After 20 years in Afghanistan, the eagles of the American Empire have turned into big doves, flapping their wings and fleeing, leaving thousands of local followers waiting for the judgment of fate. Why say "again"? Because half a century ago, american troops withdrew from South Vietnam in 1972, and North Vietnamese troops invaded Saigon three years later, which was the first time in American history that it explicitly acknowledged its defeat in the war. In that war, the North Vietnamese were always using the ten-life-for-life strategy of attrition to wear down the will to war of the American Empire. This time in Afghanistan, the US military began to withdraw for more than 3 months, and before it was time to completely withdraw, the Taliban had already conquered the whole country. President Ashraf Ghani abdicated power and fled to neighboring countries, the Taliban announced the formation of an interim government, and the Ata commander Baradal, who had just visited Tianjin in July, was about to become president of the interim government. This withdrawal from Afghanistan is the first rout of the U.S. empire in the post-Cold War era and has great significance and far-reaching implications in global geopolitics. I suspect that future historians will most likely define the defeat of Afghanistan as the first domino of the collapse of the liberal global empire built by the United States.
I am not an expert on Afghanistan myself, but as a scholar of international issues, I occasionally have the opportunity to observe the discussion of this issue by people who are more professional than me, so I have the following impressions for the reader to criticize.
What is wrong with the U.S. Afghanistan strategy?
Strategy is first and foremost about the balance between goals and means. The United States took advantage of the sympathy and flattery of the countries of the world after 9/11 in 2001 and relied on its absolute superiority in force to launch a war in Afghanistan. Their publicly stated goal, which would have been rather limited, was to bring the attackers to justice. But some of the key figures in the American war machine, such as the powerful neoconservatives of the time, cramed their geopolitical bootlegs into it, trying to penetrate other countries through military superiority, and then engaging in regime change to advance their global democratization agenda. If you only want to achieve the first small goal, in fact, there is no need to make a big deal, you only need to take out tens of millions of dollars in bounties, get bin Laden's whereabouts, and then a few drones can take revenge by long-range, and the cost of money and life is very low; but to achieve the second grand goal, that is, the 100,000-strong army will spend twenty years in twenty years, because if you want to comprehensively transform a country's political system, you must comprehensively transform the country's economic and cultural base. Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars and killed more than 2,300 military personnel (not counting the large number of U.S. military contractors who died in Afghanistan), what do they end up getting? There was only one humiliating defeat, accompanied by doubts from global allies and bystanders about its national strength and strategic will. Clearly, America's strategic decisions were ideologically oriented, not based on a dispassionately realistic assessment of its own goals and means.
If a person wants to successfully lie and deceive others, he must first convince himself of the lie; in the long run, the strategic loss of the liar misleading himself will always be far greater than the tactical benefit of misleading others. Therefore, honesty is not only a virtue, but also a very reasonable survival strategy. I have always advocated that in foreign policy, we should not superstitiously believe in the so-called propaganda ability and discourse power, and should not take others as fools. You fool others for a while, but the potential cost is huge and long-lasting, and the biggest price is to fool yourself. The Propaganda Machine of the United States is good at fooling the world with the discourse of liberal democracy, rule of law and good governance, but the greatest harm is to fool its own decision-makers into ignorance of historical facts and ideologies. Over the past 20 years, the expansion and blurring of U.S. strategic goals in Afghanistan has something to do with the ideology of U.S. foreign policy.
Since ancient times, successful conquerors have usually given enough freedom to the conquered peoples, and even implanted their political authority into the local religious culture, such as the ancient Persian Empire's Akamenid dynasty to Babylon and other places with religious freedom; the Qing conquerors in Han China called the emperor ruled by the Confucian bureaucracy, while in the steppe called themselves the Heavenly Khans, these are successful cases. The ideological arrogance and obsession of the US Empire has cost it a great price in life, money and imperial prestige in Afghanistan, and its lessons are worth learning from onlookers.
Second, since Afghanistan is a pit, why didn't the United States stop the loss earlier?
Strategic timely stop loss requires courage and political capital, but neither of these nor the previous statesmen of the US Empire. By 2008, the U.S. political elite was widely aware of this strategic mistake, and the Obama administration wanted to withdraw its troops, but failed to do so. The Trump administration also wanted to withdraw its troops, and it did not withdraw. Why? On the political table, it is said that it is to defend the face and credibility of the empire, and under the table is the obstruction of the interests of some military leaders and military industry.
I once heard a retired U.S. military officer talk about his daily situation in Afghanistan: "Usually we hide in a huge fortress-like barracks and don't go out, sometimes there will be guerrilla attacks in the middle of the night, nothing more than a small rocket to scare us, most of the time we can't die Americans." 」 But once the Americans were killed or wounded, we paid the tribal leaders to help catch the attackers. Most of the time, within a few days, unsure or false attackers would be caught and their bodies hoisted to high poles at the edge of the bazaar to set an example. "I asked him, aren't you paying protection money to the local forces?" The answer is, yes, that's what it is. I really couldn't imagine that there was such a nest of occupying forces, which is ridiculous to say, but it is reasonable to think about it carefully, after all, the bitter lesson of the Vietnam War for American politicians is that it does not matter if you spend some money, but american public opinion cannot tolerate too many soldier casualties. I asked again, then why did you stay there for so long? He replied that face and credibility, coupled with the fact that no politician was willing to bear direct responsibility for the defeat.
I have often said that the essence of the political economy of empires is leverage, and that leverage is sustained by strategic credit. So why is the current Biden administration finally willing to withdraw its troops? My guess is that there is really no money financially, and that the forces behind the political left and right have converged on the issue of imperial contraction. From a fiscal point of view, since August 1 this year, the exemption of the federal debt ceiling has expired, the epidemic response and local infrastructure are very expensive, and the War in Afghanistan, a rotten project carried out by the former former leader, does not need to spend money to sustain it. From a political point of view, The Democratic Party's big financier Soros and the Republican Party's big financier Charles Koch have jointly funded a think tank called the Quincy Institute in the past two years, and their main policy is the strategic contraction of the US empire.
Third, why are the Afghan government forces supported by the United States not combat effective at all?
Military combat effectiveness does not come first of all from weapons and equipment, but from people's will to fight. If the will to fight is 1, then weapons and equipment, geographical advantages, logistical supplies, military training, etc. are followed by 0. If the will to fight of an army is 0, then give him more other things, multiplying by zero or zero. Where does the will to fight come from? I think it is not profit, but righteousness. Of course, for different peoples, this meaning is different. The Afghan government forces during the U.S.-occupied period were essentially mercenaries forced to make a living puppet for the United States, and they lacked a strong local righteousness to forge their military soul.
Therefore, the ancient Chinese people paid attention to "righteous warfare" and "the division is famous", and when Cao Jie debated the war, he first asked the rulers what they relied on to participate in the war, and our party and our army have always emphasized that they are the division of justice, and this is to ensure that the whole army has a righteousness in their hearts.
The U.S. military invaded Afghanistan, giving itself the moral doctrine of initially arming itself to avenge 9/11, and then going further to promote liberal democracy to transform the world. But the problem is that bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan and not Afghanistan, and what the U.S. military is doing in Afghanistan is constantly deconstructing its own claimed moral goals, and you can deceive the world with propaganda, but you can't deceive america's own soldiers for a long time, because they know what they are doing. More importantly, the Afghan government forces supported by the United States do not have any "righteousness" in their hearts to support them, and the US military does not seem to have done any effective political work and psychological construction for this puppet army.
Clausewitz has always stressed that war is nothing more than a continuation of another (violent) means of politics; our army has always regarded the political work of the army as the basis of combat effectiveness. These are truths that have been proven over and over again in practice.
Fourth, if we put aside the issues of war ethics, international law and political influence, from a purely strategic point of view, is the US military completely without a chance of winning the war in Afghanistan?
I think there is.
First, they must, from the outset, greatly reduce their strategic goals and fail to pursue those illusory ideological goals, such as a comprehensive political and social transformation of a distant and impoverished country on the other side of the globe. American politicians and strategists must pragmatically and clearly define the purpose of war before sending troops, for example, implanting their own national interests into the strategic core area of the Eurasian world island at a reasonable cost (time, life, finance).
Secondly, the difficulties and risks of war must be fully estimated, and the brutality and protracted guerrilla warfare waged by the resistance forces must be fully prepared. If, in 2001, when the George W. Bush administration planned its invasion of Afghanistan, it did not intend to do its best in one battle, but conceived from the outset of a five- to ten-year war process that would be repeatedly washed, then the loss of life and financial costs of the US military itself would be estimated to be much smaller. The so-called repeated washing of the market refers to the fact that after defeating the Taliban regime in a month, the tribes formed a coalition government in the form they saw fit, and then the United States withdrew its troops quickly, but retained a number of important strategic strongholds that were easy to defend and difficult to attack, ready to intervene again. When the Taliban made a comeback and the weak coalition government was gradually defeated, the United States once again sent troops to defeat the Taliban... By repeatedly luring the snake out of the hole and hitting it seven inches, the form of warfare changed from guerrilla warfare, which the Taliban were good at, to multiple rounds of frontal warfare in which the US military had absolute superiority. After four or five such repeated washes, the will and ability of the local resistance and their supporters to fight will be greatly undermined, and they will no longer have too high expectations of relying on violent struggle to defeat the puppet regime supported by external conquerors; and in the repeated tug-of-war, the strength of the tribes, who is loyal and who is traitorous, will also be exposed, and when the final distribution of power is finalized, it can be distributed according to this fundamentals. By then, the political equilibrium and institutional arrangements achieved would have a relatively solid local foundation, rather than an order imposed entirely by the US military based on subjective preferences and military superiority.
Why should I think and discuss this fourth point? This is obviously not meant to be heard by the defeated Americans, who are now bent on fleeing the land of right and wrong. I mean to Chinese policymakers thirty or half a century from now, who may still be my students or fans. A friend told me that you are afraid to worry too much, as we all know that Afghanistan has been an imperial graveyard since Alexander the Great, and we Chinese a peace-loving, modest and introverted people. Of course, I hope that I am more worried, but the ancients warned us that there is no beginning, and there is an end. Don't forget, when the U.S. Empire was just rising 100 years ago, it was a day of criticizing the imperialists and colonial powers of old Europe, and how stubborn isolationism and self-morality flaunted in the American foreign policy tradition! But people's minds always change, and when you have a hammer in your hand, everything is a nail. Now that China has just risen and will not be strong, many young people have already hung up on Chen Tang's phrase "those who commit crimes against strong men will be punished from afar" all day; thirty years and fifty years later, future Chinese may easily find a bunch of reasons to argue their choices. After all, in the vast majority of people's rationality, most of the time, it is only used to justify their emotions and desires.
I am not a pacifist, and I acknowledge that some wars are inevitable, and at some point acts of force are even a moral imperative. When I was young, in order to get a doctorate, I also conducted several years of research on the history of strategy and the history of strategic thought, and pondered many brilliant examples of great strategists. However, as I grew older and more experienced, especially after reading more history books, I began to gradually experience another kind of wisdom.
A successful leader once summed up his lessons like this: "To be a leader, the most important and difficult thing is patience." Leaders have a lot of power and resources in their hands, but the risks, responsibilities and pressures are greater, and if they want to do everything exactly according to their own ideas, it must not be done well. How could this not be the case for leading countries in anarchic systems? In history, those great empires that are brave and good at war, happy to take revenge, and rapidly expanding often collapse quickly, becoming short-lived and lamentable stories, while the successful empires that truly and profoundly shape human history and civilization often uphold the concept of realism that is honest to cold to cold, and do not pursue short-term glory but pursue long-term growth.
May the future not forget the original intention, and the heavens will be long.