Afghanistan Chess: Pivot to China
Biden is old, but he is wise to the way world power chess is played.
The U.S. is moving a Rook and a Bishop from one side of the board to the other. Smart. The U.S. got stronger. China got weaker.
Today's post is a progress report on the game.
The U.S. pullout from Afghanistan helps us strategically. Afghanistan is far away. Any country could house people who plot to blow up our federal buildings and try to overthrow our democracy; Timothy McVey in Oklahoma City and the January 6 insurrection in D.C. prove that. We put Afghanistan onto central stage by deciding that it was a criminal state that harbored the 9-11 terrorists, but we could have identified other countries to target--and did. Iraq. The 9-11 terrorists were Saudis and they harbor and fund Islamic fundamentalist terror. But they have oil. We are semi-aligned with them in opposition to Iran. Our interests in the Middle East are oil and Israel. We can and do live with Muslim extremism.
The U.S. shows we support our allies. We fought for 20 years, lost soldiers, and spent a trillion dollars in an effort long understood to have been hopeless and counter-productive. We demonstrated that we will persist for two decades against all reason and self interest.
China-- not the U.S.--was the big beneficiary of our war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan borders the Xinjiang province of China, home to the Uyghurs, the Turkic ethnic group of Muslim faith. China is struggling and failing to integrate them into their imagined multi-ethnic harmony of Chinese diversity. China has resorted to Plan B: Internal surveillance, religious persecution, prison, family separation, forced abortions, and "re-education." The U.S. kept the Taliban--also Turkic people of Muslim faith--busy fighting us. Our leaving means a chaotic Islamic state on the border adjacent to Xinjiang. That is less than ideal for us but it is a genuine danger for China.
The Afghanistan move is really about Taiwan. China is an export power whose ports are surrounded by an island chain from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The straits between them are narrow and the U.S. Navy patrols the area. China is vulnerable in the event of serious conflict. Taiwan is officially part of China but in fact shore batteries protect Taiwan from China. It is theirs, but not theirs.
Taiwan is also a rebuke and a contradiction of the central Chinese Communist Party deal with its people, that the CCP is the source of their new prosperity. Taiwan is more prosperous and did it with economic and political freedom. China would invade if they could do it easily, but cannot. Taiwan is well defended, the U.S. Navy is there, and amphibious warfare needs staging of a landing force, and secrecy is impossible in a world of satellites.
So now we have a chess game of signals. We have freed ourselves up. The U.S. will assure Taiwan that we are committed to the South China Sea by sailing ships there. Taiwan will be grateful. China will understand it to be a provocation. They will respond by selling fighter jets to North Korea or something similar. We will avoid a direct confrontation because our populations are hostage to each others' nuclear bombs. And besides, we are trading partners.
The chess game only makes sense as a way for world powers to position and re-position themselves while avoiding direct war. No one really wants a war.