The smiling warriors are back

I remember a TV ad where a man looks through a vodka bottle. The otherwise smiling and classy-looking people appeared wild and ugly when their true colours were revealed through the bottle.

Biden’s team is no different. We are heading toward the traditional White House where the men in charge ensure America flexes its muscles abroad. No more late night tweets at the domestic media but trouble in the far-flung corners of the world, which the American people would probably never know about. Trump disturbed people inside America and Biden will do that globally, with a smile instead of the accordion playing hand gestures of Trump. If Biden’s team is viewed through that vodka bottle, instead of seeing the suit wearing smiling Ivy League educated leaders, we’d rather see ancient hunter gatherers who roamed the planet, not settling in one place, always on the hunt.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s pick for the secretary of state, has been described as a man having interventionist tendencies. Raised by a stepfather who was a Holocaust survivor, Blinken wanted to become a journalist or a film producer. While he didn’t become either, his spin ability was well manifested in foreign policy speeches of president Bill Clinton, which Blinken had written. Those talents would come handy when waging wars in the name of Responsibility to Protect, self-defence, and other such fictions. When president Obama labeled Syria’s use of chemical weapons as his “red line” and never followed up with an attack, Blinken had said, “superpowers don’t bluff.” Taking a further jibe at Obama, Blinken had also said then, “it’s neither [Obama’s] desire nor intention” to wage war against Syria and the US doesn’t do “pinprick” attacks.

Afghanistan is very likely going to suffer from that hunter gatherer class that will soon be in charge of the most lethal military in mankind’s history. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is going to horrible lengths to avoid concluding the peace deal with the Taliban. He and his cronies are faithfully embracing the aphorism ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’. Last week, hours before Secretary Pompeo visited Doha to meet with Afghan and Taliban leaders in hopes of keeping the peace deal intact, there was an ISIS attack in Kabul. IS-K shows vivid signs of Indian and Kabul support.

Even The New York Times was not in its reflexively easy reporting mode. In an article last week it said, “Although Afghanistan’s senior vice president, Amrullah Saleh, is spearheading a crackdown on crime in Kabul, it remains unclear how a vehicle loaded with rockets managed to enter the city and fire its arsenal in broad daylight.” In other words, IS-K is in bed with the Kabul establishment. And yesterday, another bomb attack in Bamiyan (a predominantly Shia area, whom the IS-K has declared a war against) killed 14.

In an interesting intersection, Ghani not yielding to peace in Afghanistan is linked to Trump not yielding to a peaceful transition of power in America. Ghani is delaying peace because he knows full well that once Biden is in charge, peace would be asphyxiated because Biden belongs to the class of presidents that wages wars instead of ending them. When Biden talks about restoring America’s credibility, it means restoring it at the receiving end. Credibility is the code word for keeping America’s belligerent creed alive. Blinken said, “As the President-elect said, we can’t solve all the world’s problems alone”, meaning America will get back to interventionism in cahoots with ‘allies’.

That is the most dangerous statement from the Biden team yet because whenever America needs allies for dirty work abroad, those allies do very dirty things too. Brace for foreign wars!

Published in The Express Tribune, November 26^th, 2020.

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