Politics
However, when we unleash the dogs of war, we must go where they take us. In other words, it has invariably become Hobson’s choice.
In an interview for the New Yorker Radio Hour, Anand Gopal, a prominent American journalist and a finalist for Pulitzer Prize 2015, discusses how the new-aged Taliban don’t have the slightest idea about 9/11 or, for that matter, why the U.S was even there in Afghanistan in the first place. All they have ever seen and experienced are wars, and that’s all they know. Fight, win, and take revenge when their people die. Their mentality is (almost) tribal. Anand has spent considerable time with the Taliban, and he warns about the empty claims they are making. He says a small…
Politics
Reasons for its retreat are not the same as reasons for the fiasco.
The temptation to disengage from Afghanistan has always existed. However, it gave way to realism as the threat of terrorism could put any American president’s fate in jeopardy. Finally, the United States has dealt with its fears or been pushed to do so, given the emergence of more prominent threats.
The U.S military withdraws from the Bagram military base, the nucleus of American operations in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. The exit is expected to complete in September 2021, before the 20th anniversary of 9/11. The stepping down of General Scott Miller, the leading commander of the US security forces…
Politics
All of it shows the need to mitigate the existing gender inequalities in society.
Abortion-ban is equivalent to chastising women due to their gender. It takes us back to the fundamental evils of society —gender inequality and patriarchy — and how they cast their dirty shadow and soil almost all dimensions of a woman’s life. These medieval anti-abortion laws make life even more difficult for them, both emotionally and logistically. Looking at where we stand today, I sometimes wonder how much longer do we have to wait before gender ceases to be a factor. …
Politics
The tremendous human sorrow explains Afghanistan’s high reliance on America. Should the world reconsider America’s credibility as an ally?
America faltered in supporting and delivering justice to the people of Afghanistan in their worst time. On the contrary, it conned them and the Afghan government, America’s ally in the fight against the Taliban, leaving them incapacitated. America showed them a dream affirming they would have their back and, instead, backed out. This has blown the standing of America in the world to bits.
America spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, and the result is before our eyes. The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has put the lives of millions of Afghans in danger. The entire world is shocked by their advancement…
Politics
Dark clouds of fear and disappointment overspread Afghanistan as the Taliban occupies major cities faster than anticipated.
“Men learned to fight like they learned to breathe, without even thinking. They fought dogs, they fought cocks. They fought tiny delicate birds that fit in a human hand and lived in a human coat pocket, and they bet on the results. They fought wars for decades until no one seemed to remember quite what they were fighting for. The national sport was essentially a fight, on horseback, over a headless calf or goat. Over the years, whenever Afghan men would tell me that they were tired of fighting, looking weary and creased, I would have only one response: Sure…
Politics
Even when wars are fought to defeat greater evils than the evil of war itself, nothing justifies the actions taken in chasing that goal.
“War does not determine who is right, only who is left,” says Bertrand Russell.
As humans became more civilized and organized, their methods of killing each other became more sophisticated and purposive; hence they can now kill on a larger scale. The fight is not only about survival anymore. We are, by preference, quite willingly preoccupied with conjectures such as religion, nationalism, and other similar abstractions.
Victory in the war against the external enemy is generally analogous to having a license to further your authority as a State over people. In current times, it has gone a step further; it…
Politics
America’s miscalculations in Afghanistan and its inability to deal with the armed non-state actors are corroborating China’s Expansionism.
“Alongside the globalization of the world economy, the international political system is tilting schizophrenically towards greater fragmentation.” Says William J. Burns in his book the Back Channel.
Geopolitics cannot stand voids, and therefore China jumped right in and axed it. Just some days after the U.S pulls out of Afghanistan, China shows its grand support to the Taliban by hosting a meeting for their co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani and eight others with the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, in Tianjin, China. The timing is perfect for the Taliban as they are desperately looking for validity from the international community, especially…
Politics
China’s staunch animosity towards democracy takes shape in Hong Kong as the rule of law gets pulverized, and it launches ideological warfare on Hongkongers.
The Chinese government has perfectly calculated the ideological barrenness that it thinks persists in Hong Kong’s society. It has found ways to replenish that. They achieve the task by suppressing dissent, necessitating loyalty, blocking information through cracking down on the internet, and deploying many other similar tactics. However, its goal is always to maintain social stability no matter what, as that is their code to political power. Social stability is seen as a byproduct of high economic growth, whereas people are seen as the biggest threat to power by officials. That’s why they need to be subsumed in the system…
Politics
“Thinking in terms of great-power clashes, and sparring over who is the bigger hypocrite, will neither resolve international disagreements nor solve common problems. The only way to do that is to focus on what achieving common goals actually requires,” says Harold James, a professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. [1]
The rationalization and ‘absolute’ geographical determinism that geopolitics bleeds to straighten out the contours of the world are not befitting anymore, for the kind of world we now live in represents that no one has any interest in rules and boundaries set by the most powerful.
The…
Press and Politics
With a solid and classifiable voice against the Chinese government, Apple Daily had the bullseye painted on its back.
There is no better tool than the press to catechize the government. Bullies attack, censor, jail, and murder journalists because dissentious truth threatens their survival and loosens their grip on power. Cocooning your people from diverse viewpoints and giving them only your version of the truth (the State’s version) means you are fearful of your doings and want to conceal it desperately; hence, undermining people’s right to know. Deforming the truth by falsely accusing the press of distortions and chipping away at their freedom in this day and age can backfire. Smashing a pro-democracy press to pieces is not going…
