Mick Hartley

Never has the emptiness of those slogans about the evils of US imperialism and neo-colonialism rung more hollow than now, as America does what the hard left and the Stop The War crowd have always campaigned for, and pulled out – leaving Afghan citizens, and especially the women, at the mercy of the Taliban.

Alice Thomson in the Times – Women will again be the biggest victims:

Twenty years ago, I spent three months circling Afghanistan, interviewing women brutalised by the Taliban. Zarah, a doctor, was so hungry she was chewing her hair in Herat when the Taliban stopped her in the street. They accused her of sucking a sweet in public and dragged her away to be lashed. While still semi-conscious, they raped her. She fled to Iran with her four children.

Masuma escaped to Peshawar after she watched the Taliban pull out her four-year-old daughter’s “provocative” long eyelashes before they threw boiling water over her face. Haziza, stuck on an island in the middle of the Pyandzh river in Tajikistan, explained how three of her five daughters had been abducted….

I kept in touch with several Afghan families who eventually returned home. Their daughters went to school, they could learn maths and science, 60 per cent of students at Herat university — as of this week — are female. Women became MPs, journalists, lawyers and aid workers. In the cities, they went to sporting events, yoga classes, learnt to skateboard and hung out in shopping malls; in the villages they slowly began to cast off their burqas. Women’s life expectancy went from 56 to 66 as maternity services improved.

Two decades of educational, social and political rights are now being ripped to pieces. Posters of women are erased from beauty salons, teenagers are again hidden in cellars and three and a half million educated girls return to the dark ages. The majority of Afghans, born after 2001, have never seen the Taliban in power. The little girl in a pink T-shirt pictured being hauled over the wall into Kabul airport, presumably by her father, will have little real idea why he is so desperate to flee with her.

Daniel Finkelstein cites Yanis Varoufakis, the leftist former Greek finance minister and his fatuous tweet celebrating the day “liberal-neocon imperialism was defeated once and for all”, and telling the women of Afghanistan to "hang in there sisters". It sums up perfectly the obscenity of that Stop The War position – which now seems to be the position of the Biden administration, and more broadly of the west in general. 

“Hang in there sisters” is not merely the policy of the far left, of Varoufakis and Jeremy Corbyn. It is the policy of everyone who thinks that intervening militarily in Afghanistan and other places takes too long and is too much bother. “Hang in there, sisters” is the policy of Joe Biden, of mainstream Labour opponents of foreign “adventures, of Tory sceptics. “Hang in there sisters” is the policy of those going on about “Tony Bliar” and pledging “no more illegal wars”.

Biden’s actions are the result of 20 years of political rhetoric in the United States. Barack Obama’s slogan was “yes we can” but his argument was “no we can’t”. Donald Trump’s slogan was America First and his argument was that US foreign commitments were an encumbrance. Under both presidents and now, calamitously the current one, America has been in retreat from its role as a world leader.

This has happened largely without complaint from the rest of the world. Much of Western public opinion welcomed reassurance that America did not see itself as the world’s policeman. No one much seemed to be worried about what would happen if we dialled 999 and America didn’t pick up the phone.

There is a reason why we have police forces. Without them comes the rule of the violent, the triumph of the thief. Without them there is no law worth having and no freedom that endures. Yet the relief that US power seemed to be receding didn’t appear to create an understanding that a western alternative would need to be created. Instead, the alternative to American power has been Assad power, Putin power, Xi power and now Taliban power. The end of Pax Americana is proving to be the end of Pax.

Be very careful what you wish for, in other words.

After all those years when people argued that the imperialist Americans should “get out” of wherever it was they are, we see what happens when they do. People running alongside their aircraft, begging to come aboard, clinging to the underside as it lifts off.

Biden has argued that America can’t be in Afghanistan simply to protect women’s rights, because there are any number of places where it could be doing that. The justification for a sustained presence can only be the contribution it makes to American safety. It seems extraordinary that he did not perceive the small US contingent there as making his country more secure. But even if he did not, there is another argument against his position. Just because it isn’t possible for the West to protect human rights everywhere, doesn’t mean it cannot or should not act to protect it anywhere.

The US is a country in which there are heated debates about micro aggressions that somebody may have detected in a book, but shrugs both its left and right shoulders over abandoning millions of women to the most brutal kind of oppression….

I understand the challenge posed to liberal-neocons. I think the argument that intervention is hard, has unpredictable consequences, and may require decades of commitment without an obvious exit strategy is obviously correct. Twenty years of experience have underlined that.

Yet I do not regard “hang in there, sisters” as an acceptable alternative. We have seen all the problems, even the disasters, of intervention played out on our screens and people like me have to acknowledge what happened and own it. But now we are seeing the consequences of withdrawal and of rejecting “forever wars”, and advocates of that position have to acknowledge what is happening and own that too.

I don’t think the choice is easy. But I suppose it is my background that leads me to prefer the sins of commission to those of omission. I think the West may have underestimated the effort and sacrifice and years of engagement its interventions require, but this effort and sacrifice and duration is nonetheless worthwhile. The US entered the second world war in 1941 and it still has troops in Germany.

For Britain we have to match the level of our resources and our commitment to our concern. If we agree the world needs police officers, and recognise the US will no longer police by itself, the consequences are clear. For we cannot offer our sisters false solidarity.

Remember the Euston Manifesto, all those years ago? – the brainchild of Norman Geras and others. It was in part a blast against those on the left who, like Yanis Varoufakis, have nothing better to offer than endless diatribes against the US and, in contrast, little or nothing to say by way of criticism of the enemies of the West. It seems more relevant now than ever. Norm would, I think, have found much to agree with in Finkelstein's article.