KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
Joe Biden must have thought he was finally due for a run of good luck.
After a Senate career that resembled the Rio Grande — long but shallow, and grand only in name — he was a figure of fun in the Obama administration and slid immediately into obscurity. He didn’t even run for the big job in 2016, and nobody was looking for him. His prospects were resurrected by the unlikely phenomenon of Donald Trump, perhaps the only man in American politics both tawdry enough to make Joe Biden look statesmanlike and incompetent enough to lose an election to him.
And the timing could not have been better for Biden as president-elect. The worst of the COVID-19 epidemic was behind us (or so it appeared at the time), and the hard work of developing vaccines against the virus had been done, leaving only the considerable but manageable logistical challenge of the vaccination campaign. The worst of the economic suffering associated with the epidemic had passed — GDP had grown at an astounding 33.4 percent in the third quarter of 2020 and a solid 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter — while employment and wages had been headed in the right direction.
It might have been a very enjoyable retirement, the best-case scenario for a man whose basic unfitness, both intellectual and moral, for the office has never been in serious doubt.
But the world has a way of intervening. George W. Bush had campaigned for the presidency as an education-reformer skeptical of “nation-building” adventures abroad, but 9/11 changed that. It remains mysterious why President Biden provoked the crisis in Afghanistan that has upended his presidency — the withdrawal of U.S. troops was a Trump priority, and Biden is not especially beholden to those. It may be as simple — and as profane — as the fact that Biden did not want to spend September 11, 2021, watching MSNBC pundits bemoaning that U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan 20 years after the precipitating event. Joe Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972, ought to have learned from Richard Nixon’s example that ending an inconclusive war is a complicated undertaking with very little political payoff.
The retreat from Afghanistan has presented a horrifying display of political cowardice and incompetence. It is likely that Democrats will pay a price for it at the polls, provided that Republicans resist their neurotic urge to debase themselves in some dramatic way between now and the midterm elections. But there are concerns beyond the question of short-term political advantages. Our policy in Afghanistan is not going to be one of open-ended military engagement and nation-building.
So, what is our Afghanistan policy going to be?
Three points that should inform our thinking.
First: Afghanistan policy is China policy. Afghanistan borders China, and much of the suffering in Afghanistan has its origins in Pakistan, which is today something between a Chinese client-state and a Chinese colony. China has several interests in Afghanistan, some of them in conflict. While the bosses in Beijing no doubt take a certain satisfaction in watching Americans scuttling off in ignominious defeat, they do not relish the thought of a revivified Islamist movement inspired by the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan and perhaps interested in turning its gaze to Xinjiang, where Beijing is busily reducing the Muslim population. Beijing doesn’t want Afghan opium crossing the border into China — and some very powerful people in China see opium and heroin as competition to the bootleg fentanyl (and its precursors) produced in China and distributed worldwide under a legal regime one Brookings scholar describes as “freewheeling.” Afghanistan sits atop some $1 trillion or more in rare-earth minerals, the development of which would undermine China’s dominant position in the production of those commodities, with both economic and strategic consequences. While we cannot ignore the horrifying suffering of the Afghan people, we should keep in mind that U.S. interests in Afghanistan have never been exclusively, or even principally, about what happens inside Afghanistan.
Second: Afghanistan policy is European policy. Our European allies (and our allies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere) are bitterly disappointed by our headlong retreat from Afghanistan, a policy that has been executed with little to no substantive consultation or coordination with those allies. The Europeans who had been hoping that the end of the Trump administration would mean a shift in the conduct or content of American engagement with the rest of the world are awakening to the fact that presidential unilateralism in foreign affairs is not a characteristic of the Trump administration or of Republican administrations but of U.S. political practice at large. The Biden administration hardly even consulted Congress, which is controlled by members of President Biden’s own party, much less with our allies in Brussels and London. And if Afghanistan policy is China policy, then Europe policy is China policy, too: The United States has shown itself unable to secure its interests in Afghanistan, where our enemy is a half-organized rabble of gangsters and fanatics — how much less likely is it that the United States will be able to secure its interests vis-à-vis China while going it alone, or effectively alone? In the coming decades, it is very likely that we will see one of two conditions prevail: Either the world will be increasingly dominated by China, or an alliance of the United States, our allies in the English-speaking countries, and the European Union will contain China under a system of multilateral institutions and global norms that reflect liberal-democratic values rather than nationalistic-autocratic values. We let our allies down in Afghanistan, making it more likely that they will let us down in the confrontation with China.
Third: Afghanistan policy is law-enforcement policy. My friend Andrew C. McCarthy has argued eloquently and persuasively against the “law-enforcement approach” to dealing with jihadist terror, the deficiencies of which he understands precisely because his background is in prosecuting terrorists as criminals after they have committed atrocities. But the law-enforcement model has two important things going for it: One, we may take a law-enforcement approach because we apparently are determined not to maintain a conventional military engagement in Afghanistan, and, though one assumes that there are agents from the spookier corners of U.S. government being dispatched to do unspeakable things to unspeakable people, such measures go only so far; two, a law-enforcement model makes some sense because we are dealing with the Taliban, which is, as I have argued for some time, best understood as being first and foremost a crime syndicate.
This is not to say that its Islamist fanaticism is not sincere, but the Sicilian progenitors of the modern Mafia were no less committed to religious orthodoxy, and in their time they even resembled the Taliban down to such details as enforcing social conservatism in dress and manners and policing public displays of vice. Religious fervor and criminal intent can, in the right circumstances, go hand in hand, and often do.
And with international aid drying up and no domestic economy to speak of, the Taliban will be especially reliant on the production of drugs (not only opium and heroin but now also methamphetamine) and other criminal undertakings for money, which it is going to need — desperately. With the Americans licked, the top strategic threat to the Taliban is the Afghan people’s detestation. The Taliban do not want to spend the next 20 years in the role of Americans — fighting an insurgency that they have the power to defeat in every individual confrontation without ever defeating it in toto. The Taliban apparently have learned something from organizations such as Hezbollah, and they apparently intend to become a provider of public goods — not only a guarantor of physical security but also a patron of social welfare and development. But it takes a hell of a lot of heroin to build a highway. If the Taliban are going to try to buy consent, the price is going to be high.
These factors will interact in complicated ways. For example, while the United States surely would like to see less heroin and fentanyl coming across our borders, the profits from such drug sales present a second dimension to the issue because they may fund Taliban efforts to entrench and legitimize their rule, possibly through the development of the country’s mineral resources or through flashy infrastructure projects — which probably would be carried out with Chinese aid by Chinese firms in the service of Chinese strategic and economic interests, as in Pakistan.
We can run from Afghanistan, but we cannot hide from the consequences.
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