The US is gone but rivals China and Russia will be limited in their role in the new Afghanistan because of its deep economic needs and the fate of Islamic minorities within their borders, writes Robert Patman
America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan after 20 years of war has fuelled fresh fears in Washington of American decline and new hopes in Beijing that this is true.
But the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is unlikely to be a tipping point in relations between the world’s superpowers.
The Biden administration is quite rightly blamed for overestimating the staying power of President Ashraf Ghani’s government and failing to secure Kabul International Airport well ahead of its announced departure date.
Nevertheless, the Taliban triumph was at least 18 years in the making over the course of three US administrations.
In 2003, the George W. Bush administration made the fateful strategic error of unilaterally expanding its war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq - a state which had nothing to do with 9/11 – and quickly found itself ensnared in a bloody insurgency, a development that led to the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan by 2006.
Despite pursuing an aggressive counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan and killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the Obama administration was unable to break the resistance of the Taliban and envisaged a full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, a plan that was delayed in 2015 at the request of the government in Kabul.
The Trump administration talked tough and declared war against “Radical Islamic Terrorism” but also pledged to end America’s “endless wars.” On February 29, 2020, the Trump team signed a deal with the Taliban - without the consent of the Afghan government - to release thousands of Taliban prisoners and withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by May 2021.
The speed and ease of the Taliban victory certainly shocked the Biden administration. Reasons for the rapid collapse include corruption within Ashraf Ghani’s government and the adroit use of social media by Taliban militants.
However, it is also clear the US had not been winning for a long time in a $1 trillion-plus counterterrorism effort in Afghanistan and that the Biden administration essentially implemented the Trump deal to leave the country.
The fact that the US sustained such an expensive military commitment for so long with few signs of success was linked to a post-9/11 context in which a sense of national exceptionalism and a burgeoning military-industrial complex has loomed large in shaping American national security policy.
US exceptionalism refers to an informal ideology that endows Americans with a pervasive faith in the uniqueness and superiority of the country’s founding liberal principles and a conviction the US has a special destiny among nations, especially in defending the world against the perceived threat of Islamist terrorism.
The military-industrial complex - a term coined by President Dwight Eisenhower to describe a powerful constellation of interests consisting of government agencies, arms producing corporations, and military bureaucracies supporting the US national security establishment – has used its financial muscle to exert significant influence over lawmakers in Washington to frame the post-9/11environment in Afghanistan and elsewhere as militarily threatening and one conveniently requiring high levels of military spending.
Ultimately, the US policy of gradually transferring the responsibility and direction of the war effort to the Afghan state government proved no match for the Taliban.
But is the American setback in Afghanistan a gain for Washington’s authoritarian rivals, China and Russia?
Both China and Russia have been quietly courting the Taliban leadership for some time and seem to believe they will benefit in some way from America’s departure from Afghanistan.
Yet there are grounds to believe that the euphoria in Beijing and Moscow could be short-lived.
For one thing, the Taliban will prove to be a high maintenance ally.
Economically, Afghanistan is one of the poorest states in the world and is dependent on foreign aid for 20 percent of its gross income. The US froze USD$9.5 billion of the Afghan central bank’s assets while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suspended access to its funds
While the Taliban have been talking to Russia and China about possible economic cooperation projects, it seems unlikely these states are willing or able to extend immediate large-scale aid while the new government in Kabul seeks to unlock international funding and deal with a humanitarian crisis caused by war and Covid-19.
Moreover, the Taliban faces domestic resistance to its fundamentalist brand of Sharia law, and security challenges from armed opposition in the Panjshir Valley region in northern Afghanistan and terrorist attacks from rival groups like the ISIS-K group.
China and Russia normally have few qualms about exporting arms to an authoritarian ally, but the presence of Muslim minorities in both states and the close proximity of Afghanistan is a complicating factor.
In addition, the relative decline of the US in the post-9/11 era in places like Afghanistan does not mean the torch of global leadership will be automatically passed from America to another superpower such as China.
The collapse of an American ally in Afghanistan does not give China or Russia a new capacity to shape the rest of the world.
Today’s great powers have less autonomy and are more vulnerable than their counterparts of the past because they find themselves constrained by an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world whose array of security, economic, health and environmental problems stubbornly refuse to recognise borders.
The ‘Great Game’, as the contest between great powers for global dominance is often called, is coming to an end but it will probably take several decades for today’s contenders to come to terms with this emerging reality.
