The Structural “Failure” of American Interventions
As the United States pulled out of Afghanistan last month, ending the country’s longest running war, there were cries across the political spectrum that the affair looked like “another Saigon.” These fears were only amplified by the various human rights disasters that have occurred since the American pullout, which were heavily covered in the media, as well as a picture of a helicopter that starkly matches the last helicopter leaving Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). To many, it seems indicative of a broader issue in American foreign policy – we just don’t intervene like we used to.
However, this logic misses the point. Since WWII, the United States has engaged in hundreds of military interventions, and very few – if any – have been “successful” by any holistic metric. Afghanistan, like Vietnam and Iraq before it, is indicative of a bigger problem. American interventions are rarely popular where they occur, which forces them to spend unreasonable amounts of money hoping to withstand popular resistance (both to the military and the government the US props up). That’s why the intervention in Afghanistan cost (at least) $1 trillion (£740 billion), took twenty years, and ended with zero results: it was doomed from the start.
Starting with Afghanistan, we can see this trend clearly. Despite the vast sums of time and money the US spent building a self-sufficient, stable Afghani government, it collapsed in three weeks in the face of a worse-equipped militia group that the US went into Afghanistan to defeat in the first place. This group – the Taliban – is not even particularly popular. It has a horrible human rights record that will likely continue under its second stint ruling the country and is widely considered a terrorist organisation. Despite this track record, no amount of guns or money would have stopped the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan the moment the US left. The Afghani government propped up by the US was a puppet regime, which means any group with minor popular support and organization could destroy it. The Taliban just happened to be the one with the opportunity to.
Ironically, “just happened to be” is not the whole story, because it was the US in the first place which funded and armed the Taliban in the 1980s. In fighting one of the last Cold War battles, America thought it a smart idea to back a radical religious organisation against the Soviet-supported Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). Since the DRA fell, it worked…until now, when this time the group that overthrew it decides to embarrass the new, American-backed puppet government. It is just another example of the contradictions, inconsistencies, and straight-up disasters that have coloured American foreign policy for decades.
Vietnam and Iraq are the other American interventions that follow a similar pattern. In Vietnam, America propped up a deeply unpopular South Vietnamese dictatorship, refusing calls for reunification in fears that the country would turn communist. And, after over a decade and hundreds of thousands of lives lost, it did, because North Vietnam was popular and South Vietnam was not. In Iraq, the US had no trouble deposing the widely disliked Saddam Hussein, but it had much more trouble imposing its will on a country that simply did not want it to. A fact that everyone in the West accepts – you need to be popular to rule – is ignored, time and time again, by the American government.
To be clear, this is not a problem restricted to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. With few exceptions, every American intervention since WWII has followed this pattern. The US and UK decided to overthrow the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, and installed a more Western-friendly leader in the infamous Shah Reza Pahlavi. The latter was unpopular and was overthrown by an extremist religious movement in 1979 (sound familiar?). America was (and still is) notoriously bad at trying to overthrow the Cuban government. Even in places where US-backed leaders remained in power (Augusto Pinochet in Chile, for example), their governments rarely had significant support and almost always had to resort to effective reigns of terror. It is never smooth sailing for an American puppet state.
A common retort to this line of logic is the Korean War. The US did not “win”, per se, but supposedly it was done “right”. It was a good intervention, compared to the bad interventions of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But this argument is both wrong and dangerous. It is wrong because the intervention installed a regime led by a ruthless dictator and staffed with Japanese collaborators, which would be like keeping Nazi collaborator Philippe Petain as President of France after WWII. (Notably, South Korea did not become a democracy until the late-1980s, as a result of a popular protest movement.) The intervention itself was also brutal and destructive. General Curtis LeMay, who oversaw the war’s bombing campaign, estimated that that 20% of Korea’s population died in the conflict. This number is likely an exaggeration, but it provides a good overview of the destruction Korea faced in the 1950s. Massacres like No Gun Ri, where the US military executed around 300 civilian refugees, drive the point home. It is dangerous rhetoric to argue this is “the good intervention” – doing so erases the aforementioned brutality and justifies future intervention, even if it kills 20% of a country’s population. Like Vietnam, like Iraq, like Afghanistan, Korea was a failure that should not be held up as a model for anything but how not to treat civilians.
We should not delude ourselves, however. American policymakers are well acquainted with the failures of these interventions, and yet they keep happening. I have not even mentioned Libya and Syria, two (albeit minor) interventions in the past decade that both led to serious instability in the Middle East and North Africa. The human cost of these interventions, both for those they supposedly seek to “protect”, and American soldiers themselves, simply cannot be justified with any kind of cost-benefit analysis. This is a structural problem, not a mistake naïve policymakers keep making. These wars benefit the few – multinational corporations, military contractors, politicians, etc. – at the cost of the many. As General Smedley Butler wrote almost a century ago, “War is a racket.” Seeing the state of American foreign policy since, it seems nothing has changed.
Image courtesy of Javed Tanveer/AFP via Flickr, ©2018, some rights reserved.
