After eighteen years of failing to defeat aragtag group of terrorists known as the Taliban, the world’s mightiest power has signed a “Peace Deal”that allows the US to extricate itself from the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan.In return, the Taliban have promised to end terrorism inside and outside of Afghanistan, respect the civil and human rights of all their citizens includingwomen, and help create a democratic polity. In other words, they have promised to disown all their founding principles.
The so-called peace deal is essentially an instrument of surrender that allows the US to claim that it has achievedpeace with honour. It brings back memories of Vietnam where an ill-equipped, badly trained and poorly armed nemesis forced the US to return home.
Under President George W Bush, the US had gone into Afghanistan in December 2001 after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.Bush said he was going to install a peace-loving, democratic government in Kabul. The policy continued during the Clinton and Obama administrations. Within a few weeks of the US invasion, the Taliban were overthrown. Their weakly armed and poorly trained fighters were pummelled into the ground by US firepower.
Thousands of Taliban leaders and fighters were killed, maimed or wounded. Those who survived disappeared into the mountains. For years, they lay dormant. A decade later, they began to reappear. In the past five years, they regrouped and began to make their presence felt, first in the rural areas, then in the urban areas.
With the signing of the peace deal, the American project to bring “true democracy” to Afghanistan has ended in failure. How did this come to pass?
A book authored byProfessor Mearsheimer, a leading international theorist, provides an answer. The book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, was published in 2018. It says that ambitious liberal democracies want to turn other countries into their mirror image. Through “liberal hegemony,” they want to fulfil what they regard as a moral duty:protect the human rights of the citizens of other countriesand therebypromote peace between nations.
With the signing of the peace deal, the American project to bring “true democracy” to Afghanistan has ended in failure. How did this come to pass?
Unfortunately, says Mearsheimer, the strategy is naïve: “Great powers are rarely in a position to pursue a full-scale liberal foreign policy. As long as two or more of them exist on the planet, they have little choice but to pay close attention to their position in the global balance of power and act according to the dictates of realism.”
In a unipolar world, such a policy might exist. But the world is not unipolar. Thus,great powers “regularly dress up their hard-nosed behaviour with liberal rhetoric.” They talk up liberalism while following realism. Ironically, the liberal state is likely to end up fighting endless wars, thereby increasing rather than reducing international conflict. Mearsheimer claims that liberalism is actually the cause rather than the cure of the many problems that ail the world today. It is delusion at best and hypocrisy at worst: “No liberal state has every shown serious interest in helping other states to gain economic advantage at its expense just to fight global injustice.”
The attempt to impose liberal values, such as through the war in Afghanistan, is a sure-fire way of “doing more harm than good.” Most people in the US foreign policy establishment are smart enough to know it. But they live in denial.
Mearsheimer says there “is simply too much evidence of failure to defend that policy” as witnessed by the failure to spread democracy in the Middle East. Furthermore, engagement with China has failed and relations between Russia and the West have become “poisonous.”
While liberal democracy is the best political system in the world, it is not the same as liberalism in foreign policy. Mearsheimersays, “Nation-states…do not like the idea of other countries interfering in their domestic politics. Just think about how angry Americans get when they hear that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Liberal hegemony, however, calls for the United States to interfere in the politics of countries all over the planet. It calls for the US to do social engineering on a grand scale, to include invading and conquering countries if necessary. This policy is sure to generate resentment and resistance that will ultimately undermine it. And for realist reasons, Russia will resist NATO expansion.”
Then he raises a very troubling point, “Liberal hegemony is bad for liberal democracy on the home front.” Why? Because “that highly ambitious policy leads to endless wars and the building of an increasingly powerful ‘national security state,’ which is sure to undermine civil liberties inside the United States.”
In order for liberal hegemony to work, two conditions have to be met. First, the world has to be unipolar. Two, it has to be centred on a liberal democracy. Mearsheimer says that is no longer the case since China and Russia have emerged as strong rivals to the US. Thus, the only viable policy for the US to follow is that of realism in which it will compete with China and Russia.
He concludes, “Liberal hegemony is effectively finished as a grand strategy, since the United States is no longer free to pursue an ideologically based grand strategy. It now has to focus on balance-of-power politics.”
In the presidential election of 2016, Donald Trump emphasised the failings of liberalism. He did two things:one, he embraced nationalism and talked of”Making American Great Again” by putting “American First.” Two, he embraced realism by supporting the decidedly illiberal regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia. Seeing the Taliban in the ascendant, Trump began looking for an exit strategy within days of assuming the mantle of president. The just-signed peace deal, based on a series of hollow and unenforceable promises from the Taliban, provides a way for the US extricate itself from a quagmire.
It is difficult not to spot its failings.Will the Taliban will honour the deal? It is unclear who will monitor their compliance, let alone enforce it. What will happen if they don’t honour it?Trump says that Afghanistan is no longer a US problem. It is a job for Afghanistan’s people and theirneighbours. Are they up to it?
My fear is that Afghanistan is likely to remain mired in the myriad cultural, social, economic and developmental problems that have been the bane of its existence for decades. To quote Mearsheimer, Trump’s embrace of nationalism and realism “does not inspire a hopeful outlook for the future.”
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