In February 2020, the first Trump administration signed the Doha accord with the woman-hating Taliban. The deal provided for an immediate reduction in US air raids on Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan, in exchange for a Taliban clampdown on al-Qaeda activity directed against Americans from within its territory. Longer term, it also outlined plans for a gradual withdrawal of all Nato troops from Afghanistan.
As we all know, a rushed military peace deal is no peace deal at all. There is an alternative timeline in which the US could have withdrawn slowly and strategically from Afghanistan, leaving the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani in a position to hold its own against the Taliban.
The sudden withdrawal of US air power made such resistance impossible. The Americans’ own oversight authority, known as SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction), would later issue a report blaming the removal of US air support for creating “a sense of abandonment within the ANDSF [Afghan military] and the Afghan population”.
Unpaid Afghan soldiers began to flee their posts, ahead of a Taliban army which advanced unchecked by the firepower of Ghani’s erstwhile American allies. By April 2021, Joe Biden announced that he would not reverse Donald Trump’s agreement in Doha or the decision to withdraw troops. SIGAR, led by the Obama-era Democrat appointee John F Sopko, later stated that Biden’s announcement had “destroyed ANDSF morale”.
The result, familiar to anyone who remembers the horrors of a sunny August just three years ago, was a total Taliban takeover. Women in some parts of Afghanistan are no longer permitted to speak in public spaces, even to each other. None are allowed to take part in civic society; they are slaves in the kitchen, bedroom and nursery.
To men like Donald Trump and Joe Biden, perhaps these are all necessary trade-offs in a great game. To the rest of us, it should serve as a reminder that there are some overseas wars America was right to fight and wrong to abandon.
This week, it is the turn of Ukraine to stare down the barrel of a totalitarian army as American assistance evaporates into the ether.
Ukraine has 63 days before Trump re-enters the White House. It is widely believed that Trump will then capitulate to Vladimir Putin (a man by whom he has been forced to deny being blackmailed) and withdraw the US military support with which Volodymyr Zelensky’s government has been fending off a second Putin invasion of Ukraine. (The first invasion, lest we forget, took place in 2014. It ended with the annexation of Crimea and a purge of the last fragments of the Muslim Tatar community to have survived the Soviet genocide of 1944. These are acts of anti-Muslim persecution about which Putin’s great allies Iran, and their apologists in the West, seem oddly silent.)
This latest crisis comes 1,000 days after Putin, fluent in the language of post-colonial nostalgia, sent his latest army into Ukraine and justified it with a series of grand edicts about the Russian imperial destiny.
Unlike the Taliban, Putinism is not seeking to establish a slave society for women in the territories it conquers. Its motivating impulse is a vision of Russian supremacism. The implementation of that vision, however, is every bit as totalitarian and cruel.
When it invades Ukrainian territory, it kidnaps children and deports them to Russia to be raised without a memory of their homeland. Backed by the UN and the ICC, Ukrainian authorities have released the names of more than 19,000 such children, now forcibly adopted within Russia. If Trump forces Ukraine into a “peace deal” that does not involve the return of every one of these children, he will be complicit.
Sexual violence, too, is at the heart of how Russia imposes its supremacy on subject areas of Ukraine. During the late spring period of 2022, when Ukraine fought back against early Russian landgrabs in the Kyiv region, they routinely retook land only to find that local families had been left devastated by the Russian army’s practice of raping Ukrainian women in front of their children to ensure compliance. (The British ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, referred to this practice as “part of Russia’s arsenal” in April 2022.)
Throughout the conflict, Guardian journalist Emma Graham-Harrison has consistently documented the “systemic” sexual torture of Ukrainian men held in Russian detention centres, usually by other men. The victims of this practise are male, but the motivation remains macho and misogynistic: to the fascist mind, there is no greater humiliation of men from an inferior racial group than to be treated as women. Male Ukrainian victims, of course, suffer doubly from stigma and from lack of support in an aid system which primarily provides resources to female victims of sexual violence.
No wonder then that France and Britain have been rushing to provide further military aid to Ukraine, pushing for the use of Storm Shadow systems in these last few desperate days before Putin’s preferred candidate returns to America’s White House. No wonder, too, that Biden has finally granted permission for the use of America’s Army Tactical Missile System to strike targets within Russian soil – like every Biden decision, too little, too late.
ATACMS, as they are known, are thought to have struck the Bryansk region today. But in reality, Biden’s prevarications mean that this is neither as effective nor as provocative an escalation as doveish observers may pretend. It is widely believed that Russia pulled most of its major assets deeper into Russia and out of range of ATACMS strikes several months ago.
Meanwhile, Putin has responded to the latest sabre-rattling by clearing his throat and publishing new Russian guidelines that grant him the right to respond with nuclear weapons to any attack from a non-nuclear state “with the participation or support of a nuclear state”.
Yet if Putin wanted to nuke Ukraine, he would do so, not publish a list of legalistic pronouncements threatening that he might reserve the right to do so. As the Kyiv-based security analyst Jimmy Rushton pointed out this week, from an internal Russian perspective the firing of US weapons at the Bryansk region doesn’t constitute a change in the legal status of the war.
Russia firmly asserts its right to hold onto the Crimean region as inalienable Russian territory – yet Ukraine has been firing US-made weapons here for months. It has not responded with a nuclear response to this invasion of “Russian” territory. To claim that an attack on the Bryansk would constitute an escalation would be to accept that it is an occupier in Crimea, not a sovereign state.
The latest round of hostilities are not, therefore, a reckless escalation but a weak and final flick of the dice by a group of Western leaders fatally undermined by America’s populist turmoil. Soon, Trump will force Zelensky back to peace talks with the Russian dictator known to have attempted his own assassination.
Yet by cleaving as hard as possible to our own commitments to Ukraine, Keir Starmer has a chance to show what the British contribution to a world without American leadership can look like.
That will inevitably involve close co-operation with France and the EU. Its victories will be small and piecemeal, constrained by the realities of a life as a second-tier power. But the alternative is total complaisance in a world of illiberal strongmen. America may let Ukraine down, as it let Afghanistan down. This time, Britain should not be complicit.
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