AFGHANISTAN (Washington Insider Magazine) – There are, to be sure, more than just a few international issues marking the world today, and, somehow, so many of them seem to involve the United States in one way or another; this can be said despite that many instances likely and actually don’t involve America in any practically literal sense at all. Yet whether it be the negotiations with Iran in Vienna that recently ended, discussions with Russia in Geneva regarding the Ukraine and Crimea, a Civil War in Ethiopia, North Korean missile tests, or the continually unfurling international COVID-19 pandemic and the response to it, the world is as busy and unsettled as ever, and America continues to attempt to effect it all.
And sanctions are, indeed, the recourse with which the United States so often chooses to settle with when a conflict emerges somewhere across the globe; if the US could sanction COVID-19, the Congress would, in fact, have drawn up several copies of ever more intense restrictions across the past two years to subject the illness to. Now, all jokes and joking aside of course, sanctions strike as a diplomatic penalty that might be easily confused, in the right proverbial lighting of course, with an aggressive, war-like and punitive action; and yet, they also must ring out across the world as rendered moral judgments as well, where a powerful nation or nations create a tangible declaration of their own intellectual or philosophical views on a topic or subject, expressed through the admonition of another nation through this economically restrictive act and process.
On Afghanistan
Regarding Afghanistan, a nation that was recently overrun by the Taliban, who had been lying in wait within the region over the course of 20 years and remerged once American forces had finally pulled out of the polity under the Presidency of Joe Biden, the United States wishes to affect some type of control and pressure upon the Taliban government, to be sure. And, furthermore, the US has used sanctions since the Taliban takeover to attempt this pressure for the desired result. Yet, of course, these sanctions have not stopped the reported executions of former Afghani governmental figures or officials, nor have they created an atmosphere where the Taliban has backed off on many of the cultural and social restrictions that were previously feared for.
In short, sanctions have not caused many positive innovations for the people of Afghanistan and have, instead, likely caused even greater, magnified suffering in a now disconnected and, in many ways, darkened Emirate. The sanction regime hovering and haunting Afghanistan under the obviously disagreeable Taliban, is the same sanction regime that remains in place across the world – used against nations like Cuba, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as well, to little practical, diplomatic or humanitarian effect. It surely must not be sustained against Afghanistan, any more than against any of the other aforementioned nations, no matter how distasteful the Taliban or anyone else might be. To extrapolate further some points of which were recently written in a different publication. The Times, apart from the massive humanitarian implications, pushing Afghanistan to the peripheries of the international community is the surest way to evolve it into a narco and terror state in record time.
Without some means of interacting with the greater international community economically and diplomatically, Afghanistan will find and create other means for pressuring the international community into consideration, and will likely have to resort to some of the more nefarious economic exercises for making money within a largely isolated and suffocated polity, surrounded by nations that do not like them either.
The opiate trade – of which the Taliban declares it wishes to stop entirely – might be the best bet for funding their nation other than acting as a financially compensated safe haven for other groups of a similar ideological or philosophical ilk; neither courses would be positive innovations for the world or the United States, and the evolving circumstance would be one in which all parties in several years time would grimace and groan regarding, pointing fingers and attempting to fix what was long neglected, diminished, ignored and discarded.
Attempting to work with Afghanistan to find a structure similar to the Iran Nuclear Deal, through which practical, social and diplomatic innovations vis-a-vis the Taliban would result in improving economic and diplomatic standings and functioning between that nation and the amicable and agreeable nations of the world, must be the move here, with the relief of sanctions promised so long as international institutions and their inspectors determine that Afghanistan is taking steps to meet those agreed to conditions and expectations.
Should something like this be achieved, to then derail in the future an Afghani-American diplomatic innovation like this, as happened previously regarding Iran, in favor of a continuance of the sanction regime, such as was seen during the days of Donald Trump and the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, would, as it was regarding Iran, be sheer and utter lunacy. It would also be greater evidence of the further failure of American diplomacy and imagination vis-a-vis foreign policy.
For, while the people of Afghanistan have already suffered massively in the months this the country was retaken by the Taliban for the first time in 20 years, reports suggest that the starvation and privation could intensify dramatically in the coming months and onward should nothing change. It is not for wanting to go “easy” on the Taliban, who also must make great strides on their own, but because there are millions of people at risk of being suffocated and starved out of existence without the humanitarian empathy of the United States and the greater international community of nations.
And it is not as though the Taliban are really beloved by many in the region either – within or without Afghanistan – as a nation like Iran, filled with Iranians and regional immigrants and refugees alike, have a deep, historically rooted distaste for them, no matter what the current administration in Tehran tries to posture to the contrary. Pakistan, a nation often credited as having given asylum and recruits to the Taliban across the last 20 years of United States occupation, is reportedly not too thrilled to have them as the controlling officials next door either. Meanwhile, those three other border states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have all intensified border security since the Taliban have taken over; while the latter has accepted Afghani refugees, the two former nations have become further guarded regarding movement coming from Afghanistan.
While Russia has shown itself apparently open to diplomacy and some form of cordial relations with Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban, they have not necessarily fast-tracked their ties to the new regime of Afghanistan either. China too, has postured similarly, and yet remain at a cautious distance from an entity that they very much naturally do not align with in many ways. And so, as each nation has discussed the need for internationally normalized relations with Afghanistan, that nation remains out of the international loop, and their populace suffers greatly and without reason as a result; the US and its allies must recognize this and make a profound and positive move in influencing the current governors of Afghanistan towards a better, less violent and more inclusive path both within and without their country in the future, as they have hopefully been attempting to do at Oslo in Norway.
“…The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable, – abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe. Some preach it in the name of Justice. In the great events of man’s history, in the unwinding of the complex fates of nations Justice is not so simple. And if it were, nations are not authorized, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents of rulers.” – John Maynard Keynes
While the United States would like to believe that sanctions will liberalize Afghanistan, or perhaps even lead to a time where it could be taken back by more secular, less extreme forces, there is little evidence anywhere else across the globe, either presently or historically, that this is likely to occur. It does neither of those things, nor does it, as I stated in a piece just days ago, soften up or create feelings of positive, mutuality between nations for negotiations or reconciliations going forward. Sanctions instead are a punitive and deeply harmful punishment that always will crush and affect people while the more powerful and entrenched weather the storms and plagues of international economic warfare.
This action, as will be discussed in a future piece regarding Russia, often serves to create a different effect upon the targetted population and society; in the Afghani example, however, the caustic nature of suffocating and vitriolic sanctions on so many poor innocents spread across a still sparsely connected nation could very well backfire by creating conditions that are ostensibly the fruits of American and Western subjugation, instead of diplomacy. This type of behavior by the United States is the surest way to radicalize entire generations and greater groups of people, and to create deeply rooted opposition to cooperation for decades to come; all of these long-held strategies and assumptions will not suddenly work in Afghanistan where they have previously failed in so many other places and instances.
What is needed, therefore, are more international conferences with delegations from the leading powers of the world, the leading figures of those nations within the regions in question, as well as diplomats who are ready to find innovative, mutually beneficial and constructive paths onward in the search for ever more positive and healthy relationships within the international community of nations. They must endeavor to solve great and difficult, culturally and historically profound questions, and they must look to do so in ways that will hurt the least for all parties going onward into the future. Diplomatic routes are not so fast and unilateral in nature as are sanctions by a nation or group of them, and take tact, time and understanding to mold and develop properly; regarding Afghanistan, this will all take as much time, effort and consideration as do the discussions with Iran and Russia, and as would those with Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
Conferences are then, quite a necessary step in the entire diplomatic process, and will be so necessary in each circumstance in order to come to mutual, constructive and agreeable processes and routes for a better future. Oslo, Geneva and Vienna must be added to further, and should these types of meetings become common place, then all the better. The United States and its allies must properly lean into this recourse, and embrace the reality that nations cannot economically savage a nation or nations into mutuality or submission, but must work together and with one another to create diplomatic pathways and routes towards stronger and more trusting ties and shared accountability, as well as responsibility. To be sure, this path will not be as easy as slapping sanctions on a “problem” and calling it a proverbial day, but the rewards that will be yielded down the years will act as further proof of the good sense that building relationships – even with those polities or governments that might be disdainful or distasteful – makes when one analyzes the circumstances in question.
Yet in the final analysis, history, as well as common sense, has shown us what mistreating nations, even in conferences and grand, multilateral dialogue, can create for the world, as well as the United States in particular. When the Allied Powers at the end of the first, great war decided at Versailles to economically and practically barbarize and punish Germany, blaming nearly exclusively that nation and its people for the remarkably nuanced and complicated buildup and chain of events that would precipitate what posterity has declared to be the First World War, they set in motion circumstances which could, and in short succession did, bloom and blossom into the deadly and genocidal Second World War, in which the Germans barbarized the world and its most vulnerable peoples in even more grotesque and disturbing ways.
And again, just decades later, when the United States blocked the Geneva Agreements from fully being implemented and executed as it related to Vietnam and their joint, collective elections, as was previously agreed to in 1954, they set in motion for themselves a conflict that would absorb countless lives from not only themselves and nations around the world, but also and mostly those from the nations of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. These, alongside the previously mentioned Munich Conference which infamously included both Adolf Hitler as well as Neville Chamberlain, have been the types of international conferences and agreements of which have left diplomatic functioning in low regard, and even disrepute in some circles, and furthermore have positioned proponents of the sanction in higher esteem than that individual who works to parse out complex and oftentimes culturally entangled incidents, ambitions and relationships.
It is this individual, the real and true diplomat who, before war has begun and the bullets can fly through the air and into those innocent men, women and children, must fight and work with vigilance and diligence towards building a brighter tomorrow, even as the grey and blackened storm clouds of violence and conflict appear upon the horizon – however distant or near that all might suggest itself to be. The diplomat must work on this Afghanistan circumstance with the same spirit he endeavors with when attempting to solve the Russian or Iranian quandaries and riddles too; he must use his knowledge of history, of the contemporary circumstances in question, of the nation, its people, their government and of that greater region, of international form and function, as well as, on top of it all, regarding how best to reconcile the interests of his own nation or collective with those interests of the specific nation and its population.
Afghanistan offers different, and very distinct issues than the other two often mentioned situations, and yet, finding ways to positively affect that nation, all while saving and helping to allow for the development and growth of millions of innocent lives in the present and future, feels like massively important reasons to endeavor with the great resolve and ambition that America and Americans too possess in great abundance to achieve these ends through these purposes. By finding resolutions and recourses to these difficult questions across the globe, from Afghanistan to the Crimea, to Cuba and Tehran, the United States could very well find itself in stronger international positions regarding its diplomatic prestige after years of disappointments, with great, carved out new channels of diplomatic innovation and possibility to explore whenever and wherever international crises involving the US – or even the EU – might emerge, evolve or develop in the future.
