World

President Joe Biden walked into the grand UN General Assembly chamber this morning with a list of asks, an appeal for greater cooperation among the world’s great powers and a bit of controversy trailing behind him. Biden’s first UN address came at a difficult time in American diplomacy. The European Union, led by an irate France, is livid over a $60 billion US-Australian nuclear submarine deal that European leaders view as skeevy and duplicitous. And last month’s American troop exit from Afghanistan remains a sore point for contributing nations in the Nato coalition, some of which wanted more time to evacuate their own nationals. Biden, however, sidestepped all of these disputes.

When President Joe Biden tapped longtime aide Antony Blinken to be his secretary of state last November, Blinken landed his dream job. Here he was, a man widely respected in foreign policy circles, continuing the family business (his father and uncle were both ambassadors and his stepfather was an adviser to John F. Kennedy). What Blinken could have lived without, however, was the grandstanding, bravado and livid speeches from lawmakers responsible for overseeing his work. Unfortunately, fielding self-righteous questions is a part of the job description.

There’s a disgusting scene I can’t stop thinking about. It comes about midway through This Is What Winning Looks Like, a 2013 VICE documentary about America’s efforts in Afghanistan you can watch for free on YouTube. The film switches between the documentary footage itself and a sort of metafilm in which the filmmaker, Ben Anderson, discusses aspects of his work with Eddy Moretti of VICE, with Anderson’s footage from his time overseas frozen on a computer monitor behind them. The scene in question starts at 51:00 in the YouTube cut, was filmed around 2012, and involves a series of horrific murders. These were perpetrated not by the Taliban, but by America’s supposed allies: the country’s nascent police force.

Let’s say that two decades ago you were wondering where to invest your savings for retirement and the money that was supposed to pay for your kids’ college years, and decided to consult with your financial adviser known to be a market wizard. Let’s call him Tom Friedman. 'Don’t pay attention to all the bullish talk about Steve Jobs and Apple', Friedman said. 'I would bet all my money on two of the market’s crown jewels, Alta Vista and Enron'. Well, to make a very long story short, you are now spending your retirement years in a trailer park in Nevada, while your son is dealing drugs and your daughter works for an escort service to pay for their college studies.

The late Edward Said invented, or at least brought into vogue, the notion of Orientalism. For a time this became the big boo word in academia, a handy phrase for casting a variety of writers, ranging from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad, into the abyss for their putative imperial cast of mind when it came to depicting the inhabitants of the further reaches of the British empire. But soon enough, as a recent and lengthy erudite review in the London Review of Books noted, Said apparently found himself accused of the very same sin by the cultural revolutionaries that he had exposed. It turned out that the founder of Orientalism was (gulp) an Orientalist. My, my.

North Korea now possesses a nuclear weapons arsenal that could kill millions of people in minutes. Our media, rushing to create the simple but misleading narrative that President Joe Biden has ended America’s supposed longest war, forget that Washington technically has been at war with North Korea for 71 years. It's Pyongyang, not Kabul, that will be the real test of Biden's foreign policy — and the real opportunity. A few months back, the Biden administration named that conflict its top national security priority. Yet Team Biden has done little to work towards ending what can only be described as the ultimate forever war. And, just like clockwork, Pyongyang seems to always remind us that its deadly atomic arsenal is growing by the day.

Sydney Social media is depressing at the best of times, but when you are on Day 60 of a lockdown that doesn’t let you stray more than five kilometers from your house, it’s a nightmare. Open up Facebook, and there’s an old high school mate smugly plopped down in a business class seat heading for Hawaii, toasting you with a glass of second-rate fizz. Flick over to Instagram, and your favorite little hotel in Tuscany has got the long table set for a 'celebration of love’ and the union of a couple who live someplace that doesn’t require exit visas of its citizens.

America's longest war draws to a bloody end. As the pullout deadline approaches, the probability of more atrocities like the suicide bombing last Thursday that killed 13 of our troops, and more than 90 Afghans, remains nauseatingly high. The American public was ready for us to leave Afghanistan. It was not prepared for just how ugly leaving could be. President Biden bears responsibility for the lives lost, just as he bears responsibility for those lost throughout the course of this conflict and the similarly ill-premised Iraq War — both of which he helped to launch while he was in the United States Senate. He has made grave mistakes. One mistake he has not made, however, is to waver from the decision to withdraw. He has not let terrorists change our timetable.

President Biden blames Donald Trump and his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo for the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Mike Pompeo vehemently disagrees. In this exclusive interview with Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, Pompeo sees America's failure in Afghanistan and its loss of credibility as direct results of Biden’s policies of ‘weakness’ and warns that ‘if the Taliban decide that they're going to become violent in a full-on assault, the US should use every element of its military power to protect American interests.’   Lausanne, Switzerland  Urs Gehriger: President Biden announced that he would withdraw all US military forces by August 31. It looks highly unlikely that this can be accomplished.

You have to hand it to the Taliban (or, if you are Joe Biden, the ‘Tally-bahn’): they are both a persistent and an infernally clever lot. As to their persistence, recall that George W. Bush assured us that, ‘thanks to our military, our allies, and the brave fighters of Afghanistan...the Taliban regime is coming to an end.’ That was in December 2001. As of August 2021, they control the country and are as I write issuing ultimatums to the President of the United States: everybody out by September 11, no, make that August 31 — otherwise, there will be ‘consequences’. Oh, and by ‘everybody out’, we don’t mean Afghans who may have worked for the US: they have to stay. There does seem to be a communications breakdown about radical elements in Afghanistan.

However much it is denied, we still live in an imperial age, at least metaphorically. Just as the withdrawal from Afghanistan registers the momentary decline of the American empire, it registers the momentary rise of the Russian and Chinese ones. America failed in Afghanistan because its military, while capable of fighting high-tech wars on land and sea, could not fix complex Islamic societies on the ground. Indeed, Afghanistan demonstrated how the deterministic elements of geography, culture and ethnic and sectarian awareness can vanquish Western ideals of democracy and individual liberty.

Twenty years after 9/11, the War on Terror has come full circle. Everyone expected the Taliban to surge back to power as soon as American forces left Afghanistan. Instead, the surge began while America’s embassy in Kabul was still open, inviting unwelcome flashbacks to Saigon in 1975 and Tehran in 1979. There are piquant memories of 1989, too — not of the Berlin Wall’s fall or a young Francis Fukuyama’s publishing ‘The End of History?’ in the National Interest, but memories of an Afghan insurgency’s triumph over a superpower. That triumph would inspire and ultimately contribute in the most concrete ways to a decade of terrorism, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is 20 years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did. Scholars and partisans still argue over the reasons America lost in Vietnam, so why should Afghanistan be any different? On the plus side, the debate promises to be far more interesting. When it comes to Vietnam, partisans debate rules of engagement, bombing strategies, funding levels and the Tet Offensive. With Afghanistan, the question could be: did gender studies cause America to suffer its most humiliating defeat ever? Cockburn wishes he was joking. Traditionally, nations have waged war by mustering armies, defeating their enemies in battle, and despoiling their lands and cities.

'There is no light in the bazaar. The Americans brought the light when they came to build the great dam . . . but when they left the took the machine with them and now there is no more light.’ — Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush There really isn’t much that is amusing about Afghanistan. There never has been. But Eric Newby wrote a most amusing book about his trek through the Hindu Kush in the late 1950s. These days, when the Americans decamp from Afghanistan they leave behind tons — literally tons — of lights, not to mention munitions of various sizes and lethality, roads, buildings, communication devices of all sorts — you name it. A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban.