There might be some ways to bid goodbye, and us President Joe Biden didn’t find the simplest words. His 18-minute speech defending the choice to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by August 31, a choice that led to the collapse of a costly two-decade experiment with democracy and therefore the Taliban taking back Kabul almost exactly 20 years after their ouster, will go down in history as a stark lesson in how a superpower does business with the world: It always acts from self-interest. this is often well understood but Biden underlined it. His definition of the target of the war in Afghanistan as not nation-building except for “preventing a surprise attack on the American homeland” contradicted years folks policy and involvement in Afghanistan, pouring of money into holding elections and shoring chosen leaders in Kabul. But Biden’s speech was most egregious for the way during which he dismissed Afghans as nation who don’t have the desire to fight their own war, but instead want American soldiers to fight it for them. Apparently, Afghan soldiers who were killed fighting alongside US and NATO troops count for nothing, and neither do the efforts of ordinary Afghan civilians who threw themselves into an equivalent “nation-building” project that Biden dissed, and therefore the risks they took within the hope that it might help to stay the Taliban out forever. There was no acknowledgment, even for form’s sake, of the uncertain future the Afghan people and therefore the entire region now face. What he conveyed unequivocally, though, is that the US has closed this chapter in its history.
For India, this is often a replacement challenge. On the rear of the American presence in Afghanistan, India had built on its age-old ties with the country to get back the influence it had lost after the exit of Soviet troops and with the arrival of the mujahideen, and eventually the Taliban. Delhi’s three-year-long confusion — to speak to the Taliban or not — was finally overtaken by the speed of events over the previous couple of days. As of Tuesday, India has zero diplomatic presence in Afghanistan. Re-establishing it’ll depend on the type of dispensation that takes shape in Kabul over subsequent few days, and on whether India decides to interact with it.
Pakistan, which has finally achieved the objectives of its Afghanistan policy with the Taliban victory, will want to clip India’s wings. India is now virtually friendless within the region, stop by the China-Pakistan axis, and more or less by Russia too. Even South Block’s friends within the erstwhile anti-Taliban Northern Alliance have seen the writing on the wall, taking the primary opportunity to go to Islamabad. What India wants to realize by courting an increasingly pro-China Iran remains to be seen. Overall, India features a tough task ahead, re-balancing equations within the region and beyond, whilst it shores up its security. In its severity, things recalls Delhi’s moment of reckoning with the collapse of the Soviet Union and therefore the end of the conflict . this is often no less a test of India’s policy .
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