America invades. China trades.

This blog post appears as an article on Bella Caledonia: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2021/10/05/america-invades-china-trades/

The great challenge of the 21^st century is understanding China – Martin Jacques

They’re the lucky ones.

I switched off.  The BBC presenter was talking about 3 Afghans who’d reached the UK, just before the US withdrawal. 

You escape violence, panic and chaos, leaving family and friends.  You face a future in Priti Patel’s Britain, trying to get money, work and help, not knowing when you’ll be free to return to your home country.  And you’re the lucky ones?

The US and allies’ exit from Afghanistan, 20 years after they invaded, is a pivotal, kairotic moment.  The BBC led on it for weeks, focussing almost exclusively around Kabul and the airport, on soldiers leaving and the desperate plight of those who’d helped them, trying to flee.  The rest of the country and the majority of the population were all but ignored.

The portrayal of the new governing powers was rigidly hostile.  Though the Taliban are a mass of conflicting forces, the T word was used, often in the third person singular, to portray them indiscriminately as monolithic, brutal and primitive. 

Surely the people that defeated the greatest superpower on earth warranted analysis?  The UK media might as well have said the Gruffalo, such was the infantile demonisation.  The Taliban has terrible tusks and terrible claws.  And terrible teeth in its terrible jaws.

And terrible misogyny.  The BBC presented a stark contrast: women studying, teaching and working before the withdrawal versus barbaric suppression of women’s rights after.

Dr Yvonne Ridley was imprisoned by the Taliban in 2001.  In a recent Scot Goes Popcast, she says the women judges, journalists and doctors were green shoots, but came from the privileged elite of Kabul and the main cities.  Across the country, female illiteracy is 84%.  Some places have no schools, while shiny new schools in Kandahar are devoid of teachers and pupils.

The truth is that the Taliban had greater popular support than the deeply corrupt puppet regime it replaced, which collapsed weeks after the US started to pull out.  The president fled the country before the Americans did.

Given how they worked with the Americans to smooth the evacuation, Dr Ridley believes the Taliban have changed.  And that they’ll adapt further, if they are to stand a chance of governing the broken country they’ve inherited. 

There are signs, from meetings and discussions being held, that this regime will be more inclusive, not just of tribal elders but neighbouring countries, other ethnic groups and women.  Ridley adds: My money’s on the women.

It’s bound to take time.  But how long and why on earth should women have to keep waiting for the opportunities, rights and equality that should be theirs already?  And as for theocratic fascism – the sooner that’s consigned to the bin of history, the better!

But bombing’s not the answer.  While we must object to the regressive elements of the Taliban, the more realistic path to change in Afghanistan is through engagement.

To be fair, the Beeb’s coverage is a bit more savvy with the return to Kabul, after 27 years, of Jeremy Bowen, Middle East editor.  He has no illusions about the Taliban’s unforgiving idealogy, but he makes clear how the war undercut attempts to make Afghanistan a better place.  Tellingly, he now wears a shalwar kameez to respect the local dress code.

Overall, the BBC and the rest reflect the narrow outlook of the UK establishment.  Ex-foreign secretary Raab’s grilling by MPs showed how little the government knew about what was going on: how many Afghans worked for Britain; how many have the right to settle here; which foreign ministers were contacted and why 5000 desperate emails went unread by his department.

He knew nothing.  Not even the dates of his holiday.

The chaos, divisions and instability sown by 20 years of US, UK and allied occupation left those powers strangely ignorant of the country they invaded.

In February 2020, Trump signed the Doha deal with the Taliban, committing to the withdrawal of US and British troops by May 2021.  Biden upheld the plan, amending the exit date to August.  Everyone knew what was going on. 

Aren’t we supposed to have world-beating intelligence services?  What did we miss and why?  Chief of defence staff General Sir Nick Carter said: I don’t think we realised what the Taliban were up to.

Imperial declines are unlikely to be peaceful; the US one has been especially bloody.  We mourn the 3000 people killed in the New York horror that triggered the US invasion, but how do we weep for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Afghanistan since 9/11?

The US forces’ last act was a Hellfire drone attack on a white Toyota. They thought, based on substantial intelligence, they were targeting an ISIS terrorist.  Instead, 7 children were playing around the car.  The drone killed them and 3 adults, one of whom worked for an American aid organisation.  It was a futile, impotent response, like a microcosm of the entire Afghan war.

Tony Blair says the US departure is tragic, dangerous, imbecilic. 

Once he stood, in too-tight jeans, alongside George W. Bush, helping him enter Afghanistan and Iraq.  Now Tony returns, to the scene of the war crime, to tell us this wouldn’t have been the exit pursued by A. Blair. 

But we see for ourselves.  Blair’s liberal interventionism is just another brand of racism, a legacy of colonialist attitudes and systems.

When I went to Afghanistan, in the 1970’s, it was neither modern nor Western, but it was safe.

Since then, the Soviets and the US, have joined the list of invaders – stretching back to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan – who’ve dug themselves into this graveyard of empires.

William Dalrymple’s Return of a King gives a vivid history of the first disastrous British entanglementin Afghanistan, in 1839.  The British installed a deeply unpopular ruler, Shah Shuja.  They thought they’d beat Russian expansion.  It was all part of the Great Game, a sort of imperial pissing contest.  The retreat, in 1842, saw 20,000 British troops killed.

One of the bloodiest deaths was Sir Alexander (Sikunder) Burnes.  Cousin to Scotland’s bard, he was the classic example of a talented, diligent Scot trying to make the British empire function.  Forced to accept unworkable instructions from his witless, arrogant superiors, he was hacked to death in Kabul at the age of 36.

Nothing learned, there were 2 more Anglo-Afghan wars in 1878 and 1919.

Some in the West, seeking a replacement for the US, cite China as the next imperial aggressor.  More misconception. 

As Martin Jacques, author of the seminal When China Rules the World, says: the chances of China being so stupid are zero. 

Part of the explanation is China’s experience as the underdog, dominated by Japan and the West for a century of humiliation and – since 1949 – as a developing country.  Unlike the US and the UK, China knows how it feels to walk in the shoes of a state like Afghanistan.

Throughout its long history, China has often been a world power.  Yet, while it attaches the greatest importance to retaining (and reclaiming) lands which it regards as its own, it has little tradition of colonising foreign territories.

Instead, as it works with an ever-greater number of countries, China prioritises stability and development.  In Afghanistan, this means that Beijing is likely to offer the new regime economic aid to rebuild and fight ISIS.

Since post-Mao reforms in the late 1970’s, China has focussed remorselessly on its economic strength, while improving its infrastructure, the lives of its people and its involvement with the rest of the world.

In the 1980’s, China’s economy was 5% of the size of America’s.  By 2014, it was the same.  In the 2030’s it could be twice as big as the US.

This meteoric and inexorable rise has enabled China to join the world.  It became a member of the World Trade Organisation in 2001.  It recently signed up to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade agreement of 15 Asia-Pacific countries (including Australia).  The RCEP accounts for 30% of global GDP, and the same share of the world’s population – more than the EU and the US-Mexico-Canada pact.

The global reduction in absolute poverty is at least as much to do with internal Chinese development as western aid & trade.

Obama set up, in 2016, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, another trade deal between some of the RCEP states, plus Canada, Chile, Mexico and Peru.  Within months, Trump pulled the US out.  Now, China has applied to join the TPP.

Since 2013, China’s most ambitious international project is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a huge multi-continental investment, infrastructure, construction and trading project.  It now involves 139 countries.  China is highly fused with the global economy. 

Italy was the first European state to commit to the BRI.  Russia now sees it as an opportunity.  Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister says: China is the country that came to Pakistan’s aid.  Most of China’s partners are developing countries, which now account for two-thirds of the world’s economic activity.

Meanwhile the G7’s influence is diminishing, its market dominion a fraction of what it was.  The west’s share of world population is just 14%, compared to the developing world’s 84%.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a major military humiliation.  But the greatest blow to the West was economic: the 2008 financial crisis, from which it’s never recovered.

Cold war rhetoric won’t wash.  The recent formation of AUKUS misreads the realities of international progress.  It’s more fantasy – the US is like playground bully, Draco Malfoy, having just lost one massive fight, instantly picks another, egged on by hapless Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, the Crabbe and Goyle of international diplomacy.

At the very moment when they could seek to build bridges with China and others, the AUKUS squad choose the military route.  Johnson says stocking the Indo-Pacific seas with nuclear submarines is not intended to be adversarial.  Tell that to the French and other allies, who are incandescent at the move.

The crucial thing about China is its difference from the West.  It’s not like a Western nation state.  Its approach, rooted in a civilisation going back to Confucius, is shrewder, deeper, more strategic.  It doesn’t indulge in Bush’s good guy versus evil simplistics.

Huge problems lie ahead of course: environmental crises, tech wars, refugee flights, the return of Trumpism etc.  A major concern is what a cowed US will do with all its weapons.  60 years ago, Eisenhower warned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.  Now it’s bigger, stronger, yet aimless; how long before it concocts another casus belli, a pretext for war? 

The post-US world is not all about China vs. America, replacing one superpower with another.  We’re seeing a shift away from a minority of developed countries ruling the world towards a multipolarity of developing countries.

To understand is not to condone.  How can we share the values of distant civilisations?  I’ve never been to China, nor can I speak a word of Mandarin, which I’d say were the least requirements to assess the rights and wrongs of what’s happening within that huge country.  This article is about how to go with the grain of history and humanity, as the whole world moves forward.

This new world order is already spreading from south-east Asia to encompass the rest of that continent, Africa and Latin America; projects like the link across the bay of Maputo, capital of Mozambique –  the longest suspension bridge in Africa.  And the joint hydropower plan to build 2 dams in Argentina, due to generate nearly 5,000 megawatts of electricity, reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

The BRI might reach further into Europe and even the USA itself.  Though China may be preeminent in this process, it’s unlikely to dominate it.

A current upside to China’s connecting with the world is the number of Covid vaccines it’s provided to over a hundred countries – 884 million, with plans to make it 2 billion by the end of 2021.  The US has delivered 160 million.

The world is changing.  Good.

Paul Bassett 

Glasgow

October 2021