Why Our War in Afghanistan May Mean the End of American Empire

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 6, 2009.

In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.

In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a "bleeding wound." Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however, that the bleeding still couldn't be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on its peripheries, went down the tubes.

Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.

After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way.

Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don't expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?

Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.

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Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

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