Nicolás Pascual de la Parte
Ambassador at large on Cybersecurity and Hybrid Threats
The hasty and chaotic withdrawal of the US and NATO from Afghanistan supports the myth that this Central Asian country is the tomb of empires. It is well known that neither Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British nor the Soviets were able to overcome the fierce resistance of the warlike tribes of the Hindukush mountain massif. What is perhaps not so well known is that it took the Muslims themselves two centuries to impose the religion of Allah in such a rugged territory. The disbandment of the West, broadcast live this August, would thus be the latest infamous chapter in this story of failure. It seems premature and risky to try to anticipate the geopolitical consequences, all of them serious, of the exit from Afghanistan, but perhaps we could anticipate the most obvious ones.
The first is the evident loss of prestige and credibility of the US as the superpower guarantor of the liberal international order and the security of its allies. I do not share the catastrophic judgments about the irreversible decline of the American hegemon, so often prophesied since the Vietnam War, since the US continues to have more military deterrent power than the sum of its two rivals, China and Russia. I believe, on the other hand, that we are facing a change in the US geostrategic paradigm, which definitively closes the cycle of military land deployments in Asia (and the rest of the world) to export democracy and fight jihadist terrorism, initiated 20 years ago with the launching of the “war on terror”. Washington will focus, as both Trump and Biden made explicit, on confronting the systemic rivalry that an emerging China opposes to its global hegemony, through the articulation of an alliance of liberal democracies around a G-10.
The second obvious consequence will be the growing questioning of the relevance and effectiveness of the Atlantic Alliance, which has been badly damaged by its first major out-of-area operation. NATO went to Afghanistan as a gesture of solidarity with the United States attacked on its territory on 9/11/2001, after invoking for the first time the collective security clause of Article 5 of Washington’s founding Treaty. A military action to combat terrorism (“Operation Enduring Freedom”) evolved into one of assistance, advice and training of the Afghan security forces (“Mission Resolute Support”). However, the Alliance never played a leading role in political coordination or military planning in the Afghan conflict, but merely ancillary to the changing US strategies and tactics. Against this disappointing backdrop, the elaboration of its new Strategic Concept, scheduled for approval at next year’s Alliance Summit in Madrid, is expected to be particularly complicated. It is therefore urgent that the allies, led by the US, recognize the Alliance as a genuine forum for debate and political coordination and joint military planning, and provide it with the decision-making processes and operational capabilities essential to successfully face the new challenges and threats to the collective security of the West, based on disruptive technologies, cyber-attacks, hybrid threats and massive disinformation. Quite a Copernican change.
A third consequence will be the need to give a more ambitious goal and a faster pace to the development of a Europe of defense, to the construction of a powerful European pillar within NATO, allowing European strategic autonomy to act and project force beyond its borders to defend its own interests when its transatlantic allies decide not to do so. The imminent launch of the European “Strategic Compass”, which aspires to be a shared military doctrine that defines threats and addresses them jointly, should be a significant step forward in Europe’s quest for geostrategic protagonism in the new world order. Positioning Europe as a global player will require decisiveness, commitment, investment and solidarity.
Otherwise, no one will benefit immediately from the disaster in Afghanistan. The establishment of a radical Islamic regime, in which the Taliban will have to fight for power among their different families and on a par with even more extremist terrorist franchises such as ISIS-K and Al-Qaeda, will not bring stability to neighboring countries: Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia or China. The latter two frankly worried about a possible radical contagion to their own Muslim minorities.
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