(Image: PA)

The United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan doesn’t mark the end of US power in the world, but it does mark the end of the neoconservative era. I don’t see how that can seriously be doubted.

The neocon ideal was that the US was a virtuous power — possibly one divinely ordained — which had a moral duty to gain itself another century of global dominance and spread liberal democracy to be taken up instantly by the people it invaded. 

That is utterly gone, a memory of a delusional period after the end of the cold war and before China was ready to assert itself on the world stage. It failed everywhere it was tried. But rather than admit the flawed nature of the idea, the last stragglers at History Airport are looking for something, anything, to blame.

What have they come up with? America was defeated in Afghanistan because the country and its army had become “too woke”.

The West has lost its spirit to impose order, and its armies have lost their capacity to fight because the latter are giving troops lectures on appropriate use of pronouns, and the West as a whole is so bowed down with guilt over past colonial imperialism that it cannot act in a resolute fashion. It’s a consoling myth that covers the far more complex forces of our recent history, and obscures the paradoxes at the heart of this vast failed mission. 

The plain truth is that Western colonial empires relied for their energy and resolve on essential notions of race, tied to both dominance and progress. “Virtuous race” was already in trouble by World War I. After World War II, reckoning with the Holocaust saw it rejected entirely. The cold war gave reason to back coups and wars, but under the cover of such, mass decolonisation occurred. In shifting to a post-cold war era, we lost the one rationale strong enough to power a war of brutality, conquest and dominance. 

To dominate Afghanistan we would have had to do things such as would make a mockery of the war’s humanitarian claims. It would have taken half a million troops on the ground, which would be unacceptable back home. It would have required “pacification” — mass population removal to control zones — to deny the Taliban a context in which to operate. Or it would have required mass area bombing with extremely high civilian casualties.

In all cases, destroying the country in order to save it. 

Could the US have got away with this in 2001-02, when 9/11 had its blood up? That would have been the only time, and it still wouldn’t have worked unless it was of such terror — a half million or so dead — as to obliterate anything the Taliban were. But it would have had to stop some time. And what next? Children grow, and 15-year-olds take up arms, and it restarts with redoubled ferocity. 

For years occupation toddled along as a blocking operation. But something more was needed, and thus the education of women and girls came to the fore. This had never been part of the initial plan. It came to be branded as nation-building, but it was its opposite. In nation-building, you wipe out antagonistic ideals and forces, establish institutions commensurate with a conquered people’s deeper culture, establish relations and leave them to it.

The whole “women-and-girls” thing was a farce. It was the rationale by which the Rudd/Gillard governments stayed in the war, at the same time that Tony Abbott took it up.

That should have been a clue. It was a war aim reverse-engineered out of the war itself, to give it meaning. It followed the same playbook as the Soviets who, following their 1979 invasion, had tried to make Afghanistan a showcase for fast-track Marxist developmentalism, bringing a village peasant society to modernity in a generation. 

That effort, and our own, is social reconstruction, not nation-building. Its effect is to take one key dimension of social life — gender relations — and distort it so utterly as to throw all social relations into disarray. It is the logic of colonisation of Indigenous peoples and it supercharges resistance.

What is life worth if people are going to not merely rule you, but change who you are? Death in combat acquires deep meaning from that, because in resisting you are saving part of yourself that might otherwise be annihilated. That was the energy of the mujahedin, which the US took to the next level, with money, weapons and advisers. From there, al-Qaeda and the Taliban were seeded.

Haunting, isn’t it, to see now the CNN footage from 25 years ago as the Taliban came into Kabul, hanging chunky TV sets from lampposts? And today, as they give AK-47-on-the-oak-desk press conferences in their Ray-Bans and bandanas, checking their recruitment app on their androids? 

The full disaster is this: by the late 1990s, the Taliban had already modulated, as any revolutionary regime must, to actual governance. They were working cautiously with NGOs — including women’s groups — on healthcare, rural water supply and other such matters. Twenty years of war has re-radicalised, and given them plenty of lethal fervour against collaborators.

We haven’t gone nowhere in this war — we have gone backwards, the Afghans and the world. 

So Afghanistan has proved the graveyard of another empire. It was an imaginary one, but the bodies on the ground are real. The neocons? Their concern is moving from the order of battle to the line-up of the Wiggles as they try to find a way into History Airport with their baggage, trying to get the last flight out.