#58 Afghanistan, 9/11 and World Power

A Note to my readers.

From time to time when an important global event occurs, I will write a short essay about the event and illustrate how history can be used to inform ourselves about the event. The success of the Taliban in Afghanistan is just such an event. The question I posed was how can a relatively small military peasant army overcome a mighty nation like the USA? I hope you find the read interesting.

Roger

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New York, NY, September 19, 2001 -- Rescue workers climb over and dig through piles of rubble from the destroyed World Trade Center as the American flag billows over the debris. Photo by Andrea Booher/ FEMA News Photo.

The American defeat in Afghanistan has created a plethora of arguments and analyses, much of it very insightful.  In this short article, I want to ask a simple question: Why did the Taliban defeat the Americans, when they are the most powerful military on earth?

The Taliban were no more than a local militia with no massive military arms or air support. In recent years, we have become so used to Islamic military engagement that we tend to forget how recent Islamic armed force has been.

It is worth remembering that from 1945 until 1989, the fight against US Imperialism was undertaken by many variants of the Political Left. Each country that resisted the USA threw up its own variant of peoples movements.  75 years later, only China, Vietnam and Cuba remain. Yet socialist movements across Latin and Central America, the African continent and throughout Asia struggled to create socialist governments. They all failed and today their efforts are part of world history. They all failed due to the success and power of the CIA and the American military power. The CIA was a militarised secret service; it was able to torture, assassinate, and overthrow governments and much more without public scrutiny back on its home territory. Afghanistan though was different. It was the first time since 1945 – perhaps excluding the creation of Israel – that American had invaded and then ran a territory as if it was a colony in the period before 1945.

The CIA had first learnt the tricks of their trade in Vietnam, and from there were able to defeat socialist movements around the world. The fall of the USSR in 1991 saw the USA at the height of its power.  From that time onwards, the Americans could have consolidated their hold on world power. There were then no alternatives. The US dollar ruled world trade. Yet despite their global dominance they had failed to bring the old USSR, then the new Russia on side 

The US failure to bring the USSR/Russia into its orbit as a political ally with a growing economy was perhaps its most damaging failure of judgement. I would argue, their poor understanding of what world power was all about in the late 20th century.

After 1991

After 1991, left-wing insurgency fighters disappeared. For a few short years, it was as if the USA had succeeded not just in the USSR but in the world as a whole. Since that time, the place of the Left contesting local power has been replaced by the growth of a multitude of militant Islamic forces. Year after year, militarised forces ideologized through Islam have grown and grown to retake the place by the Left.  The Taliban in Afghanistan are the first military victory against global imperial invasions.

World Power in the late 20th century

Since the end of the second world war when the USA seamlessly took over world power, it appeared superficially as if American Global Power was part of the retaking of local power by every new nation-state. Colonialism was at an end and self-rule seemed to be the opportunity of the world’s nation-states.  For 20 or 30 years after 1945, it seemed as if the people had a real choice over their future. Many Nations found out the hard way that socialism was not one of the options if they wished to avoid US intervention. Socialist movements were attacked and defeated. Yet despite a multitude of defeats, people around the world wanted to share in the prosperity they saw in the rich countries.

Everywhere people yearn for a better life.  Everywhere people want peace,  security, and economic wealth. Societies that grow their economies and widely distribute the resulting wealth tend to be stable with relatively satisfied populations. China, Singapore, South Vietnam are just a few examples.  We know this from worldwide surveys that occur annually. World powers in the 20th and 21st centuries that fail to understand this cannot have a long future.  Without the spread of wealth throughout societies, American and NATO-led invasions are doomed to fail as they failed in Russia after 1991.

America sent its best economists to sort out the old Soviet economy. Almost immediately a vast number of Russian were impoverished. America lost the plot and the rise of Putin ended that adventure. A gigantic opportunity was lost for similar reasons that the USA lost to the Taliban in Afghanistan. This same pattern can be seen everywhere since the invasions after 9/11. American military power without rapid economic growth which is distributed across societies is doomed to fail.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years, the Americans are leaving a land of hugely impoverished people. Here is the key to American failure. They know everything there is to know about military power. But when it comes to development economics they seem to know nothing. The Afghans needed and still need huge infrastructural projects which will unite them with their neighbouring countries. They need developments banks that will supply the capital to develop large and small industries;  they need agricultural banks to support a growing peasant population to develop agriculture. And they need a nationwide educational system that provides the knowledge to run all of this.

What the Afghans received instead was a huge development of narcotic farming for drugs, some education in the cities that allowed a few privileged women to rise up, and little else. Despite the American activity worldwide, they have never learnt the lesson that ‘freedom’ is not just a political weapon to throw around. Freedom is enough to eat, security in all of life, and education for the children, and only then can we move into democracy.  

Why are the American Establishment so blind?

There are many ways to answer this question. It is possible to go back to the 19th century and the defeat of the indigenous peoples by military force. Or to examine the rapid growth of monopoly power in US industry and commerce in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Or to examine the growth of neoliberal ideology in economics and politics as the justification of low taxation for the richest peoples.

Even if we ignore all these historical questions for the moment. The USA was responsible for the successful rapid growth of Germany and Japan after 1945 and this alone could have been a marker for understanding what really works to create long term political allies.

After 1948, the Americans provided the means for the German and Japanese populations to rapidly recover. Both populations had already experienced people in government.  Both Japan and Germany developed their own Development Banks.  Both still exist to this day. In Germany, KfU is the second-largest bank, and it is still state-owned. These development banks were key to their remarkable recovery. There is an example of their own making of rapid recovery from complete devastation.

If the Americans had set out to develop Afghanistan they could have incorporated the Taliban in their plans, and everyone would have been pleased. But that is not the American way. The Americans and the Western world have been convinced by their propaganda. That use of military force comes first, second, and third.  It appears that they are so overwhelmed by their military power that the more prosaic needs for jobs and growth across the society was ignored or forgotten.

American politicians and media continuously talk about shared ‘universal values’ and democracy. Yet you would have thought that they must know that all this is ideology. But as with all great powers they have come to believe their ideology. Just as the British believed at the end of the 19th century that they were a ‘superior race’ to all others and that they had God-given right to rule ‘lesser peoples’. Even with the loss of all their colonies after 1945, and the obvious loss of world power, they still sing annually ‘Britannia rules the waves’.  And don’t be fooled, as many people in Britain still believe it.

The American leaders, like the British before them, have come to believe their own propaganda. Ideas of ‘universal values’, including particular understandings of democracy, are not so universal as they are Western ideals tied to the demands of political elites.

In Iraq, Syria and Libya the Americans preferred to lay the land to waste rather than allow an alternative form of Development that does not allow private Western capital to enrich itself. These three countries in their own ways were ‘developing’. All three were benefiting many, perhaps the majority, of their people. All three have been destroyed and made into basket-case economies. None so far have shown that they can pull themselves out of the poverty and suffering that their invaders have inflicted on them.

Democracy is a great ideal.  Unless it is carefully defined and continuously upgraded it has become a method of maintaining the status quo. Maybe democracy, as practised in Western countries, has always been a method to keep the demands for a ‘fairer society’ at bay.

Our Future After Afghanistan

The peoples of our world have produced societies that cannot be compared with anything in history.  At the core of our societies are new technologies and new forms of communications that have been constantly changing. With these developments, new social and economic relations emerge.

After 500 years from the time that the Portuguese first adventured down the West Coast of Africa, the world has seen at least three sets of great powers rise and fall. First came Portugal, and then Spain soon behind. They eviscerated the empires of the Incas and Aztecs. And colonised huge stretches of both North and South America.  Both empires collapsed in 1815 after the French wars. Lack of industrial development is the simplest explanation for this. They were followed by the British, French, and Dutch.  From 1815, The British had become dominant. By 1914  their ambition overrode their ability as they attempted to conquer Germany, the rapidly growing contender Nation.  The two wars in 1914 and 1939 defeated the dominant powers, having overextended their military abilities.

Then came the turn of the USA after 1945. As we have seen above, she too became overextended militarily and began to be defeated by local determined forces. It is quite clear that the USA cannot learn from her failures. When the USA turned her back on colonial control as she did after 1945, she opened the door for the peoples of the world to want wealth and prosperity. It is this she cannot provide, as her first colonial invasion in Afghanistan shows so clearly.

In the 18th and 19th centuries colonised people may have wondered how their Western masters had approroiated so much wealth. Once colonised people had been freed from the yoke of foreign rule, i.e after 1945,  they were able to desire to increase the wealth of their own country for themselves. Afghan people were no different. Yet the American colonisation of their country has left the people in dire poverty. Their failure has been to develop the country as whole. This failure is the bedrock of why the new trained army was unwilling to fight. It was the same failure in the old USSR. The people were impoverished by the economic framework the USA brought to the country.

Great powers cannot alter their policies when they come to believe their own ideology, when they come to believe in the ‘truth’ of ideas they put out as propaganda. Just as the old colonisers were used to extracting wealth, so the Americans that came after 1945, have equally become used to extracting wealth.  They cannot understand that people want ‘to develop’ themselves and their country.

Our task is to help our last great power to focus her many talents on herself. To help her develop her economy and her people. To use her spare resources on herself rather than waste its military power around the globe. Only in this way can we look forward to a bright future for all of humankind.

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