EpochTimes - Interview With Conrad Black. Can America Recover from Its Botched Withdrawal From Afghanistan?
Excerpts:
It looks like a botched job. I think the view both in Britain and in Canada, and in many other places, is not that this is a demonstration that the United States is finished as a serious power or anything like that. Claims like that are exaggerated. But [the view is] that it was an inexplicably poorly conceived operation.
If you accept that the idea was to leave, the traditional method of doing it is you take all the most vulnerable people out first. The military covers the retirement of all those who are going to have the most difficulty, and then the military retires in the sequence that they organized themselves so that everyone’s retreat is covered, is conducted in an orderly manner, and then the more mobile forces leave right at the end.
The Russians when they retired under quite different circumstances, after an unsuccessful occupation of 10 years, did leave in that way. They took their collaborators out first, and then they withdrew the armed forces from the South towards the North and then across into what was then the USSR, Uzbekistan.
That is the way you do things, and the Americans didn’t do that. Secondly they did not consult adequately at all with the allies, and third, despite the claims that are being uttered in official circles in Washington now, they did not advise people to leave.
And at the same time, they did absolutely nothing to expedite the departure of Afghan allies of the United States. They subjected them to a terribly irritating, bureaucratic application process that was not expedited or accelerated in any way. Then when they suddenly started to leave, these people were effectively just abandoned. And it appears that of the more than 100,000 apparent Afghans who were evacuated in the last days, very few of them had rendered any assistance to the United States, and most of those who had, translators and so on, were left behind. So people feel, I think it’s fair to say everywhere, that it was a botched operation.
That doesn’t mean the United States is no longer a great power. Of course it is a great power and no less a great power now than it was a year ago. But this is not good for a country’s reputation and credibility.
Biden is not handling it with anything like the forthrightness and credibility that President Kennedy handled that error at the Bay of Pigs.
There is the fear, and it’s been quite widely expressed in the last couple of weeks, that this will embolden the Taliban and their allies—if it’s correct to call them allies, to some extent they’re rivals, I suppose—the terrorist groups, ISIS and Al Qaeda and so on.
There can’t be any doubt that [this will have an effect,] the spectacle of the United States making such a shambles of this in Afghanistan, the original terrorism-exporting country, though largely because of the negligence or inability of the regime in Kabul to exercise sovereignty over its whole territory.
The French and the British, with whatever misgivings, and the other countries in NATO will attempt to encourage the Americans to be a little more coherent and consistent and try to be supportive and try to reinforce the alliance as best they can.
There is a question about whither NATO? Where is going and how is it trying to get there? It needs leadership, and I regret to say, I don’t think we’re going to get much leadership out of the Americans in the next three years.
No sane person would make any comparison between Afghanistan and Taiwan. I mean, Afghanistan is a landlocked country. Taiwan is an island. Afghanistan’s one of the most primitive countries in the world. Taiwan, one of the most advanced in the world. And where the Afghan army was well-equipped, it disintegrated under internal pressure.
The armed forces of Taiwan are extremely well equipped and extremely well-trained and very numerous, and they would defend their island with great courage and ingenuity I’m sure.
The United States, let us face the fact, is responsible for Taiwan becoming a serious country. And the United States rescued South Korea—with allies, but the allies playing a secondary role. The United States designed the present government of Japan and put Japan back on its feet.
China historically never took any interest in the world beyond its borders. This is a first for them. There’ve been periods in the past, several, when China was a mighty power, but even at those times, it only demanded exaggerated respect from its immediate neighbors, and wasn’t much interested in the world.
That has changed, but they haven’t picked up the lessons that quickly. And then they were so overbearing, even the Colonels in Myanmar threw them out. They couldn’t stand it anymore.
China itself of course must never be underestimated. This has been a bad embarrassment for the United States, but it does not destroy the fact that in three lifetimes, just three lifetimes, since the Battle of Yorktown, the United States has in that time for the last 80 years or so, been the preeminent country in the world.
I think we are now at the point where radical African American groups are completely overplaying their hand, and yet they have attracted a certain amount of adherence from non-black groups, saying that the United States had this original sin of slavery and hasn’t adequately atoned for it, but that’s not where the majority is.
The Democrats are now an informal and almost incoherent coalition of different elements.
[They include] outright socialists, this somewhat violent and in any case, very refractory group, still purporting to relive and assert vengeance for the moral shame of slavery and its aftermath. And [they include] the traditional Democratic party, which is essentially a reasonable, more rather moderate group contesting with the Republicans to run the government.
It’s all at the same time, but it’ll all disentangle quite quickly. And the United States will revert to being a rationally governed, reasonably competently governed, great power exercising and defending its national interests with its allies.
But I think this rather painful period of working out the internal complexities of the United States and getting the right personnel in place opposite the world, and serving legitimately, neither belligerently nor with too much laxity, the legitimate interests of the United States. I think we’ve got this presidential term and congressional term to go through to get there, but they’ll get there.
Americans are, almost all of them as you know, patriotic people; they love their country. And it is fundamentally an extremely powerful country. I mean, China is a poor country. There’s a lot of people that have very little resources, and it has no institutions that enjoy or deserve the slightest respect, except up to a point the army, the military.
You can’t believe a word the Chinese government says or a statistic they publish. It’s a substantially more corrupt country than the United States.
The United States is all right; it’s just having a bad period, but a brief one.
I think there’ll be a reaction against what’s happening now and a powerful sentiment over the next few years to say in the United States, “Let’s stop this nonsense, let’s stop horrible fiascos like Afghanistan from having that happening again. Let’s define our national interests in the world, provide the resources to protect it in consultation with serious allies, work it all out,” and continue the fundamentally highly successful history of the United States. It’s an interruption like the Civil War but not as severe, and unfortunately not one in which the country is guided by so outstanding and brilliant a leader as Abraham Lincoln.
Apart from everything else, three-quarters of the forces in Afghanistan were NATO forces; they weren’t Americans. So the Americans pulled the plug on everybody. Here in Canada, we have hundreds of Canadians stranded there. We’re in the middle of an election campaign right now, and it is an issue, but the focus here is on how the Canadian government handled it, not what the Americans did.
I’m a member of the British Parliament. I didn’t happen to be there, but I’m in the Upper House there, the House of Lords. The British Parliament expressed its contempt for the conduct of the President of the United States.
And no president prior to Biden, 44 different individuals, has attracted such opprobrium in so eminent a place as the Parliament of the United Kingdom. And for that to be visited upon this president is a very serious warning that the alliance is not gonna take much more of this.
It’s still the great United States of America, and presumably, whatever the political backbiting in the United States, both parties will know not to do this kind of thing again. Not to fail to consult properly, not to fail to plan properly and not to sort of slam the door and tell everyone it’s none of their business.
The United States is a strong country; we know that. But they should go back to being what they’ve been very good at. Their leading statesmen, like Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, were all very good at this multi-lateral game, even though they held the chair.
They were considerate of their allies and liked and respected by their allies. And they can go back to that.
I don’t see any evidence of anyone who’s doing any strategic thinking around there.
I think they’d better get back into the habit of having serious foreign policy specialists preparing serious plans and presenting them to the president and ultimately the country for the determination.
Recently the Taliban spokespeople have been saying that they’re going to be basically relying on China or the Chinese Communist Party for funding, and fueling a kind of economic comeback.
The Chinese are welcome to it. Every cent that they spend in Afghanistan will be wasted. If they wanna spend, put their Belt and Road through there, I think we should rejoice in that. It’s not a graveyard of empires; it’s just a waste of great powers’ attention.
The whole Chinese expansionist influence-building plan is nonsense.
I think the Chinese are embarking in areas where they’re not familiar, and they don’t realize how easily local nationalist sentiment can arise, gain support from rivals to the country they were then objecting to, namely China in this scenario, and sort of scorch the fingers of outreaching China.
As a plan of expansion of Chinese influence, I think the whole thing is nonsense. Let them get on with it.
China obviously has to be treated with respect, but if they start to become overbearing, seriously overbearing with other countries, we should support those countries. China is not strong enough to challenge the world. It’s not really strong enough to challenge the United States if the United States plays its diplomatic cards properly.
Trump was right to call the world’s attention to the Chinese threat.
He was right in trying to kick NATO into shape and telling everyone to pay up more. But I think just a return to essentially Trump’s policy but with a much more diplomatic presentation, a much more sophisticated and conciliatory presentation, that’s what should be done.
Your core is strengthen the alliance. I would say broaden it. I mean, pump up the alliances in the Far East and in the North Atlantic and across the Mediterranean. Put them all together, making one mighty alliance of democratic states.
Leave no one in any doubt that the defined interest of the democratic world will be defended, will be effectively and forcefully defended. Goodwill to everyone, malice to no one, but we’ll hold our own.
Read the entire interview
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/conrad-black-can-the-us-recover-from-its-botched-afghanistan-withdrawal_3990326.html?v=ul
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