It appears that soon after the fall of Kabul, the greatest super power in the world, United States of America is on the cusp of losing another capital of a close ally -- Ukraine. On October 2nd, 2021 Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister said: "To the Afghan people we make this commitment. We will not walk away, as the outside world has done so many times"
But they did walk away on August 15th, 2021, after having killed more Afghans as collateral damage than Al Qa’eda or Taliban ever had.
On September 1st, 2021, soon after the Kabul debacle, President Biden renewed his commitment to Ukrainian security and territorial integrity as well as his support for its joining of NATO. But barely 6 months later, Ukraine effectively, is on its own. It might just be a matter of days before Kyiv too falls to the Russians, regardless of whatever heroics Ukrainians can conjure up in the face of superior Russian fire power. The West will of course write angry letters and give a few metaphorical spit balls to the Ukrainians to defend themselves. The question arises: why? Why such a steady stream of lost wars and broken promises by the West?
The answer is multi-faceted and can perhaps be explained best by two interlinked impulses at the heart of the Western enterprise: imperialism and racism. Post-Soviet Russia was a humiliated and bankrupt country run by bankers from the West in the 1990s. The Western triumphalism was not shared by the Russian people who were undergoing the misery of market reform. Vladimir Putin, the current president of Russia, misguidedly or otherwise, sought to restore some honour to a traumatised society. While his policies domestically were hardly democratic or inclusive, he nevertheless leveraged Russia’s vast energy resources to restore some semblance of relevance of Russia as a great power in the world. And therein lies the nub of the matter.
The NATO allies could not countenance a resurgent Russia as an equal in international affairs. The West had taken in almost all of the Eastern Europe in the NATO fold in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now they had trained their eyes on Ukraine as the next prize, to reinforce a US dominated security order in Europe.
Russia was not averse to being a partner to the Americans in that security order, but not on the terms that Americans were willing to countenance. An order based on equality between Russian and US interests. But the Americans and the West chose to press their advantage and used their Western centric allies to undermine the evenly balanced political order in Ukraine to steer it towards the West, something that Russia had made clear was a red line.
Through the Minsk process it had been agreed between the West, Ukraine and Russia that Ukraine will be a neutral (buffer) country between Russia and the West. The neutrality clause precluded any future membership of the Western alliance for Ukraine. The West, however, continued to press its advantage by leveraging its allies, mostly with dark histories and present policies of ultra-nationalist fascistic leanings, to undermine pro-Russia constituencies in Ukraine. The result is the human and political tragedy unfolding in Ukraine since February 24th, 2022.
The parallels with Afghanistan are uncanny in this instance. The promises of eternal alliance and support were taken seriously by the Afghans, just as they were by the Ukrainians. The intemperate US allies like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, including Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (the one who invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place) thought that they could have free reign domestically and could thumb their noses at their closest neighbour Pakistan. The same as the Right wing Ukrainian politicians who trusted American ‘commitments’ to their security as a licence to run rough shod over deep fissures in their own polity, and to annoy a close neighbour, Russia.
Why does the West promise more than it can deliver? The answer lies in West’s imperialist hangover and colonial hubris. It owns the world, its liberal values are the only true ones, it represents the end of history and any opposition to it could possibly not have a legitimate point -- the Western self image and reasoning goes. And if it sounds overstated, just watch any Western news channel or pronouncements of its leaders for 30 minutes and you get the picture.
Why is the West trusted by its allies than its history warrants? The simple answer in the short term is often money, as was the case in Afghanistan, and also in Ukraine. Not to mention that often Western constituencies in the global South share their patrons’ contempt of opposition to their world views, and visions of the future. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan like the Right wing in Ukraine never really arranged any picnics for their domestic opposition and replicated the black and white imagery of civilization versus obscurantism in Afghanistan, or democracy versus dictatorship in Ukraine.
Imperialism was never just about commercial interests. It was also equally about spreading benefits of civilization, underwritten by racism. It is no coincidence that a two decade veteran of international journalism for American CBS news Charlie D’Agata had to wonder how could ‘civilized’ white folks of Ukraine face war like ‘less civilized’ places like Iraq and Afghanistan. One would be hard pressed to find any coverage of the Ukraine war in the Western media lamenting, that it is happening in Europe. Europe! The horror! The horror!
None of what I say above takes away from the criminality of Russian invasion of a sovereign country. Neither does Western chicanery take away from the depravity of the Taliban or their allies. But one wonders what could have been. Ukraine could have been a peaceful prosperous country attending to its affairs, like Finland in the days of the Cold War, serving as a peaceful bridge between Russia and the European Union. Americans instead of painting the entire rural Afghanistan with a Taliban brush could have attended to rural development, peace and negotiation instead of bombing wedding parties and schools. Thinking of countries as pawns without any regard for their internal complexity, history and fault lines lands us where we are today with Ukraine.
It is never the case of a psycho dictator doing bad/evil things to innocents. Deliberate ignorance and disrespect of history, culture and humanity of others are the real villains of the contemporary human tragedy from Kabul to Kyiv and beyond.
But they did walk away on August 15th, 2021, after having killed more Afghans as collateral damage than Al Qa’eda or Taliban ever had.
On September 1st, 2021, soon after the Kabul debacle, President Biden renewed his commitment to Ukrainian security and territorial integrity as well as his support for its joining of NATO. But barely 6 months later, Ukraine effectively, is on its own. It might just be a matter of days before Kyiv too falls to the Russians, regardless of whatever heroics Ukrainians can conjure up in the face of superior Russian fire power. The West will of course write angry letters and give a few metaphorical spit balls to the Ukrainians to defend themselves. The question arises: why? Why such a steady stream of lost wars and broken promises by the West?
The answer is multi-faceted and can perhaps be explained best by two interlinked impulses at the heart of the Western enterprise: imperialism and racism. Post-Soviet Russia was a humiliated and bankrupt country run by bankers from the West in the 1990s. The Western triumphalism was not shared by the Russian people who were undergoing the misery of market reform. Vladimir Putin, the current president of Russia, misguidedly or otherwise, sought to restore some honour to a traumatised society. While his policies domestically were hardly democratic or inclusive, he nevertheless leveraged Russia’s vast energy resources to restore some semblance of relevance of Russia as a great power in the world. And therein lies the nub of the matter.
The NATO allies could not countenance a resurgent Russia as an equal in international affairs. The West had taken in almost all of the Eastern Europe in the NATO fold in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now they had trained their eyes on Ukraine as the next prize, to reinforce a US dominated security order in Europe.
Russia was not averse to being a partner to the Americans in that security order, but not on the terms that Americans were willing to countenance. An order based on equality between Russian and US interests. But the Americans and the West chose to press their advantage and used their Western centric allies to undermine the evenly balanced political order in Ukraine to steer it towards the West, something that Russia had made clear was a red line.
Through the Minsk process it had been agreed between the West, Ukraine and Russia that Ukraine will be a neutral (buffer) country between Russia and the West. The neutrality clause precluded any future membership of the Western alliance for Ukraine. The West, however, continued to press its advantage by leveraging its allies, mostly with dark histories and present policies of ultra-nationalist fascistic leanings, to undermine pro-Russia constituencies in Ukraine. The result is the human and political tragedy unfolding in Ukraine since February 24th, 2022.
Why does the West promise more than it can deliver? The answer lies in West’s imperialist hangover and colonial hubris. It owns the world, its liberal values are the only true ones, it represents the end of history and any opposition to it could possibly not have a legitimate point -- the Western self image and reasoning goes.
The parallels with Afghanistan are uncanny in this instance. The promises of eternal alliance and support were taken seriously by the Afghans, just as they were by the Ukrainians. The intemperate US allies like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, including Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (the one who invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place) thought that they could have free reign domestically and could thumb their noses at their closest neighbour Pakistan. The same as the Right wing Ukrainian politicians who trusted American ‘commitments’ to their security as a licence to run rough shod over deep fissures in their own polity, and to annoy a close neighbour, Russia.
Why does the West promise more than it can deliver? The answer lies in West’s imperialist hangover and colonial hubris. It owns the world, its liberal values are the only true ones, it represents the end of history and any opposition to it could possibly not have a legitimate point -- the Western self image and reasoning goes. And if it sounds overstated, just watch any Western news channel or pronouncements of its leaders for 30 minutes and you get the picture.
Why is the West trusted by its allies than its history warrants? The simple answer in the short term is often money, as was the case in Afghanistan, and also in Ukraine. Not to mention that often Western constituencies in the global South share their patrons’ contempt of opposition to their world views, and visions of the future. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan like the Right wing in Ukraine never really arranged any picnics for their domestic opposition and replicated the black and white imagery of civilization versus obscurantism in Afghanistan, or democracy versus dictatorship in Ukraine.
Imperialism was never just about commercial interests. It was also equally about spreading benefits of civilization, underwritten by racism. It is no coincidence that a two decade veteran of international journalism for American CBS news Charlie D’Agata had to wonder how could ‘civilized’ white folks of Ukraine face war like ‘less civilized’ places like Iraq and Afghanistan. One would be hard pressed to find any coverage of the Ukraine war in the Western media lamenting, that it is happening in Europe. Europe! The horror! The horror!
None of what I say above takes away from the criminality of Russian invasion of a sovereign country. Neither does Western chicanery take away from the depravity of the Taliban or their allies. But one wonders what could have been. Ukraine could have been a peaceful prosperous country attending to its affairs, like Finland in the days of the Cold War, serving as a peaceful bridge between Russia and the European Union. Americans instead of painting the entire rural Afghanistan with a Taliban brush could have attended to rural development, peace and negotiation instead of bombing wedding parties and schools. Thinking of countries as pawns without any regard for their internal complexity, history and fault lines lands us where we are today with Ukraine.
It is never the case of a psycho dictator doing bad/evil things to innocents. Deliberate ignorance and disrespect of history, culture and humanity of others are the real villains of the contemporary human tragedy from Kabul to Kyiv and beyond.