US interest in allying with terrorist groups rather than cooperating with European allies

BY: Alfonso Gomez Delacroz

PEJOURNAL – The defeat in Afghanistan and the catastrophic retreat after 20 years of spending in this country show the irreparable recklessness in US foreign policy today. The first characteristic that comes to mind from the confusion is the paradigm shift in American foreign policy. A fundamental turnaround that does not endorse the claims of US pioneering in the international system and the new world order declared by this country, or at least Washington’s efforts to do so.

In the meantime, however, the problem is that after World War II, the United States in particular sought to lead the world, claiming to unite in a unipolar order with the fall of the Soviet Union, to instill and implement its ideals in the world system, and ultimately a superpower. . This order was based not entirely on the US military, but rather on the credibility of the civil society that created American values. Credit that can be said to have been tied to the advancement of Wilson’s principles before he left Afghanistan. But Afghanistan became a nightmare that engulfed all the ideals of the liberal democratic order and hegemony of the United States.

Wilson, in his Fourteen Principles of 1918, first and foremost upheld the right to self-determination, to support the subsequent expansion of democracy, and to support the international mechanism for resolving disputes diplomatically through multilateralism through international organizations and mechanisms. He emphasized the need to protect the collective security system, to support multilateralism, to support open and public diplomacy, to oppose covert diplomacy and covert agreements, and to uphold maritime freedom and free international routes.

Although these principles themselves have been controversial, as historian John Huff has argued, they have also led to humanitarian intervention against their purpose, which has been a source of tension, conflict, and misinterpretation of American foreign and domestic policy.

Wilson spoke of the need to respect the will of nations and the need to satisfy them. Until now, however, there has been a history of coups in Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Iran, Indonesia, and many other parts of the United States. But now something beyond these coups is underway. If these coups were justified as supporting the free world against the communists, today the situation is reversed. Support for a political coup against the Morsi government in Egypt, support for Saudi Arabia and unprecedented arms deals, and support for many other dictatorships around the world show that the United States is no longer in its best interests as Wilson thought. It seeks the right to self-determination of nations, but also in war and agreement with even Salafi and Wahhabi medieval extremist groups.

It may now be said that the current American policy is based more on Wilsonianism than on its own; It is centered on Trumpism, which has infiltrated the American political structure. Usually, political currents and ideological currents go beyond individuals. In other words, just as Wilson left behind a tradition after his death, the tradition of Trumpism has now prevailed with his unexpected votes in the 2020 presidential election. Thus, in the Pentagon-Congress-White House triangle, what has resulted from the aggregation of votes and the dominant thinking in US foreign policy is the spirit of Trumpism that has dissolved within the Biden administration.

The case of US negotiations with the Taliban and the surrender of Afghanistan to the fossilized medieval group after 20 years of costly presence in that country is instructive. For example, the talks of the US representative without the presence of the representative of the central government of Afghanistan in the Doha talks are in Qatar. 9 rounds of talks without serious information from the Afghan government by Zalmay Khalilzad, US Special Representative for Afghanistan, showed that the US is currently creating an instructive innovation in international law and international conventions. According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 (VCLT) on the implementation and interpretation of treaties; The scope of application of the 1969 Vienna Convention is limited to “treaties between states”. However, Article 3 of the Convention itself provides an additional clause that the legal obligation of agreements between states and non-states should not be abolished, nor should agreements be made independently of the Convention under international law. The question here is whether the scope of the Vienna Convention includes non-state actors such as jihadist and Salafi militant groups.

If such a thing happens contrary to the Vienna Convention; Does the guarantee of implementation of the agreement with a non-governmental actor have international legitimacy and domestic acceptance? How can the Taliban in Afghanistan be justified after the group came to power and the rights of women and minorities were taken away, as well as the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani, for whom the United States owed several million dollars and now holds the post of Interior Minister? Is. Even with the renaming of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to the Islamic Emirate and the enactment of Sharia law and the resettlement of female students and women who had found their place in Afghan civil society by empowerment, how and exactly by what means can Americans oppose the other side? Adhere to the 9 rounds of the Doha Agreement. Haqqani supports senior Taliban members who are heavily influenced by al-Qaeda in a 144-page Pashto-language book entitled Military Lessons for Mujahideen to Use Suicide, Behead, and Bomb while being targeted. It is legitimate to give benefits to citizens of European and American countries.

The key issue in Afghanistan right now is not an agreement between a government with a terrorist background and an opposition group inside its own country. Rather, it is fundamentally important for Washington to decide from the outside with a militant group to seize power, even without the intervention of the central government, which emerged spontaneously in the case of Afghanistan. Also ignoring the international community, not explaining why it left Afghanistan, leaving the Taliban out of the hands of the US with heavy and semi-heavy weapons, not consulting with NATO member states that have been with the US for 20 years against terrorist groups and establishing a system of government Based on the values ​​of democracy, fighting and sacrificing as the main American partner in the Afghan war campaign during these years; But they were never consulted, they are among the mistakes that ُ put an end to the new American order in the form of Wilson’s idealism and the American-led Western liberal order.

Aren’t Biden and Trump the emergence of another Chamberlain in the world that relieved Hitler of the idea of relieving the memory of European countries? It seems that now that Wilsonianism is dead in the United States and its coffin nails have been strengthened by defeating and fleeing Afghanistan by surrendering to the Taliban, we should see more distance from international cooperation to protect the United States from such military intervention in other countries. The question now is, where else in the world will Biden, the executor of the new Trumpism, die instead of Wilsonianism, as a laboratory for his interventionist military policies?

Whether under Trump or Biden, the US government refused to accept the right of Afghans to determine their own future through a referendum, and fought behind the scenes in complete secrecy, with a nineteenth-century gesture like a paternal inheritance. He handed himself over to a militant jihadist-extremist and Salafi group that had been terrorists before surrendering and overnight became an even more important strategic partner for the United States than the Europeans and NATO.

These strategic mistakes, in turn, indicate a lack of planning in costly military interventionism and the failure of US-led strategies in the current international order, and may even necessitate no legal, multilateral, and accountable mechanism in its covert diplomacy. He does not see and even the fate and interests of Europe as a strategic ally of the United States are eaten away like a toy in the hands of American politicians (in a card game). The fundamental question here is whether Europe, in the words of an American theorist; The puppet of the United States will remain, or we can see a shift in Europe’s greater responsibility in foreign and security policy in the current context and in the aftermath of the drastic developments against the Green Continent.