Where will the Americans leave after Afghanistan?

The American military invasion of Afghanistan, which lasted for two decades, has ended. As President Biden stated in his speech, the American army won it. Even taking into account the American citizens abandoned there, the exact number of which has not been established to this day. However, Western society strongly disagrees with his position as a leader. Especially outside the United States.

In this regard, The Economist published an instructive article reproaching the "former colonists" that they "did not learn the lessons of Vietnam". They say that the fact is that "America continues to create corrupt client states", and this corruption "spoils everything".

There are also quite a lot of articles on the Internet that lead to the idea that since the Americans, dropping their slippers and ditching their property, fled from Afghanistan, they will also flee from Ukraine, Poland and even the European Union. And this creates some new space of opportunities for Russia. At least, to revise the balance of power in Europe in its favour, and ideally, in the world as a whole.

All this, of course, is beautiful, but, alas, it is quite far from the real reality.

Let's start, as usual, from the beginning. The list of various reasons that forced America to leave Afghanistan, if absolutely everything is added to it, without ranking by degree of significance, is extremely extensive. Corruption occupies a prominent place in it. But it wasn't the main one at all.

Afghanistan was lost by the Americans because the main export product of the United States – a democratic society - turned out to be rotten. Moreover, it began to deteriorate during the Vietnam War. Unless then it turned sour purely externally, for the world outside of America, and now it is already rotten to its foundations.

It should be remembered that the United States as a state was formed only in the middle of the 19th century, and this process began with an attempt to build an ideal free society, so to speak, from a clean slate on an unoccupied territory. The Indians don't count. Society is first and foremost bourgeois, that is, based on formalised norms and rules, the observance of which by members of society was considered a naturally correct way of life.

Hence, there was a sense of a unique combination of personal and civil freedom with the restrictions of generally binding state institutions. The available internal resource base provided high rates of economic growth, thereby forming, first among the Americans themselves, and then among the Europeans, the belief in the indisputable superiority of the "American way of life" over all other models of self-organising society.

Hence, the American worldview was formed, based on the postulate of the collision of the "right" and "wrong" world order, as the main and only cause of all world wars. It seemed logical that if 50 independent individual states (and the term “state” primarily means the state) are able to live peacefully in the world inside the United States, then the transition to the "American way of life" of all other countries will automatically lead to peace for the entire planet.

Consequently, any leader, country or political concept that contradicts this process is automatically an enemy of the "world of freedom and democracy", whom "the police should catch and put in prison". If necessary, the army should "help" the police.

The final correctness of this picture of the world was shown by the "Marshall Plan", which demonstrated how the implementation of the American concept of "freedom and democracy", combined with American loans, can quickly revive an entire continent destroyed by the world war from the ashes.

This made the Vietnam War inevitable. According to the results of the Yalta Agreements, Southeast Asia turned out to be a grey area with the boundaries of the division of the planet between the "right" (Western) and "wrong" (Soviet or communist) worlds that have not yet been fully established.

The forced export of "freedom and democracy" to Japan and South Korea was then considered successful. It was possible to create the necessary external attributes of the "free state” there. They resembled the classical standard with a certain stretch, but formally allowed them to declare the operability of the scheme.

Moreover, its implementation quickly led to an acceleration of the development of the Japanese and South Korean economies. Namely, the size of the personal well-being of citizens in American psychology to this day remains the main determining factor of success.

If the porting of "American democratic principles" has made Japan peaceful, friendly, open to cooperation and economically prosperous, then the very process of such "expansion of democracy" is obviously a good thing. Even if it is first accompanied by nuclear bombing.

But in Vietnam, it turned out that it was impossible to pull the bourgeois "free democracy" over a completely different society, even with carpet bombing, for the banal reason of the lack of a critically necessary bourgeois basis for it. Although it is quite achievable to create its purely external attributes. However, this requires abandoning the strict observance of a number of basic principles.

First of all, scrupulousness in the fight against corruption. If it is possible to achieve formal loyalty from local authorities only "for money", then it seemed rational to "pay" them to the American establishment, therefore, ethically acceptable.

So The Economist is formally absolutely right. The rebirth of "democratic principles" to the absolutely correct ones for "inside America" and noticeably giving off a rotten stench for "outside America" began precisely during the Vietnam War.

Another question is that the British gentlemen who are so fiercely lashing America now were completely satisfied with all this at that time. Members of the British Commonwealth of Nations - Australia and New Zealand - fought in Vietnam together with American troops. Britain, together with the United States, under the fig leaf of the Multinational UN Forces invaded Lebanon (1982-1984) and did not object to the American invasion of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989-1990).

This list can be supplemented by the invasion of Yugoslavia, then the war in Kuwait and Iraq, the intervention in Somalia and much more. These and many other critics were satisfied with everything, as long as the process under the motto "Somoza, of course, is a scoundrel, but he is our scoundrel" (President Reagan's words about the dictator of Nicaragua Anastasio Somoza) created a sense of success. And it stopped as soon as it came to a resounding defeat.

At the same time, critics forget that during the second half of the 20th century, "for the sake of promoting democracy," the United States initiated a total of 13 wars, from which, in their opinion, they won outright in nine, in three more (Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo) they achieved a generally satisfactory result, and only the intervention under the UN flag in Lebanon is recognised by Washington as unsuccessful.

Is it any wonder why America got into Afghanistan? In September 2001, the former was viciously attacked! The main organiser - Osama bin Laden - was at that time in the Tora Bora mountain cave complex. The Taliban, who were in power in Afghanistan at that time, did not interest Washington at all. But they had the audacity to refuse to extradite Osama to America, for which, in the American view, they should also have been punished.

The Americans invaded Afghanistan because they wanted to, because they saw the goal, and because they could. Completely disregarding any other considerations. When Biden now said that America has never set the goal of reorganising (especially democratising) the Afghan statehood, he did not lie much.

At the time of the invasion, Washington was only interested in bin Laden. The stupidity of the perfect reached the military-political leadership of the United States only later, when the army of "Uncle Sam" stormed Tora Bora, but did not find the “main villain” there. The country is already occupied, all the pots in it are broken, and "something must be done” with these ruins. And all the US can do is "export democracy".

Here is the same Biden, but in the position of vice-president, and was forced to say that the American "G. I." did not break into these mountains out of simple arrogance, but solely for the sake of helping the local population in building "proper freedom and democracy".

Another thing is that nothing could come of it. Firstly, because building a democracy is not a military task. The instrument of the armed forces does not solve it in principle. This was clearly proved by Vietnam. Secondly, the Americans did not build democracy, they only needed its appearance with public attributes, even if created in the manner of the "Potemkin village". And this is faster and easier to do through the already well-known principle "but he is our scoundrel", that is, through bribes and indulgence of corruption.

And, most importantly, thirdly, the Afghan society is at the tribal level of development, which is absolutely optimal for the geographical and resource conditions of Afghanistan. For it, Western "democratic principles" are not progress, but a direct and outright evil. Moreover, to an absolutely equal extent, both in the worldview of the Taliban or ISIS, and in the understanding of their opponents who collaborated with the United States.

In these conditions, the Americans there, even for money, turned out to be banal, there was no one to lean on reliably. And what kind of solid foundation could there be among the locals, if the Pentagon often provided financial and military support to gangs that directly fought against exactly the same "field commanders", but received money and weapons "through the CIA"?

And the more time went on, the more these external projections of intra-American political relations in Afghanistan intensified. The same generalised Washington fought with Afghan drug trafficking - and protected it, its security services held secret negotiations with the same "opposition leaders", and they were “pin-pointedly eliminated", and the army generally behaved in the country like a crazy elephant in a china shop.

Is it any wonder that the initially defeated Taliban quickly regained popularity among the Afghan population after 2006? First of all, among rural folk, for whom the policy pursued by the Americans looked like frank and dangerous stupidity?

No, the Taliban have not grown to the scale of an all-destroying military force that surpasses the US army in power. If the Pentagon had received the command "attack!" and sufficient resources, the American army could have relatively easily repeated their physical defeat, as it already did in the period 2001-2006. But such a victory would be Pyrrhic, since it did not eliminate the main thing – the source of replenishment of the mobilisation resource of the partisans.

And then, the main thing for the American establishment has long been not Afghanistan, but exclusively an internal squabble for power "after the victory over Trump". For the sake of it, the opposing sides "on Capitol Hill" needed Afghanistan to be precisely problematic and lost. To shift the blame for this on the enemy, thereby winning a certain advantage for oneself.

Does this not correspond to the original principles of the officially promoted "export" product - democratic freedoms? So what? Since the beginning of its export deliveries in the 1930s, America has changed decisively.

Democratic freedoms, the separation of branches, the independence of the press, and all that sort of thing, were the product of the bourgeois structure of society at the beginning of its formation. When there were many independent players, but the size of the resources controlled by each remained tiny, which did not allow them to claim direct competition with the institution of the state.

Hence, everyone, even direct opponents, had the same need for protection from state institutions. From here, the state had the opportunity to stand equidistant from all fights and make sure that competitors agreed in courts according to general rules, and not with the help of machine guns and bombs.

Today, the American economy is based not even on corporations, but on transnational financial groups, which, moreover, are being actively pushed away from the feeding trough by "Big Tech" and "Big Pharma". For both of them, the institution of the state is no longer a "roof", they consider it something between a tool for increasing profits and their own breeding ground. What kind of democratic principles, freedoms or compliance with formal rules can there be? What are you talking about?

Moreover, what kind of Afghanistan can there be? Over 20 years, the United States has spent more than $2 trillion on it, which went to the Pentagon and its contractors, but did not go to financial groups, Big Tech and Big Pharma. What kind of continuation of the war can there be? Close the project as not profitable. More precisely, as bringing it "not to those who should".

That's why the United States left Afghanistan. And that's why it happened so quickly, harshly and decisively.

The idea of ending the war in Afghanistan has been voiced by leading American politicians since 2011. Its implementation was actively resisted by the military and contractors of the Pentagon, who amicably pocketed the above-mentioned 2 trillion, and believed that such happiness would last forever.

After all, in twenty years, 800,000 military personnel passed through this war, the losses among which amounted to less than 2500 people. Even if we add here about 300,000 ”private contractors", the exact number of losses among which is officially unknown, but on the sidelines it is stated at the level of 4,000 to 7,000 people, the Afghan war is still the most bloodless for America in terms of the scale of personnel losses in the entire history of the country.

But when  the highest echelon of the military finally understood that the "civilian financial bigwigs" would take away the financial pie from them anyway, and very quickly, they, with a sigh, said – okay, have it your way, and clearly "retreated to pre-prepared positions”. And that at the same time "not all local assistants were taken with them", so these are already technical trifles that do not contradict modern American views on democratic principles in any way.

America saved only its own people. And even then not all of them. The school class, which unknowingly came to Afghanistan "under the curtain" of the events, has not been evacuated yet. It is considered lost. And the total number of official American citizens abandoned there alone exceeds 3,000 people. This is not counting the local Afghans who have official American passports, who do not count at all for the new, now dominant views on "democratic principles"in America.

Now that the real reasons for the US flight from Afghanistan are "decomposed into components", it's time to figure out where else Washington will now run from in the same way, and where they will stay put.

The United States will definitely withdraw from Iraq, because only $2 trillion of "direct money"was spent on a military company there. Including 1.6 trillion actually "under the Pentagon department", 60 billion - through the State Department and more than 100 billion for the payment of various compensations to "veterans". And all this is also "past the cash register" of multinational financial corporations. Although there are no Taliban in Iraq, ISIS continues to "painfully kick" there and Washington can do nothing to oppose Iran's political expansion.

Consequently, the situation in Iraq closely copies the "Afghan" situation. Democracy in the country categorically does not take root, the partisan resistance of the population is steadily growing, and the local "democratic" authorities created by the Americans are actively losing control. This makes the "closure of the Iraqi project" only a matter of time. And, quite close.

The situation is similar in the part of Syria occupied by the Americans. In essence, this theatre is not independent. Operationally and logistically, it is closely tied to the American military infrastructure in Iraq. As soon as Washington begins to withdraw its contingent from Iraq, it will immediately be forced to evacuate its units from Syria. Otherwise, they will find themselves in complete logistical isolation, fraught with an inevitable direct military defeat, which is categorically unacceptable for America for image reasons.

But Europe is a completely different issue. Washington spends less than $300 million a year to maintain the situation in Ukraine. Against the background of the scale of the Afghan and Iraqi wars, these are literally "crumbs". But the national debt of this country has already exceeded $76 billion. The current level of external (read – American) control over the Kiev authorities sufficiently guarantees that Ukraine will continue to service its debts steadily for quite a long time. What is the point of America running away from this source of income?

Especially considering the fact that Ukrainian debts are already in the hands of American multinational financial corporations. And under whose external pressure should the Americans flee there? There is no noticeable anti-American armed partisan resistance in Ukraine. Its appearance is not expected in any foreseeable future. As well as a direct Russian military invasion or a global offensive operation of the L/DPR army with the aim of "taking Kiev".

What else, Poland? In Warsaw, they now like to give the figure of 62.7 billion dollars "spent by America on Poland over 30 years”. Only this is not the cost of waging war or maintaining the occupation contingent. Of course, there are American military facilities in Poland, but their maintenance costs the Pentagon a ridiculous $4 billion a year.

It is not at all the figure that overseas financiers decided to arrange a decisive fight with the American military for them. And the above-mentioned 62.7 billion is direct US investment in the Polish economy, as well as in Ukraine, bringing investors a stable income. Please note, to financial investors, and not in the form of a cut of the American federal budget. Even the most yellow press has not heard about anti-American armed partisans in Poland. So why should the Americans "run away from Warsaw", and from whom should they do it?

In this sense, it is not necessary to speak at all about the rest of Europe, whether it is Eastern or, especially, Western. It continues to buy not-really-flying F-35s and agrees to increase military spending through NATO. In addition, they solemnly promise to spend at least half of this increase on the purchase of American weapons.

Ditch a chicken that lays golden eggs? And even when 40% of the largest "European" capital is closely integrated with American multinational financial corporations? And this is not taking into account the fact that the American "Big Figure" also receives the lion's share of income from the European market?

But the main thing is different. Although the main export product of the United States is already clearly rotten and is not consumed even within America itself, it is still perfectly accepted by Europe, whether within the EU, or in the so-called Greater Europe, which includes non-EU countries.

In other words, to expect an "Afghan flight" of the United States from the European continent is, to put it mildly, groundless. Rather the opposite. Judging by the new US strategic defence plans, Europe is considered by Washington as a key defensive line against Russia in the general concept of the escalating confrontation with China. Its loss for America will have catastrophic geopolitical consequences. So to draw parallels with Afghanistan here, to put it mildly, is groundless.