20 Years after 9/11
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
20 years after 9/11, the Taliban are back in Kabul. The core question being asked is: what was the point? The words circulating in Washington DC are debacle, defeat, and disgrace. Those old enough to remember the Dacca debacle of 1971 are now witnessing the DC debacle of 2021, after 50 years. This debacle seems bigger and shall reverberate through the region and beyond. What happens in Afghanistan will not stay in Afghanistan. Its geo-political and humanitarian ramifications are massive.
Alongside the aforementioned are oft-cited issues tantamount to epic incompetence. It was all foreseeable and avoidable. But common-sense reminders can often get trampled where hubris looms large.
Never has an American President been a subject of such scathing public ridicule. Palpable is the sweeping sense of anger and humiliation amongst decorated US Army veterans.
Kabul represents an epic defeat of the foreign policy-making establishment, who, through their rosy scenarios, misrepresented facts. Group-think leads to the tyranny of the same page. It then triggers an unstoppable momentum for the juggernaut of the herd mentality. Two front-page headlines of national capital newspapers are instructive: “Shameful defeat to Taliban” (Washington Times, August 23) and “The day the US lost its longest war in Kabul” (Washington Post, August 29.)
Then, too, there is a folly of self-imposed deadlines, which shrinks the space for conditions-based improvised decision-making. In the aftermath of the August 26 Kabul carnage, Biden looked dejected and fatigued. It is hard to find a sound rationale for sticking with a visibly failed strategy.
Significant it was that, on the day of the Kabul blasts of August 26, the new Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, was visiting Washington and was scheduled to meet Biden in the White House. That meeting had to be postponed.
So, 20 years after 9/11, what has changed? The needle hasn’t moved on the Israel-Palestine impasse, which continues as is, while the Kabul debacle speaks for itself on the folly of military adventurism. The Dacca debacle informs us, as does the DC debacle now. Similar follies emanating from a similar mindset presage a similar outcome. The abandonment of the Bihari remains an abiding stain on national honor.
The spill-over effects of Kabul across the Frontier need to be carefully vetted and weighed. One inevitable fallout would be emboldened militancy, which has, to date, taken a horrific toll in Pakistan, including the lives of thousands of its valiant soldiers and innocent civilians.
President Richard Nixon cited President Ayub Khan telling him that it is dangerous to be friends of America. The stranded and abandoned Afghans would and can provide compelling testimony.
In a related vein, the complicity and the culpability of the cheerleaders in Washington who were at the forefront of inciting the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan require public accountability.
Biden in 2003 was enthusiastically backing the unprovoked assault on Iraq and, in 2021, he became a proponent of quitting Afghanistan after earlier backing its invasion in 2001.
Like Hillary Clinton before, Biden is keen to pivot to the Indo-Pacific region to counter the ‘China threat.’ This so-called pivot is a ploy to pivot away from the Israel-Palestine dispute. To that end, one of Biden’s pillars of this pivot policy is India, whose Hindutva regime is going flat-out to subjugate Kashmir and Indian Muslims. The same self-delusional mistakes continue.
20 years after 9/11, has the world become better or safer?
