The Cold War Only Ends with NATO’s Defeat in the Hindu Kush

Afghanistan is a geopolitical game changer for the West

6 May 2021 (Wall Street International)*

I have always loved Afghanistan and the friendliness and hospitality of its people. I experienced Afghans not as extremists but as an extraordinarily proud, sincere and honest people who are scraping a living out of the harsh conditions of their country…

… I miss the mountains with their snow caps, the narrow green valleys with their clever irrigation systems and the cool mornings filled with the air of burning woodfires to prepare the first tea. What has become of Afghanistan and what have we done to its people? We may have come with good intentions, but we ended up having raped Afghanistan. We are now leaving its torn and mistreated body on the roadside, will slip a few hundred dollars into its pocket to calm any feeling of guilt, and will go home as if nothing has happened.

At a press conference on 14 April 2021, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg declared with an air of achievement: “We are united in leaving Afghanistan!” – what a strange way to announce a defeat. Only three years earlier, Stoltenberg had called NATO the most successful military alliance of all times.

Now, it stands humiliated, beaten by a small, ill-armed, underfunded local group called the Taliban – all bearded men with ideas that are completely contrary to those NATO claimed it had fought for. This is an almost unbelievable turn of events.

Even if Western politicians, think tanks and the mainstream media may play it down, NATO’s defeat is not a small affair. To fight in Afghanistan, we assembled under NATO command the largest military coalition of countries since WWII.

At times, this coalition included 54 countries. Even if some made only token contributions, these countries combined control well over 60% of world-wide military budgets and have some of the technically most advanced and powerful armed forces.

Almost the entire Western world had descended on Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world … and it lost. This must have consequences that go far beyond Afghanistan.

This defeat should mark the end of an era in which the West believed that it was its divine mission to rule the world as a force of good and that this gave it the right to impose, if necessary with military force, our political system on other countries.

This defeat should compel us to fundamentally rethink how we see our role in the world, how we relate to countries with different political systems, and how we can protect our principles of liberal democracy in a changing world we no longer dominate. The greatest mistake would now be to ignore the lessons we should draw from the Afghanistan debacle.

Indeed, the US/NATO pull-out from Afghanistan after 20 years of war is a signal of military defeat. None of its aims were achieved. Quite to the contrary, NATO will leave Afghanistan in chaos and on the verge of a new round of anarchy and violence. For the Afghans we had promised paradise, the sufferings will continue, if not intensify.