“Many doubt that the America has really learned its lesson and think that Joe Biden will find a new excuse to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan.”
In an analysis for Middle East News, Walden Blue wrote: Next September, the last C-130 cargo plane and Chinook cargo helicopters will fly from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, both a CIA torture center and an operations center against extremist jihadists, leaving a military defeat base. Their departure also marks the unfortunate end of the strategy of direct military conflict to reshape the Middle East instead of shifting the global strategic balance. The 20-year US war in the Middle East not only damaged US imperialist power, but also led to polarization in the region, which is now considered a brutal US political process, and China has emerged as a new center of global capital accumulation. Liberals and progressives in the United States hope that ending the military commitment in Afghanistan will pave the way for a major overhaul of US foreign policy. But many doubt that the United States has really learned its lesson and think that Joe Biden will find a new excuse to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan.
Osama’s view, Bush opportunity
Osama bin Laden acted on something similar to Che Guevara’s “focal theory.” Che Guevara believed that direct confrontation with the enemy was necessary to show the peasants’ ability to defeat the army and to persuade the peasants to join the revolution. Bin Laden, who operated on a global stage, saw 9/11 as an act that exposed the vulnerability of the Great Satan and caused Muslims to join his jihad against Satan. But that did not happen. Instead of being inspired by these events, most Muslims panicked and distanced themselves.
Yet bin Laden’s favor to George W. Bush. Bush and the neoconservatives who came to power in Washington in 2001 became. In their view, Osama’s attack was a God-given opportunity to show America’s enemies and friends that their empire is versatile. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq with the apparent justification of “eradicating terrorism” was what the Romans called “exemplary wars,” and their purpose was to tailor the global strategic space to the so-called “unipolar” state of the United States following its collapse.
Ignoring the lessons of Vietnam and the actions of Britain and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Bush administration led the United States to two unlikely wars in the Middle East, and bin Laden happily watched the process in Pakistan in a quiet barracks in the city of Abitabad.
Prolonged occupation required the presence of troops on the scene. At the height of the Iraq war, defense analyst James Fallows wrote: “It is not an exaggeration to say that the entire US military is either in Iraq today, or returning from Iraq or preparing to leave.” Most of the US military’s battalions with high military capabilities were overseas, and only a few remained as reserve or required personnel at training bases. Even the famous Special Forces were injured. Lack of human resources led the General Command to call in the Reserve Forces and the National Guard. As expected, public mood was shattered.
As the prospect of victory on the battlefield faded, public support for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan diminished.
Obama and the Development of the Second Bush Wars
Barack Obama took office in 2009 with the promise of ending the wars in the Middle East. In Iraq, most US troops returned home during Obama’s first term, but he was forced to redeploy thousands of navies and Special Forces to fight ISIS, which emerged as a result of the US presence in the Middle East. Thus, the pro-US non-sectarian stable government in Iraq collapsed and the Shiite government, which was an ally of Iran, came to power; A country that the United States was colluding with Israel to sabotage its nuclear program.
In Afghanistan, Obama added 33,000 troops to the 68,000-strong force in a futile move, believing he could “paralyze” the Taliban. Obama even waged war on Pakistan, using drones to target Taliban and jihadist leaders from bases near the Afghan-Afghan border. The war claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians, and the military called them “minor damage.”
However, Obama acknowledged the fact that getting caught up in the Middle East has diminished American power by creating domestic and foreign discontent. Conflict in “asymmetric warfare” with unconventional forces such as the Taliban and jihadists could go on forever, and Obama wanted to change the US military’s global strategy from counterinsurgency to conventional warfare. The new “Turn to Asia” program included a major US naval deployment to the Indo-Pacific region to contain China, but found it impossible to leave the Middle East given the benefits of lobbying for the war on terror.
When the Obama wars turned into the Trump wars
One of the factors influencing Donald Trump’s rise to power was the intensity of his anti-war sentiments, and he repeatedly reminded people during the 2015 and 2016 presidential campaigns that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, in 2003, when he was a senator, he voted to invade Iraq. However, Trump in the White House eventually destabilized the Middle East even more. First of all, it was his unwavering support for Israel that led the White House to great action; The relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem angered all Arab countries. He then reversed Obama’s achievement in reducing tensions in the Middle East by pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal; An agreement that monitored Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for easing economic sanctions. Finally, he signed a white check to buy weapons from Saudi Arabia, enabling the happy kingdom to intensify its brutal intervention in the Yemeni civil war.
Like Obama, Trump was passive-aggressive and wanted to show the generals that he could act “masculine” like them. The most famous manifestation of this behavior was when he openly disobeyed international law and, despite the advice and advice of prominent figures and intelligence elites, ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, a prominent Iranian general, in January 2020 on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport.
Will Trump’s wars become Biden’s wars?
Biden’s initial remarks were a reminder of the determination of Obama and Trump at the beginning of their administration to end US engagement in the Middle East. The Obama-era “Turn to Asia” agenda has been revived, and the Biden administration has clearly cited China as a strategic rival to the United States. According to the Department of Defense, China is the Department of Defense’s “Challenge No. 1,” and it will develop concepts, capabilities, and operational plans to strengthen deterrence and maintain America’s competitive advantage.
In fact, the difficulty in ending these commitments became apparent with the fact that Biden’s first military action took place in Syria; US warplanes attacked militant groups in Syria on February 25, just over a month after the new government took office.
Which side is the loser in Afghanistan?
When it is very difficult to end a side show like Syria, it will be much harder to end a big commitment like Afghanistan. As Biden approaches the September 11 deadline for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, military and civilian lobbying for the “war on terror” is pushing for a continued US presence. The Afghanistan Studies Group is overseen by Congress and chaired by retired General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the former chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that an “accelerated withdrawal” could lead to a resurgence of the terrorist threat to the United States in 18 months to three years. Biden must now shout “Who lost in Afghanistan?” Predict opportunistic extremist factions before the mid-2022 elections.