Growing dilemmas for US in South Asia

As could have been expected the Biden administration is coming under heavy criticism at home and among some sections of the international community for what is seen as a botched withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. On the domestic front, it is the political Right that is proving the Biden administration’s harshest critics.

Some of these criticisms centre around accusations that the Biden administration pulled out the US’s remaining troops in Afghanistan with hardly a care for their safety and of having compromised US national security considerations in South and Southwest Asia in the process. Generally, the withdrawal has come to be seen as considerably precipitous, unplanned and careless.

Besides, Biden is being charged with not having been sufficiently caring for non-military American lives and for those of the US’s Western allies in Afghanistan, in addition to not being protective of those sections among the local Afghan public who cooperated with the US over the years during the “war on terror”. Among the latter are intelligence operatives who worked closely with the US army. The perception is that quite a few of these cooperative sections were left behind in Afghanistan to be at the mercy of the Taliban.

Besides these strictures of a specific nature, the general perception has been steadily gaining ground among sections of US and international opinion that the Afghan people were left to their devices in the face of an inevitable Taliban take-over of the country, which is seen, of course not without reason, as being deeply inimical to the wellbeing of Afghans.

Former US Secretary of State Leon Panetta could be considered as having spoken for the US Right when he said in an interview with a section of the international media that the prime responsibility of a US administration is to protect American lives anywhere. He said that although it is true that it was the Trump administration that initiated talks with the Taliban and finalized a withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, it was up to the Biden administration to ensure that the withdrawal was effected with utmost care and judiciously. It should have been sparing of US and other lives and should have had its focus on upholding the honour and dignity of the US. However, the Biden-supervised withdrawal did none of this and compromised the standing of the US in the world community.

While such charges could be considered as integral to the usual politicking between the principal political parties of the US, there are policy issues in these arguments and counter-arguments that should not be allowed to pass unnoticed by the analyst. One is the question of the US’s standing as a world power and its reputation. Although not elaborated on by Panetta, besides the botched nature of the recent US troop withdrawal, what is also at issue here is a decision by the US to withdraw militarily from a theatre of conflict that is central to the stability of the South and South West Asian regions. Currently, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is taking a considerable amount of the flak as well for the US’s seeming blunder in South West Asia.

Afghanistan was coveted by almost all the principal powers of the modern world over the decades. First it was Britain in imperial times, followed by Russia and the US. As indicated in this column on previous occasions it is the central strategic location of Afghanistan that accounts for this unusual interest in the country on the part of the major powers.

Simply put, Afghanistan is at the geographical cross roads to a number of the world’s foremost states: China, Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and a score of Central Asian states that define the contours of the current international political order. Besides, Afghanistan is resource-rich and would prove a treasure trove for those powers that are intent on being on a growth fast track.

Accordingly, what is the message that the Biden administration would be sending to the US and the world through its troop withdrawal? The administration is indicating that it is beating a hasty retreat from a highly coveted prize in South Asia and that it is tamely allowing the US’s rivals, such as China and Russia, to occupy centre stage in Afghanistan. This amounts to a foreign policy defeat for the US.

No doubt, there are potential political costs for the Biden administration through this decision. But there has occurred a seemingly curious US decision in another region of strategic and economic interest to most major powers, while all this is happening in South Asia. That is the US decision to remove its missile defence systems in Saudi Arabia; its strategic partner in the Middle East and the Gulf.

This move by the US amounts to leaving its ally Saudi Arabia vulnerable to attack by its rivals for power in the region. But the decision by the US was a shrewdly calculated one that took into consideration its economic and security interests. The measure indicates that the Gulf and the Middle East are of waning interest to the US. Like Afghanistan they are arenas of chronic and wasting conflict that would not serve the US’s best interests in the long run.

Instead, the US would prefer to bolster its military and economic presence in the Asia-Pacific region. This is taking the Barrack Obama thinking of having a “Pivot to Asia” to its logical conclusion. The Asia-Pacific, which is home to ASEAN, is pivotal to world economic growth and the US would rather better its economic prospects there rather than engage in unending wars in other parts of the world.

Thus, the US, the so-called mightiest democracy, trying to showcase liberal values, runs the risk of being seen as having betrayed a suffering Southern country in the form of Afghanistan and of leaving it in the hands of an intolerant fundamentalist outfit that has no qualms in resorting to terror. Besides, it could be seen as tamely giving way to China and Russia in Afghanistan.