Western nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan | Simon jenkins

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British MPs this week let out a long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who were just on the lookout when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a 20-year collective experience of exporting Western values ​​to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. Members wanted someone other than themselves to be to blame. A politician is never as angry as when he is wrong.

Like their fellow Congressmen, MPs were sort of hoping the ending would be nice and tidy, with speeches and flags, much like Britain’s exit from Hong Kong. Instead, tens of thousands of Afghans who had lived in an effective colony during years of NATO occupation had come to believe that the West would never leave or protect them in some way or form. another retaliation from the Taliban. They were quickly disillusioned.

In 2006, I stood at dusk on the wall of a castle overlooking Kabul with a young UN official. He had just learned that the road to Kandahar was no longer safe. Why, he sighed, can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden? I tried to see if he was smiling, but he was grimacing. For another 15 years, armies of Western soldiers and civilians threw staggering amounts of money at the country. They created a wildly corrupt Western dependency, where some 50,000 Afghans have ties to the West that are now deadly. As for the Western-trained army, one of its trainers told me that it was mostly for the show. An occupying power could not motivate local youth to kill their compatriots who could soon rule them. He correctly predicted: they will return on foot on foot.

It has now been 22 years since Tony Blair gave a speech in Chicago lecturing the United States on his doctrine of international intervention. He wanted the West to invade countries around the world not to defend itself, but to save people everywhere from oppression. It was a reformulation of Alfred Milners’ Victorian concept of moral imperialism. British politicians on the left and on the right have long been uneasy about the abandonment of milnerism as an acceptable face of empire. Global policing is sort of embedded in Britain’s political DNA. All of Blair’s wars of aggression have been hailed in the House of Commons.

Many people have spoken this week about the decline of the West, lamenting the collapse of American moral authority. However, these theories are irrelevant. The belief that our moral values ​​somehow make no sense unless they are imposed on those who do not share them is imperialist fanaticism. It also leads to absurd biases. Iraq is now seen as bad interventionism, as opposed to the right version of Afghanistan. The virtue of this latest invasion led President Obama in 2009 to bless the war in Afghanistan with an influx of troops, bringing the US total to 110,000, a mere practical target for the Taliban.

US gunboat diplomacy, originally supposed to heal the wounds of September 11, 2001, has opened the door to false morality and a trillion-dollar nation-building fantasy. The catastrophic return of Taliban autonomy has become its inevitable conclusion. The United States with Great Britain as a lackey committed a capital sin of liberal interventionism: lukewarmness. The desire to intervene is always followed by a desire to withdraw. The traditional empires at least pretended that they would never go away. As it stands, Afghanistan has reproduced departures from India, South Africa, Hong Kong and Iraq. If you invade and conquer an alien state, you own it, but then must deny it. Western rule has killed an estimated 240,000 people in Afghanistan since 2001, more than the Taliban ever did. That didn’t leave the moral, just a mess.

We have to assume that strategists in Washington and London are now planning interventions in Taiwan and Ukraine against possible Chinese and Russian expansion. If you are asking taxpayers to spend billions on defense, you need something to prove. So you claim, as Johnson did in his bizarre conversation with Biden this week, that gains have been made in Afghanistan. You accuse the non-interventionists, as former Conservative leader William Hague did, of demonstrating the weakening of the Western spirit. In a recent column, The Hague called on Britain to continue invading foreign countries when our common humanity demands it. In doing so, he sounded like Pope Urban calling the First Crusade.

The much-cited concept of a global police force requires some framework of global consent. When the United Nations was founded, this consent was rooted in the first chapter of its charter. This stipulated that all members should refrain from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. On this basis he obtained general consent, if not always obedience. The end of the Cold War and the supposed superiority of liberal Western values ​​have encouraged the United States and Britain to declare responsibility for protecting all those oppressed by their governments. The authority of the UN charter rooted in national sovereignty collapsed and the UN gave way to the United States as a self-proclaimed police officer.

American Cold War historian Francis Fukuyama recently wrote that the United States is unlikely to regain its former hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to it. There is no world policeman. Individual nations serve humanity best by example or charity, not by war. Military intervention is rarely, if ever, humane. Western regimes have enough problems to face in their own countries. If they are thirsty for moral awareness, it should be through the imperialism of ideas, receptive minds and open doors, not guns and bombs.

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