US The end of intervention

Anniversary of 9/11 and fall of Kabul trigger questions over Washington’s interventionism

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 was always going to be a moment of deep soul searching about what has been lost and learned. But until a few weeks ago, it risked having a historical quality, as the attention of political leaders moved to a more contemporary set of threats – health pandemics, climate emergencies, big tech and greatpower competition, including the rise of China. The “war on terror”, after all, looked if not won, at least drawn. It was even possible Islamist terrorism was a temporary manageable phenomenon, increasingly confined to Africa and some lethal loners in European shopping centres.

Instead, the end to the US’s 20-year stay in Afghanistan – with the anniversary coinciding with the start of a second Taliban emirate – has injected a thousand volts into the retrospective.

If there is one early victim, it appears to be the concept of nation building and, possibly, the doctrine of the responsibility to protect.

Joe Biden, a sceptic of an Afghan war extended beyond narrow counterterrorism goals, said earlier this month: “This decision is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” In language similar to Donald Trump, he argued the US secured its vital national interests in Afghanistan once Osama bin Laden had been sent to “the gates of hell” and his training camps were eliminated.

In short, the US military’s democracy export department was closing for business.

The contrast with the start of this century is stark. Before he entered the White House, George W Bush famously campaigned against nation building, declaring: “I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.” In so doing he was rejecting Bill Clinton’s efforts in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti, not to mention Harry Truman’s efforts in Japan and Germany.

Even after the attack on the Taliban in 2001, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was clear he was not interested in postwar planning: “I don’t think it leaves us with a responsibility to figure out what kind

‘We should have pulled out our troops after Bin Laden was killed. Biden got it right’

of government that country ought to have.” The strategy, in the words of Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was one of “bomb and hope”.

But in his autobiography, Bush said: “After 9/11, I changed my mind. Afghanistan was the ultimate nation state building mission.” The fall of Kabul in 2001, the installation of a UNendorsed administration, the arrival of a UN peacekeeping force, operating under British national control, dragged the US into thinking how to make the country safe from terrorism in the future. By April 2002, Bush was converted. “We know true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government.”

Later in the year the official US national security strategy said the spread of democracy was “a vital national interest”. By 2005 the Pentagon issued Directive 3000.05, making “stability operations” a core military mission. The 2006 Army and Marine Corps Field Manual stated on its first page: “Soldiers and marines are expected to be nation-builders as well as warriors.”

The international community in an era of globalisation had permission, even a duty, to intervene in cases of genocide or war crimes. But with the Afghan withdrawal, the backlash has intensified. Advocates of liberal intervention find the intellectual tide in the US, if less so perhaps in Europe, is running fast away from them.

The old foreign policy establishment is in a state of near siege, attacked by a rare alliance of America First, Obamaera Democrats and progressives. HR McMaster, a security adviser under Trump, angrily described it as the point when “the neo-isolationist right meets the self-loathing left”.

It is argued that if support for an Afghan government can evaporate in a month after 20 years of aid and training, this is surely the moment to drive the final nail in the coffin of the belief the world can be remade in America’s image. The retired admiral Michael Mullen, the top US military officer under Bush and Barack Obama, strongly supported nation building but became the first senior military figure to admit the error, saying: “We should have pulled out our troops a decade ago, soon after Osama bin Laden was killed. Biden got it right.”

Some critics of the foreign policy establishment claim there is almost a warfare state embedded in foreign policy commentators and the thinktank world, including the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute.

Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ chief foreign policy adviser, said: “If we’ve learned nothing else over the past week, we’ve learned how deeply committed our elite media is to the US imperial project.” Stephen Walt, the author of The Hell of Good Intentions – a book about the US foreign policy elite – condemned the “chorus of overwrought pundits, unrepentant hawks and opportunistic adversaries now proclaiming that defeat in Afghanistan has left US credibility in tatters. They are wrong. Ending an unwinnable war says nothing about a great power’s willingness to fight for more vital objectives.”

Many argue for a wider course correction, including Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser to Obama.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, he suggests it is arguable that Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia would have been better off without US intervention, adding that US post-9/11 policies were repurposed by authoritarian states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. By abusing its powers of detention and surveillance, the US often ended up exporting repression.

He says the whole structure of the “war on terror”, including the over-reliance on drone strikes, needs dismantling to allow the US to move decisively past the 9/11 agenda. Liberal military interventions may have been well intentioned, but they have ended in failure. “The number of militants has gone up every year since 9/11. Clearly, what we are doing is also creating terrorists,” Rhodes writes.

Bellwether Democrats such as Chris Murphy, a thoughtful senator on foreign issues, probably catch the current mood. “The question is: should we have stayed there for ever to protect those advances? … There are really awful, despotic regimes all across the world and the US does not make the decision to send troops into every single one.”

This leaves the advocates of intervention arguing on difficult terrain that Biden could have maintained a modest 2,500 further troops in Afghanistan to tilt the battlefield. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations since 2003 and a veteran diplomat, has argued that the alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not “endless occupation” but “open-ended presence”. “Occupation is imposed, presence invited,” he said.

One of the difficulties is that those who defend liberal intervention often end up saying the policy was right but there were mistakes of execution. James Dobbins, a former special envoy to Afghanistan, said the Bush administration faced a choice between “occupying permanently, reinvading periodically, or committing to help build a minimally competent successor regime”, ideally at peace with itself and its neighbours. He said Bush wisely chose the latter course but never dedicated the cash or troops required, becoming distracted by the Iraq war.

Douglas Lute, who spent six years in the White House during two administrations, said the US had its priorities wrong. “We did too much to build the Afghan army in our own image when it had 80% illiteracy, rampant drug abuse, a political culture of

corruption endemic all the way down,” he said. “For years and years we gave them close air support, fired precision weapons, ferried them around in our helicopters, gave them the intelligence from our drones, we would send them to a US airbase to train and they would defect and seek asylum. There was a 30% attrition rate each year.”

It was less that Afghans were not ready for democracy than that it was never possible in an insurgency for democracy to gain a foothold. The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction found that “successes in stabilising Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians”. Nation building requires time, expertise, resources and skills.

Purist opponents of nation building dismiss this as “the incompetence dodge”, arguing that after 20 years in Afghanistan, almost every variation of the policy has been attempted, from surge to light touch, and nothing, judging by the precipitate collapse of the Afghan army, stuck.

Either way, three issues arise. If democracies conclude militarybacked liberal intervention in pursuit of democracy cannot work, will autocracies show the same self-restraint? In his speech describing the call for an end to “forever wars” as imbecilic, Tony Blair pointed out that Vladimir Putin has shown in Syria he is ready for the forever wars. The former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill applied the point to China: “If you are one of our authoritarian adversaries, you will be right now going around the rest of the world to those countries that are in play and saying to them: ‘You see, we told you so, we have the strategic patience and they don’t.’”

Second, if large-scale military intervention has been delegitimised by Afghanistan, what objectives can still be achieved militarily, and what can be achieved in the absence of the US? A retreat to the old toolbox of indirect coercive measures – economic sanctions, political isolation, referral to the international criminal court, diplomatic pressure – has hardly worked in Syria or Belarus.

Finally, if large-scale military intervention is over, how is counterterrorism – a fight in which Biden insists the US remains engaged – to be fought? The former CIA director Mike Hayden argued that piecemeal drone strikes could hit high value al-Qaida leaders, but are worthwhile only if aligned to intelligence on the ground.

In an essay to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary, Suzanne Raine, a former head of the UK Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, warned: “The once unimaginable physical caliphate lasted five years and has supporters around the world, many of whom have fought together. There are still more than 60,000 Daesh fighters in camps in Syria and Iraq … This is definitely not progress.”