Paths Not Taken
Finally, the US has decided to withdraw all its forces from Afghanistan and with it renege on its self-assumed ambitious responsibility of administering the country after knocking off the Taliban Government in 2002 and installing a puppet regime.
The US has learned some sour lessons from the misadventure that span well over 2 decades. Among them, the most obvious one is that the capacity to defeat an army does not necessarily translate in the capacity to govern a country diversified in so many aspects. It is surely the best moment for the US to look back on its strategies and attitudes to the global crises since the end of the cold war to learn some lessons forever attempting again to jump into the foreign conflicts.
It’s also the best moment for the US to reflect on its attitudes towards the global crisis and strategies it undertook to the unraveling crisis in the Middle East soon after the end of the cold war and their gradual abandonment by the successive regime in the wake of 9/11, and figure out the answers to the questions:1) What different kind of geopolitics might we have today had we incorporated the Russian federation in the new world order at the end of the cold war; 2) What kind of humanitarian intervention regime might we have today had the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) not morphed into another camouflage of sort of unilateralism that has been so evident and pervasive in the US policies in international politics.
The paths, not taken, are haunting the US and its hegemony in so many ways. A careful reflection on those paths is imperative if the US really wants to acknowledge its mistakes and emerge as the prudent and eligible world’s leader. The consequences of not acknowledging those mistakes are grave with its global hegemony, at best, in jeopardy. This article sheds light on two of such paths. The US fate in Afghanistan might have been quite different had the paths been taken.
The “1st path not taken” pertains to the expansion of NATO after the cold war. At the end of the cold war, Gorbachev and some of the other Russian Federation leaders showed some intentions in joining NATO and the EU subsequently. Yeltsin, in print, acknowledged the fact by revealing the long-term policy of the Russian federation of joining NATO and the EU eventually. Not only their overtures being rejected, NATO was expanded to consume the former WARSAW pact countries and even made some overtures to Georgia and Ukraine for joining.
Vladimir Ponzer in his Yale lecture “How the United States creates Vladimir Putin”, provides a riveting account of the missed opportunities of incorporating the Russian federation at the end of the cold war in the new world order in a way that would have made it much more likely to be the part of the solution than part of the problem. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were deeply troubled by the broken promises of the West. President Putin’s overtures were also turned down by the Bush administration. Repeated disappointments at the hands of the US had depressed and, in some sense, infuriated the Russian federation which eventually decided to become a part of the problem rather than of the solution. A different path could have been taken! Certainly, with much better prospects for geopolitics.
The “2nd path” lies in the realm of geopolitics too and pertains to the “management of geopolitical crises and Humanitarian intervention”. George Herbart Walker Bush really pointed the way to a new containment regime in wake of the first crises since the end of the cold war when Saddam Hussain’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. The bumper sticker for the coalition was to stop the bully without becoming a bully yourself. GHW instead of taking unilateral actions against the Kuwait invasion formed a massive coalition of almost every major country and expelled Saddam Hussain from Kuwait. Against the advice of many hawks in the US, he did not go for a regime change rather created a “No Fly Zone ” and buttoned down the Iraqi regime and made it impossible for them to threaten their neighbors.
If that had been adopted as the standard model of responding to a geopolitical crisis the US would have been looking at a very different kind of geopolitical reality. But, Geroge W. Bush abandoned the strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq and took a different path. Instead of putting a massive coalition of every major country and seeking approval from the United Nations, the Bush administration took unilateral actions in invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Either the “You are with us” or “them” approach was adopted. Commanders on the ground started ringing bells in White House in early 2002, informing the command higher up the chain that some sort of deal needed to be made with the Taliban. Without their support, no faction would be strong enough to govern the diverse country. But no attention was paid to the information. The US had to make a deal with the same Taliban after many years of worthless fighting.
The path not taken in the Iraq and Afghanistan case was partially influenced by the thinking of American conservatives. A fatal error is associated with the thinking that just because we have a massive army on Earth, we are the sole proprietor of the World’s order and its fate. They failed to recognize many economies of smallness associated with governance—support from different factions of the society.
Different paths could have been taken had the US really wanted to save its face and not endure humiliating defeat. It must not be surprising that the country would be embroiled in an endless war for a couple of decades.
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