After Afghanistan what's next for the US Empire?

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Whilst Biden is declaring victory the conclusion to SIGAR’s 300 page report ‘Stabilization: Lessons From The U.S. Experience In Afghanistan’ makes the incredible admission that:

Between 2001 and 2017, U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.

This failure is confirmed further by the decision of the Pentagon to stop publishing its public assessments of how much territory the Kabul government and the Taliban control. These assessments have long been seen as a key indicator of American progress in the war.

Bill Roggio, a military analyst who has challenged the Pentagon’s rose tinted assessments of the war, told the New York Times in May 2019, that the military assessments were revealing how the U.S. puppet government in Kabul was losing territory to the Taliban. Roggio told the Times that:

The district assessments highlight failure, which is contrary to the U.S. military’s desired message of success. Make no mistake, if these assessments showed the Afghan military retaking lost ground, the U.S. military would continue to publish the information.

In May 2019 the New York Times noted that a previous US commander in Afghanistan had called these assessments “the metric that’s most telling in a counterinsurgency.”

Other metrics in recent years such as the historically high levels of opium production, the 20% increase in ‘effective’ attacks by the Taliban on the Afghan army which has suffered from a horrendous casualty/desertion rate and the sharp rise in civilians casualties all testify to how the US was bogged down in an unwinnable war.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan and full steam ahead towards military confrontation with China

The United States has been the world’s hegemonic economic power since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. It has dominated global trade through the dollars use as the world’s reserve currency and been an economic powerhouse in the field of advanced technologies.

Now China has come along and upset the apple-cart by challenging American dominance of the global economy. This kind of existential struggle has been played out many times throughout history when dominant powers face competition from rising nations. The Greek historian Thucydides explained this simply, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

Over the last 500 years alone there have been 16 cases where a hegemonic power has been challenged by a rising power. In 12 cases the irreconcilable contradictions between the hegemony and challenger led to war breaking out.

The last century witnessed the titanic struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States that came desperately close to nuclear war and led to a series of highly destructive proxy wars being fought all around the planet.

The United States like so many other hegemonic empires in the past from the Romans to the British Empire have bankrupted themselves fighting wars to cling onto their position as top dog.

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The U.S. sees China as an existential long-term threat to its economic and military dominance which won’t be resolved by any limited diplomacy. The complete failure of the Alaska Summit back in March is testament to that.

The grave threat posed by China to US military dominance was recently acknowledged by Admiral Charles A Richard the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, who said:

We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China. The explosive growth and modernization of its nuclear and conventional forces can only be what I describe as breathtaking. And frankly, that word breathtaking may not be enough.

He added his concern over China’s development of modern weapons such as hypersonic missiles:

Because of these challenges our current terrestrial and space-based sensor architecture may not be sufficient to detect and track these hypersonic missiles.’’

He noted with alarm the fact that:

They have the largest Navy in the world and they have the third largest air force in the world.

Biden’s withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan is a recognition of the need for the American empire to speed up the concentration of its military forces against its Chinese rival.

This process was started by Obama in his 2014 pivot to Asia and has involved the US constructing military bases in allied nations that leave China surrounded by a huge and growing US military presence.

Back in February, the newly elected Biden ordered the Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to oversee a review of America’s global military footprint as matter of urgency. At the time Austin admitted that China was the number one priority for US defence planning. In July Austin bemoaned the lack of progress of in the pivot to Asia. According to one Pentagon official, the Defence Secretary complained that there was a gap, "between the stated prioritization of China and what we saw in a number of areas related to attention".

As the Afghan debacle begins to recede into the distance Biden will bring to bear the full might of the US military machine as its prepares itself for potential conflict with China in the 2020s.

Image from zerohedge.com