Three points on Afghanistan

First: Afghanistan policy is China policy. Afghanistan borders China, and much of the suffering in Afghanistan has its origins in Pakistan, which is today something between a Chinese client-state and a Chinese colony. China has several interests in Afghanistan, some of them in conflict. While the bosses in Beijing no doubt take a certain satisfaction in watching Americans scuttling off in ignominious defeat, they do not relish the thought of a revivified Islamist movement inspired by the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan and perhaps interested in turning its gaze to Xinjiang, where Beijing is busily reducing the Muslim population. Beijing doesn’t want Afghan opium crossing the border into China — and some very powerful people in China see opium and heroin as competition to the bootleg fentanyl (and its precursors) produced in China and distributed worldwide under a legal regime one Brookings scholar describes as “freewheeling.” Afghanistan sits atop some $1 trillion or more in rare-earth minerals, the development of which would undermine China’s dominant position in the production of those commodities, with both economic and strategic consequences. While we cannot ignore the horrifying suffering of the Afghan people, we should keep in mind that U.S. interests in Afghanistan have never been exclusively, or even principally, about what happens inside Afghanistan.

Second: Afghanistan policy is European policy. Our European allies (and our allies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere) are bitterly disappointed by our headlong retreat from Afghanistan, a policy that has been executed with little to no substantive consultation or coordination with those allies. The Europeans who had been hoping that the end of the Trump administration would mean a shift in the conduct or content of American engagement with the rest of the world are awakening to the fact that presidential unilateralism in foreign affairs is not a characteristic of the Trump administration or of Republican administrations but of U.S. political practice at large. The Biden administration hardly even consulted Congress, which is controlled by members of President Biden’s own party, much less with our allies in Brussels and London. And if Afghanistan policy is China policy, then Europe policy is China policy, too: The United States has shown itself unable to secure its interests in Afghanistan, where our enemy is a half-organized rabble of gangsters and fanatics — how much less likely is it that the United States will be able to secure its interests vis-à-vis China while going it alone, or effectively alone?