A graph in a recent Times op-ed by an apologist for China’s rulers summed up their party-line takeaway from an American defeat:
Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors — Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States. Now China enters — armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.
Alexander’s, the Brits’, and the Russians’ forays in Afghanistan were imperial enterprises, but the U.S.’s (admittedly flawed) nation-building there wasn’t impelled by low, exploitative motives. Mr. Zhou isn’t interested in such distinctions. Instead, he’s out to distance China’s policy from that of all the countries that have tried to subdue Afghanistan’s fractious clans. But does he really have a point? It’s true that for the Greek States, Brits, and USSR, Afghanistan was just a piece in their empires’ puzzles. But China’s rulers’ view of Afghanistan isn’t much different: they see the country as another trading post on their 21st C. Silk Road. Afghan lives don’t matter to them; profit is their only motive.
Times journalist Jordan Byron recently made a video of Crystal Bayat, a young Afghan woman who has dared to protest against the Taliban in the days since the fall of Kabul. In this August 20 report (link here), clips of an interview with Bayat alternate with footage of her marching in Kabul. Her reflection in the Q&A about the day the Taliban took power — “my dreams died” — provides the video’s title. But the shots of Bayat in the streets — driven and draped in the Red, Green, and Black of the Afghan Flag — show a wounded, but not beaten fighter. Her call and response with the crowd gave me goosebumps: “Our flag!…Whose flag?… Our flag!” Back home in the U.S., Trumpers’ (and others’) crazed allegiance to the Stars and Stripes has made me wary of flag worship, but Bayat proved flags can be beautiful.
Mr. Zhou’s op-ed claimed to think through the question of the hour: “what went wrong, and how, after billions of dollars spent on a 20-year war effort, it could all end so ignominiously.” Yet there was nothing ignominious about Bayat’s protest. Taliban soldiers couldn’t make her back down. (I wonder if anyone could?) If people like her came out of American-backed Afghanistan (despite the government’s ineptitude and corruption), maybe we didn’t just blow all those billions of dollars. By contrast, if/when China’s coming hegemony ends, I doubt their legacy in Afghanistan will amount to much more than infrastructural residues of an ignominious partnership with canny mad-men.