Review of World Affairs (RWA)
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
Nepal
It is astounding how the present government of Sher Bahadur Deuba manages to ignore the dismal state of the country. He has absolutely no mandate and was arbitrarily imposed on the people by none other than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Nepal, His Most Distinguished Honourable Shri Shri Cholendra Shumsher J.B.R. Because of his hanky panky, he is now under attack from all sides.
Because of the government’s non-performance, Deuba has come under severe attack from one of his Young Turks – none other than the ebullient Gagan Thapa.
The whole government structure is in disarray. The division of labour and power between the three branches of government –the executive, legislature and judiciary — has been swept away. There is not only any balance, it doesn’t exist at all!
The Legislature
Parliament has been prorogued and is non-functioning because Deuba and his cohorts [and his coalition bedfellows in crime] want to rule by fiat. At the same time, he is under tremendous pressure to ratify the MCC compact in parliament.
The Judiciary
At the same time, the Supreme Court is also in limbo. It is a house divided and is not doing its proper work.
The Executive
Consequently, there is intense chaos. The Deuba government has lost all credibility both on the domestic and external fronts. It has no international standing at all. Moreover, his misrule is a grave threat to our national security.
Deuba promised that all eligible Nepalese would be vaccinated for Covid-19 by mid-April next year. Why is it then that the Prime Minister’s Office has been persistently preventing the Ministry of Health from procuring Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines? (The Kathmandu Post, Nov. 4, 2021). What is the reason for this foul play?
Most professionals are deeply concerned about the dismal state of the economy. The government doesn’t seem to have any foreign exchange reserves, hugely reduced remittances and rising inflation (see: informal internet group: nnsdee@googlegroups.com). With a nincompoop as finance minister, what can you expect?
Shri Deuba was in Glasgow to attend the UN Climate Conference. However, he has not seen fit to inform his countrywomen and –men about the state of the world’s climate crisis and what Nepal is doing about it. Probably, the discussions were well over Deuba’s head, and also not interesting or relevant to him. The environment minister is, of course, nowhere to be seen!
The fact is that the Nepali Congress has long lost its political elan and Deuba is a mere cypher. His political allies have become an albatross around his neck, and he doesn’t have the balls to control them. No amount of rhetoric can make up for the poor government performance.
It is noon for the President of the Republic, Shrimati Bidya Bhandari to act decisively. He and his band of crooks should be kicked out and a provisional, technocratic government installed. If she insists on twiddling her thumbs, she will be derelict in her constitutional duties and will have to face consequences at a later date.
Ever since the fatal year 2015, the year of the promulgation of the so-called New Constitution, there has been a steady decline in the willingness and ability of the government to put the priorities of the state on an even keel. At the domestic level, the government has not placed the national interests of the people first. At the external level, the national security interests have not been treated with the seriousness they deserve.
The nation got through the Covid-19 pandemic, not because of the government’s seriousness of purpose or sense of direction. It got through despite the government’s callousness. It was as if the Hand of Providence was held over the nation. The Protecting Deity of the nation literally protected us.
But this cannot go on indefinitely. As the popular saying goes: ‘God helps those or help themselves and to prevent the country from becoming a failed state or ‘going to the dogs’ [with due apology to man’s best friends, especially during the auspicious season of Tihar!], the time is now ripe for the people of Nepal to take things into their own hands. But where are the resurgent, revolutionary youth, where is a vibrant civil society?
Nepal needs to be different. It needs fresh women and men to shape the new Nepal – to inaugurate reforms from the bottom up and revamp the main institutions and all their parts. It needs a complete transformation and a fresh vision!
Afghanistan
Ever since the collapse of the Ashraf Ghani government and the takeover by the militant Islamist Taliban, the news from the land-locked, buffer state in the Hindu Kush at the crossroads of Asia has only been dire.
The ongoing debate over America’s failure in Afghanistan among media and academic pundits and, of course, arm-chair experts is still raging. The latest contribution by Barnett Rubin offers perhaps the most cogent and realistic explanation for America’s debacle [in: “War on the Rocks”, Nov. 1, 2021].
Rubin is, after all, predestined to comment on Afghanistan affairs. He has had decades-long contacts and collaboration with the movers and shakers of both countries – including Afghanistan’s last two presidents, Hamid Karzai and Dr. Ashraf Ghani. He served as senior adviser to both the U.S. special representatives for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-2013) and the U.N. special representative of the secretary-general for Afghanistan. He has taught at Yale and Columbia universities. He is currently a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation of New York University.
Rubin’s meticulous critique spells out:
– The complete lack of consideration of how rural Afghanistan functions
– An inadequate counter-insurgency strategy
– A “Ponzi scheme’ of corruption effectively funded by U.S. dollars
– Ashraf Ghani’s [and the entire political establishment’s] refusal to believe that the Americans would eventually abandon them and, ipso facto, defeat was possible
– A missed [and golden] opportunity to reconcile with the Taliban after the 2001 US invasion
– The diminished US influence in the region.
Rubin concludes that from start to finish, the US-backed project of ‘good governance’ was ill-conceived. Western institutions could not be implanted into a backward, rural, impoverished oriental society!
The Taliban have no inkling of how to proceed – they are prisoners of their own antiquated, pre-conceived notions of an Islamic society. The West is not helping matters by releasing Afghanistan’s own frozen funds. As a result, the country is experiencing a resurgence of the Islamic State of Khorasan. They have stepped up recruiting members across disgruntled Sunni groups, including the former military. Currently, their terrorist activities are directed at the innocent and helpless [and hapless] minority Shi’a, but soon even the state may be on the line.
This is the unintended consequence of not having achieved a political settlement before abandoning Afghanistan.
Sino-American Relations: Pundits’ & Experts’ Views
Some American commentators have argued that Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to have an “obsession” with the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
Hal Brands writes in Bloomberg that China is repeating some of the mistakes of the Soviet Union:
– It has courted an arms race with the U.S.
– Posed the global order as an East-West struggle
– Unleashed its diplomats to “chastise American officials publicly, in tones reminiscent of Cold War rhetorical clashes.
In Brands’ view, the strategy has overtones of needless antagonism, ignores interdependence [especially global health, climate and economic issues], and could disadvantage Beijing in the long run.
“It’s no longer debatable that the United States and China . . . are entering their own new cold war,” Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis write in Foreign Affairs (Nov./Dec. 2021). The current contest may be imprecise, but revisiting that history can offer today’s policymakers “a framework within which to survive uncertainty, and possibly even thrive within it.”
Comparisons of the U.S.-Soviet conflict to the U.S.-Chinese competition have circulated for years, as have rejoinders that the last century’s history is not, in fact, doomed to be repeated. “China and the United States cannot hope to establish truly friendly relations, Wang Jisi [then Dean of the School of International Studies at Beijing University] wrote in 2005. Nor was theirs “a relationship of confrontation and rivalry for primacy, as the U.S.-Soviet relationship was during the Cold War” (Foreign Affairs, Sep./Oct. 2005).
As cooperation became more difficult to sustain, Beijing and Washington would “not necessarily transcend the ordinary operation of great-power rivalry,” Henry Kissinger [former U.S. Secretary of State & National Security Adviser; architect of US opening to China in the 1970s] argued in 2012. But with recent history as a warning, they need not “adopt confrontation as a strategy of choice,” (Foreign Affairs, March/April, 2012 & “On China”, Penguin, 2012).
U.S. policy-makers soon sought “a stronger and more sustainable approach” to China, as Kurt Campbell [US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, 2009-13] and Ely Ratner [Deputy National Security Adviser to US Vice President Biden, 2015-17] wrote in 2018, as it became clearer that the United States was facing “its most dynamic and formidable competitor in modern history,” (Foreign Affairs.)
But comparing the increasingly combative relationship to the Cold War with the Soviet Union was “misleading,” Yan Xuetong [Professor & Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University] warned the following year. “A bipolar U.S.-Chinese world will not be a world on the brink of an apocalyptic war,” driven by “rigid opposing blocks” and “an ideologically driven, existential conflict,” (Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2019).
Better understanding the twentieth-century conflict could help the United States avoid a worst-case scenario. Washington cannot expect competition with Beijing to reach “a definitive end state akin to the Cold War’s ultimate conclusion,” Campbell and Jake Sullivan [Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, 2011-13, National Security Adviser to US Vice President, 2013-14, current NSA to Biden] argued in 2019 (Foreign Affairs, Sep./Oct. 2019).
Therefore, they wrote: “it would be misguided to build a neo-containment policy on the premise that the current Chinese state will eventually collapse, or with that as the objective.”
Cold War-style U.S. policies would make sense only “if Beijing were truly bent on destroying democracy and spreading authoritarianism,” Jessica Chen Weiss [Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University] wrote in 2019. “Overreacting by framing competition with China in civilizational or ideological terms risks backfiring by turning China into what many in Washington fear it already is” (Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2019).
Even if a protracted U.S.-Chinese competition cannot be avoided, it is unlikely to follow the same course as the U.S.-Soviet struggle, Odd Arne Westad [professor of History & Global Affairs at Yale University ] wrote in 2019. The analogy to the Cold War “has become irresistible,” but the two conflicts are just as different as they are alike. It is these differences, the contrast between the sources of Soviet conduct then and the sources of Chinese conduct now, that stand to save the world from another Cold War,” (Foreign Affairs, Sep./Oct. 2019).
John Mearsheimer [Professor of Political Science at Chicago University and the leading proponent of “Neo-Realism Theory” in IR] argues that the conflict is already locked in. “Once China grew wealthy, a U.S.-Chinese Cold War was inevitable,” he writes. Now, the United States and China are engaged in “an intense security competition that touches on every dimension of their relationship” – and compared to the last one, “this cold war is more likely to turn hot,”(Foreign Affairs, Nov./Dec, 2021).
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
Login to add a comment