2021 was a year when ideology trumped morality. Will this year be any different? To be fair, it is difficult to tell when there are still 363 days to go before we can look back in anger or joy. But Afghanistan of a very early 2022 tells us it will be a look back in anger.
We can say the same thing for Yemen, but that must be a Leader for another time. European powers often blame the United States for the sudden withdrawal of American troops from Kabul. We say, about time. Isn't a 20-year forced occupation of an independent country enough notice for withdrawal?
Not only that. The US and European nations had no legal or moral basis to invade an independent country to "impose Western liberal values overnight", as former British prime minister Gordon Brown wrote in The Times on Dec 29.
What's worse, the West just left Kabul without paying for the 20 years of devastation it has visited on Afghanistan and its people. The West can quarrel about whether the Taliban are good for Afghanistan or not. But that quarrel is best settled by the Afghans. Not by the Americans or Europeans. Certainly not by American or European bullets.
If no country in the world had taught the US and Europe to keep their ideological values to themselves before, Afghanistan has now. Brown is right. The West has an obligation to help the Afghans as The Guardian quotes him as talking to BBC Radio 4. In the former prime minister's own reckoning, half of Afghanistan's population are facing extreme poverty, including one million children at risk of starving to death.
If the Europeans aren't helping, the Americans are worse. According to David Hearst of the Middle East Eye, a regional news portal, much of the Afghan central bank's US$10 billion in assets is parked overseas, including US$1.3 billion in gold reserves in New York. It appears that the US is using the money as leverage to pressure the Taliban to adopt Western values.
If not by bullets at least by bullion, the US seems to think. It is okay for the European Union and the US to have dreams, but let them be the right ones. To impose Western liberal values by bullets or bullion isn't the right one.
Rules-based international order isn't made of this. Do not get us wrong. We aren't against the West having its own liberal values. By all means have them, and have them within the West's borders. But there, too, be just. Do not go othering. If the West can't be inclusive at home, we see no reason how it could be so outside its home.
True, people are angry at the West. And for a good reason,too. For far too long the West has imposed its worldview on others. The West must know its culture isn't the only one on Earth. Remember, there are eight billion people of varying faiths and hues on this blessed planet of ours.
The West's toolkit of policies must accommodate other worldviews. Otherwise, what are dreams for the West will be nightmares for the rest. And as Brown implies in his op-ed piece in The Times, the nightmares of the rest will come to haunt the West. And that will be reason enough to look back in anger.
