By standing up to all those who wanted to prolong the US military presence in Afghanistan, Joe Biden united a broad front against him, ranging from traditional warmongers eager to assert US supremacy to ‘liberal interventionists’ who claim to care about the plight of Afghan women. Yet Biden’s political record offers ample proof that he’s no dove. All he has done in Afghanistan is end a deployment that had neither halted Taliban advances nor prevented the development of a regional branch of Islamic State (Islamic State-Khorasan Province, IS-KP), which is a far bigger threat to the US than the Taliban.
The collapse of the Afghan government and the tragic chaos that accompanied the final phase of the withdrawal of US and allied troops from Kabul was, however, a fitting end to the 20-year cycle of the ‘war on terror’ that the George W Bush administration initiated after 9/11. As far as projecting US power goes, this cycle resulted in a heavy defeat, the second of its kind since 1945, the Vietnam war being the first.
The war on terror’s failure in Iraq was actually more serious than in Afghanistan, even if the US withdrawal from Baghdad was more orderly. That is because the strategic stakes in Iraq were greater than those in Afghanistan, as the Gulf region has been a US priority since 1945.
In 1998 the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an influential neoconservative thinktank, urged President Clinton to invade Iraq. The PNAC had both Democrat and Republican members, and their open letter to Clinton was signed by some who would later hold key posts in George W Bush’s administration.
Two of them, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, even called for an invasion of Iraq immediately after 9/11. But the military insisted the first response should be in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaida was based. Initial US troop levels in the two countries nevertheless revealed their relative priority: under 10,000 in Afghanistan in 2002 (and under 25,000 until 2007) compared with over 140,000 in Iraq by 2003 (1). Nevertheless, US troops had to leave Iraq in 2011 under a humiliating Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration reluctantly concluded in 2008 with the Iraqi government led by Iran’s ally, Nouri al-Maliki.
Rout of the Iraqi army by ISIS
In leaving Iraq, the US had withdrawn from a state that had become subservient to a neighbour far more dangerous to its interests than the Taliban. Its withdrawal did not lead to the immediate collapse of the Pentagon-fostered Iraqi army, but only because it faced no threats in 2011. But when ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) invaded Iraq from Syria three years later, the Iraqi army suffered a rout comparable to the Afghan military’s debacle this August.
The Bush administration hoped the ‘war on terror’ would be the ideal ideological pretext for resuming US imperial expeditions, and the US population, traumatised by 9/11, largely supported them. Ten years earlier, Bush’s father, George HW Bush, thought a swift and successful campaign against Iraq (the first US-led Gulf war) had put an end to ‘Vietnam syndrome’, Americans’ opposition to imperial wars following that defeat.
But, second time around, this illusion crumbled. The intractable situation in Iraq reawakened Vietnam syndrome. Washington’s ‘credibility’ — in other words its dissuasive capacity — was greatly reduced, which encouraged Iran and Russia in the Middle East. George W Bush’s team failed because it hadn’t followed the military doctrine developed under Ronald Reagan (1981-89) and Bush Snr (1989-93), drawing on the lessons of Vietnam and recent technological advances.
The new doctrine — whose proponents included Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, respectively Bush Snr’s defence secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — aimed to avoid getting bogged down in a protracted war involving tens of thousands of US soldiers and a high casualty rate. Conscription had been abolished in 1973 and the Pentagon had no wish to send potentially rebellious students into combat, as it had in Vietnam.
Henceforth, military interventions would have to rely mainly on remote warfare: new technology now made it possible to devise ‘smart’ weapons. Time-limited, geographically focused ground deployments would minimise US troops’ direct involvement in combat missions. However, if a major offensive were required, the US would intervene from a position of overwhelming superiority to avoid an escalating troop commitment over several years.
‘Liberating’ Kuwait
The military operation against Iraq in 1991 to ‘liberate’ Kuwait followed this doctrine. Washington took time to assemble a huge force in the theatre of operations (including 540,000 troops and nearly 2,000 aircraft), as Bush Snr wanted to avoid any risks in this first largescale US war since Vietnam. Iraq was subjected to an extensive preliminary aerial bombing campaign before ground troops went in. The fighting lasted just six weeks, with limited US military casualties (148 dead), and achieved its objectives: Iraqi troops were driven from Kuwait, and Iraq brought under US control.
Of the two conflicts George W Bush initiated in his turn, in the name of the ‘war on terror’, the first, in Afghanistan, initially conformed to the post-Vietnam doctrine: intensive use of remote warfare, limited deployment of US forces, and ground combat fought mainly by local forces, in this case under the warlords of the Northern Alliance.
In contrast, the invasion of Iraq factored in a lengthy occupation from the start, a clear violation of the lessons of Vietnam. This was justified by the unfounded idea that the Iraqi people would welcome the US army as liberators, which explains the discrepancy between the numbers deployed there (130,000 American troops) and the scale of their task. We know what happened: state-building in Iraq under US occupation played into the hands of Iran. And meanwhile, the US had gradually embarked on a parallel and equally senseless state-building exercise in Afghanistan. Once again it became bogged down, ensuring this would be the longest war in US history.
President Obama signalled his commitment to the post-Vietnam military doctrine, as did President Trump. Obama had opposed invading Iraq; he oversaw the US withdrawal from the country negotiated by his predecessor and was reluctant to engage in new military adventures. The US intervention in Libya in 2011 was confined to long-range strikes and was time-limited. And Obama refrained from direct intervention in Syria until ISIS invaded northern Iraq.
Obama’s war on ISIS was long-distance, with limited deployment of ground troops to supervise local fighters — regrouped government forces, fighters from the autonomous Kurdish region and pro-Iran Shia militias in Iraq, and leftwing Kurdish fighters in Syria. The success of the campaign against ISIS at relatively low cost to the US contrasted starkly with George W Bush’s very expensive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But Obama made much greater use of drones than his predecessor, inflicting a considerable death toll (2).
Trump followed the same course, despite his obsession with undoing his predecessor’s work. After trying to improve the terms of a deal with the Taliban, he pledged to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021. He continued to make extensive use of drones and ensured their deployment was even more shielded from public scrutiny than before (3). He also sought to distinguish himself from Obama in his use of much greater firepower. Less than three months into his presidency, he ordered missile strikes against Syrian military sites on 7 April 2017 and dropped ‘the mother of all bombs’ (GBU-43/B MOAB, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, which had never before been used) on an IS-KP target in Afghanistan on 13 April.
From Obama to Trump
Biden has not strayed from his predecessors’ course. During his election campaign, he stated his support for the military doctrine inspired by the ‘lessons of Vietnam’ and implemented against ISIS in Iraq and Syria: ‘There is a big difference,’ he wrote in 2020, ‘between large-scale, open-ended deployments of tens of thousands of American combat troops, which must end, and using a few hundred Special Forces soldiers and intelligence assets to support local partners against a common enemy. Those smaller-scale missions are sustainable militarily, economically, and politically, and they advance the national interest’ (4).
So Biden ensured that the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was completed, giving himself just four months of extra time and failing to avoid the debacle the whole world saw. By ordering a missile strike in Syria against targets linked to Iran only one month into his presidency, he showed that he, like Trump, would not shy away from using the full range of remote strike capability. He also made a very public use of drones against a target in Afghanistan on 29 August, which was believed to be a vehicle packed with explosives ready for a suicide attack on Kabul airport like the one that killed more than 180 people, including 13 US military personnel, on 26 August.
After a damning investigation by the New York Times, the Pentagon admitted on 17 September that it had in fact mistakenly killed ten civilians, including seven children (5). No military official has resigned (6): the frequent killing of civilians is ‘collateral damage’, inherent in the use of drones and all forms of remote warfare. According to a British observatory, the US carried out more than 14,000 drone strikes between 2010 and 2020, killing between 9,000 and 17,000 people, including 910 to 2,200 civilians (7).
At the same time, the US is increasing its military budget in order to maintain its global supremacy, deter rival great powers such as China and Russia, and threaten any minor power that might seriously undermine its interests with a fate like Iraq’s in 1991. All of which delights the military-industrial complex. Despite having withdrawn from Afghanistan, the new Biden administration submitted a $715bn military budget for fiscal 2022 to Congress. On 23 September, the House of Representatives decided by 316 to 113 to raise it by $25bn, bringing this new budget close to 2011’s record level of nominal (non-inflation-adjusted) spending (8). And that was when the US was still in Iraq.
Translated by George Miller
Courtesy LeMonde Diplomatique
(1) See Gilbert Achcar, ‘The US Lost in Afghanistan. But US Imperialism Isn’t Going Anywhere’, Jacobin, New York, 4 September 2021.
(2) See Emran Feroz, ‘Obama’s Brutal Drone Legacy Will Haunt the Biden Administration’, Foreign Policy, Washington DC, 17 December 2020.
(3) See Hina Shamsi, ‘Trump’s Secret Rules for Drone Strikes and Presidents’ Unchecked License to Kill’, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 5 May 2021.
(4) Joseph R Biden, Jr, ‘Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing US foreign policy after Trump’, Foreign Affairs, Washington DC, March-April 2020.
(5) See Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, ‘Pentagon acknowledges Aug 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians’, The New York Times, 17 September 2021.
(6) Peter Maas, ‘America’s Generals Are Cowards. Fire Them All’, The Intercept, 23 September 2021.
(7) ‘Drone Warfare’, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, London.
(8) See Joe Gould and Leo Shane III, ‘Plans for bigger defense budget get boost after House authorization bill vote’, Military Times, Vienna (Virginia), 24 September 2021.
Gilbert Achcar
Gilbert Achcar is a Lebanese academic, writer and socialist. He is a Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. His latest publications include The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (University of California Press, 2013) and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2016).
