The stunning end to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with an unambiguous defeat has had little consequences in American domestic politics. To be sure, the final rout may have contributed to President Biden’s decline in public opinion polls, but there are plenty of other reasons for that. The end of the Afghanistan War, surely a matter of historical import, just disappeared into the news cycle. After the lives lost, the resources wasted, and the ideals betrayed, one might expect the political class to pay attention and to demand accountability. Yet no one seems to notice.
Such an accounting could take the form, for example, of congressional hearings—but instead Congress prefers to rehash the sad political circus of the January 6 riot. It has no time for the two decades in Afghanistan, telling evidence of our legislators’ priorities. Instead of congressional hearings, a special commission might be convened, serious and bipartisan, such as the one that followed on 9/11. No one is taking this road either. Enormous expenditure of resources and a defeat clearer even than the exit from Vietnam, and Washington doesn’t care. The impassioned call by Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller has not been heeded; on the contrary, he was punished for making the suggestion. It is as if the war were already well on the way to being forgotten by an amnesiac political culture at large. At least the veterans, their families, and the families of soldiers who lost their lives will remember.
The congressional avoidance is the most salient piece of evidence of a general cultural repression that deserves closer scrutiny. It involves more than the standard marginality of foreign policy for the domestic public. Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat has addressed the problem in terms of a lack of patience, a mindset that helps us understand the eagerness to end the so-called endless war. But there is another, perhaps deeper connection between the Afghanistan defeat and contemporary American politics. The impatience with the duration of the commitment in Afghanistan and the perplexed relationship to the distinct features of its culture are indicators of aspects of contradictions in American society and in Western modernity more broadly. Two commentaries by French geographical thinkers, Fabrice Balanche and Christophe Guilluy, have been translated and juxtaposed on this site. Taken together, their focus on space and culture sheds important light on these matters.
Balanche proceeds from the material priority of the geographical terrain in Afghanistan, a country defined by its steep mountains and valleys that have produced a society of compartmentalized ethnicities and tribes, while also posing genuine physical challenges to any invading force. It is this physical and existential reality of Afghanistan that, he argues, was largely ignored by American and Western military planners, as well as by the Soviet occupation effort before them. The aspiration for any homogenizing polity of equal rights, the core ideal of modernity, turned out to be a bad fit for the conservatism and regionalism of the Afghan condition. One might wish that it would be otherwise; one might wish that that the effort to establish a regime of democracy and liberty had succeeded. That emancipation project is what the mission in Afghanistan grew into, after it expanded by mission creep beyond the initial goal to defeat al-Qaeda. The ideals of that modernization and democratization are hard to dismiss. They evidently were not achieved.
Balanche attributes this defeat to a structural ignorance on the part of the planners, who remained separated from the material and cultural reality of the place. They had little appreciation for the facts of life on the ground, for the difficulties of the terrain and the recalcitrance of the culture. Instead they engaged in an abstract projection of Western ideals onto a very foreign arena, both physically and culturally. Given their training and mindset, the planners operate—so Balanche argues—with the assumption of a global uniformity of space, devoid of particularity, and they therefore do not take into account the radically heterogeneous conditions of the distinct situation in which they hope to operate. For Balanche this is not only a problem with regard to the West’s inability to understand Afghanistan, but one that is symptomatic of the Western approach to a much wider swath of the Middle East and Central Asia, where the lifeworlds of the population are rooted in diversities that the universalism of modernity discounts. Instead that modernizing perspective treats local culture exclusively as an obstacle to be excised in order to establish a universal regime of liberalism, regardless of the local will.
Guilluy in contrast takes us to one of the paradigmatic sites of contemporary modernity, analyzing socio-economic transformations in France and their geographic expression. His approach overlaps with Balanche’s account in bringing a spatial-geographic perspective to bear. He describes the metropolitan centers, foremost among them Paris of course, but the other major cities as well, as real estate from which the middle and working classes have largely been expelled, a long-term process of systematic gentrification. After the exile of the popular classes, the inhabitants who remain are the well-salaried bourgeoisie, some slightly to the left, some to the right, in either case well off. These are, for Guilluy, the core base of the political support for Emmanuel Macron. Nearby but safely separated from them live the large populations of immigrants who find their livelihoods in service positions for the wealthy. The traditional French middle and working classes have had to migrate to the peripheries of the country, outside of the French metropoles but also away from those regions that the wealthy have selected for their second homes, especially along the coast. An extensive deracination has taken place. This displacement fed into the populist revolt of the Yellow Vest movement and continues to motivate the far-right electorate. It is often the traditional working class or its children that has migrated from the left to the right, as globalization pushed employment opportunities overseas. They voted for Le Pen in 2017, and Guilluy predicts that they will vote similarly in 2022, as we still await the selection of candidates.
Against this background, Guilluy details the geographical tension between metropolitan center and “the French periphery.” To be precise, for Guilluy it is not only genuine location that counts, i.e., measurable distance from a metropolitan center, but rather the distance from integration into the neoliberal model of economic globalization, which has its winners and its losers. And the winners in globalization cannot help but rub salt in the wounds of the losers, declaring them deplorable.
Balanche and Guilluy approach two very different contexts, and there are important differences in their methodologies, but they agree in their central account of a binary structure of space—the showcase city of Kabul versus the deep Afghanistan valleys, the opulence of the center of Paris in contrast to the degraded periphery with its decaying regions. This is not only a matter of parallel bifurcations; these are genealogically the same bifurcation, to the extent that the abstract universalism that the West attempted to impose on Afghanistan is cut from the same cloth as the liberal globalism of the metropolitan economic model that Guilluy associates with Macronism. (To be sure, the features of cultural conservatism associated with the French periphery are hardly identical to the conservatism of the Afghan countryside, although both stand in important proximity to the category of tradition: the spatial divide maps onto the difference between abstraction and particularity, or between progress and tradition.)
The similarity of these parallel analyses points us back to our initial question: the connection between the disinterest in the Afghanistan defeat and the politics of contemporary American society. The familiar opposition of the American coasts and “flyover country” is effectively identical to Guilluy’s contrast of cities and periphery in France. Metropolitan universalism is based on an abstract liberalism that is impervious to the lived experience of a country’s population, held in disdain because it “clings” to traditions, or at least is treated as if it does. Power, wealth, and what is valued as intelligence are concentrated in enclaves, and what lies beyond is left to decay. The same abstraction that, according to Balanche, could not grasp the geographical particularity of Afghanistan recurs in the metropolitan disdain of the domestic hinterland. This is where the connection to the American situation becomes clear. The political choice to forget Afghanistan is the same as the disregard for the expanses between the coasts. The politics that holds deplorables in contempt is the same politics that does not want to examine its own culpability in the war. This refusal to face up to the war and its lessons will further embitter the domestic conflict between liberalism of the metropoles and the populism of the periphery.
