ROHAN ARORA, Editor-in-Chief—Since the creation of the United Nations, and even before that in the beginning of the 20th century to today, the US has created an image for itself on the world stage that is fundamentally based on interventionism and provoking unnecessarily violent and costly conflicts in the name of said interventionism. The developing situation in Kabul is only the latest in a series of diplomatic faux pas committed by the United States in its longstanding contention with the middle east.
This blatant failure to properly assess the situation and plan a proper exit strategy led to a very chaotic exit, culminating with the Taliban, USA’s main foe in the area, completing a total takeover of the territory not even a month after the vacation of the territory by US armed forces. What ensued next was chaos. The evacuation and diplomatic abandonment of Kabul was a messy and drawn out operation- which, like many of the US’s foreign policy mistakes in the last two decades, could have been avoided with better planning. Many lives were lost unnecessarily, and many more are still in danger because of their ties to the previously occupying US government forces.
I doubt the United States government cares about this failure as much as it is positioning itself to appear. The United States will continue to meddle in foreign countries where it has no business to, and try to influence their sociopolitical development. Because that is what the US does, and has done for the past century or so.
What this development should signal to the powers that be, is something entirely different than what is going to happen. This should telegraph to Diplomatic officials that such contentious occupations cannot result in any fruitful multilateral connections being formed. These knife’s edge conflicts take an excessive toll on the resources and manpower of both parties, and ultimately the situation ends up similar, or worse than how it was before US involvement, in Kabul’s case, worse.
Backlash against the government is justified, but to me, it’s important to note that these people shouldn’t be held any more or less reliable than those who created the system which continually causes this harm upon other nations. Some of the people involved are simply enforcers who have no say in the recreation of these foreign policy doctrines. In fact, a good number of people fall into this category because of the political minefield diplomatic policy making tends to be.
Nonetheless, this is indicative to me that it is time to change how we think about foreign policy. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result or outcome. The United State’s foreign policy, in that case, is insane. Nothing about the systems in place in Kabul were original in any regard. They were all predecessors sof systems in place in Korea, and Vietnam, and the Philippines, and Cuba.
Now, more than before, it seems necessary to have a reckoning, as a country, about how diplomacy should operate. While there have been many great foreign policy achievements in the last century, Things like Kabul, and vietnam remain a stain on the reputation of the United States, and will continue to happen if the dynamics and logistics of the situation are not understood.