16th August 2021
Once upon a time geopolitics seemed so much easier.
As Christopher Hitchens commented back in 2001, after 9/11:
‘The Taliban will soon be history. Al-Qaida will take longer. There will be other mutants to fight. But if, as the peaceniks like to moan, more Bin Ladens will spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: should that be the case, there are many many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again.’
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I was one of those who nodded-along with Hitchens at the time, but I quickly realised the reality of ‘regime change’ did not correspond to what was said in sterling newspaper columns and comment pieces.
And by the time of the Iraq invasion (with which I did not nod-along) it was plain that no actual thought was going into what happened next in any of these adventures.
Now, twenty years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the west are retreating in circumstances which show that there was never any practical, sustainable plan for ‘regime change’.
Indeed, instead of a changed regime in Afghanistan, we have a regime resumed.
And the full resumption only took a day, after some twenty years of occupation.
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Back in 2017, at the Financial Times, I put the calls for ‘regime change’ together with other simple notions from the first part of this century, as part of a general politics of easy answers:
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I remember as a United Kingdom government lawyer around 2003/4 being asked to help on a commercial procurement matter involving the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
I did not have much idea what I was doing, though I did my best – and it was soon obvious that nobody at the Coalition Provisional Authority knew what they were doing.
I remember thinking at the time that it is one thing to clap and cheer at ‘regime change’ but for it to happen in reality was quite different.
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This is not to argue absolutely against military interventions – either ‘liberal’ or otherwise.
What it is an argument against, however, is the notion that ‘regime changes’ are easy, or even effective.
Interventions are not political exorcisms, where the demons are expelled forever.
Instead, the notion of ‘regime change’ is a form of magical thinking.
And it always was.
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As far as I can tell, one of the main problems with regime change is that not enough thought goes into what happens after the regime changes. There’s a tendency to believe that the job’s done once the bad old government have gone but of course it isn’t. The country would need help to get to a point where it could go it alone, but rarely gets it. If we (not just the UK) took the time and effort to think this through, rather than going in and coming out with a political glow up (as it were) we’d do better and we’d be a force for good rather than one that drives them to quiet/noisy/violent desperation or near anarchy.
And so our fourth Afghan War comes to have much the same outcome as the first…
Looking at the quoted Christopher Hitchens piece in the Guardian, it pointed me at another (contemporary) piece, by Paul Kennedy: ‘What Balfour could teach Bush’ – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/29/afghanistan.internationaleducationnews . Not a lesson learnt…
I was reading your blog having spent the last few hours reading/discussing software & AI regulations. It strikes me that ’regime change’ may follow the Teddy Bear Method of dealing with high stress situations that actually require complex responses… @jameschristie blog has an interesting take:
https://clarotesting.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/teddy-bear-methods/
Thanks. As a psychotherapist’s husband , I enjoyed that post and its references. The ability to make connections across fields is becoming rarer in our, highly specialised, world.
Ditto for David’s post on Norse sagas.
Very insightful.
In the end you just want to get paid and go home. So yatter yatter, yes yes, all is lovely, we are methoding like crazy and all the boxes will be ticked and all the tees crossed. So when it all doesn’t work or takes longer you are fireproof and so are all the consultants etc etc. So we can get paid and go home.
The methodology is dead, long live the next methodology. Meanwhile there is good work being done, slowly and quietly but those humans get fed up with abuse after while and do something else. Or of course sell methodologies.
Easy answers combined with a systemic willingness to spin/lie about what is happening. We are making ‘good progress’ is the constant refrain, until ‘oh, it’s all collapsed’.
There will have been many who knew what the reality was, but few who were willing to say anything and even fewer who were willing to report it to the public.
I guess there can be circumstances where an illusion is necessary to achieve a specific objective. But the provider of the illusion should really keep in mind that it is an illusion.
I can tell you from personal experience that what passes for foreign policy has nothing to do with “facts on the foreign ground”. It is all to do with what plays well back home. Facts be damned. An Ambassador or reporting from the Embassy has practically no influence on policy. For an Ambassador to tell the truth to capitals in questioning current policy is a seriously career limiting move. This applies down the line. I am sure that the quick collapse of the Afghanistan Government was fully predicted by intelligence reporting but was not want the policy makers wanted to hear. Hence the current insistence on an intelligence failure as the blame game commences.
You are correct to an extent. The UK ambassador to Washington told truth to power and was dismissed. American diplomacy has been used more to project power than to gather and use intelligence. The Chinese appear to be following this trend whereas the Russians are not. More astute administrations value such intelligence, such as the Venetians whose diplomatic network was second to none in its time.
One could argue that when a young man has little prospect of making money through a profession or through a trade or through business, and he sees his country languishing at the bottom of the heap with others racing ahead with their peoples enjoying ever more comfortable lives, that such a young man starts to get resentful and angry. In such a state of mind, he might be attracted to extremism of one sort or another. If you agree with this logic, the answer is clear: the west should ensure that all countries are able to trade in what they’re good at. For many of today’s poor and wretched countries, their comparative advantage lies in farming, but the US and the EU and other OECD countries shut their doors to agricultural trade 60 years ago. There is an argument that we brought these extremist movements into being ourselves.
I had understood that “regime change” wasn’t a legally acceptable reason for going to war with ANY other state.
Iraq was in my view an illegal war and I am still unconvinced there was no legal recourse against Blair and others for their actions. If it had been possible to prosecute any alleged wrongdoers for their actions I think UK politics would have been cleaner and Middle Eastern politics less damaged.
Successful regime change cannot be imposed, it can only evolve internally. The English still have not found one that effectively suits all its citizens/subjects after four hundred years, as Brexit has so amply demonstrated. The French have been through two restorations and five republics and still have an imperfect model. The Russians and Chinese merely replaced one autocratic regime with another. The American version exhibits every generation it’s own inherent weaknesses. It has to be “owned” by the people. After nearly two thousand years the people and countries of Europe are still trying with different levels of success. All human beings crave agency and those fundamental human rights that are now recognised by the UN, but however much they are born free they remain very widely in chains.
Regime change is not magical thinking. Thinking you will have a Liberal democracy in a country with no history if it, no religious tradition to support it, nor an ethical heritage of it makes it magical thinking.
France had regime change in 1940 and again in 1944. Some regime changes take longer, witness the UK’s slow motion centuries long move from monarchy to a Liberal democracy if sorts…
Afghanistan had regime change and it has changed back but it will not go back to the status quo ante. Instead it is reshaped to some extent by its experience and while there is no faction fighting for liberal democracy, Afghanistan has been exposed to the modern world…
We forget at our peril how long it took and how much blood and treasure was spent along with almost unbearable human suffering and sacrifices to achieve the Liberal democratic benefits we enjoy today.
Regime change does occur. It is another question whether it sticks….
Joe Biden quoted in the Guardian: “It’s the right decision for our people, the right one for our brave service members, the right one for America”.
Is that it? All that matters is “America”?
The reason they invaded in the first place was supposedly to protect “America”.
What a disgrace. “America first”. That’s all that matters.
Worse than Trump, at least he never pretended to care.
What a world we now live in.
The repercussions will last for generations.
And sorry, did he really say this: “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals, get those who attacked us on 11 September 2001 and make sure al-Qaida could not use Afghan as a base to attack us again. We did that”.
“…use Afghan as a base…”???
He is not a British or US squaddie using that horrible shorthand slang for a country, he is president of the US.
And they wonder why half the world hates them.
We built up the Taliban as one of the protagonists in the Afghan war with the USSR. In our latest adventure on the NW frontier we failed to do anything relating to Taliban logistics – they don’t make their military equipment, they never did. Cut off their finances and they would be nowhere near any cities today. But we have a long-term relationship with the ideological descendants of Wahhab, ever since we betrayed TE Lawrence. We and others continue to pay the price for this arrangement, which profits a few mightily. The arrangement offers the necessary mix of instability and stability in the Middle East, which ensures aa healthy supply and profit from oil, notwithstanding the decades old evidence that the consequent global warming my well end our current civilisation.
Had Bush paid half as much for an army of plumbers and electricians to serve in Iraq, the Iraqis would have voted him in.
(Sadam would have resisted for a while, but his ain folk would have tossed him out).
As I recall from the invasion of Iraq, regime change was never mentioned during the debates at the UN about the legality of invading. It was all about removing WMDs. Yet the day the invasion began suddenly Blair started on about regime change. Clearly the intent all along but couldn’t have been mentioned while trying to persuade the UN to sanction the action.
Regime change by force or invasion should never be considered. It doesn’t matter how appalling the regime is. It will always end up creating something worse at great cost in human life in the process. The invasion of Iraq is an object lesson in what can happen, since everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong in the worst possible way.
The West actively supported the insurgency in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and as a result effectively created what became AQ. The “war on terror” was a huge mistake since it only encouraged radical support for AQ and later ISIS. Invading Afghanistan with little idea where AQ were based was a huge gamble which didn’t pay off then and is completely unravelling now.
The West encouraged and supported the Arab Spring uprising against Assad’s regime, leading to appalling loss of life without the “regime change” which was the aim. Arguably it enabled ISIS to set up its caliphate.
It’s one horror show after another. It must stop being the default response of foreign policy. This isn’t hindsight on my part. I never supported the war on terror or the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq because even then there was ample evidence what would be the result.
Thanks for this thought provoking blog. I’m long an admirer of Christopher Hitchens although not an uncritical fanboy.
After reading his writings I saw his argument why he had made the journey from 1960’s style UK leftism (even a dalliance with Communism at university) to becoming a full throated US neo-conservative (a label he embraced) and as such a believer in the ‘West’ using its economic and military power to topple terror regimes such as Saddam’s Iraq (Regime Change).
With his early death in 2011 he never saw the Pandora’s box of horrors that the invasion of Iraq opened and as an observer since then I’m struck by what I call ‘The Tale of Two Hitchens’.
Christopher’s brother Peter Hitchen also made the journey from socialist to conservative but in his case to another and very old fashioned conservatism with a side of reactionary right-wing religiosity. Peter calls himself a ‘Burkean conservative’, others would not be so charitable.
It was Peter Hitchens views on the Iraq invasion that intrigued me as he was one of the few UK Conservatives to totally oppose it (and UK involvement in Afghanistan) right from the start taking the view that its not for the UK to impose its views and mores on another nation and that meddling in another culture will only lead to disaster for both them and us. He takes the view that Britain should deal with other nations strictly on the basis of its self interest (mainly trade) only. However if you read his writings there is a strong element of a contemptuousness along the lines of ‘they are uncivilised savages and you are deluded if you think you can change them’ – which is exactly what regime changers like his brother was think the West can and should try to do.
Its fascinating since Christopher Hitchens style neo-conservatives are in reality all muscular leftists whereas Peter Hitchens style conservatives like to think they are Adam Smith style laissez-faire capitalists exponents of realpolitik but in practice its a very one sided libertarianism of conformity to what your ‘betters’ say and invariably this is justified with a strong side of religious cant that strays into white nationalism and its ideas of the supposed superiority of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation.