Afghanistan and the great powers
Europe. A new wave of refugees from Afghanistan could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It is common in Europe to hear that Turkey uses refugees as blackmail. Obviously that is not the view in Ankara: refugees crossing from Turkey to Europe are not Turks, so why should Turkey be held responsible for hosting them? A wave of refugees from Afghanistan traveling from Quetta to the Aegean would not be as easy to accommodate by Turkey as the 2015 wave resulting from the Syrian civil war.
United States. The withdrawal is an unmitigated failure. I hear sometimes that America’s goal in Afghanistan was unrealisable. There is a problem with this thesis: I have no idea what the goal was and neither does anyone in Washington. When you occupy a country for twenty years without knowing what you are doing there, it is perhaps unsurprising that the story does not end well. The United States has just sent a chilling message to its allies worldwide: if domestic considerations so dictate, they may be abandoned to their luck in the blink of an eye. More important in my opinion: Washington has shown over the past two decades that it is no longer able to create political order outside America’s borders and the reason is it has no understanding of political realities and no capacity to articulate foreign policy goals within those realities.
China. There will be an opportunity for China, which is starting to build a new regional order encompassing Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. China is not interested in changing Afghanistan, but it is very much interested in the country’s mineral deposits, many of them of great importance for the ongoing climate transition. Beijing can easily work with Pakistan to extend its influence over the Taliban. Chinese economic interests in Afghanistan will be carved out from the rest of the country and heavily secured, a process I have witnessed in many other countries and regions.
Thanks Bruno. Should one strategy succeed, a 21st century İlkhanate will be a vast diocese in southern Eurasia, linked to Khanbaliq by a second parallel economic corridor. With all the prosperity and protection the celestial mandate implies.
It strikes me as significantly revealing and ironic to pull out from Afghanistan with one often quoted reason being to refocus on balancing China. But where? İf anything, maintaining a strong presence in Afghanistan that would give the US a critical role as power balancer - especially in the very heart of Eurasia - would be key. The past 20 years of failure can be written off somewhat. But the next 20 years is different and with no strategy nor grasp of real power politics.
The European position and that of the many of the Afghan people makes me think of the geopolitics of Gildas, post Roman legions' withdrawal from Britain and also for domestic considerations then. "Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur." İt's a warning to allies yes but the procession is from allies to imperial prefectures to abandoned dependencies.