Because America cannot be surprised at the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan
The Taliban have set up their "political office" in Qatar which is also home to the largest US military base in the Middle East. Italics by Teo Dalavecuras
Seen from the outside, that is, in the most superficial way possible, the withdrawal of US and allied forces from Afghanistan has something sad (and even sinister: the hasty closure of many diplomatic representations is reminiscent of what happened in Damascus towards the end of 2011 and , considering what happened in Syria over the next ten years, it does not promise anything good, at least from a European point of view, assuming and not granted that, somewhere, such a point of view is found). Also this time, Erdogan's Turkey is preparing to play an important role and has already "summoned" the Taliban, to whom it is linked by the common Islamic faith translated into the mystique of power.
Certainly, the "sale" of this retreat to international public opinion is unconvincing, despite the US's direct hold on the holy alliance of the Western media. Boris Johnson with his unassailable cheek declared that the United Kingdom is proud of what it has managed to do in Afghanistan in these twenty years, but nothing like pride and not even a contained satisfaction can be found in the statements of the exponents Americans, from whom it seems rather to intuit that (with the necessary exception of the military lobbies) they are not exactly enthusiastic about having let themselves be led by the nose for twenty years by an Afghan political-administrative class to say the least opportunist, at the average price of 50 billions of dollars a year (not counting human losses), so that the message that transpires is lapidary: "now, they make do!".
The only gimmick of the American softpower managers was the alleged "surprise", spread with the usual zeal by the international media, for the very rapid spread of Taliban power in the territory not yet completely cleared of the men and means of the Western armed forces. "Found" of a depressing modesty if only one thinks of the fact that Western demobilization had already been discussed three years ago by the Trump administration precisely with the Taliban, who have established their "political office" not in North Korea or even in Cuba but in Qatar which, if I remember correctly, is also home to the largest US military base in the Middle East, with ten to fifteen thousand men strong.
After all, Biden can console himself with the idea that even the greatest and lightning-fast founder of empires of all time, Alexander the Great, two thousand and three hundred and fifty years ago was forced to leave the mountains of what in his time was called Bactria with the tail between the legs.
But above all, the authority of the American president draws comfort from the resignation, imperiously requested at the end of July and obtained within a week, of Andrew Cuomo, the governor of the state of New York who had to surrender after a tug-of-war of a few months. to the campaign unleashed in December last year by The New York Times (NYT) and then also cultivated by other highly influential newspapers such as The Atlantic , for accusations of unsolicited touching, more or less indecent proposals to women of the state administration (with the usual effect avalanche, at the first report if others were queued, up to the number of 11 hypothetical victims).
Governor for three consecutive terms, strongman of the Democrats in New York, Cuomo had not dealt with dwarfs and dancers, but with rather serious things like public housing and state fiscal policy, but if he did it well or badly he did not. we will perhaps never know. It seems to understand that at the origin of his fall there is the strange rule according to which anyone, in the state, can uninterruptedly run for the office of governor and be elected for an indefinite number of legislatures, and Cuomo had already declared that he wanted to reapply for a fourth time. It has been hit and (for the moment) sunk, for reasons that have nothing to do with the contents of its policies or with the modalities of their implementation, but with the violation of the taboo of a sexual morality whose code is daily updated by the writers sitting in the offices of the large newsrooms. Before Cuomo, moreover, Eliot Spitzer, who as attorney general of the State of New York had confronted the Gambino family, leaves the office of governor two days after the usual NYT publishes revelations on a federal investigation concerning him for suspicion of past mercenary sexual relations.
If the authority of the President is corroborated by the prompt resignation of the reprobate Cuomo, it is legitimate to ask whether the same can be said of the authority of the democratic method, of which Biden has not stopped waving the flag since he took office in the White House organizing, in the during his late spring trip to Europe, a real "call to arms" by Western democracies against authoritarian regimes (which more, which less, depending on relations with NATO). As it was known, the democratic method would ensure the replacement of the leadership of the state through electoral confrontation but the case of Cuomo seems to suggest that recourse to the polls rather serves to "ratify" forms of opaque ostracism managed on the basis of equally opaque accusations of violation of ethical codes that the prosecution reserves the right to define in the course of work, also according to the evidence against which it manages to collect. In a society made up of consumers-spectators, it was decided to entrust to the media system – suitably pre-oriented, it is reasonable to assume and even to hope – the task of regulating the rotation of political command posts with demonizations on command.
Then, of course, Lukaschenko, Orbàn, Kim-Jong-Un, Al Sisi, Putin, Xi Jinping and so on, deploring to be self-satisfied with the democracy that continues to reign in the Western world. But when it comes to the crisis of democracy (as the political scientist Jan-Werner Mueller, from Princeton and therefore authoritative by definition, does) besides worrying about the "trumpified" Republican Party and the autocratic degeneration of Poland and Hungary, it would be good to devote a minimum of reflection to the role and relative weight of electoral consultations and mass communication. Or to other topics that in a university worthy of its name should be daily bread, such as the "hierarchy of sources". Today, of the sources of the rules of the politically correct and of the cancel culture, very little secret weapons of the American softpower and therefore destined to regulate the dynamics of public life, and above all to define its borders, much more effectively than the dusty Constitutions, of the even more dusty codes and / or laws promulgated by parliaments.
Incidentally, in the great American universities, as is well known, a policy of removing classical studies is underway, also based on the denunciation of the male chauvinist and racist preconceptions disseminated in the classical texts. Sacrosanct denouncement, God forbid, but it is curious that the removal takes place precisely at the moment in which American politics is about to re-establish its own democracy by resorting to an important institution in the Athens of the fifth century BC. C., ostracism. It would take a little coordination, Holy God!
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ritirata-afghanistan-crisi-democrazia/ on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 06:30:55 +0000.