Chaos in the concert of powers? Henry Kissinger and the fall of Kabul
Henry Kissinger 1984 (© Mitchell Levy/Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com)
What does Henry Kissinger think? It is a question many have asked about successive crises, ever since the former Secretary of State was removed from office in 1977. It is one which his lengthy retirement has given him plenty of time to answer, while bringing in the big bucks as well. The obituaries have been in store for decades, doubtless with their predictable headlines of the “ ultimate practitioner of Realpolitik”. No foreign policy moment is complete without someone consulting the sage about whether the latest Presidential excursions fit into his grand “concert of powers” or fulfil those ever-so-evasive American “national interests”. Four decades of score-settling, though, have not removed the fact that it was Kissinger whose disastrous plans for Vietnam ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, and the symbolic end of American invincibility. The equally damning fall of Kabul highlights again, perhaps more than anything, the limits of the diplomat’s powers. Trying to balance the pressures of the globe on a set of precarious weighing scales falls prey to the internal forces that international collaboration and treaties can do all too little about.
Kissinger’s many foes like to bring up his youthful trauma to explain his middle-aged ruthlessness. The 1930s childhood as a German Jew who escaped to America, fought in the war and had to confront the sight of a concentration camp he had liberated after so many of his ancestors had been murdered. He’d seen the worst of humanity, so was prepared to excuse a great deal of inhumanity when it came to removing Salvador Allende in Chile or backing Suharto’s vicious invasion of East Timor.
It’s a nice idea, but doesn’t stand up too well to much of what the man himself has written or said. Rather, Kissinger is obsessed with America’s place in the world and the preservation of its ideas at all costs. When those interests fade away, as in South Vietnam or Afghanistan, he’s prepared to leave these countries to their fate. When domestic pressures become too great, the foreign battles have to be given up. The defence of American ideas, in short, has limits. “And Henry is nothing,” said one of his Washington underlings admiringly, “if not a practitioner of Real– and Macht politik , with a healthy dose of central European pessimism.”
In his 2014 book World Order, Kissinger tries to accommodate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into this pessimistic concept of “ equilibrium ” on the world stage. At first, the tale goes smoothly: 9/11 posed a tangible threat to America, so Nato had to invoke Article 5 and remove al-Qaeda. He rightly traces the historical roots; the monumental power struggle of the Cold War had been replaced by (in practice more deadly) non-state insurgencies under the banner of Islamism. In the new “unipolar world order”, that was now the greatest threat to America’s “city upon a hill”. And so the 2001 invasion fitted perfectly well into Western interests.
Yet Afghanistan is no Korea or Granada, Bosnia or Panama. The mostly barren country had not earned its title as a “graveyard of empires” by chance: Britain, China, imperial Russia and the Soviet Union had fought over its lands before — in vain. Going into Afghanistan purely out of national or economic self-interest was shown to be hard enough. Not merely invading, but trying to set up a desertified Luxembourg, with all the trimmings of a constitutional government and thriving middle class , was positively fanciful. Hence President ’s Biden’s slippery rhetoric about never having had any intention of nation-building back in 2001 after all.
Much has been recently dragged out about the impossibility of setting up a Western-style government in this arid and mountainous landscape, whose clans and tribes have stubbornly resisted all foreign invaders for centuries. It is in vogue to pronounce Bush, Blair and the rest, as power-hungry dreamers for thinking they could be the saviours of women oppressed by the Taliban, or could upgrade the country from its terrorist-ridden, poverty-stricken condition. This is overly defeatist — the kind of ideas that defined Donald Trump’s isolationist attitude. The West does not have to impose its values on the rest, or pursue purely military routes for influence, something of which even Kissinger was fully aware. The last two years of the pandemic have encouraged leaders to close their borders, and an increasingly isolationist and insular attitude is the immediate result. The abandonment of Afghanistan is the first of the tragic consequences which such an approach encourages.
Such resignation ignores any might the Star-Spangled Banner still possesses. If America has to protect itself first, once in a while there’s a chance that its power can be applied not only to contain foes, but to support friends, even powerless ones. This moralistic approach is one Kissinger, the ultimate pragmatist, will not accept. Lord Palmerston’ s edict — “We have no eternal enemies and no perpetual friends. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow” — was the saying of a man at the head of a nation which did, at that time, rule the waves. It applied to America in the last century, and was the unbidden maxim of Kissinger’s rule. It will now be China’s, since President Biden seems intent on having no friends at all, and curating a host of perennial enemies to boot.
The Wars Against Terror are now seen by too many to be exceptions, conflicts dreamt up in a geopolitical rush of blood, where the urge for revenge wherever it was deemed to be necessary dismissed the need for a cautious appraisal of diplomatic concerns. Kissinger is right in saying that bleeding-heart concerns about human rights were in no way the main catalyst for war; extremists in Afghanistan were a problem for China, Russia, Pakistan and India as well. Indeed, those who protested against the war in 2001 have not always been so fast in calling out the Chinese oppression of its own Muslim population.
Realism and idealism do not have to be simple opposites; good statesmanship lies in the balance between the two. Where America got lost was in its balance of military and political objectives; between the initial desire to remove the threat of global terrorism and to hunt down Bin Laden, and the subsequent goal of promoting female education and liberating the country from its feudalist shackles. That confusion of purposes meant withdrawal, whenever it did happen, was doomed to be fatal. America put trillions of dollars into the country, but not enough for serious enforcement of democratic government; it sent thousands of troops, but not enough to enforce order over the myriad sects which still controlled swathes of rural regions. As Kissinger pointed out last week , it failed to define its objectives; at one moment mounting troop surges, while simultaneously announcing the date for their withdrawal. The Taliban, it seems, could not have asked for a better state in which to prepare. American interests were never spelt out, which meant American aims were always fated to fail.
What Kissinger’s mantras of realism, equilibrium and the concert of powers miss out, however, is the human side. Kissinger’s book describes the strategies of diplomats and presidents, not the fates of Afghan teenagers or the ruinous consequences of bombing campaigns. His latest thoughts give little time for the haunting picture of babies thrown over fences into the hands of soldiers or the desperate refugees clinging on to moving aeroplanes. Maybe that is the job of the journalist, and his the unthankful one of the statesman, tasked with sorting through the mire. After all, a picture can say a thousand words, but the politician can decide the fate of a thousand lives in an instant. The future of the Afghan people may be at the forefront of millions of minds as the scenes from Kabul are replayed over again. But they will soon fade. So long as Joe Biden is leading the free world, the hopes of those repressed under the tyrants, theocracies and usurpers of the planet will fall away just as fast. When Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, Tom Lehrer declared the death of satire. Now America’s leadership and Europe’s complacency are the only cruel jokes around, and Xi Jinping seems to be the only man able to laugh at them.
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