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Soldiers raise the flag: After 20 years, the US and its allies are withdrawing from Afghanistan
Photo: AP
America has made a decision: after 20 years, the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan, together with the allies who followed them there after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
What remains is a country that has not been completely controlled by any single authority for decades and that is now again facing conflicts between rival centers of power.
At the moment it is the radical Islamic Taliban who are recapturing province after province, sometimes in bloody skirmishes, sometimes without a fight, by reactivating networks that they have established in recent years.
The withdrawal of US troops is not only a turning point for Afghanistan itself, it could also shift the geopolitical weights in the region.
The country, almost twice the size of Germany, has six direct neighbors and another indirect country with Russia, which pursue their own interests in the Hindu Kush.
Similar to the withdrawal of the Soviet Army in 1989, the withdrawal of the Western coalition has created a vacuum that other regional powers could fill.
The situation is reminiscent of the US troop withdrawal from Iraq, which lasted from 2007 to 2011.
At that time it was primarily Iran that expanded its political influence, and shortly afterwards the militant movement of the "Islamic State" (IS), which brought large parts of the country under their control - with dramatic consequences far beyond Iraq.
It is still too early to predict in detail the consequences of the western withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But the motives that drive Afghanistan's neighbors can be described.
So who could be winners and losers?
An overview:
Iran
In principle, Iran's government welcomes the withdrawal of Western troops from its neighborhood.
As in Iraq ten years ago, it is a value in itself for Tehran that its archenemy, the USA, continues to withdraw from the region.
But unlike with the predominantly Shiite Iraq, Tehran has always struggled with the predominantly Sunni Afghanistan, especially with the Taliban.
Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif warned in April that if they fill the vacuum left by Western troops, it is “a recipe for a new war in Afghanistan”.
The states of the region could not bear any further burden.
Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands, according to the government even millions, have fled to Iran.
The leadership has not yet agreed on whether the withdrawal of the West has more advantages or disadvantages for Iran.
Iran's services, including the Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran), have been in contact with individual Taliban factions for years, especially in western Afghanistan.
They seem to be building on reducing the influence of even more radical groups in Afghanistan.
Another camp, like the conservative daily »Jomhouri Eslami«, warns in principle against the »Taliban terrorists« on the other side of the border.
Pakistan
Pakistan has significantly better relations with the Taliban than Iran - and traditionally poor ones with the Afghan government. Kabul, for example, has not come to terms with the so-called Durand Line, which was drawn between the British Empire and the Emirate of Afghanistan at the end of the 19th century and which today forms the border with Pakistan. Afghanistan will "never recognize" this border, said then President Hamid Karzai in 2017.
At first glance, the weakening of the Afghan government and the rise in power of the Taliban after the withdrawal of US troops play into Islamabad's hands. But the Taliban are a difficult and by no means docile partner even for Pakistan. The stronger they get, the less influence Pakistan will have over them. Islamabad's support for other radical groups also weighs on its relationship with the US and Pakistan's rival India.
Nevertheless, due to its geographically and historically close ties to its neighboring country, Pakistan is likely to have a strong influence on its future fate.
To protect its own interests, however, Islamabad is faced with a balancing act: Pakistan wants the Taliban to be in power, but not for them to dominate Afghanistan.
At the same time, the government in Kabul should not be too strong, but neither should it be so weak that another long civil war breaks out.
China
Critics in Washington warn that China will be one of the beneficiaries of the US troop withdrawal.
Beijing is just waiting to use the leeway America is giving up.
In fact, like Iran, China is pleased that America and its allies are leaving without a win after 20 years.
And it's also true that Beijing has plans to include Afghanistan in its global Silk Road initiative - with energy and trade corridors, mining and transportation projects.
But the glee with which some US commentators see China as the next empire to fail in the "empire cemetery" is likely to be premature.
Instead of increasing its presence in Afghanistan (as China did in Iraq after the US withdrawal), Beijing flew 210 Chinese nationals last week.
Many Chinese workers have already left the country in the past few months.
For China, Afghanistan is currently less of an investment destination than a security problem - in the country itself, and in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, where China is connected to Afghanistan by an almost 80-kilometer-long border.
Beijing fears that the conflicts it sees coming in Afghanistan could spill over into Chinese territory.
The Muslim Uyghur minority, oppressed by Beijing, lives in Xinjiang.
China claims Uighur militants used the border to smuggle arms and held training camps in Afghanistan.
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan - and Russia
The governments in Afghanistan's northern neighbors are also worried about this.
Turkmenistan reported fighting on the border at the beginning of July, Uzbekistan set up a tent camp near the city of Termez "for unexpected events" - as did Tajikistan, where more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers have already found refuge from the advancing Taliban.
Taliban representatives in Moscow vowed that they would not take their conflicts abroad: "Our territory will never be used against neighboring or friendly countries." But neither Russia nor the three other former Soviet republics, which are victims of Afghanistan, seem to trust these promises History connects: The invasion of the country, which began in 1979 and ended ten years later, made a decisive contribution to the decline of the Soviet Union.
In early August, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan will hold joint military exercises to simulate, according to a Russian lieutenant general, "the eviction of banned armed gangs that have invaded the territory of an allied state." The setting is a training area north of the Afghan-Tajik border, not far from Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, where German units were stationed until a few weeks ago.
As obviously the withdrawal of the West extends the scope of the neighboring states in Afghanistan, they are still hesitantly considering their options. For most of them, security concerns outweigh the political and economic plans they may harbor in the long term. There are still no winners or losers in sight. They are all waiting to see how the situation in the interior of the country develops - this is also evidence of how little the West has changed in Afghanistan over the past 20 years.