By Hong Yuan
The Taliban took over Kabul airport after the United States pulled out its last batch of troops on Aug 30, marking the end of its almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. The US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan was not part of its strategy to deal with the “threat from China and Russia” but the failure of the “war on terror” started by former US president George W. Bush.
Washington spent more than $2.3 trillion, deployed more than 130,000 troops and lost thousands of them to avenge the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by overthrowing the Taliban regime and establishing US-style democracy in Afghanistan, but ended up withdrawing from the country in utter haste, leaving behind chaos and uncertainty and the Taliban in power once again.
The failure of US hegemonic policy
First, the withdrawal shows the failure of the US’ hegemonic policy. After the 9/11 attacks, the US did not reflect on its foreign policy and instead bypassed the United Nations to make its “war on terror” a global war to cover the country’s political failure by trying to achieve victory through military means in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says: “The skillful fighter puts himself in a position which makes defeat impossible and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy.” The US should have established an honest political order and promoted law-based politics to reach that “position” in Afghanistan. But it didn’t.
Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz once said that “war is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means”. Peaceful politics is also a continuation of war politics and the two forms of politics complete the circle of war and peace. No matter how powerful a country is, its political failure at one level will inevitably lead to its military failure at the next level.
A major historical event always has an impact on the future, when people are expected to formulate policies by learning lessons from the event so that they don’t have to revisit the tragedies of the past.
But instead of learning the right lessons from the 9/11 attacks and the initial military success in Afghanistan, the US administration and the American military industry made the reckless decision of continuing the war to fulfill their own interests. The US’ failure in Afghanistan will have a huge impact on the global situation, which incidentally could force the US to launch another war in another country or region.
Enormous defeat on military front
Not winning the war in Afghanistan, and therefore any war in a long time, was the second failure of the US an enormous failure on the military front. The war in Afghanistan was a military defeat for the US, with the suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed at least 170 people, including 13 US soldiers, on Aug 26 reflecting the irony of the “war on terror” on whose pretext the US troops entered Afghanistan in the first place. That the US military, the most powerful in the world, couldn’t eliminate the Taliban even after two decades shows how wrong US politicians were in their assessment of the ground realities in Afghanistan.
The US kept moving away from success as its troops continued to kill civilians by mistaking them to be terrorists and even bribed the very Taliban forces they were supposedly fighting to ensure the smooth transportation of their supplies and personnel. On the other hand, the Taliban succeeded in mobilizing some Afghan people in their support and won many a guerrilla battle against the US forces in the mountains and countryside, which helped them take hold of major cities.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said during the Vietnam War that “the conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose”. This is exactly what happened in Afghanistan.
Despite its extensive surveillance network, intelligence-gathering system, and technological superiority, the US’ intelligence analysis was often off the mark in Afghanistan and made it the object of ridicule in the eyes of many. For example, after the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, the US forces killed 10 members of one family, including seven children, in the retaliatory drone strike because military intelligence mistook them for suspected terrorists.
The US military’s power and capability seemed to be ineffective in the face of the sudden attack and retreat tactics of the terrorists in Afghanistan, with poor planning and implementation of battle tactics making matters worse. For instance, had the US used the Kandahar airport and the Bagram airbase, too, to pull out its forces, the evacuation could have been smoother and less chaotic.
–The Daily Mail-China Daily News Exchange Item
