The sweeping Taliban advance, the helplessness of the Western-backed Afghan government, the panicked evacuations of Western embassy staff from Kabul, the Taliban’s total conquest of Afghanistan brought the 20-year-old US and NATO war to an end with defeat of USA and West.
In 2001, following the terrorist attack on the WTO Twin Towers in New York on 9.11.2001, the United States and the United Kingdom intervened in Afghanistan to overthrow al Qaeda and the Taliban, declaring the start of the 20-year war.
by Thanos S. Chonthrogiannis
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The cost of war
Hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed in US and allied bombing raids. Hundreds of NATO soldiers lost their lives. Millions of Afghans became refugees to escape religious totalitarianism, war, and poverty. The cost to the US was $ 1trillion.
Tens of thousands of civilians have fled and continue to flee their homes, and hundreds have been killed or injured in the past month because of the Taliban advance. Within a week, the Taliban had taken control of 85% of the country.
The violence perpetrated by the Taliban in their passage is strong and causes terror to the residents. Unmarried girls and widows are forcibly abducted from their families. Revenge-style killings of dissidents continue, and human rights abuses are rampant.
The head of the Republican caucus in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, has launched a series of outrages against President Joe Biden’s policy in Afghanistan, accusing him, among other things, that the consequences of his policy will be even worse than the humiliating fall of Saigon in 1975 at the end of Vietnam War.
The Geostrategic Significance of Afghanistan
Afghanistan’s First and Second Vice Presidents Amrullah Saleh and Sarwar Danish respectively were among the first to leave the country for Tajikistan. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021) also fled the country along with other governmental officials, leaving the country and its future at the mercy of the Taliban.
The formation of Afghanistan’s geopolitical and geostrategic relations with the Taliban in power in relation to other countries and especially to those bordering it is what is required soon.
Afghanistan is a mountainous country with an agricultural economy. High poverty combined with the low profits of fruit growing pushes many Afghans into illegal crops e.g., of opium.
Opium exports account for 11% of the country’s GDP, making Afghanistan the largest opium exporter in the world.
But Afghanistan’s subsoil is very rich in untapped mineral deposits worth up to $ 3 trillion. It includes huge reserves of copper, iron, lead, lithium and other rare earths, deposits of coal and oil, precious and semi-precious stones, marble, etc.
The Taliban possibly will not accept foreign troops even from Islamic countries to remain on Afghan soil in any peace context. On the other hand, countries such as Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and China, as well as Russia and Turkey, will support Taliban and will be supported from them as a regime by their countries-neighbors that have land borders to Afghanistan.
The Taliban regime will try to be officially recognized by these countries and exchange embassies with them so that they also have full freedom to exercise power inside the country, regardless of whether the West recognizes them.
On the one hand, opium cultivation will generalize and grow further as the main export product, as the cost of changing crops is too high, and the Afghan economy cannot afford it.
With the withdrawal of the US and NATO from Afghanistan, China will join the Islamic State of the Taliban and Afghanistan through generous financing/lending for infrastructure reconstruction (airports, road and rail networks, public buildings, and hospitals, etc.) in exchange for the extraction and exploitation of the mineral wealth and rare earths that exist in the territory of Afghanistan.
The Islamic regime of the Taliban will adopt the authoritarian Religious-Islamic type political model in combination with the capitalist economic model of China. China, as a representative of an authoritarian political model, has no reason to interfere in Afghanistan’s internal political scene, on the contrary, it will provide to the Taliban regime the necessary technology of monitoring the mass population.
At the same time as Afghanistan is annexed to China’s geopolitical sphere of influence, China is achieving its most uninterrupted energy efficiency through land-based gas pipelines network starting in the Persian Gulf (Iran) and reaching Afghanistan via Southwest Chinese borders.
The regimes of Iran and Taliban equally and China, and since the countries of the former USSR that have land borders with Afghanistan are controlled by Russia, a union of authoritarian political regimes will be created with a capitalist-economic model of economy. Asia is united in a common model of governance and economy.
Pakistan will sooner or later be controlled politically and economically by China and through Afghanistan and Iran, China will be gained valuable access to the Indian Ocean (China already has its naval base in Pakistan’s Gwadar port).
The absence of the West from the belly of Asia through the presence of its troops in Afghanistan enables the countries of continental Asia to unite, acquiring the same political-economic model as that of China and Russia respectively. The US is losing power on the world geopolitical chessboard by losing its military bases in Asia.
The establishment of a base of international terrorism in Afghanistan will now be coloured/determined by China’s relations with the United States. While the US over time will be difficult to return militarily to Afghanistan.
