All this to what end? All this money, time, energy, reputation, and not to put too fine a point on it, Afghan and NATO lives. Why?
To be honest, I am not sure Biden has covered himself in the glory that Dems and their apologists have claimed. Indeed, if Trump had been at the helm today, he’d be mocked, shouted at, blamed, and generally held responsible for this (some people are still doing it, saying that he started it, with ‘it’ being the withdrawal and not the whole getting into and staying in the quagmire without even the will to see the root cause and try and solve for it and thus sinking deeper and deeper into the shit, a lof of which was American to begin with, something that every President from Nixon onwards has been responsible for).
This, therefore, if anything, is a failure of the United States of America’s foreign policy, reputation, power, and of face, in every way imaginable, and no amount of posturing about good Taliban and bad Taliban, and giving excuses like letting people decide and leaving Afghanistan to its own fate, having tried their best, and various such flimsy explanations cut ice.
You went in there with a purpose, whatever that was, and I am not sure whether even the American politicians who voted for it knew it. You are leaving with not just not having achieved it, but also with having regressed, and taking the whole region down along with you. The problem is not just you have ended up way behind where you started from, you have left people who you promised Pax Americana, and touted it as such a mission, in the lurch.
No one should have believed or taken the US of A at its word. No one will anymore. And this is not the first time they have taken a shit on their allies, as history will note. Their threat of military and financial power is now as hollow as a Rambo film. The USA of Roosevelt and Truman is gone. It only needed a burial as a formality. And the Afghanistan fiasco has done that.
That said, if, as some conspiracy theorists are claiming (and the truth, especially about Afghanistan and the Great Powers has so often been so bizarre that I shall be counting nothing and no one out), USA has created the situation on purpose with a hope that the Mujahideens will now start trouble in XUAR and will link up with the Uyghurs to create enough internal strife for China as to keep them, their politicians, their army, and their money occupied, they are going to be shocked when it comes back to bite them in the ass, if history (and very recent history) is any indication.
Of course, it isn’t just Biden. There are several parties that have covered themselves with shit in the process.
About India, for example, the less said the better. We are now like the proverbial, ‘dhobi ka kutta‘, and belong in neither camp. We control nothing, our power, money, history, or reach amounts to nothing, and are asked our opinion of nothing. No one speaks to us except to tell us to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. Even the uneducated medieval tribals of the Taliban have asked us to stay the fuck out, and we have conceded as such by putting our tails between our legs and staying put. Gajab beizzati hai.
Now, we will have more clashes on our Western front as the real Pakistani army is freed from their duty to pretend-fight their pretend-enemy, the Taliban, and pretend-patrol their pretend-borders with the pretend-state called Afghanistan. We can look forward to more trouble in the Kashmir valley and more deaths of both civilians and military personnel, as more of these jobless Mujahideens find well-paid work away from home. I predict more trouble from the North and East as the Red Army encroaches on more and more of our land because we are too busy in the West (as if even when we weren’t, we could do anything about it). And of course, there will be more trouble at home as state-sponsored non-state actors make life difficult for us inside the nation, whether extreme Red left or extreme Green right (which is already a boiling cauldron thanks to our extreme Saffron right ensuring they don’t need an external force to communalise and radicalise Muslims in India, nor Dalits and the Bahujan samaj, as the new extreme Blue left rises, threatening to take with it young lives from the oppressed people into extremism; after all, this government is about ‘Make in India’).
OK now, back to the much-touted successes of the ‘civilising mission’ that the Americans are claiming to have achieved, viz., extreme penetration into Afghan society of literacy (99% of under 20s), female emancipation (40% girls educated, up from 10% 20 years ago; to contrast, around 60% of girls are educated in India), democratic values (if not by practice, at least in theory), and capacity-building in roads, potable water, power (96% of the country has access to electricity now), and telecom, as well as exceptionally well-equipped and trained indigenous armed forces and police, amongst other similar progress.
What of them, you ask? I will not get into the morality of this, whether the USA was imperialistic or extractive (given that Afghanistan had neither mineral nor oil wealth), whether the military-industrial complex as spoken of by those in the know was hand-in-glove with the US government and administration to invent, test, sell, and replenish more and more of the toys it wanted to sell to the American taxpayers, if this was a scope-creep of galactic proportions from the point when it was about stopping and/or reversing the spread of communism by the enemy in Afghanistan to (rather quickly) becoming the enemy, or whether the Americans have some kind of saviour complex because of which they thought they ought to have done what they did at a reported cost of US$5.6 trillion, thousands of troops’ lives, and a debilitating blow to the myth of Pax Americana (or anything Americana, for that matter) for a rather long time.
My own opinion, as I watch the entire charade unfold on my screen, on both television and Twitter, is that this kind of turnaround (or takeover, whatever you call it) is not possible without tremendous outside help AND inside support. That means that not only have the Talib fighters got the blessings and assistance in cash & kind from the powers-that-be (USA? Pakistan? China? Russia? Dog knows), they could not have done this without active and continuing support of the majority of the Afghan population which has in some way, either via commission or omission, always sided with the Taliban. Many people are talking about sizes of dogs and the fight when comparing the Taliban volunteer (?) militia with the well-paid, well-drilled, well-equipped, and well-experienced Afghan army and paramilitary forces. I believe there was most definitely some collaboration, some failure at the top and/or the bottom, and some premeditated and planned turnarounds. Perhaps many in the erstwhile Afghan army have joined the Taliban and/or stood by as they marched across the nation picking up towns and country like a 21st century Pacman. Whatever it is, it looks highly suspicious. The dog, indeed, did not bark, it would seem prima facie.
Or maybe this is just a short-term reverse. And the Taliban will dissolve just as quickly as they coalesced and destroy the core, thereby allowing the ‘regular’ Afghan administration and army to take back control once again as the Talibs and Mujahideens are relegated to the mountains and caves, where they will hold sway and control parts of the countryside with small armed militias reporting to a warlord, who will soon be assassinated for another, and so on. In short, back to being Afghanistan.
There is no way to tell. I do not know the truth. I am only speculating based on what I have been fed by the media and those that influence my opinion on it. So, I will be open to listening to more sides and reading more stories that come out of the region by people closer to the ground than I as well as letting it play out, before I make up my mind.
I suggest you do too.
