Perceptive prognoses and perspectives après Taliban victory

Penning this from Boston days before the 20th anniversary of the world politics-altering al-Qaeda assault on New York’s storied Twin Towers and the Pentagon behemoth in Washington, D.C., I cannot but be struck by a notable coincidence.

If I was then there and viewed in real-time on TV the two hijacked aircraft plough into the ill-fated Manhattan towers, I am currently in the city from whose airport (Logan International) the three weaponized aircraft took off on their nefarious missions.

The third crashed into a Pennsylvania field after a group of doughty passengers fought off the hijackers, thus aborting their pernicious plot to fly the aircraft into a high-value target in Washington, D.C.

What makes the above set of circumstances especially engaging is that this write-up is being composed less than three weeks after the Taliban’s swift, sweeping seizure of Afghanistan following the fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021.

It may be remembered that it was the Taliban’s sanctuary to the alQaeda, and its notorious ringleader Osama bin Laden, that triggered the U.S.-led invasion/ occupation of the then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan which officially ended, 31 August, drawing the curtain down on a nearly 20-year war which earned the sobriquet, the ‘forever war’.

PERCEPTIVE PERSPECTIVES

Among the tsunami of comments, critiques and suggestions that have since swept across this land in its aftermath, those offered here for providing timely, revealing insights into America’s current state of mind are those by Mark Lander in the New York Times, 2 September. “While Mr Biden may have antagonized foreign policy elites, his determination to extricate the United States from costly entanglements overseas plays better with average Americans. While the harrowing images of the evacuation have damaged his approval ratings, polls suggest that that many, if not most, share his conviction that the country does not have a compelling reason to stay in Afghanistan…

“Biden in his year as VicePresident, in addition to opposing the Afghanistan surge, resisted NATO intervention in Libya and advised Obama to hold off on the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden… “Biden has also shown a willingness to disregard the views of European allies, a factor that helps account for the frustration in London, Berlin and other capitals where his electoral victory had been celebrated after Trump’s browbeating. The NATO campaign in Afghanistan was a credit to the solidarity of the alliance, which made Biden’s lack of consultation all the more stinging…

“It does not pose an existential threat to the alliance says a European diplomat, but it raises doubts about America’s credibility…

“At home, foreign policy experts criticized Biden for presenting a false choice when he said the United States could redirect the resources spent in Afghanistan to the geopolitical competition with China and Russia. The challenge posed by those rivals, they said, is not going to be overcome by pulling out 2,500 troops out of Kabul.”

The following observations of Richard N. Hass, who served in the George W. Bush administration and is currently president of the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations, are worth mulling over: “We got it wrong in Libya, we got it wrong in Vietnam. But over the last 75 years, the foreign policy establishment has gotten most things right…

“My biggest concern is that the United States may now be entering an era of underreach…History suggests that there is as much risk in under-reaching as overreaching.”

Washington Post’s David Ignatius has, as usual, incisive offerings, including those detailed below in his 1 September column:

“Afghanistan will present serious counter-terrorism challenges for the United States, but they will be different from the ones that took us to war in 2001, in the shadow of 9/11. The United States is far better protected now; intelligence and law enforcement here and around the world are much better integrated. The Islamic State is a threat in Afghanistan, but it suffered pulverizing defeats in Syria and Iraq. Al-Qaeda lives, but feebly. It didn’t win this war… “For a change it (the Taliban) has the urgently ticking watches, and we have the time…Closein neighbours, such as Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran, may have greater interest in checking threats from post-war Afghanistan…

“What went wrong in Afghanistan? We’ll be haunted by the question for years, just as we were after the humiliating retreat from Vietnam in 1975.”

NOT A SUPER-POWER Non-American viewpoints worthy of consideration include British defence secretary Ben Wallace’s comments in an interview to the Spectator magazine, days after the final evacuation of western forces from Kabul.

“It is obvious that Britain is not a super-power. But a superpower that is also not prepared to stick at something isn’t probably a super-power either. It is certainly not a global force; it’s just a big power.” Another attentiongrabbing observation is that of an EU diplomat Joseph Borrel who has been quoted in the Boston Globe, 3 September, asserting that “Afghanistan has shown that the deficiency in our strategic autonomy comes with a price. And that the only way forward is to combine our forces and to strengthen not only our capacity, but also our will to act.” He was speaking, following an EU conference on Afghanistan at Brido Castle, Slovenia. A bunch of incisive observations on the postTaliban victory situation in Afghanistan has been collated by Robyn Dixon of the Washington Post, 31 August. They include Russia’s presidential envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov’s emphatic plea for the lifting of the freeze on Afghanistan’s financial reserves and for western countries to lead a global conference to help rebuild the country’s economy.

As per Dixon, Moscow’s attention is increasingly turning to fears that without international support and financial assistance, a new Taliban government will fail to stabilize the nation. He reminds that Moscow has been calling on the West to “accept the reality” of the Taliban victory, while pressing the Taliban to form a government that includes different political parties and ethnic groups, a move seen as the best hope of winning international support.

Not surprisingly, Russian officials, Dixon informs, are warning that no one should expect the Taliban to meet western standards for democracy and cultural and religious practices. “Russia doesn’t care about human rights in Afghanistan;” said Kiril Krivosheyev, an Afghanistan analyst of a Moscow think-tank: “Our red line is security for Central Asia to stop any terrorism and influx of armed men into those countries.”

Revealingly, Russian media, one is told, has stopped referring to the Taliban as a terrorist organization, instead referring to it as a “radical movement.”

Kubulov opined that the international community must keep in mind “the cultural and religious specifics of the Afghan people and not try to push anything on them, based on one’s cultural notions of democracy and order.” Incidentally, the proKremlin Moskovsky

Komsomolets newspaper cautioned recently against rushing to recognize the Taliban, in an interesting article by columnist Mikhail Rostovsky, headlined, “In bed with the Taliban?”

“So far no one in the international community has recognized the Taliban as the legitimate authority in Afghanistan…The Taliban may create a stable political regime in Kabul or it may not. The Taliban may prove that their newfound ‘moderation’ is no short-term PR stunt, or it may not. The Taliban may keep its promises not to turn Afghanistan into a playground for dangerous international terrorist organizations who threaten Russia too, or it might not.”

Increasingly, the question of whether or not – or when, if at all – to recognize the Taliban regime is coming to the fore in international discourse. A write-up by Steven Erlanger in the New York Times, 2 September, for instance, covers a wide canvas of related issues, including tackling the question of why other countries are interested in Afghanistan’s future. As per Erlanger, there are basically three, as thus summarized: to counterterrorism; Afghanistan’s rich trove of natural resources and because of the centrality of the issue of humanitarian aid.

As he sees it, for the Taliban to achieve international recognition it must not just secure approval of the kind of government it forms, but pass the critical test on what it actually does on the ground, not merely what it promises it will do.

As to the key question of how much leverage the United States/allies have over the Taliban, Erlanger summarizes it, thus: “most of it can be measured in $” – a reference, among other things, to the United States freezing Afghan central bank reserves, $ 7 billion of which is held in U.S. institutions, in addition to the $ 460 million in emergency reserves with the International Monetary Fund.

With the United Nations General Assembly on the cusp of reconvening shortly in New York, it will be interesting to monitor how the question of who occupies the seat for Afghanistan plays out. Those familiar with the goings-on at the UN here say that it could be a while before Taliban-governed Afghanistan is able to make good on its claim. Finally, of course, there is this unknown factor: whether or how the international community will take responsibility for the safety of people in Afghanistan who had wished to leave but have been left behind.

On another level, it is notable that, as per the BBC, 3 September, the EU and the United Kingdom joined the United States in saying that they will deal with the Islamist group but won’t recognize them as Afghanistan’s government.

The head of BBC’s international department Lyse Doucet who is in Kabul says that while the Taliban are seeking international acceptance, they are seeking it on their terms. If the West does not to deal with them, there are other powers such as China, Russia and Pakistan they can turn to. On the other hand, as the Washington Post reported on 3 September, the Pentagon indicated that it could work with the Taliban against terrorists. The newspaper quoted the chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, as saying that it is “possible” the United States will coordinate with the Taliban in the fight against the Islamic State, although he declined to make predictions about potential collaboration with Afghanistan’s new leaders.

TILTING TOWARDS INDIA?

While

the

world

is befuddled or otherwise preoccupied with analyzing the intricacies and ramifications of the still-evolving situation on the ground in Afghanistan, those attempting to follow Nepalese affairs are no less in a quandary to fathom what is really going on in Kathmandu.

Among the conundrums that confront one in a quest to unscramble the present Nepali political jig-saw puzzle is that even nearly two months after the Deuba-led coalition has assumed power it is still in an inchoate form, sans even a foreign minister. Whatever the reason(s) for such an obvious lapse in responsible governance, it does nothing to obscure or minimize the significance of worrisome multiple media reports informing that Kathmandu has not formally communicated to New Delhi relevant queries relating to the much publicized, weeksold tragic Mahakali incident that unfolded in Darchula.

Then, Jag Singh Dhami, a Nepali national, plunged into the swirling waters of the river and disappeared, allegedly because India’s border security personnel jerked the cable mechanism which he was using to crossover from India to Nepal.

Even more diplomatically unnerving is that the Deuba-captained government has resurrected a border dispute with China which last September was formally shot down by the then government. Notably, former Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli recently utilized a party event in Kupondol to categorically declare that Nepal does not have a border dispute with China.

But, what really takes the cake is that eight former Chiefs of Army Staff of the Nepal Army have been invited, en masse, to an Army Chiefs Conclave in New Delhi, an Indian initiative apparently green-lighted by Singha Durbar.

One can only hope that the powers that be desist from any rash politico-militarydiplomatic hanky-panky, especially in the uncertain security environment in South Asia spawned by the return of the Taliban to power in neighbouring Afghanistan.