The U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan brings to an end 20 years of a misguided military operation and places squarely on the table the difference in outcomes achieved through geopolitics and through cooperative development. We never should have been in Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks were not organized by a group of 19 individuals coordinated from a cave. The hijackers drew on external support during their time in the United States, and it came not from Osama bin Laden operating in Afghanistan, but from Saudi Arabia. There was no military mission to achieve in Afghanistan.
But it served as the first in a new series of wars, based on a new paradigm of geopolitics that flouted international law and asserted a Responsibility to Protect that demanded military action to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations based on the flimsiest (and most easily faked) of pretexts.
As Helga Zepp-LaRouche writes in her Afghanistan at a Crossroads: “The strategic turbulence caused by the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, offers an excellent opportunity for a reassessment of the situation, for a correction of political direction and a new solution-oriented policy. The long tradition of geopolitical manipulation of this region … must be buried once and for all, never to be revived.”
The world is not a zero-sum “Great Game.” Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan expressed the potential for U.S.-Chinese cooperation: “The biggest challenge for the United States is not China. It is in the United States itself. Its strategy toward China must avoid forming a vicious circle of misleading and misjudgment. As long as we uphold the concept of a shared destiny for all mankind, the issues between China and the United States will not be fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable, and a path of peaceful coexistence and cooperation will be found.”
Finding the path towards cooperation requires thinking of the future, drawing us to look, as Hussein Askary expressed it on Saturday’s LaRouche Organization event, not at the mud under our feet, but towards the stars over our heads.
International cooperation on the physical infrastructural development of the broader region will bring benefits to Afghanistan and its neighbors that far surpass what could be achieved without that integration. This will require engineering. It will require technical support. And it will require stable financing. This is an opportunity to bring neighbors to the table and to draw on expertise around the world.
The how-to book has quite literally already been written—by EIR and the Schiller Institute—in the form of a program for trans-national infrastructure and large-scale industrialization and agricultural technology deployment.
“For all these reasons,” Zepp-LaRouche writes, “the future development of Afghanistan represents a fork in the road for all mankind. At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of the opportunity that lies in the application of the Cusan principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites…. In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!”
It is only by abandoning geopolitics and adopting domestic policies to launch an economic renaissance and crush the power of finance, that the United States could qualify itself to play a useful role in the world. America’s urgently needed missions will be the subject of an upcoming pamphlet from The LaRouche Organization.
The work of the greatest recent American thinker on the issue of development—Lyndon LaRouche—is the topic of a LaRouche Legacy Foundation August 14 online seminar, on the occasion of “The 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971.”