CONTEXT

• The recent bombing by the Islamic State outside Kabul airport that killed about 200 Afghans and 13 Americans at a time when the U.S. was scrambling to evacuate its citizens from Afghanistan was a tragic testimony to everything that went wrong with America’s war on terror.

BACKGROUND

• After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. went to Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban regime.
• Twenty years later, when the U.S. exited Afghanistan, the Taliban, which never fully severed its ties with al-Qaeda, was back in power in Kabul and the country was emerging as the new base of the Islamic State.

LIMITED OPTIONS FOR U.S.

• Though the U.S. President Joe Biden says the war on terror will continue, but the U.S.’s options are limited now.
  • It has lost its base in Afghanistan.
  • Its alliance with Pakistan, which goes back to the Cold War, is over.
  • Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries refuse to host an American base.
  • All of this will impact intelligence operations.
• Even if the U.S. wants to carry out a drone strike in Afghanistan, it will have to fly the machines from the Gulf, based on intelligence collected from afar.
• Hence, the question arises- if the U.S. couldn’t defeat terrorism after fighting two decades in Afghanistan along with Pakistan, how is it going to fight it in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan from bases in the Gulf?

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE WAR OF TERROR

• • After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. saw a global outpouring of support in favour of its military action against al-Qaeda.
    • But the fundamental problem with the war that the U.S. launched was that it wasn’t strategically focused on defeating al-Qaeda.
  • Instead, driven by neoconservative, then U.S. administration, launched regime change wars to remake the Muslim world.
  • In 2001, the U.S. brought down the Taliban regime and destroyed al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan.
  • But instead of going after al-Qaeda networks, the U.S. initiated the next regime change war in Iraq.
  • The invasion of Iraq, based on false intelligence or the lie that President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, not only diffused the U.S.’s focus in Afghanistan but also created conditions inside Iraq for al-Qaeda, which was forced to retreat from Afghanistan, to establish a new branch.
  • Al-Qaeda in Iraq, rose from the ruins of post-war Iraq to become the deadliest branch of the global jihadist outfit.

• In 2011, NATO launched another regime change war in Libya.

• • The U.S. believed that with its superior military force, it could topple regimes, reorder political systems and remake the world.
    • Driven by this idea of remaking the world, U.S. brought down the regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but it remained clueless about how to tackle the instability that followed.
  • In Syria, the U.S. stopped short of a direct military intervention but backed armed rebels against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

• It was from the ruins of Syria that the Islamic State rose.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE INSTABILITY FOLLOWED

Rise of terrorism:

• As a result of instability arose in the region, jihadists thrive amidst chaos and lawlessness.
  • Post-war Iraq provided a new base for al-Qaeda, while Libya’s collapse into anarchy, with different militias and governments fighting each other for control, allowed terrorists to spread to other parts of Africa.

Rise of Islamist and Islamophobic politics:

• The regime change wars, which helped terrorist outfits proliferate in many countries, also led to the strengthening of both Islamist and Islamophobic politics across the world.
  • The repeated attacks on Muslim-majority countries and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of locals, mostly Muslims, in these wars helped strengthen the jihadist narrative that the ‘Christian West’ is launching ‘a crusade’ against Muslims.
  • American strikes were broadcast on social media with the aim of recruiting young Muslims.
  • As a result anti-Americanism emerged as a dominant political theme across Muslim-majority countries, which Islamist hardliners sought to cash in on.

Outflow of refugees:

• • The wars also triggered a massive outflow of refugees from the affected countries to neighbouring nations and the faraway West.
    • Already on the ascent after the 2008 financial crisis, the populist far-right in the west turned the situation into a political weapon.

• Thus, the regime change wars, which failed to defeat terrorists, came back to divide and haunt the West in a different form.

GEOPOLITICAL SETBACK

• The most unexpected setback that the U.S. suffered was in geopolitics.
• When the U.S. was busy in the Muslim world, China was steadily rising. But by the time the U.S. realised that China had become its greatest rival since the end of the Cold War, it was too late:
  • the U.S. had already lost the war in Afghanistan
  • al-Qaeda had split into different branches
  • divisive, ethno-nationalist and Islamophobic politics had become stronger at home
  • and the moment of unipolarity had passed
• In the face of these enormous challenges, the present U.S. President Biden decided to end the war in Afghanistan allowing the Taliban their victory.
• Thus, leaving the war on terror uncertain and caused a shift in the U.S.’s strategic focus towards a resurgent China.

CONCLUSION

• • Despite all of this, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan doesn’t mean that the global hegemony of the U.S. is over.
  • America’s withdrawal and the perception of its weakness will embolden its rivals like Iran, Russia and China.
    • But the U.S., which is seeking to return to realism from neoconservatism, might wait for its rivals, especially China, to commit blunders or it might grab other strategic opportunities.

• Thus, Afghanistan is not the end of American power; it’s the beginning of the new U.S.-China cold war.

• • Meanwhile, terrorist outfits will continue to operate from the heavens they have already found.

Reference:

1. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/how-the-911-wars-changed-the-world/article36556673.ece