The Afghanistan Papers, a new book published in August, sets out what is probably now the consensus about the US’ 20-year intervention which ended yesterday.
“…the US government’s strategies were a mess, … the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and … drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government,” the Amazon.com synopsis says. “All told, the (book) is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground.”
Even the intervention’s staunchest apologists are avoiding any attempt at defending it. Their default position is to lament the way President Biden implemented America’s troop withdrawal and charge him with betraying those that were deployed in Afghanistan, particularly Afghans on the payroll of the US-led coalition.
People involved at the highest level of the failed Afghanistan intervention are shifting attention from their role in it by arguing the withdrawal is a defeat for the West that can only embolden its enemies.
A uniquely British storm broke over the reluctance of the UK’s Ministry of Defence to evacuate 200 cats and dogs from a pet sanctuary in Kabul run by a former British marine. The good news for animal lovers is that they all got out just in time. That is more than can be said about some UK passport holders and hundreds of others who helped Britain in Afghanistan.
...Events can be unimagined
The punditry will probably in due course disappear into the black hole of public memory. And yet, something important has occurred.
Those of a gloomy disposition will sermonise about yet another example of governments in Western democracies failing to tell voters the truth. The Afghanistan Papers looks like becoming their essential reference.
Others suggest the Afghan debacle marks the end of 30 years of hope since the collapse of Soviet Communism in December 1991 that liberal democracy and free markets would rule the earth. They too have a point.
But there’s a larger issue that the Afghanistan scuttle may foreshadow: the collapse of liberalism as an appealing solution to humanity’s political and social dilemmas.
This may appear fantastic but history’s littered with unimagined events.
Liberalism emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries as a result, initially, of the codification of rights in property. Landowners secured the legal right to challenge the arbitrary power of the sovereign, usually a king or prince, to tax and confiscate their estates and farms. This in turn inspired the idea that rights could extend beyond property to intangible concepts including freedom of speech, thought and association. We call them human rights.
Constitutional revolutions transformed the politics of most of Europe, the Americas and even parts of the Middle East by the end of the 19th century. By 1939, practically every independent state had a written constitution which defined the rights of those recognised as full citizens. They often weren’t democracies and rights were often infringed, but these states were all products of an era in which liberalism made the intellectual running almost everywhere.
Property owners were the agents of the liberal revolution. Contradictions were evident from the start. Almost half America’s founding fathers were slave-owners. British factory-owners voted for the reforming Liberal Party but resisted demands for higher pay from their employees and action to eliminate the poverty that surrounded them. But these anomalies in the liberal mindset were eventually erased.
The connection between the inviolability of physical property rights — particularly in land — and human rights generally has been the defining preoccupation of liberal thinkers since the European enlightenment. It remains at the heart of modern libertarianism and the inspiration for those resisting state power.
Expanding property ownership has also long been seen as vital both for optimal economic development and a healthy democracy where voters have a material stake in good government.
So why, despite the unshackling of markets, is there a crisis of confidence in the liberal project which seemed irresistible a generation ago?
There are multiple explanations including poor governance in democracies and irresponsible business behaviour, particularly in finance. Economists argue that herd mentality has overwhelmed the rational individual. Voters beset by ignorance and prejudice are accused of having done the wrong thing again and again.
…Why should Americans risk death and mutilation for a system in which they have no material stake?
Rarely mentioned, however, is the impact of the increasing dominance of intangible service creation and investment in the world economy. This seems like an abstraction, but it has played a role and perhaps is the dominant one.
The overwhelming majority working in the private sector in Europe, North America and Japan no longer produce things like food, cars or clothes. They create intangibles, the very existence of which can only be established by law, unlike tangibles which can at least be physically quantified.
Trade in services consequently requires much more legal validation, as anyone buying insurance or management consultancy will confirm. Dissatisfaction among buyers of services can’t be empirically substantiated. It has to be legally-affirmed, often involving resort to the courts.
The complexity of service economies becomes almost overwhelming when dealing with rights in intangible capital. Intellectual property law is a quagmire which works in favour of those with money.
But it’s most perverse consequence is the emergence in less than a century of a mechanism that allows claims to be made on the contents of people’s brains.
If you work for a UK service firm, your employer has in principle the right to any commercial use of what you’ve learned in his or her service. Even after you’ve moved on, a company can claim your ideas, when translated into a competitive service offering, constitutes theft.
As libertarians have argued for decades, property rights in ideas are not only unfair; they fly in the face of the liberal axiom that a free person must enjoy full ownership of his or her body, including the contents of their brains. For them, the right to property depends upon the indisputable legitimacy of peaceful purchase, original discovery or creation. Intangible property rights in contrast depend almost totally on successful legal action which can over-ride all three.
The perverse consequence of the collapse of communist collectivism 30 years ago is not only increasing wealth inequality in most advanced economies, something which libertarians and orthodox economists see as inescapable in a free society. It’s also led to personal freedom being constrained in new and increasingly pervasive ways.
Laws that turn ideas into ownable things allow the state and corporations to exercise control over thoughts and how they’re expressed in ways that were previously inconceivable.
In societies with markets dominated by intangible capital, there is a growing feeling of loss of control at work and in the community. What appears to be the engine of the economy is invisible and often only comprehensible to those with a sophisticated understanding of intellectual property law. The American ideal of the proudly independent homesteader and the risk-taking entrepreneur is dying. The new masters of the free market universe are expensively-educated IT geeks who can afford private space travel backed by costly lawyers and private equity firms incorporated in tax havens. It’s a community that few can gain admission to no matter how hard they work. Covid has widened the divide between a privileged elite and the impecunious majority forced to make a living by doing something that actually has value.
What’s surprising is there are still so many prepared to risk death, mutilation and their mental health so far from home for a system in which they have so little stake.
Laws strengthening ownership rights over ideas have also created a channel for state-owned corporations based in countries deemed to reject Western values to acquire influence through strategic investment, including in the media. The response is increasingly taking the form of proscriptions and social media suppression. The Twittersphere can feel like a scene out of George Orwell’s novel 1984.
This is the global context that helps explain how a peasant movement enforcing an ideology that rejects everything Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stood for has claimed victory over the might of a nation conceived in liberty. It is perhaps no coincidence that one of the things classical liberals and the Taliban agree about is that ownership of ideas is invalid. For most Muslim thinkers, it’s actually blasphemous.
The West’s rivals sense the Afghanistan withdrawal is a sign of weakness and are ready to exploit it. But the largely overlooked truth is that the places that fear the decline of the liberal order most are also where it’s being mainly facilitated.