شارل الياس شرتوني/انسحاب الولايات المتحدة من أفغانستان … التباسات وآفاق/Charles Elias Chartouni/The US Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Equivocations and Prospects

شارل الياس شرتوني/انسحاب الولايات المتحدة من أفغانستان … التباسات وآفاق
The US Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Equivocations and Prospects
Charles Elias Chartouni/August 17/2021

The withdrawals from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, have been paramount on the US and EU Foreign Policy priorities and were completed gradually and at cascading intervals since 2014, but they were permanently marred by equivocations, uncertainties and mostly dubious outcomes: neither stabilization nor the prospects of Nation-Building have come to fruition, in spite of the gigantic investments, the costly military interventions and the the occupation time. The emblematic scenery of the Kabul Airport reported yesterday by the media, is quite illustrative of the enduring inability of these imploded geopolitics to overcome their systemic entropies, build institutions, engage modernity and achieve the least consensus on whichever national or public policy matters. The succeeding US administrations have respectively attempted, to no avail, at upholding their withdrawal pledges at subsequent stages, whereas their coalitions have subsided throughout the last decade. The Biden decision is of no surprise and comes at the heels of the US negotiations with the Taliban initiated under the Trump administration, however what is surprising is the abrupt, clumsy, ill sequenced transition and its imponderables.

The systematic review of the unfolding events yields the following observations: 1/ the Taliban’s conduct establishes the evidence of their blatant violation of the agreed upon withdrawal stipulations; 2/ the US separate negotiations with the Taliban and the sidelining of the central government in Kabul has weakened its stature, reprenstativeness, and entitlement to adjudicate national conflicts; 3/ the central government has failed to build its moral, legal and operational autonomy, validate its credentials all along, and generate steady supportive constituencies amongst a strong and dynamic budding civil society; 4/ Taliban are going to be confronted with the new realities of an Afghan civil society that is unlikely to be cowed through State terrorism, and empowered feminine constituencies that will resist their relegation to moral subordination and professional marginality; 5/ the false assumptions about a new moderate version of the Taliban have been quickly dispelled, since their Islamic extremism, cooperation with al Qaida and its ilk are already in display, and the transformation of Afghanistan into a rehabilitated platform of Islamist terrorism is under way; 6/ the comeback of the Taliban is inevitably going to resuscitate the lingering geopolitical contentions of the Indian subcontinent, and their major strategic and security hazards (conventional and nuclear) on the crossroads between the different South Asian’s interfaces, the Larger Middle East and the European limes; 7/ NATO and Western democracies have to overcome their ideological blindspots, review their security paradigms, recast their strategic alliances, and start acting on comprehensive geopolitical arrangements and containment scenarios, which put an end to the widening strategic voids in regions swayed by endemic under-development, ethno-political conflicts, Fragile State structures, competing primordial loyalties, Islamic extremism, and pliabilty to jostling power politics.

The plodding transition should give way to the featured orderly political transition, the confrontation of the Taliban on the very basis of their willingness to abide by the rules of international civility, Human Rights standards, readiness to disassociate themselves from al Qaida and its extremist ilks, and build an effective governance. Short of these minimal conditions, the Taliban return to power ushers a new era of geopolitical instability, international terrorism, and the perpetuation of Islamism as the prevailing doxa of the contemporary Islamic religious discourse and its modulations. The defensive posture of President Biden was quite reminiscent of domestic score settling, normative discrepancies between ethical imperatives and Realpolitik mandates, and the ensuing inconsistencies between policy planning and implementation and their backlashing effects on the current administration. Whatever might have been the considerations, it should have proceeded more carefully with its withdrawal plan, and reckoned with the pitfalls of negotiations with a terrorist organization operating on the interstices of clashing cultures, tattered and vast geopolitical wastelands, fragile statehood, and the jarring semantics of contemporary Islam.