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License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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US defeat in Afghanistan marks the end of neoliberalism

By:   []

Date: 2021-08

The neoliberal era, which arrived as the US lost the Vietnam war, has ended with America losing the war in Afghanistan. And the war on terror. And the war on drugs.

Images on Twitter timelines, TV screens and in group chats tell a gruesome story for those who face slaughter and subjugation by the Taliban. Women, Shia people and anyone who collaborated with US and UK forces or with the now-essentially defeated regime face a grim future, as the “hooligans of the absolute”, as the political thinker Tom Nairn dubbed them, take control of the country once more.

I can’t help but think of the Afghans I met in a refugee camp in Belgrade in 2015. One man had been shot in the leg while serving in the national army alongside British troops. He was flown to a hospital in Cardiff, where he spent a year recovering. But he was denied asylum, and sent back to Afghanistan. Knowing Taliban forces would kill him and his family, he had walked all the way to Europe on his gammy leg, with his sister and her children.

Were they turned back at the EU border? Have they been killed? I tried to stay in touch on Facebook, but I’ve no idea what happened to them.

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I can’t help but think of the 32,000 Afghan asylum seekers the UK has turned away since 2001, as openDemocracy revealed yesterday. Did Britain’s deportation flights deliver them to firing squads?

I can’t help but think of my grandmother, who was in her late 80s when the NATO invasion began in 2001. “Didn’t we learn our lesson in the second Afghan war?” she asked the teenage me, referring to the British invasion in 1878, only a generation before she was born.

I can’t help but think of the accounts of the first Anglo-Afghan war, in 1839, when Britain invaded, was kicked out of, and then reinvaded the country as ‘revenge’ – murdering, raping and starving whole villages as they went, so they could turn this human society into a buffer zone for their Indian colony. This isn’t a 20-year history, it’s a 200-year history.

I can’t help but think about the war on drugs. If, instead of criminalising heroin and driving its central Asian growers into the pockets of the Taliban, we had legalised and regulated it, where would we be?

I can’t help but imagine why so many teenage boys and young men who have known nothing but NATO occupation are so desperate to overthrow the government that they will align with foreign fighters and slaughter their neighbours.

And I can’t help but wonder at the failure of Britain’s national press to ask these questions. Twenty years of war, twenty years of supposed nation-building by what started out as the most powerful alliance in human history has been swept aside in a matter of days.

The neoliberal era is over. And as we see in Kabul today, what comes next isn’t inevitably better.

Is neoliberalism really over?

There has been a bit of debate of late about whether neoliberalism is dying, or changing. Events such as this year’s G7 agreeing, in theory at least, to a global minimum corporation tax, encouraged the economic historian Adam Tooze to say that the elite consensus around neoliberalism as an idea is gone.

Just as significantly, as openDemocracy co-founder Anthony Barnett has pointed out, the height of neoliberalism was defined by a denial in elite circles that such a thing existed. “You might as well debate whether autumn follows summer,” Tony Blair argued in 2005, against those who wished to discuss the globalisation of Western markets.

This wasn’t an ideology, they’d say, just logic, just the way things are, just reality. These days, even the Financial Times is starting to question whether neoliberalism works – yes, using that word – and the arch think tanks of the ideology have returned to using the term. Their idea isn’t common sense anymore – it needs defending.

Economics journalist Grace Blakeley thinks neoliberalism is alive and well, though. Writing in Tribune in May, she argued: “The neoliberal state is not a small state, it is a state designed to meet the interests of capital”. COVID bail-outs, she concludes, don’t spell the end of neoliberalism. “States are spending more money because big business and big finance needs to be bailed out – again.”
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