The situation in Afghanistan: the meaning of the American withdrawal

It is always hard to understand events as they happen. Faced with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, analyses have multiplied announcing Washington's final decline, others explaining China's clear advantage, others still comparing the current defeat with the one in Vietnam.

In reality Washington will benefit from this departure, a sign of significant imperial maturing, beyond the damage to its image caused by the dramatic last hours in Kabul. In their adolescent phase empires let themselves be guided by emotion, live on spur-of-the-moment impulses, to the point of harming themselves. At that stage they are imperialistic, inclined to intervene everywhere simply because they have the means, used to barging in at every opportunity.

So much interventionism produces a serious dispersal of energy, taken away from decisive theatres, while enemies profit from the distraction. These are the negative effects of a youthful posture that empires recognise only later, when they understand they must intervene militarily only where strictly necessary, when there is no other way. Every hegemon in history has gone through this passage, from the Romans to the Ottomans to the British.

This now concerns the United States, finally aware that it must conserve its energy, ready to turn from imperialist into imperial. In recent years Washington's apparatus has come to regard war as indispensable only in the strategic sphere, where a failure to fight would mean the end of American supremacy. Only in that circumstance. In order to concentrate more effectively on maintaining the American system, on containing its main enemies, on saving the resources available.

The first event of the new course is the withdrawal from Afghanistan. After twenty years spent in the strategically irrelevant Central Asian country, the United States decided to go home, handing the territory over to the Taliban, today the main representatives of the Pashtun people. Above all, handing the external management of Afghanistan to the powers that gravitate around it, all of them antagonistic to Washington. Especially the Chinese and the Russians, who benefited most from the long American stay in the Hindu Kush. And who are now called on to fill the power vacuum, to prevent the country from seriously damaging their own trajectory.

For Beijing, on the route from Xinjiang to the Pakistani port of Gwadar, one of the main hubs of the New Silk Roads, a Chinese-style counter-globalisation project set against American dominance. For Moscow, on the stability of the whole of Central Asia, potentially marked by Islamist guerrilla warfare and by Turkish penetration. Should Afghanistan collapse or turn once again into the sanctuary of global jihadism, the situation would take a decidedly negative turn for China and Russia, while it would have no effect on the trajectory of the United States, all but immune to what happens in Kabul.

This is the meaning of the American withdrawal, and the reason for the concern gripping the regional powers, beyond the propaganda satisfaction they have been broadcasting in these weeks. A clear refutation of Washington's decline, a depth that is very hard to grasp at the moment, and impossible to interpret without geopolitical tools.

Dario Fabbri

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