This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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US has no intention of a global military retreat despite Biden’s promise

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

The US’s disastrously chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has ended. Whether Taliban rule itself will descend into chaos as financial and other crises unfold is far from clear, but the regime has close friends in the region, especially within Pakistan’s military. Neighbouring China sees many opportunities for gain. Both these countries depend on a perceived level of Taliban-run stability, but even more distant states are already elbowing their way in.

Within a day of the final US plane taking off, the Qatari military landed with a team of specialists tasked with setting up the airport as a commercial operation. The Russian, Chinese and Pakistani embassies in Kabul have remained operational throughout the changeover, while the UK and US already have embassies in Doha, making it easy to meet the Taliban at their existing diplomatic office there. Even the British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, flew to Qatar in haste to help things along, and possibly salvage his career.

Overshadowing all of this on the world stage is the weakened status of the US and President Joe Biden’s position. There is little doubt that his personal standing has been damaged, and we may now see Kamala Harris coming to the fore. Before the recent withdrawal chaos, the twenty-year war had become deeply unpopular, with the majority of Americans only too keen to see the troops return home. A Pew poll conducted in the last days of August showed that even as the tragedy in Kabul unfolded, support for the withdrawal among US adults remained at 54% to 42%.

Little evidence of state-building

In his speech from the White House this week, 24 hours after the last US soldier left Kabul, Biden accepted some responsibility for the mess – while also blaming others – but went on to make a much more general point: "This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” His declaration that such operations, especially when they included state-building, were no longer among US policy priorities, is widely assumed to be a major change of direction.

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Since US security policy impinges on the rest of the world, this may have a considerable long-term impact, but it raises many more questions than it answers. For a start, to what extent has the US even been involved in state-building over the past two decades?

The Afghanistan operation was supposed to destroy al-Qaida and terminate the Taliban regime, but the Bush administration lost interest in Afghanistan within weeks of the initial success in November 2001, leaving it to the Europeans and others to rebuild the state as Washington moved on to the wider ‘axis of evil’, starting with Iraq. It did go back into Afghanistan within a few years as the Taliban made their comeback but the emphasis then was on counterinsurgency, with state-building very much secondary.

It’s true that with Iraq, at least, the initial focus was on building a new state intended to be a shining example of a pure neoliberal domain. Yet the transitional government known as the Coalition Provisional Authority was run from the Pentagon rather than the State Department and was aimed at transforming the Iraqi economy into an example for the region and beyond. Being run from the Pentagon took it far closer to the intentions of the Bush Administration and away from the professionals of the State Department who would ordinarily have been in charge.

Plans included wholesale privatisation of state assets, opening up oil and gas exploitation to foreign control, a minimum of financial regulation and a flat rate tax system, but it all went badly wrong, so much so that Barack Obama could fight his 2008 election campaign on getting out of the country as soon as possible.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/us-has-no-intention-of-a-global-military-retreat-despite-bidens-promise/
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