The End of an Era

OPINION The End of an Era: The U.S., Afghanistan, and the Death of the American Academy

“The virtues [empires] claim to uphold and defend, usually in the name of their superior civilization, are a mask for pillage, the exploitation of cheap labor, indiscriminate violence and state terror.” — Chris Hedges (https:// scheerpost.com/2021/08/30/hedges-the-empire-does-not-forgive)

BY LUKE PETERSON

August 2021 has become a noteworthy month in the annals of U.S. foreign policy — a macabre and shameful episode marking the unceremonious end of its longest war. After two decades of violence, bloodshed and unfulfilled promises, the last American soldiers departed Afghanistan, finally terminating a military occupation so lengthy and nebulous as to be appropriately dubbed the “forever war.” An entire generation of Americans and Afghans grew up with this de facto reality, which was just as reliable as death and taxes. As of August of 2021, however, all of that changed.

The Biden administration’s decision to complete what had been attempted in fits and starts by the Obama and Trump administrations shocked, maddened and dismayed a great many. Some railed against Biden for turning his back on the military (a Republican initiative to impeach him over this decision arrived in Congress stillborn). Another group approved but criticized the withdrawal’s chaotic nature and the unspeakable number of casualties among allies and activists who have been or will be lost in its

wake. A smaller cadre of critics feared the humanitarian costs of a newly triumphant Taliban gaining ground and material as quickly as the U.S. military and the Afghan National Army could surrender it.

Another regularly blamed scapegoat for this defeat is Pakistan, which has lost more than 70,000 civilians and suffered $150 billion in related damages due to American and various Afghanistan-based groups. However, addressing the Sept. 14 Senate devastation in Afghanistan have been mirrored on the domestic front by a no less total (though undeniably less bloody) assault on the parameters of fact, objective truth and professional expertise.

Clearly, the latter begets the former. The U.S./Global North economy’s neoliberal overseers have cored out the academic profession, thereby making the comfortable pursuit of an intellectual expertise the purview of a tiny elite of sheltered Ivory Tower dwellers. Those

AFGHANISTAN IS A CRITICAL EXAMPLE OF WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO A LATE-STAGE EMPIRE WHEN INTELLECTUAL CAREERS BECOME THE PURVIEW OF EFFETE ELITES, AND WHEN THE REAL STUDENT ENGAGEMENT THAT COMES WITH TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION NO LONGER EXISTS AS A VIABLE PROFESSION WITH A SECURE ECONOMIC FUTURE FOR QUALIFIED PROFESSIONALS.

Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the withdrawal, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) pointed out that it was in Pakistan’s interest to “prevent chaos and civil war” in its neighborhood. He then added that it was the Trump administration, and not Pakistan, that had enabled the Taliban’s takeover. After all, that administration had released three top Taliban commanders to push the peace process forward.

THE ACADEMIC BOONDOGGLE In truth these critics, while frustrated and shamed by yet another American military boondoggle, should not be at all surprised by this most recent misadventure’s outcome. Indeed, this precise unprepared-for retreat was all but assured from the moment America’s imperial boots stepped on Afghanistan’s equally famous empire-killing ground. Even casual students examining the history of empire predicted this disastrous outcome and warned us of its cataclysmic potential early in the U.S. occupation.

Unfortunately, the American body politic has proven itself incapable of learning from history and, as such, incapable of avoiding the chaos and destruction of imperial overreach. Indeed, the last 20 years of financial waste, civilian destruction and countrywide fatted few make up only about one-fourth of teaching professionals in higher education in the U.S. today; the remaining three-fourths are on short-term contracts that terminate during the summer and provide no guarantee of future employment. In addition, most of them provide no medical insurance, retirement benefits or regular inflation-related rates of pay increase despite the instructor in question’s level of seniority.

In short, successful social scientists in academia are isolated from the rest of the world, forced to become grant-chasing archive dwellers authoring obscure and uncontroversial articles, yearning to receive notice from the most prestigious journals and the institutions that publish them. As such, it’s no longer possible to be a working-class academic who is just as steeped in the real and unfolding political world as he or she is in academic theory and intellectual trends. Three-fourths of us live paycheck to paycheck, hoping against hope for an eventual escape from academic precarity. The rest grow wealthy in the professional and intellectual space carved out for them by the aforementioned adjunct professors, building career plaudits and academic credits while being careful to avoid antagonizing the halls of institutional, state or imperial power.

Afghanistan is a critical example of what can happen to a late-stage empire when intellectual careers become the purview of effete elites, and when the real student engagement that comes with teaching in higher education no longer exists as a viable profession with a secure economic future for qualified professionals. A weakened, cowed and increasingly unstable American intelligentsia leads to unchecked and unconstrained state power. The occupation of Afghanistan was an obvious pitfall that should have been avoided at all costs by the American imperium. A country with a largely rural population characterized by largely unpredictable levels of devotion to a national flag, not to mention one with poor infrastructure, a heavy dependence on foreign aid and a history of resisting foreign military occupation, was always a doomsday scenario for the American military.

Neither the Soviets nor the British, even at the height of their military prowess, managed to conquer Afghanistan for an extended period. Even the mighty Alexander the Great, often cited as “one of history’s greatest military minds,” failed to do so. The lessons of history were plain to see, and had our country managed to avoid the death knell for the most important profession offering critical, public evaluation of U.S. foreign policy over the last 30+ years, these blatant mistakes in policy, military commitment and

overseas expenditure may well have been mitigated, if not avoided.

Instead, decades of a deliberate power shift within academia have robbed working-class professors of all but a pittance — most adjuncts make around $2,500 per class per semester in the U.S. — and have robbed public discourse of the kind of critical mass that comes with economic and professional stability among the most read and educated members of any population. We have whittled away academia as a viable career path for all but a few highly qualified individuals, and we long ago began to judge education’s value by how much the graduating student can earn in the free market. Thus, wages now trump wisdom, and critical thought takes a distant second place to cash and credit.

We no longer teach or value critical thought, media literacy, theory or introspective history. We denounce critical race theory, epidemiology and anthropogenic climate change. We openly mock the existence of an objective truth as we lambaste science, training and expertise as partisan parlor tricks designed to produce a liberal bias among the educated classes. These fractures in our collective intellectual development, in combination with our military Keynesianism (the endless pumping of public money into the military) have led us to ignore history and to demonize the Other both at home and abroad.

AND THE RESULT IS …? A creeping process of American imperial overreach and a gathering and justified global anti-Americanism are now realities. Seen through this prism, Afghanistan may not represent the end of the failed American imperial experiment, but may only be the beginning of its predictable and violent demise.

Today, the U.S. is utterly bound to its bloody historical legacy even as it maintains an incredibly destructive presence around the globe. Without a resurgence in the academy and the intellectual tradition it claims to uphold, we can expect more destructive, dead-end military operations in the decades to come. That academic resurgence and a renewed value being placed on critical thought will have to come with a sweeping change in our economic priorities, along with an end to our current bellicosity and learning how to function as a peaceable society. As it is, the U.S. is fully committed to enriching the few in the guise of serving the many. In short, it is indubitably chained to its own ceaseless folly.

These contingent economic parameters — the quintessential neoliberal ideal — drive this country’s economy, impoverishes its most educated people and denudes the weight and power of critical, political discourse. Popular media and the pervasive culture instruct us to idolize those human dragons whose hordes of gold now outstrip the resources of countries with populations in the millions, and inform us that we should be uncritical, deferential and completely unquestioning supporters of the warrior caste that bestrides the globe to sustain and support this iniquitous system.

The U.S. continues to run headlong into these existential pitfalls because the few critical voices that still try to make themselves heard are so drowned out by the mainstream’s chatter that they can no longer mount a “legitimate” challenge. Moreover, very few such academics possess both the historical expertise and the institutional security to challenge the architects of the 21st-first century American Empire. By stopping these trends or at least creating alternatives, we bring hope to future generations — American, Afghani, Iraqi, and Palestinian alike. Arrest them not, and we remain passive bystanders scrambling for scraps, witnesses to our future’s demise. ih

Luke Peterson, PhD (The University of Cambridge --King’s College), Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, investigates language, media and knowledge surrounding political conflict in the Middle East. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he regularly contributes to local, national and international media.