Graham Fuller, the former CIA Station Chief in Afghanistan and a 27-year veteran of the CIA and the State Department, published a strongly worded article on Aug. 16 in Responsible Statecraft, “America Leaves Afghanistan, and the Regional Politics Take Over,” regarding the situation in Afghanistan, subtitled: “There will likely be a return to a much more historically normal state of global affairs in which multiple players are engaged.” He is contemptuous of the “American neocons and liberal interventionists” who got us in the regime- change wars of the past decades, and points positively to China’s Belt and Road as an avenue for rebuilding Afghanistan and bringing peace to the greater region.
Fuller writes: “The neo-imperialist neoconservatives all argue that the American departure and the subsequent collapse of the Kabul government are deeply destructive to American `credibility’ as a superpower in the world. The underlying ideology of this view is of course the cherished concept that the United States must serve as global policeman everywhere and that a failure to do so is a sign of weakness and decline.”
He may have added that British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said essentially the same thing today, that the pull-out of Afghanistan shows a lack of “resolve” which ”our adversaries like Russia find encouraging.”
