American foreign policy

For 20 years America built a Potemkin village and called it Afghanistan. Now this cardboard democracy has been trampled down in a matter of days by the Taliban. The speed and comprehensiveness of the rout cannot be explained by Joe Biden’s blunders. The war has drawn to a humiliating end not because of a weak president’s missteps in the final weeks but because the entire project was misconceived. Afghanistan was not ready for democracy and trillions of dollars in American aid could not even begin to change that fact. With US and allied forces providing security, the Afghan government did not even have to fulfill the most basic function of any state. The Afghan government lived off charity — foreign money, foreign arms.

‘After al-Qaeda and the Taliban fall...when we "drain the swamp", as the President says, the medium-term goal is to roll up all al-Qaeda cells around the world. Then, with the help of other nations and possibly the ultimate sanction of the United Nations our hope is that we will see a relatively stable government in Afghanistan, one that does not harbor terrorists, is acceptable to the major players in the region, represents the ethnic make up of the country and provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country.’ So said Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, on October 22, 2001, as America invaded Afghanistan. ‘The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.

Glenn Greenwald wants right-wing populists to understand that the CIA is not their friend. On Sunday thousands of Cubans swarmed the streets of Havana amid ongoing blackouts, food shortages and rising prices. Increasing COVID infections have strained the island's healthcare system and put medical care at a standstill. The protests are the largest of their kind in over a decade. In turn, the government began a crackdown. More than 100 activists and journalists are reportedly in custody. One male protester was shot in his home on Wednesday during a police raid. Facebook and Twitter played a crucial role in allowing the rest of the world to witness the unrest — so of course the Cuban government has banned those platforms in the last 72 hours.

‘The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese,’ Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware intoned on the Senate floor as South Vietnam neared collapse in 1975. Thankfully, the Ford administration ignored this shameful advice. One of the more regrettable statements of its decade, it was likely one of the positions former Obama defense secretary Robert Gates had in mind when he wrote that Biden ‘has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades’. When the United States left Vietnam in 1973, it took two years for Saigon to fall to the Communists.

In May 2017, TIME magazine published a cover showing the White House being infected and taken over by Russian onion domes. The image meant to suggest that Donald Trump was a sleeper agent on behalf of Vladimir Putin. This sort of thinking was the driving force behind four years of media hysterics and seemingly endless cable news segments portraying Trump as a Russian puppet. ​With Joe Biden, naturally, the media has adopted a distinctly different tone — especially when it comes to the President’s relations with Russia: this despite six months of Team Biden’s complacency towards Russia, bad actors and even Putin himself. Gone are the accusations of ransom and pee tapes, or treachery — even as Russia makes aggressive moves on the world stage and towards the United States.

The objectives of the Authorized Use of Military Force approved by Congress in 2001 have long been accomplished. Once Osama bin Laden was killed in Operation Neptune Spear in 2011, the last element of the AUMF was met. Our mission in Afghanistan was complete. But we did not leave. Why? The arrogance of a Military Industrial Congressional Complex that saw an opportunity to turn Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy, using American taxpayer money to fund the experiment, over a 20-year period. It failed. A dirty secret: most of the money spent to help Afghanistan and its people was spent in Washington DC to enrich individuals and corporations that did nothing to help develop Afghanistan — a sad truth that my late friend Jerry Doyle called ‘combat to commerce’.

President Biden’s description of President Putin as a 'worthy adversary’, in advance of their summit today, was a sensible move. On the one hand, it restores the basic civility necessary for any diplomatic exchange, after Biden’s unfortunate 'killer’ remark. After all, the conduct of international relations by a superpower is a serious matter — and part of Biden’s own international prestige lies in his restoration of dignity to the US presidency after the flamboyant excesses of Trump.

With 40 percent of the population vaccinated, a palpable sense of normalcy has returned to America. The young are now getting their turn at the COVID vaccine and in almost every city, restaurants and bars are back in full swing. But while selfies of joyful reunions with older relatives flood social media here, in India, the picture is grim. The country reported world record-breaking coronavirus infection rates for four days in a row. Hospitals in several cities are grappling with severe shortages of beds, medicines and oxygen. For a country widely seen as the pharmacy of the world (India produces 60 percent of the world’s total vaccines), it is a sad irony that just 8 percent of its own population has been vaccinated thus far.