Review of World Politics (RWP)

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla Deuba Must Forge Ahead PM Sher Bahadur Deuba has done it again! He is amply demonstrating his incompetence, although fate gave him a fifth chance to serve the country with distinction. He is failing on all fronts:
  1. He has become a prisoner of the political parties that gave him the vote of confidence and elevated him to high office. He does not have the mandate of the people, and as things stand, he will be unable to lead the Nepali Congress (NC) to victory in the next general elections. He, together with the other two top NC leaders, Ram Chandra Paudel and Sushil Koirala have failed to bring their house in order.
2. Directly following from 1 and 2 above, he has been unable to present the country with a full council of ministers. 3. He has shown that he is unable to strike while the iron was hot. He should have at least pushed through the appointment of cabinet ministers to significant portfolios – health, economics and foreign affairs. 4. This points to the fact that he is not serious about tackling the still raging Covid-19 pandemic, bringing our foreign relations on an even keel, and resuscitating our battered economy. It has also been quite some time since the infamous Darchula Incident. The Nepali people deserve to know the results of the government enquiry and what the government proposes to do vis-à-vis the Indian government, and what it has already undertaken with regard to helping the bereaved family. Nepal’s foreign policy is in tatters. The government has been unable to bring home all the Nepali migrant workers stranded in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover of power. It is not the time for dilly-dallying. Deuba must forge ahead – with or without his newfound friends. If they hamper his decisive moves to help the country and the people, Deuba could easily:
  1. Announce a mixed cabinet of members of his own party and technocrats
2. Assemble a council of economic experts 3. Reconstitute the National Security Council with fresh faces and a new, dynamic vision. The Beginning of the End for Afghanistan U.S. President Joe Biden has attempted to put up a brave face in the light of the catastrophe withdrawal after 20 years of close engagement in Afghanistan. Everything went awry and began to unravel. The Taliban cemented their total control of the country on Monday. Biden’s unilateral and precipitous decision will still come to haunt him personally, his Democratic Party and the country as a whole. The post-mortem of the Biden’s administration’s bankrupt Afghan policy is still outstanding. The Blame Game However, on Monday he still made a defiant defence of his own decision to withdraw all U.S. troops and blaming the swift collapse of the Afghan government on the refusal of the country’s military to resist the Taliban advance (NYT, August 17). Speaking to the American people from the East Room of the White House, Biden insisted he had no regrets about his decision to end the longest war in U.S. history. The majority of the American public is still with him on this issue, but public opinion is a very fickle animal and future American perceptions will depend very much on what the Taliban unleashes on the population. Biden also blamed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country to Uzbekistan as the Taliban advanced to Kabul, and failed to live up to his promise that the Afghan military was prepared to defend the country after the last American forces had departed. The confused state of the Biden administration with regard to Afghanistan was in full display when the US President announced last week that he had authorized the deployment of an additional 5,000 troops “to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban.”  All very well and good, but it was at the same time a warning to the Taliban [and their foreign supporters across the border] now encircling the capital Kabul that the U.S. was not yet ready to fully abandon the country. It was also an attempt to avoid the chaos and humiliation of a Saigon-style debacle. Over the last few weeks, the Taliban had made significant gains across Afghanistan and controlled most of the country’s provincial capitals. All major cities like Kandahar, Herat and Kunduz had fallen under the control of the Taliban, whose fighters were circling ever closer to Kabul (CNN, August 15). After the fall of Jalalabad, east of Kabul near the Pakistan border, it only remained for the Taliban to dispense the coup de grace with the large walkover in Kabul. Reasons for the Collapse of the Afghan Government and Military The speed and extent of the Taliban blitzkrieg victories should make us pause to think of the brilliant tactics and long-term strategy of the Mujahideen. These have definitely been a result of long time planning. Any military expert and national security pundit worth his salt should be able to point to the source(s) of the Taliban’s successes in the war zones. The insurgents have definitely been thoroughly trained in a foreign, but similar environment, and have also been armed accordingly.  Why is it that the American military establishment in Afghanistan and the CIA operatives there failed to pinpoint the acute dangers from this ‘unholy alliance’ ? The Taliban of and by themselves could never have achieved the resounding battleground victories in such a manner that American and international military experts have been astounded by the rapid march of events. The U.S. and NATO military establishment and so-called national security experts completely ignored the sinister developments lurking in the background. It was a question of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, but a disastrous failure nonetheless.  How could the whole structure of the Afghan security forces collapse like a house of cards? One urban area after another fell to the Taliban like clockwork in the classical realization of the ‘domino effect’.  It was definitely not a deus ex machina that led to the remarkable landslide conquests of the Taliban and the pathetic showing of the Afghan security forces. It was the fatal underestimation of the hidden danger by the U.S. [but not by the Afghan government].  Another way to look at the unfolding Afghan tragedy is to conceptualize which regional power looks to gain most from the resurgence of the Taliban, and the eventual re-establishment of an Islamist Emirate at the crossroads of Asia. The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com