Whither Afghanistan?

Empires advance and empires retreat, though not in circumstances of their own choosing — to borrow from one Karl Marx — and certainly never smoothly or without upending entire regions, countries and societies in their wake.

What has and continues to unfold in Afghanistan is nothing less than a historic tipping point when it comes to US hegemonic and imperial decline. The chaotic and panicked scenes at Kabul airport, where US and British military forces are hastily attempting to effect the evacuation of their own nationals still in the country, along with Afghans who worked with them during the country’s occupation, unsurprisingly have drawn comparison with Saigon in 1975.

Just as Saigon marked the end of US geostrategic ambitions in Indochina after ten years of war and conflict there, so Kabul marks the end of the same in Central Asia.

Making the ‘Fall of Kabul’ today more significant than the Fall of Saigon back then, however, is that the former has come at the tail end of Washington’s unipolar moment, when after the Berlin Wall came crashing down Western ideologues and neocons in Washington became intoxicated with triumphalism and ‘End of History’ fanaticism. At this historical juncture, the world appeared to them like a freshly cooked steak, waiting to be devoured.

The Grand Chessboard is the title of the 1997 book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. In it he argues that domination of Eurasia should be viewed as critical to US strategy for domination of the world’s resources in the post-Cold War era. Brzezinski was key in advocating US military and material support for the Afghan mujahideen, support which began under the Carter administration in 1979 in order to draw the Soviets into their own Vietnam-style quagmire.

In this they succeeded, but at what price? For the trajectory from then to now has been one of imperial overreach on the part of a Washington establishment blinded by an entirely misplaced sense of its own exceptionalism and a catastrophically failed belief in its ability to bludgeon and bully the world into submission.

‘You have the watches, we have the time,’ the Taliban leadership is said to have pointed out to their American counterparts, and so it has proved. With hardly a…