Desperate bid to flee Kabul, bring back memories of similar evacuation measures in Saigon, Cambodia and aborted evacuation bid in Tehran, Iran.
@prashanthamine
Mumbai: United States of America (USA) president Joe Biden has had his ‘Bay of Pigs’ like moment after he executed a messy, ill-timed pullout of US troops from Afghanistan. Already the hasty, ill-planned pullout from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Ashraf Ghani, puppet government in a matter of hours in Afghanistan has dented the US image of a global super-power.
The messy pullout and within matter of hours the spectacular collapse of its puppet government in Afghanistan, conjured up, brought back those nightmarish images of its pullout from Saigon, Cambodia in 1975, wherein US army helicopters landing on the rooftop of its embassy in Saigon to evacuate its staffers as desperate Vietnamese and Cambodians were trying to hang on to the US helicopters.
Like its botched-up intervention in Saigon, Cambodia that propelled the even more despotic regime of Khmer Rouge to power in Cambodia, here too in Afghanistan it has reinvited the dreaded Taliban. Between 1960 to 2011 (last 51 years), the US had 96 times made military interventions in foreign countries, 24 of them being major interventions.
Barring the German reunification of October 3, 1990, none of them have ever been successful. The immediate blow back for the US is that henceforth no one, not even its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, will take it seriously, denting its image of a global superpower.
Someone has aptly said “Here is the mightiest nation on the earth with a defense budget of $778 billion begs with a slipper wearing Taliban to spare its embassy in Kabul. From ‘Make America Great Again’, it is now ‘Make America Beg Again’”.
Historically, the US and its Presidents have had a penchant for repeating their mistakes, leaving a benchmark for their successors to even better that benchmark. The failed ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of April 17 to 21, 1961 of US backed exiled Cubans opposed to Cuba’s Fidel Castro, tarnished the image of then US president John F Kennedy.
This is another example of the spectacular failure of its famed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other US intelligence agencies, to anticipate the sudden collapse of its puppet government in Afghanistan.
US history is replete with such instances, be it Cuba (1961), Iran (1979-80), Cambodia (1975), Vietnam (1973), Somalia (1995), Iraq (1991), Haiti (1995), Afghanistan (2001), Libya (2011) among the long list of botched-up US military interventions.
In 1980, then US president Jimmy Carter’s plan to evacuate 52 US embassy staffers held hostage for more than a year in Iran’s capital Tehran, ended in a disaster.
The secret collateral operations in Cambodia (1975), images of armed American GIs running after a naked crying Vietnamese girl fueled anti-war protests in the US, or the horrific images of Somalian militia tying dead bodies of American GIs to their jeeps and parading them through the streets of Somalian capital Mogadishu, or the now round-about way admission of late US Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in February 2002, that they did not find any Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq in 1991, are classic examples of US intelligence going horribly wrong.
Although the Taliban led by Mullah Omar was created in 1994 by Pakistani army general Hamid Gul, it was actually Muhammed Omar backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that called the shots in the Taliban hierarchy. All this was with tacit support of the US as it was done to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The US and its NATO allies may now be blaming their now ousted puppet regime of Ashraf Ghani of failing to put up a fight to the Taliban. Intelligence sources reveal that the US and its allies made two crucial blunders. One they recruited non-Pashtun tribes in the Afghan armed forces and security agencies. Secondly, the armed forces and security personnel were poorly paid.
In Iran, the Americans had toppled (1979) the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (1953-1979) and installed its own puppet regime of Mohammad Shah Reza Pahlavi who was overthrown in a bloody coup and forced to flee by Ayatollah Khomeini.
The predominant tribe in Afghanistan is the Pashtun tribe, there are other people of Turkic ethnicity, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Hazara (Shias), Kyrgyz, Nooristani, Aibak, Baloch, Brahui and many other lesser-known tribes. Majority of the tribes do not have any commonality in customs, beliefs and values. Pashto or the Pashtun tribesmen form the majority in north Afghanistan and follow their own ethnic Pashtunwali traditions.
Culture of Warlords is quite rampant amongst the tribes, especially in the northern regions bordering Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. Most of the tribes do not recognize the Durand Line that was drawn by the British between Afghanistan and Pakistan in November, 1893. The British had unsuccessfully fought three wars with the Afghan tribesmen. Afghanistan finally attained nationhood on August 19, 1919.
It is ironic that the US under former President George W Bush had launched the War on Terror in 2001 to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The 2001 War on Terror was the fallout of the 9/11 terror attack in the US by the Al Qaeda that ruled the roost in the northern hilly ranges of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Twenty years later, the US has helped the Taliban come back to power. It is little wonder then that those countries that share borders with Afghanistan: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, China, and Iran are the most worried lot.
The US has made costly errors in judgment in finding friends in countries that they tend to meddle in. They often tend to have poor knowledge of the ground realities that is the outcome of poor intelligence. To overcome that the US has found a strange way and that is to give citizenship to people from Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan just to understand their psyche and brush their misdeeds under the carpet.
During his speech at the White House on Monday, President Joe Biden admitted that the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban takeover happened “more quickly than we anticipated”. Just a month ago, Biden had dismissed the chances of a Saigon like situation happening in Afghanistan.
“None whatsoever. Zero”, Biden said. He further added, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the – of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable”. If that was not enough, he went on to add further, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”.
Ever since then the Biden administration has so far not called on any prominent world leaders, countries like India that are now chairperson of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
Former CIA director and former Defense secretary in the Obama administration Leon Panetta reacting to the developments in Afghanistan termed it as Biden’s ‘Bay of Pigs’ moment. He further went on to argue that the United States credibility on the world stage has taken a significant blow.
According to Suman Bery, Global Fellow, Asia Program at the Wilson Centre in his assessment of the situation remarked, “The poor management of the military (and now diplomatic) withdrawal of the United States and the rout of Afghan forces by the Taliban have hurt the reputation of the United States both for competence and for reliability as a partner”.
Former Director General of India’s Military Intelligence, Lieutenant General Ravi K Sawhney while talking to strategic affairs expert Nitin A Gokhale remarked “the Americans have mentally withdrawn from the battle, although they may be there physically”. It pretty much summed up the state of mind of the US, which was amply reflected in what happened in Iran and before that in Vietnam.
It was not just the US that made the fatal mistake of not understanding the geo-politics and the tribal culture, the Soviets too made the same mistake as they invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
Prime Minister Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated by his deputy Hafizullah Amin in September 1979. Later Amin himself was assassinated by the Soviet Special Forces.
Killings and barbaric executions are not new to Afghanistan, not at least for the Taliban. The second exiled President of Afghanistan, Mohammad Najibullah was dragged out of the United Nations (UN) compound in 1992, in Kabul and publicly hanged to death from a tree outside the UN compound. The Soviets too propped up friendly regimes which ultimately took the Soviets down along with them.
The Taliban has little international support in the form of Pakistan, China, Qatar and Iran. The Islamic State of Afghanistan, US, UK, NATO and the International Security Assistance Force. Most of the Arab and Islamic states are hesitating in openly acknowledging the new Taliban led Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has already made it clear that any recognition of the new regime has to be on the international stage. For most of the Arab states and neighbours of Afghanistan legitimising the Taliban regime will have deep, far and wide implications for themselves as well. Moreover, it is too early to predict what will happen next in a volatile situation in Afghanistan.
