Afghanistan tragedy may be a sign of a dangerous new world order – Scotsman comment

American neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have reputations that will be forever tarnished by the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Joe Biden's decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was followed by a swift victory for the Taliban (Picture: Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

But when this movement first began in the US during the Cold War, it seemed like a breath of fresh air. Rather than support pro-US dictators, they argued, America should instead promote democracy and freedom around the world – using military force if necessary – to seize the ideological high ground in the struggle with the Soviet Union. It was a policy viewed by critics, with some justification, as American imperialism.

However, before the binary struggle of the Cold War, America had isolationist tendencies and, with Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, these attitudes may be returning to the mainstream.

It was Donald Trump who shifted the ‘Overton window’ – the policies and views considered acceptable – on Afghanistan. Had he not signed what the Republican National Committee’s website until recently described as a “historic peace agreement with the Taliban” and announced the US would withdraw, Biden may not have had the political cover to make the same decision. And there are some conservatives in the US who think Biden is even more of an isolationist than the ‘America First’ president he replaced.

The West’s abandonment of its Afghan allies to their fate at the hands of the infamously brutal Taliban is a “tragedy”, as Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who served as a soldier in Afghanistan, told the Commons in a powerful and emotional speech. He spoke of struggling this week with “anger, and grief, and rage”, of the sacrifices of British soldiers who died there and the funerals he had attended.

Importantly, he insisted that Afghanistan “is not a far country about which we know little. It is part of the main”. This is the antithesis of Trump’s view, and perhaps Biden’s too.

If, chastened by the neocon lies that led to the disastrous Iraq War, the US decides that interventionism is folly and increasingly withdraws from the world, the danger is that the vacuum will be exploited by not just the Taliban but other tyrannical regimes, such as Bashar Assad’s in Syria, and by the power-hungry despots in Moscow and Beijing.

So the tragedy of Afghanistan could be the beginning of a tragedy for the whole of the democratic world.

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