrupt family and his secret service. The British, for example, wanted to focus on combating drug production in the country. When soldiers from the elite British force SAS happened across a gigantic opium storehouse near Kandahar that belonged to the president’s half-brother, all British diplomats were ordered to keep quiet about it. When two German hikers were murdered on the Salang Pass north of Kabul in 2011 and evidence pointed to the entourage of a contract killer for the Afghan secret service NDS, secrecy was once again the order of the day.

It was the era of U.S. President Barack Obama – and his then-vice president, Joe Biden, who experienced the unfolding disaster firsthand for eight years. Just before he became vice president, Biden had abruptly stood up and left a dinner with Karzai in anger after the Afghan president, in response to questions about corruption in Afghanistan, told Biden that the U.S. is ultimately responsible for everything that goes wrong in the country.

Biden’s current stubborn insistence on a complete and rapid withdrawal from the country may be informed by the fury he felt in those years. He knew the situation was a disaster. But it ultimately became even more disastrous than expected.

Obama sought to bring the situation under control by steadily increasing the number of troops. By 2011, more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan. They could be victorious anywhere in the country, but not everywhere at the same time. More than anything, though, the rapid increase in the number of U.S. attacks, the rising total of civilian victims and their insurmountable military superiority all fed into their opponent’s most powerful narrative – that the Americans were infidel occupiers who must be driven out.

This narrative of foreign occupation was so useful that it was deployed by the Taliban and the Afghan government alike, just for opposite reasons. It helped the insurgents with mobilization, and it was a source of comfort for those in power. Then-President Hamid Karzai, in particular, transformed the narrative into a kind of mantra: The U.S., he would insist, will never withdraw. Their interests in Afghanistan are simply too great: fantastic natural resources, geopolitical conspiracies and the rest of it. It allowed him to constantly agitate against the American occupiers while having Washington pay the bill.

This alleged powerlessness combined with grand patriotic gestures were the order of the day in Kabul. Even when Donald Trump announced his withdrawal deal with the Taliban in early 2020, many reacted with disbelief. When Biden announced a concrete date for the pull-out in April, many still refused to believe that the Americans were leaving. Even in late June, when Afghan President Ashraf Ghani flew to Washington, there were those in the Presidential Palace and in the ministries who were still hoping that Biden would change his mind at the last moment.

Meanwhile, the massive presence of foreign troops created deep dependencies well beyond the mission’s true aims. One of those was sending the Afghan economy down a dead-end road for more than a decade. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), as the headquarters of the individual NATO forces were called, wanted to buy peace in the provinces under their control. They contracted construction projects and sponsored local media outlets and security companies. Slowly but surely, the PRTs became the largest employer almost everywhere. In Faizabad in the northeast, a warlord received a five-figure sum each month for the protection of the army camp – so that he wouldn’t attack it himself.

The corruption, nourished by the billions of dollars being poured into the country, "threatens all U.S. and international efforts in Afghanistan," was the conclusion reached in March by John Sopko, who has been the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction for almost a decade. His reports have long provided a detailed look at the shocking situation in the country.

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Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai (third from left) with a Taliban delegation. 

Foto: Abdullah Abdullah / Facebook / REUTERS


The money attracted the greedy to both the government and the military, creating an elite that stubbornly dug in its feet against all efforts to put a stop to the corruption. Even as recently as July, with the collapse of the government imminent, the corruption continued to worsen, said Yama Torabi, the outgoing founder of Integrity Watch Afghanistan and the country’s best-known anti-corruption activist. "Everyone was trying to drag in money at the last moment," he says.

In early July, the U.S. secretly abandoned their gigantic airbases overnight, first in Kandahar and then in Bagram, north of Kabul. They didn’t even inform their Afghan guards of the coming withdrawal. The Americans’ No. 1 priority was "force protection." The precipitous pull-outs, though, only served to inflame growing resentment among the former allies. When withdrawing from a Special Forces base, the U.S. troops destroyed almost all of the armored vehicles at the site. "They’d end up on the black market anyway," the commander said. Only one vehicle was left intact.

The drama surrounding the withdrawal was certainly not Washington’s intention. But it triggered the internal collapse of the Afghan government, the Afghan military and, indeed, the entire Afghan state. "We have never really believed in anything," says the old militia leader Hadji Jamshid in the north, who already fought against the Taliban 25 years ago. "They fought for the wrong thing. But damn it, they’re prepared to die for it. We aren’t."

"They fought for the wrong thing. But damn it, they’re prepared to die for it. We aren’t.”
Former militia leader Hadji Jamshid


By July, there was hardly anyone in the Western secret services and militaries who had much faith in Afghan security forces. Kabul, though, according to increasingly pessimistic forecasts, would stay in government hands. In June, a prognosis from Washington suggested that Kabul would hold out for six more months. The BND, Germany's foreign intelligence agency, predicted 90 days on the eve of the city’s capitulation. Last Saturday, a high-ranking security official with an international organization in Kabul said the capital would hold out for 17 more days. The constant American air surveillance over the capital with drones and B-52 bombers, the official said, would prevent the Taliban from attacking Kabul until the U.S. withdrawal was complete.

But that’s not how things turned out. Since spring, the Taliban has been able to smuggle thousands of fighters into the capital, apparently undisturbed by Afghan security forces. During our July meeting in Kabul, the Taliban military commander accurately told me that Taliban fighters had long since taken up position at the Qargha Reservoir. On the day of the takeover, videos taken at the amusement park there show the fighters joyfully driving bumper cars and jumping on a trampoline.

But as accurate as his claims were about the Taliban’s presence at the amusement park, it remains unclear precisely what the new rulers plan to do with the power suddenly in their possession. The commander said that Taliban leadership was open to the idea of a joint transition government. Not even the higher-ups in the Taliban, it would seem, expected the country’s political leadership to implode so suddenly and President Ashraf Ghani to fly out of the city on Sunday, apparently finding shelter in the United Arab Emirates. The takeover of Kabul was "unexpected," Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the 53-year-old lead negotiator for the Taliban’s political arm, said in a video message.

Which of the quartet of Taliban leaders will ultimately end up at the top? Not even that is clear. Mullah Baradar, who immediately returned to Afghanistan from Qatar, helped found the Taliban with the legendary Mullah Omar and is the most senior of the four. Baradar was instrumental in negotiating the 2020 deal with Washington – talks to which the Afghan government was not invited – that laid the cornerstone for the Taliban takeover.

The Taliban’s true top-ranking "emir" still hasn’t even made a public appearance. Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, who took over his current position when his predecessor was killed in a U.S. drone attack, is thought to be in Quetta, Pakistan, where numerous Taliban leaders reside.

That leaves two other members of the leadership quartet, one of whom is likely to have gained no small amount of prestige recently. Taliban military leader Mullah Mohammad Yakub, around 30 years old, propagated a military strategy of targeted attacks, long-term bribery and clever infiltration in recent weeks – an approach that proved fabulously successful. The son of Taliban founder Mullah Omar, Yakub had long been considered too young, too inexperienced and too self-centered to lay claim to become a successor to his father.

That leaves Sirajuddudin Haqqani, commander of the terror network Haqqani, which is thought to maintain close relations with both the al-Qaida leadership and to the Pakistani secret service ISI. He is well known in Washington: He is on the FBI’s list of the world’s most-wanted terrorists and the CIA supported his father 40 years ago in his fight against Afghanistan’s Soviet occupiers.

Given this cast of characters, it is far too early to posit an answer to the key question being asked in the West: Will Afghanistan once again become a breeding ground of terror? What the Taliban want at all costs is power over Afghanistan. On that count, they are nationalists. Terror attacks overseas, though, as they learned to their detriment in 2001, can quickly lead to losing power. A lesson which has likely contributed to their becoming an organization that is obsessive about control, in contrast to the first time they ruled Afghanistan prior to the U.S.-led invasion.

Still, they are not able to decide on their own, nor can they rule the entire country alone. For the past several months, the Pakistani secret service has been assiduously developing jihad groups in the north and east of Afghanistan that could develop into terror threats to the rest of the world: The Islamic State, Jaish-e-Mohammed and others. Pakistan’s leadership, which has for decades been obsessed with the country’s conflict with India, would like to maintain Afghanistan as a dependent hinterland and intends to continue exerting pressure on the Taliban.

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People stranded at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Foto: Akhter Gulfam / EPA

Installing Haqqani would likely give Pakistan significant leverage in the Afghan leadership. Mullah Baradar, by contrast – who spent eight years in Pakistani custody and was maltreated after he established unauthorized contact to the Karzai government – would likely be an embittered adversary. He was only released in 2018 because Washington hoped that it would be possible to reach an agreement with the Taliban if he was part of the negotiations. And that hope was fulfilled.

This week, the victorious Islamist radicals struck a more conciliatory tone in their statements and first press conference. Of course, they insisted, girls will be allowed to continue their schooling and women will be permitted to work. But such assurances mean little; the Taliban have proven in the past their proclivity for rapidly changing course. As soon as the last U.S. troops have left the Kabul airport for good and the Taliban have consolidated their power, that conciliation could be quickly abandoned.

TV moderator Shabnam Dawran, one of the country’s most prominent journalists, has already described her experiences with the new rulers in a video: "Today, I wanted to go to my work; I did not give up my courage." She was told to go home and that the rules had changed. "Our life is at great risk," Dawran says in the video, then asking the world for help.

Serious resistance to the Taliban rulers isn’t likely in the near future. To be sure, erstwhile Vice President Amrullah Saleh did not leave the country as Ashraf Ghani did, instead returning to his home in the Panjshir Valley, the last bit of the country that isn’t under Taliban control. But Saleh won’t be able to do much from there. The valley is legendary for being home to Ahmed Shah Masood, who was able to prevent both the Soviet military and the Taliban from taking the valley. Back then, he benefited from supply lines stretching into neighboring countries. Today, though, the valley is completely surrounded by the Taliban and also doesn’t have an airport.

Most pressing, though, could soon be the question as to how the Taliban can rule at all. Already, several million Afghans are dependent on food aid from the World Food Program. Western Afghanistan is currently suffering under the worst drought it has seen in a decade. The state coffers are empty and the central bank’s assets are largely stored outside the country, where they are inaccessible. Whether the West likes it or not, if aid deliveries are not made and assistance is not provided to the country’s health-care facilities, many people will die.

Soon, the humanitarian situation may force the West to do something it spent the last 20 years trying at all costs to avoid: Support Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan shows ‘limitations’ of US military, experts say

The swift collapse of the Afghan government demonstrates the US military’s inability to engage in nation-building, experts say.

Hundreds of people run alongside a US Air Force C-17 transport plane as

 it moves down a runway of the international airport in Kabul, August 16

 [Verified UGC via AP]

By Ali Harb
21 Aug 2021

Washington, DC – The United States’ longest war is coming to an unceremonious end.

US troops are leaving Kabul with the Taliban once again in charge of the capital of Afghanistan, which American soldiers captured nearly 20 years ago.
KEEP READINGBiden vows to evacuate Americans and US allies from AfghanistanBonus Edition: Afghanistan specialNATO allies pushing to extend Kabul evacuation deadline

The rapid collapse of the Afghan government after 20 years of US support shows the limits of Washington’s military power, several experts have said, boosting arguments against US foreign interventions and “endless wars”.

President Joe Biden’s critics, however, say the scenes of desperate Afghans attempting to flee Kabul are a sign of US weakness and proof of the necessity for global American military engagement.

As much of the world’s focus rightly remains on efforts to get Afghans to safety outside the country, the Taliban’s victory is spurring a heated debate in Washington about the US’s role in the world.

“A military-led project of state-building and nation-building is always going to be doomed to failure,” said Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think-tank that advocates against interventionist policies.
‘Hammer and nail approach’

Anxiety over abuses under Taliban rule, including the rights of women as well as the safety of Afghans who worked with the US, was on display in the chaos at Hamid Karzai International Airport.

Footage of people flooding the tarmac and hanging on to departing aeroplanes showed a glimpse of Afghans’ fear of life under the Taliban.

Meanwhile, the Taliban’s assurances that it would not seek revenge against its foes have not mitigated the growing concerns over Afghan suffering amid reports of rampant abuses already being carried out.

Biden has acknowledged the threat to human rights in Afghanistan while arguing that there is nothing Washington could do to fight off the Taliban except sending thousands of more troops to fight and possibly die in the country.

“Does anybody truly believe that I would not have had to put in significantly more American forces – send your sons, your daughters … to maybe die,” he said on Friday.

 “And for what?”

Jawied Nawabi, an Afghan American assistant professor in sociology and economics at the City University of New York – Bronx Community College, said he hopes that the US draws a lesson from Afghanistan to become less reliant on military power.

“There is a saying that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and they just keep doing the same thing,” Nawabi told Al Jazeera of the US military interventions.

“I just hope … people start resisting the military approach, the hammer and the nail approach.”

Despite what has been widely characterised as a military defeat for the US in Afghanistan, many hawkish voices in Washington are arguing that the issue was a lack of persistent force behind the hammer of military power.

“This Trump-Biden withdrawal is a big mistake,” former US official John Bolton, who served under George W Bush and Donald Trump, wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

“Beijing and Moscow they are laughing. Tehran and Pyongyang have seen that the Administration is credulous when it comes to claims by devoted adversaries of the United States. It makes us look like we’re suckers.”

For his part, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who helped negotiate the withdrawal deal with the Taliban last year, said the current administration should have used force as a deterrent against Taliban fighters, including the threat of coming after their “friends and family”.

“The Taliban are aggressive, and they are fearless because we have an administration that has refused to adopt a deterrence model, the one that President Trump and I had,” Pompeo told Fox News last week.

Reliance on force

Nawabi said the blunt force approach was the main problem with Washington’s relations with Afghanistan, arguing that the US needs more “soft power” in its foreign policy via aid and development programmes.

The US spent more than $2 trillion on the war, but Nawabi raised questions over how much of that money went to aid Afghans versus the money spent on the Pentagon and military contractors, noting the staggering rates of poverty and drug abuse in Afghan society.

Asked if he was surprised by the swift Taliban takeover, Nawabi told Al Jazeera it did not matter how long it took the Afghan government to crumble if the collapse was inevitable.

“Why is it that after 20 years, you built a hollow state that would collapse even in six months, if not 11 days? Why would that question even arise if you had actually built a real capacity and military system?”

Sheline, of the Quincy Institute, echoed Nawabi’s remarks on resources dedicated to Afghanistan being spent on the Pentagon and military contractors, invoking former President Dwight Eisenhower 1961 warnings about the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex.

She said weapon manufacturers and war profiteers are the ones who want “the forever wars to continue”.

“The nation-building project in Afghanistan was always going to fail because you cannot impose democracy or impose a system of government on another people and expect it to have legitimacy,” Sheline told Al Jazeera.

The view that the US should not police the world or engage in nation-building is a popular one among voters, Sheline added.

Their actual policies aside, the last three US presidents were elected on platforms of less, not more, military interventions. Barack Obama pledged to end the Iraq War in his 2008 campaign. Biden and Trump used the term “forever wars”, promising to end them.
Calls for oversight

Sahar Khan, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said while the US army remains the largest and most powerful in the world, Washington is “too reliant” on military force.

“The main lesson, which I hope resonates, is a deeper understanding of the limitations of the US military,” Khan told Al Jazeera.

She said past experiences – in Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan – have shown that the military cannot adequately accomplish “civilian-centred missions”.

“Military organisations are not equipped for nation building, and they shouldn’t be equipped for nation-building,” Khan said.

Critics of the withdrawal have warned that it may compromise Washington’s credibility in the world as well as its commitment to its allies.

But Khan said the US earns its global credibility from its domestic realities, not its foreign policy.

“The power of the United States really is the fact that it is still very much a land of opportunity,” she said. “And I think that narrative eventually does end up coming to the top.”

The argument resonates with many legislators in both parties, who are calling for investing resources spent on the “forever wars” at home.

Scott Cooper, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a US military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he does not like the term “forever wars” because of its isolationist connotations, stressing that Washington should remain engaged in the world.

Still, he voiced support for efforts to curb executive power to engage in war, including the push to repeal authorisations for the use of force (AUMFs) granted by lawmakers to then-President George W Bush after the 9/11 attacks.

“I don’t think that this is an America-first or isolationist idea,” Cooper told Al Jazeera. “What we need to have, and what is important and responsible, is that the first branch of government in the United States, the legislative branch, needs to do its job.”

The US Constitution gives Congress solely the right to declare war, but World War II was the last time legislators did so formally.

A Taliban fighter in the city of Ghazni, south of Kabul, August 14

 [File: Stringer/Reuters]

Cooper said the rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was always a real possibility, if not entirely predictable.

“I’m brokenhearted,” he said. “We worked so hard there, especially those of us that were in the military.”

As for the lessons to be learned from the war, Cooper said there are unintended consequences to interventions.

“The military option is oftentimes the most fraught and difficult and probably not the right option if there are not other things that are involved such as a diplomatic option,” he said.

Cooper added that while the US could supply and train the Afghan military, it could not ensure or fully measure two vital factors – morale and loyalty.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

After the chaos in Kabul, is the American century over?

Afghans run beside a US Air Force transport plane as it tries to take off from Kabul, Afghanistan. Photograph: AP


The ‘forever war’ has finished with a debacle. If this marks the end of American interventionism, what will take its place?



Julian Borger in Washington
Sat 21 Aug 2021


A few months ago there were US bases all over Afghanistan where you could immerse yourself in Americana, buy Coke and Snickers bars from vending machines and watch live sport on TV.

Now the outpost has shrunk to one side of Kabul airport, a chaotic remnant of a 20-year stay where rearguard troops are trying to salvage the last scraps of dignity and honour, seemingly tossed aside by the political leadership in Washington, by trying to extract American stragglers and Afghan allies. Those allies, once inspired by talk of democracy, women’s rights and the free press, are now faced with the awful life-and-death dilemmas of preserving evidence of their work for or with the US-led coalition, in the hope of last-minute salvation, or destroying it, in a bid to escape execution.

The speed and totality of the defeat at the end of the longest war in US history inevitably raises questions about its place in the broader sweep of modern history, and the biggest question perhaps is whether these scenes mark the last throes of the “American century”.

It has been an era in which the US was supposed to act as the world’s policeman, maintaining order according to a fixed set of rules, and stepping in when necessary to stop the worst crimes against humanity. The reality often turned out to be far short of that ideal, but is the whole project, in theory and practice, now coming to an end?

The term “American century” was coined in 1941 in an essay by the publishing tycoon Henry Luce, who suggested that: “We can make a truly American internationalism something as natural to us in our time as the airplane or the radio.”

That ambition was certainly achieved in the years that followed. The liberation of Europe from the Nazis was followed by astoundingly successful exercises in nation-building in West Germany and Japan, which became prosperous democracies and reliable allies.

The D-day landings in 1944 cemented America’s commitment to global intervention. Photograph: AFP

There are other populations around the world who have reason to see the US global policeman as essentially a good cop, such as the Bosnians and Kosovans, for whom America stepped in when European powers failed to lead.
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“It certainly wasn’t the Cuban missile crisis, it certainly wasn’t Iraq, but [the Bosnian intervention] is a good showcase of what can be done when America has a moderate, benign, ambition,” said Sabina Ćudić, of the Bosnian liberal reformist party Naša Stranka.

It was in the aftermath of the US-led intervention in Bosnia and the subsequent Dayton peace accords that the US secretary of state Madeleine Albright said: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation.” Few if any US officials talk like that now, and the last Americans left in Afghanistan feel very dispensable indeed.

In other parts of the world, the experience of American global policing has been quite different. It was there to allow the oil to flow and the tankers to sail unimpeded, enforcing a set of rules, albeit rules that were designed at the outset to benefit the US and the handful of great powers. In Latin America, the veneer was even thinner, and the policeman acted like the private security firm for a few corporate interests.


Half of Britons think US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was wrong

The American century reached its zenith after the fall of the Berlin wall, and the emergence of the US as the world’s sole, unrivalled superpower. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a neat half-century after Luce published his essay.

The apotheosis would last a decade, until disaster arrived out of a clear blue sky on 11 September, 2001. Nearly 3,000 were killed in the attacks on New York and Washington, but it was America’s visceral reaction that would prove to be more damaging to US standing in the world.

The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 marked the high point of US power around the world. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

It triggered the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, which may be coming to an end for the US now, but which will continue to be the reality for the civilian populations left behind for years, perhaps decades, to come.

Disaster followed disaster: the Arab spring was a grotesque inversion of the European democratic revolution it was supposed to emulate, leaving bloody chaos both where the old regimes fell, such as Libya, and where they held firm – Syria.

The damage done by 9/11 did not unfold quite as terrorist leader Osama bin Laden intended, according to Nelly Lahoud, an analyst at the thinktank New America who has been sifting through his papers, but it did have a “catastrophic success” in changing the world. It was a case of the autoimmune response proving far more deadly than the infection it was supposed to fight.

In a new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, former Guardian journalist Spencer Ackerman argues that the worst damage was self-inflicted, through the impact of the “global war on terror” and all its excesses: torture, mass surveillance, militarism and authoritarianism.

“Of all the endless costs of terrorism, the most important is the least tallied: what fighting it has cost our democracy,” Ackerman writes. “How like America it is not to recognise that the true threat was counterterrorism, nor terrorism.”

The backlash produced a repugnance in US public opinion for foreign intervention. One of the few things that Donald Trump and Joe Biden had in common was their determination to leave Afghanistan, and Biden completed the withdrawal that Trump agreed with the Taliban in February 2020 in Doha.

The 9/11 attacks provoked retaliatory action that even Osama bin Laden could not have anticipated. Photograph: Peter Morgan/Reuters

The speed of the Afghan government’s collapse reflected not just military weakness but also a fecklessness and incompetence which had clearly spread through administrations. At the president’s prompting, officials were adamant that the events unfolding at Kabul airport were not a repeat of the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, photos of which had been an emblem of American defeat for more than a generation. But the similarities were unavoidable.

“Having literally been in Saigon for the fall of Saigon, it certainly looks like Saigon to me,” said Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer-prize winning author whose family fled Vietnam when he was four, in a tweet.

The US evacuated 130,000 Vietnamese allies in 1975 and subsequently accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It was a test of humanity, but also power. A superpower that cannot or will not protect its allies is not worthy of the name.

In a New York Times commentary Nguyen urged the Biden administration to do as much for the Afghans. “For these civilians, the war hasn’t ended, and won’t end for many years. Their future – and Mr Biden’s role in determining whether it’s one of resettlement and new beginnings or one of fear and misery – is what will determine whether America can still claim it will always stand by its allies,” he wrote.

The withdrawal of US troops in 1973, and the fall of Saigon two years later, seemed at the time as serious a debacle as Kabul feels now. But it was by no means the end for America’s preeminent role in the world.

Mobs scale the wall of the US embassy in Saigon, just before the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Photograph: Neal Ulevich/AP

“As it turns out, US strategy during the cold war – supporting freedom and resisting Soviet communism – succeeded, even in the face of Washington’s blunders in Vietnam and elsewhere,” said Daniel Fried, a former senior state department official now at the Atlantic Council thinktank.

The US remains, by most measures, the world’s biggest economy, with a far stronger network of alliances than its rival, China.

Josef Joffe, the veteran editor of Die Zeit now an international affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, said the Kabul fiasco “certainly damages three critical assets of a great power: reliability, credibility and alliance cohesion.”

“Nations will now think twice about committing to the US, hedging their bets by edging toward China and Russia,” Joffe said. “Decline, however, this is not. Great powers falter when their material assets wane – as in the case of Britain in the 20th century. By contrast, the US remains the greatest economic power, backed up by technological advantage and the world’s most sophisticated army that can intervene anywhere on the planet, not to speak of the vast cultural clout China and Russia do not have.”

Even after Afghanistan, the US military reach around the globe will still be fearsome, with almost 800 bases in more than 70 countries.

“The US is the most hyper-interventionist great power in modern history, so that even when the American pendulum sort of swings more toward non-interventionism, the US is still globally involved,” said Dominic Tierney, political science professor at Swarthmore College and the author of The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts.

Tierney noted that the US war was not even necessarily over in Afghanistan. The administration has said it will continue to carry out air strikes from afar in the name of counterterrorism.

Furthermore, the reduction in the military footprint in Afghanistan and the Middle East is intended to free resources for sharper competition with China.

Donald Trump’s chaotic term as president unbalanced US geopolitical relationships around the world. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

“A retrenchment from the greater Middle East in the service of focusing on greater rivals is something that might well shore up US global hegemony, not weaken it. And I would think that is what most of the Biden administration thinks that they are doing,” said Stephen Wertheim, a historian and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who examined the origins of the American century in his book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.

Wertheim argued however that the character of US military interventionism could change in the wake of the defeat in Afghanistan. “It’s hard to imagine that the idea of nation-building by force will survive the war in Afghanistan,” he said, expressing hope that humanitarian impulses would be channelled through non-military means. “That, to me, is a much more productive form of humanitarianism than the fraught project of trying to kill some people in order to save other people.”

Few Bosnian Muslims, however, believe more humanitarian supplies would have prevented more Srebrenica-scale massacres in 1995. Ćudić, now a member of the federation parliament in Sarajevo, said: “With all the deserved criticism and analysis of the American foreign policy of the past decades, we will live to regret the decline of American ambition.”

The concern in Sarajevo is that Russia and China are filling the space vacated by the US, but without the same interest in preventing the ultimate partition of Bosnia on ethnic lines. It is a pattern being witnessed around the world.

“One of the great dangers for analysis that seeks to be critical of imperialism is the assumption that only the west, indeed only the USA, has imperial ambitions and scope. This is fatal,” said Priyamvada Gopal, professor of postcolonial studies at Cambridge University. “By the end of this century, if the world makes it there, the centre of imperial power will have shifted entirely.

“What is important is that the centre of gravity of capitalism is shifting southwards, and players from Russia and China to India are emerging.”