hankyoreh

Choe Young

By Choe Young, professor at T-Leadership School

The US war in Afghanistan ended in a catastrophic disaster. Despite spending 100 trillion won (US$854 billion) over the course of 20 years, the US failed to build a democratic country or an army capable of defending itself against the ragtag forces of the Taliban.

After Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan based on the US’ national interest with few contingency plans, his leadership is being sharply questioned both at home and abroad.

If everything revolved around the US, the national interest and anger over American young people being sacrificed overseas might sound persuasive. But there’s one thing Biden fails to see: the interests of the world are also those of the US.

Biden is being criticized despite saying the right things because he didn’t foresee the human toll. In other words, he let precious human lives fall into the violent clutches of the Taliban because of the national interest. Biden forgot that all life is as precious as one’s own.

With the notable exception of the two world wars, the US’ wars have typically ended in failure. During the Chinese Civil War, fight between the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong, the US sold weapons to Chiang, unaware that his corrupt army was selling those same weapons to Mao under the table. And the Vietnam War came to a dishonorable end despite the countless bombs that the US dropped in Indochina.

Observing the conclusion of the War in Afghanistan, we can find a number of similarities with earlier wars waged by the US. First, the US failed to grasp the moral hazards or social, cultural and religious characteristics of the battlefield. Second, the US’ focus on political calculations and the national interest kept it from predicting the disastrous fallout of a hasty withdrawal. Third, the US didn’t consider that the national interest is connected to the global interest.

The world isn’t a patchwork of separate countries but a connected community.

The world needs global ethics. Just as individuals have personal ethics, the world has global ethics. The environmental crisis facing us today is not the crisis of any one country but a global crisis. When any country’s carbon dioxide emissions get too high, it creates a crisis across the globe.

The entire world is currently struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s become very clear that it’s not enough for one country to fight the coronavirus. A problem for one country is a problem for them all.

The US has always been a vast country. Indeed, it’s not merely a country but a microcosm of the world.

The US was made a superpower with the help of Europe and other regions. It owes its wealth and power to the whole world.

For that reason, the US needs to regard the world’s problems as its own and serve as the world’s cop though the extent and method of that are up for debate, and it should regard global engagement as being in the national interest.

Biden’s poorly thought-out decision to pull out American troops has created a refugee crisis, a burden that he now hopes to share with allied countries around the world. Countries that take in Afghan refugees will have to reckon with their religious background in Islamic law and provide them with homes where they can settle down and start new lives.

Those countries will also have to wrestle with whether to accept those refugees on a temporary or permanent basis, and whether the refugees ought to return to Afghanistan someday. One option would be to find some extra space on the globe where they could settle, on the model of Israel. These are things the South Korean government should be considering as well.

Finally, the Pentagon needs to adjust its strategy in light of the US’ history of global military engagement so that the US can fulfill its duty to protect the world. The US ought to have either forced the Taliban to change or wiped it out. I hope the US won’t be seen as a country that quits when things don’t work out.

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