The Sins Of Empire

Context: The American Empire has been stuck in place with the recent Afghan withdrawal will give fillip to fundamentalism’s deepest impulses.

Seven sin of the Empire: The American empire has been alleged of committing seven deadly sins

1. Corruption: Internally - empire always empowers corrupt practices, the legions of lobbyists, arms dealers, hucksters; Externally - the reliance on mercenaries, the casual saturation with arms and implication in illicit trade.
• Thus, corruption ensured both that the US Treasury was drained and no state was built in Afghanistan.
2. Self-deception: From Vietnam to Afghanistan, America knew exactly what is going on. But the stakes in keeping the myth of imperial virtue and imperial power produce self-deceptions of the most extraordinary sort.
3. Morality: The rule of law doesn’t have meaning when empire itself enacts a regular lawlessness. So do a “humanitarian mission”, when it licenses an outsourcing of torture or disregard for civilian life.
4. Continual expansionism: The omniscience of empire is apt to give every local conflict global significance. But it also leads to the pre-eminence of war.
5. Hypocrisy: Some hypocrisy is inevitable in politics. But it becomes the defining feature through which the world understands imperial power. 
6. Cult of violence: There is an abiding paradox in US strategy. The creation of stable states and societies requires the pacification of violence. But there is something bizarre about modern imperial counterinsurgency strategies.
• From Iraq to Afghanistan to western Pakistan to the drug wars, the abiding legacy of this empire is saturation of societies with arms and militias;
7. Racism: It creates a hierarchy of those whose lives matter; even in its emancipatory mission it cannot get away from reinforcing claims of superiority that generate resentment.

Failed withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan:

• No positive change expected: The great powers will be new proxies who produce the same cycle of violence and civil war. Withdrawal does not signal a commitment to greater multilateralism or the rule of law. Withdrawal will not produce an honest reckoning with the self-deceptions of empire.
• Cultural essentialism: The pretext of common humanity, and universal liberation, which was the pretext of empire, has turned into the worst kind of cultural essentialism, making them incapable of liberty.
• Threat of rising fundamentalism: Fundamentalism has drawn its motivating energy, not from God, but from cultivating grievance against imperial hierarchies. The Taliban’s victory is not just a morale booster for fundamentalists everywhere.