By John J. Metzler, August 16, 2024The collapse of Afghanistan to the Taliban Islamic fundamentalists three years ago on Aug. 15th, signaled an inflection point on the geopolitical scene.
While the appalling stupidity of the Biden/Harris Administration’s botched and humiliating withdrawal of American forces from this South Asian land stained and sullied the reputation the United States, the fiasco equally opened the floodgates to the deluge of refugees fleeing the toppled Afghan government in Kabul.
The immediate disaster was the terrorist suicide bomb killing of thirteen U.S. Marines and the injury of scores more at Kabul Airport as the frantic evacuation of more than a hundred thousand Afghan civilians unfolded.
As U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said following the harrowing debacle; “China, Russia, Iran look at this botched withdrawal and they see incompetence that they could exploit, which may lead to miscalculation.”
Afghanistan descended back into the darkness as the Taliban’s new Islamic Emirate regime seized power and turned back the clock on a semi-secular society. The blood and treasure of the United States and many NATO allies such as Britain, Canada, France, Germany and many others had been spilled. But in vain? Billions of dollars had been spent trying to stabilize a tribal society and offer it a modicum of hope for social and economic alternatives, especially for women.
Joe Biden’s legacy remains waves of refugees, re-establishment of a rigidly Islamic religious Afghan society, and above all the withering loss of American prestige on the global level.
The images of fleeing Afghans clinging to departing U.S. Air Force aircraft, evoked heartbreaking scenes of Saigon 1975. The shambolic seventeen-day withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021 emboldened America’s enemies around the world.
So how have events in distant Afghanistan changed or altered global security?
Afghanistan — Beyond the calamitous collapse of the Western-backed secular Afghan government (I'm not saying they were virtuous nor competent), there was the political jolt and ensuing refugee surge fleeing the country. Importantly, the massive U.S.-operated Bagram Air Base, a key strategic asset on the nexus of China, Iran and Pakistan was lost. Moreover, billions of dollars of American military supplies and weapons fell into the hands of the Taliban militants; many have since been sold on international arms markets.
Russia — Biden’s Afghan blunder brought a strange Schadenfreude to the Kremlin whose own Afghan invasion in the 1980’s started the whole tragedy, but later triggered the unraveling of the Soviet Union. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin saw a real chance to probe and provoke neighboring Ukraine. While the Russians were already fighting a low-intensity war in Ukraine since 2014 when they seized the strategic Crimean peninsula, Moscow witnessed Washington’s weakness and would soon test and exploit it.
China — Beijing’s Xi Jinping regime tasted blood in the waters of the Taiwan Straits, separating the Chinese Mainland from the democratically self-governing island of Taiwan. Memories of the brutal political crackdown in Hong Kong were still fresh and now Xi was ready to perhaps take the last historic step to “bring Taiwan back to the motherland” as the Chinese communist propaganda long promised. The People’s Republic of China has never renounced the use of force to “reunite” democratic Taiwan with communist China. U.S. indifference or incompetence in Afghanistan presaged a wider malaise in Washington’s strategic thinking, then not six months into the new Biden Administration. Equally it energized Chairman Xi’s willingness to seriously consider a still murky timetable to initiate offensive military operations against Taiwan.
Iran — Although the Islamic Republic of Iran never viewed the Taliban regime as a religious or political ally, Tehran nonetheless exploited the shocking shift in the South Asian power equation. Since the collapse in Kabul, Iran has energized its proxy forces in the Middle East especially among Lebanon’s Hizbullah, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. Equally it reinforced its Revolutionary Guards units militarily supporting Syria’s Assad regime. Now Iran threatens to attack Israel directly! Much of Iran’s unbridled support of military proxies can be traced to the perception that American power is in retreat.
Three years following the debacle in Kabul the human rights situation in Afghanistan has dramatically deteriorated especially for women and girls. More than three million Afghans are internally displaced inside their own country. Since the collapse in 2021, an additional 1.6 million more people have fled the country adding to the overall number of 8 million Afghan refugees globally according to UN humanitarian agencies.
Vladimir Putin has challenged and pushed the parameters of the post-WWII European order on the steppes of Ukraine. Are Chairman Xi or the Iranian Ayatollahs planning the same?
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]
