Nor does it now seem to have much time for Tony Blair’s plans for troop deployments, peacekeeping and nation building in poverty-stricken central Asia. But then nobody now in power in Afghanistan – whether the factions of the Northern Alliance, the southern Pashtun warlords or the remnants of the Taliban theocrats – wants foreign troops in their country, as the marines at Bagram air base have discovered.
Only Afghans can create a viable political future for themselves; foreign interference has been at the heart of Afghanistan’s twenty-year disintegration. Perhaps the warlords will come to an accommodation and the talks due to be held in Bonn on Monday will start to cobble together some semblance of a broad-based government to rebuild the cluster-bomb-blasted wreckage of their society. But for the US, this is a second-order issue. It now smells the blood of its quarry, the man held responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. If bin Laden is captured and killed in the next few days, as the US and British military seem increasingly confident will happen, the Afghan campaign will be celebrated as a decisive breakthrough in the war against terror – and the US will move on, turning its attention to Iraq and elsewhere, after mopping up a few foreign jihad enthusiasts.4
But in reality it is likely to be nothing of the sort. The war against the Taliban has so dominated the global response to the atrocities of September 11, it is hard to remember that the Kandahar clerics probably had nothing directly to do with them. Western governments exaggerate the importance of state sponsorship to terror campaigns. The case against the Afghan war was primarily that it would lead to large-scale civilian casualties, fail to stamp out anti-Western terrorism, create a political backlash throughout the Muslim world and actually increase the likelihood of further attacks. In the absence of any serious effort to address the grievances underlying anti-US hatred, that argument has been strengthened. It was clear long ago, certainly since the demise of the Soviet Union, that no state could defeat the US in a conventional military confrontation and that only the war of the flea – guerrilla warfare or terrorism – could be effective. The Afghan debacle has hammered that lesson home.5
(22/11/01)
Can the US be defeated?
Those who have argued that America’s war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45 billion increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had ‘better get their house in order’ or face what he called the ‘justice of this nation’, it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all.
Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the ‘full spectrum dominance’ the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for ten, twenty-three and fifty-two years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients.
With his declaration of war against this absurdly named ‘axis of evil’, Bush has abandoned whatever remaining moral high ground the US held onto in the wake of September 11. He has dispensed with the united front against terror, which had just about survived the onslaught on Afghanistan. And he has made fools of those, particularly in Europe, who had convinced themselves that America’s need for international support would coax the US Republican right out of its unilateralist laager. Nothing of the kind has happened. When the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer plaintively insists that ‘alliance partners are not satellites’, and the EU’s international affairs commissioner Chris Patten fulminates against Bush’s ‘absolutist and simplistic’ stance, they are swatted away. Even Jack Straw, foreign minister of a government that prides itself on its clout in Washington, was slapped down for his hopeful suggestion that talk of an axis of evil was strictly for domestic consumption. Allied governments who question US policy towards Iraq, Israel or national missile defence are increasingly treated as the ‘vassal states’ the French president Jacques Chirac has said they risk becoming. Now Colin Powell, regarded as the last voice of reason in the White House, has warned Europeans to respect the ‘principled leadership’ of the US even if they disagree with it.
By openly arrogating to itself the prerogative of such leadership – and dispensing with any restraint on its actions through the United Nations or other multilateral bodies – the US is effectively challenging what has until now passed for at least formal equality between nations. But it is only reflecting reality. The extent of America’s power is unprecedented in human history. The latest increases will take its military spending to 40 per cent of the worldwide total, larger than the arms budgets of the next nineteen states put together. No previous military empire, from the Roman to the British, boasted anything like this preponderance, let alone America’s global reach. US officials are generally a good deal more frank about the situation than their supporters abroad. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon described US strategy as ‘benevolent domination’ (though it may be doubted whether those who have recently been on the receiving end of US military power, from the Middle East to Latin America, would see it that way). A report for the US Space Command last year, overseen by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, rhapsodised about the ‘synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority’ that would come with missile defence and other projects to militarise space. This would ‘protect US interests and investment’ in an era when globalisation was likely to produce a further ‘widening between haves and have-nots’. It would give the US an ‘extraordinary military advantage’.
In fact, it would only increase further what became an overwhelming military advantage a decade ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the experience of Bush’s war on Afghanistan has driven home the lessons for the rest of the world. The first is that such a gigantic disproportion of international power is a threat to the principles of self-determination the US claims to stand for on a global scale. A state with less than one twentieth of the earth’s population is able to dictate to the other 95 per cent and order their affairs in its own interests, both through military and economic pressure. The issue is not one of ‘anti-Americanism’ or wounded national pride (curiously, those politicians around the world who prattle most about patriotism are also usually the most slavish towards US power), but of democracy. This is an international order which, as the September 11 attacks demonstrated, will not be tolerated and will generate conflict.
Many doubt that such conflict can amount to anything more than fleabites on an elephant which has demonstrated its ability to crush any serious challenger, and have come to believe US global domination is here for good. That ignores the political and economic dimensions (including in the US itself), as well as the problems of fighting asymmetric wars on many fronts. In economic terms, the US has actually been in decline relative to the rest of the world since it accounted for half the world’s output after the second world war. In the past few years its share has bounced back to nearly 30 per cent on some measures, partly because of the Soviet implosion and Japanese stagnation, and partly because of America’s own long boom. But in the medium term, the strain of military overstretch is likely to make itself felt. More immediately, the US could face regional challenges, perhaps from China or Russia, which it would surely balk at pushing to military conflict. Then there is the likelihood of social eruptions in client states like Saudi Arabia which no amount of military technology will be able to see off. America’s greatest defeat was, it should not be forgotten, inflicted by a peasant army in Vietnam. US room for manoeuvre may well prove more limited than might appear.6
When it comes to some of America’s richer and more powerful allies, the opposite is often the case: they can go their own way and get away