IndiaScope: A Crisis of Competence and Credibility
Over the last few years, one has felt increasingly dispirited and disillusioned with America. Years of silently watching and wishing away the fast-collecting doubts have finally made one face the reality: the “world’s greatest democracy,” “only remaining superpower” and “greatest hope” ring hollow amidst a string of American-exacerbated or American-led disasters, whether domestic or foreign policy-related.
We have a country with the world’s best-funded agencies, enormous riches and some of the greatest minds, and yet failure after failure has been our lot.
I have written about America’s failure with Covid-19 in general, a weakness that was there for all the world to see: the greatest number of Covid-related deaths, even allowing for the fact that many countries might not be accurately reporting their own data. And just a few months ago, as the Delta variant caused a disastrous tragedy in India, I asked in this column if Americans were paying attention and using the time to take proactive measures against what would undoubtedly arrive on these shores.
Sadly, we know now, gripped as we are by an ascending Delta wave here, that they did not.
As if that weren’t enough, we saw the despicable spectacle of a botched American withdrawal from a country which we had invaded twenty years ago to avenge 9/11 and ostensibly fight and eliminate global terrorism, and where we had maintained a military presence, airfields, weapons and aircraft for two decades, spending two trillion dollars in the bargain, and costing untold American and Afghan lives.
Inexplicably, we saw an abrupt, seemingly planfree withdrawal that left computers, data, weapons, helicopters, trained canines, interpreters with targets on their backs, and hapless Americans and Afghans in its wake. They left, like a macabre gift, a huge void that the Taliban obligingly occupied immediately and proceeded to unleash their special brand of terror on women, men, children, smashing any hopes of a peaceful post-U.S. Afghanistan: another spectacular failure for America and its vaunted bureaucracies, and this time its armed services as well.
Why was this outcome not anticipated, when even lay people could fully anticipate it? With the unimaginable amounts of money and importance devoted to our national security apparatus and bureaucracies, who can we ask these simple questions: why did you not plan this differently; how did the Afghan army, trained over twenty years, fold overnight; where was our intelligence on the Taliban’s strength; and finally, who allowed this disaster to happen? To be clear, these questions are directed towards the leadership, not the rank-and-file.
We have reached, today, the end of accountability in public life. We are presented with images of terrified Afghans hanging onto the body and wings of an aircraft that is going to depart. And then when the plane takes off and people fall to their death, no one, not one person in the chain of command in the U.S. loses their job over the tragedy. It’s chaotic, but when the debacle is callously “spun” away, people become cynical and lose hope in the whole endeavor of politics and democracy itself, and by extension, in the country that the political
system is supposed to represent.
And, as it has done before, America withdraws and washes its hands of an enormous problem for those in the region, creating new and larger ones. For the Afghans, their country has been destroyed one more time as the Taliban take control and salvage their way of life. For India, a hostile force has been reinstalled in their proximity, one that is now enriched by the world’s best equipment and arms. No doubt the Indo-Af-Pak region has (re)entered a new era of instability, and waves of terrorist bombings can be expected as the region begins to (re)offer a haven for radicalism.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has become irrelevant; their policy offerings continue to be myopic and short-term. For instance, in the midst of their fretting about China, we are not talking about how much China has been strengthened by what has happened.
If that’s not depressing enough, add this to the equation: we are almost $30 trillion in debt, and the lender will surely come calling sometime.
Tinaz Pavri is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Spelman College, Atlanta. A recipient of the Donald Wells Award from the Georgia Political Science Association, she’s the author of the memoir Bombay in the Age of Disco: City, Community, Life.
Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.
