The experience in Afghanistan teaches us that the West should only intervene militarily when its own interests are at stake and when there is no alternative, according to Professor Sven Biscop of Egmont Institute, the think-tank associated with the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he serves as Director of “Europe in the World”. He also teaches at the University of Ghent, while he has also been awarded the ‘Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria’ due to his continued support for training and educational activities related to the Common Security and Defence Policy of the EU.
Hereunder, he is interviewed by Bart Beirlant, the EU correspondent of Belgian daily De Standaard.
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After the elimination of al-Qaeda, the US and its NATO allies really had nothing lost any more in Afghanistan. Now that the U.S. has drawn a line under that “strategic distraction” it is back in a stronger geostrategic position. With the Taliban, Russia and China must be starting to worry about the possible spillover of instability. This is the counterintuitive conclusion drawn in a new policy paper by Sven Biscop.
Sven Biscop: ‘The US has lost in Afghanistan just as it has lost in Vietnam. It is a terrible loss of face. (…) But there wasn’t much at stake in Afghanistan per se, once al-Qaeda was eliminated. Then, we really had nothing lost there anymore, in terms of our own self-interest. The U.S. should have been gone from there for a much longer time. Everyone has forgotten that the Europeans were already pushing within NATO from 2006-2007 on to get out of Afghanistan, but no one dared to make a fist. Everyone stayed as long as the Americans stayed. That’s the criminal thing: they kept on sending and sacrificing soldiers for fourteen years.’
Bart Beirlant: The big lesson for you is that one should only intervene militarily if one’s own interests are at stake and if there are no other options.
Sven Biscop: ‘This goes against the idea of NATO countries that we should tackle humanitarian crises or serious human rights violations all over the world. Then, we are the only ones who think that way. It is an idea that has always been applied selectively. However, often this causes more problems than it solves. It is much wiser to develop a powerful military as a deterrent and then to deploy it as little as possible. It is better to only intervene when one’s own interests are directly at stake.’
‘Then, apparently, we are afraid to say that we’re intervening somewhere out of self-interest. We’re always making some kind of a story out of it: “we are here for democracy and human rights”. However, when is a state sufficiently democratic so we can leave it behind? Every war becomes infinite when you say you are fighting it to create an ideal democracy. It is therefore better to aim for stability.’
Bart Beirlant: Then it is often difficult to determine at a given juncture where one’s own interests lie. At the time of Vietnam, people in Washington were convinced of the Communist domino theory, which later turned out to be an aberration.
Sven Biscop: ‘No European country joined the U.S. at that time. It is safer to employ the principle: “We do not intervene, and only if it is in our own self-interest, we can consider it”. If you intervene, you always cause second and third order effects that are very difficult to predict. Look at Libya: there were the refugee crisis, the crisis in Mali and indirectly even the war in Syria that were affected by it. If we had done nothing in Libya, what would have happened?’
Bart Beirlant: ‘Then we would have seen absolute atrocities among Libyans.
Sven Biscop: ‘And Gaddafi would still have been in the saddle. But when it comes to our interests, these would not have been affected, I think.’
Bart Beirlant: Let’s apply your lesson to the Sahel. France has been running an anti-terrorist operation there since 2014, the EU is training soldiers there, and in 2020 the Takuba task force was created, whereby EU countries (including Belgium) are willing to provide special forces as a matter of principle. Are our interests there so much at stake that we need to intervene militarily?
Sven Biscop: ‘If things go wrong in the Sahel and if jihadists take over a country, the risk of direct security problems for us is much greater than if the Taliban take over Afghanistan: if they no longer get involved in foreign adventures, it makes little difference to our security. Nor will we send 100,000 soldiers to the Sahel. It wouldn’t work either. A second difference is that the countries in the Sahel want foreign military aid. If we don’t grant it, they will look elsewhere: to Russia, for example, which is already in Libya and the Central African Republic. For Moscow, that’s interesting, if only to be able to create disturbance. China is also interested in military partnerships. This is back to competition between superpowers.’
Bart Beirlant: There are also parallels with Afghanistan: the EU is training the local armies, without much success , according to the French. The legitimacy of governments in the Sahel is very low. The lives of the population are not improving, and the jihadists have more time than we do. Isn’t there a good chance that everything will collapse there as well, as soon as we decide to withdraw militarily?
Sven Biscop: ‘That risk exists, especially in Mali. The military coup there shows that we have far too little influence on policy and on the strategy of both the army command and the government. A positive thing however is that the majority of the population in southern Mali is against those jihadist groups in the north. Then Mali remains a very weak state, despite our better strategy there. But we’re not really succeeding yet in implementing it.’
Bart Beirlant: Isn’t there a risk of getting bogged down there?
Sven Biscop: ‘There is already a bit of that. We feel that we can’t leave. But we also don’t really know how to proceed.’
Bart Beirlant: So is it still in our interest to have a military presence there?
Sven Biscop: ‘For the Sahel, that trade-off is not obvious. The risk of a direct spillover is much greater for us [there], because jihadist groups that are also internationally branched are involved, because it is closer and because there is trafficking of weapons, drugs and people going on. However, it is also not an existential risk. That is why it is important to [only] have a minimum military presence there.’
This interview was originally published in Dutch by Belgian newspaper De Standaard. It has been translated and reproduced with the kind permission of the newspaper.
