Pratap Bhanu Mehta & the crisis of liberal statecraft

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in the Indian Express 

The unprecedented acts of terror on 9/11, when death literally fell from the sky, were ostensibly motivated by an impulse to revenge and restoration.

No. The aim was to get American bases out of Saudi Arabia- which is what actually happened. But the Saudis were able to contain their lunatic fringe.  

The perpetrators who carried it out sought to teach a lesson to the West, and re-position their version of Islam as a powerful political force.

They sought to undermine the Saudi regime. They hoped to take over that country with its vast wealth. They failed. 

But like a blast whose reverberations fly in all directions, the deepest impulses behind the attack were less strategic and more apocalyptic.

All bomb blasts cause shit to fly in all directions. Bombing is either strategic or simply crazy. It isn't apocalyptic unless it causes the world to end.  

They set in motion two crises that are still with us.

No they didn't.  Saudi Arabia is doing fine. 

The first was the crisis of the West.

What crisis? The West bombed the shit out of Afghanistan and then took over Iraq. Then it lost the plot as corrupt contractors were enriched while China rose and rose. 

It is often said that more than 9/11, it was the overreaction and response to 9/11 that shaped its meaning.

This was a foolish thing to say. The fact is the Saudis reacted in a smart manner to an existential threat. American stupidity in Iraq handed the place to the Iranians. NATO stupidity in connection with the Arab Spring enabled Iran's influence to reach into Syria and Lebanon. Meanwhile, Libya turned to shit because of...you guessed it, NATO stupidity. China, meanwhile, rose and rose.  

There is a great deal of truth to that: 9/11 became the pretext to start two wars, put in motion the perpetual war machine, legitimise unaccountable exercise of executive power, institute the surveillance state, provide mendacious justifications for torture and reinstate the idea that civilian casualties could be counted as mere collateral damage.

All of which is fine and dandy. The stupidity consisted of creating power vacuums while enriching corrupt contractors such that Iran and the Taliban gained power and influence. Still, the Saudis got their act together and started kicking ass and taking names.  

The West was weakened in two ways.

No. It was weakened in only one way. It's power was based on economics. It stupidly let China rise while it, as Obama said, 'did stupid shit'.  

The United States was drawn into wars that it could neither win nor sustain.

It's easy for the US to win a war just by toppling a regime and then saying 'Mission Accomplished'. The stupid thing is to stick around so as to enrich corrupt contractors and let NGO's babble about human rights. 

They also left a trail of political dislocation from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Which was a good thing. Both needed to be 'politically dislocated'. Saddam wasn't a nice guy. Nor was Mullah Omar.  

This weakened the US’s geopolitical credibility and authority.

Only because China rose and rose.  

But the West was weakened through a betrayal of liberalism domestically and abroad.

No. It was betrayed by shitheads who babbled about human rights and a rules based world order.  

In response to terror, liberals tried to steer a path between what Michael Tomasky, at the time, had called the choice between Cheney and Chomsky.

Whereas liberals should try to steer a path between eating their own shit and eating each other's shit.  

But, in effect, they wound up all in the Cheney camp, as the war careers of Barack Obama and Tony Blair testify.

Because both saw themselves as Messianic figures bringing hope to Muslims in shithole countries. Thankfully, Trump turned around American foreign policy. Leave shitholes to shitheads.  

Liberalism has still not found that foreign policy that does not leave the world open to terrorist regimes and their sympathisers on the one hand, and does not devolve into arbitrary overreach causing needless suffering on the other.

Liberalism has been found to be quietly eating its own shit and mumbling incoherently. Fuck Liberalism. Either the West faces the Chinese economic challenge or Eurasia is lost and Africa with it.  

As an idea, liberalism depends upon a presumptive trust in the world, and in the dignity of individuals.

No it depends on eating shit.  

It depends upon, even if feigned, a sense of innocence about the world, where the “other” is not an object of suspicion.

Coz the 'other' is not a turd. It may be chocolate cake.  

It can rarely survive a climate of fear.

Being afraid that stuff you pull out of the back of your pants is not chocolate cake is quite salutary. 

The most consequential outcome of 9/11 was to enshrine terrorism as an abstract and all-pervasive idea in our imagination.

Nope. The outcome was to say 'more please' to ethnic profiling and smart bombs and drone strikes.  

It showed that even very small groups, under the right conditions, can produce spectacular effects.

But even smaller groups could kill the nutters in their caves or cantonment bungalows.  

It created a disposition to believe that any location or person could be a target, or that threat lurked in the most unlikely of places.

For Mehta the threat lurked amongst the founders and donors of the University he was teaching at. He resigned and ran away from them.  

It is true that the West unconscionably overreached.

No. It was initially successful but then lost the plot and wasted money.  

But this is exactly the psychological alchemy terrorism produces.

How come it hasn't done so in India? The answer is that the country is too poor to waste much money. Just killing bad guys is the only antidote needful for checking 'psychological alchemy'.  

The state is politically damned if it is seen as not taking every measure to prevent another attack.

No. It is enough that it is killing bad actors with vim and vigor. Mehta can't have forgotten why Modi won the last election. It was because he retaliated for a Pak terror strike. That's good enough. I suppose Mehta means 'Liberals' can't do retaliation. But then 'Liberals' can't do anything at all save eat their own shit. 

That there was no repeat of an attack of that scale in the US might be chalked up to at least some kind of success. But it came with a price.

Liberals started eating their own shit all over the place.  

Many measures used in the war on terror weakened liberalism.

So the thing wasn't a complete waste of time. Trump got elected. Brexit happened. Orban became more popular in Europe than Merkel.  

But if perpetrators of 9/11 wanted revenge against the West, they also wanted to reconfigure Islam.

They wanted to overthrow the Saudi regime and take over the vast wealth of that country. 

This created a second crisis. In its semiotics, 9/11 was a modern event.

Only because it happened recently. 

Not only did it use modern technology,

as opposed crashing camels into the twin towers 

it used a modern communicative strategy:

instead of just shouting very loudly 

Create a spectacular event to establish a new norm and get more recruits to the cause.

Since the 'norm' involved suicide, the thing was self-limiting.  

It also wanted to destabilise all forms of authority in the Middle East.

No. It wanted to establish its own authority.  

Al Qaeda and the response to it also marked the death nail of varieties of Arab nationalism.

Does this cretin mean 'death knell'? His expensive phoren education was wasted on him. Iraq's Ba'athism has collapsed and God alone knows who will prevail in Libya. But Egypt is still Nasserite and Syria's Assad may prevail with Iranian help.  

These trends predated 9/11. But 9/11 accelerated the crisis of authority from Egypt to Afghanistan and beyond.

Did it though? Al Qaeda has failed in Saudi Arabia and may be given the cold shoulder by the newly victorious Taliban. Where has it prevailed? In the end, this was a case of Arab Sunnis harming Arab Sunnis so Shias benefitted and Iran extended its influence.

New groups like ISIS that rose in the wake of al Qaeda deepened the crisis of authority within Islam, replacing the old conservatism with a new and more repressive radicalism.

When Liberalism talks of 'Conservatism' and 'Radicalism', you know that Liberalism has been eating its own shit.  

But they also deepened an already incipient crisis of authority of the nation-state form in West Asia.

Either there was a full-blown crisis- as in Iraq- or nothing much changed though much blood was spilled.  

If the West had an interest in, and overreached in its strategy,

What did the West have an interest in? Mehta does not tell us. He starts a sentence without knowing where that sentence is going to go. This is because he isn't really thinking. He is just cobbling together silly phrases. 

the same could be said of states in the Middle East and North Africa.

Which ones? Iran? They seem to have done rather well. It was those states which weren't overreaching which became sitting ducks. It is better to fight on foreign soil than on your own territory. Proxy wars are expensive. Insurgencies are devastating. 

One of the less talked about aspects of the war on terror is how much these states feared the destabilising effects of transnational groups like al Qaeda and ISIS that could in turn threaten their legitimacy.

What was there to talk about? The Saudis and so forth cracked down hard on the nutters. That's it. That's the whole story. 

The irony of all this is, of course, that the West had to ally with repressive regimes, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt; they served each other’s interests.

How is it ironic if people do what it is in their interest to do?  

But, ironically, it made the West an ally of the very repression that had spawned religious radicalism in the first place.

Fuck off! Mehta comes from India. We know all about 'religious radicalism'. It existed before there was a 'West' or anything to 'repress' it. Hindu India found that killing and beating Razakars etc. worked great. Religious radicals stop being radical when they are dead.  

If the intent of the attackers was to induce a paroxysm of self-destruction in the West, it was equally to introduce a repressive, fratricidal and apocalyptic violence amongst its Muslim co-religionists.

But that shit has always existed!  

Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq were just three of these battle grounds.

Nasser sent troops to Yemen for a proxy war with the Saudis. He was a deeply silly man. Afghanistan was brought down by the incompetence of its King- who ignored a big famine- and the stupidity of his cousin who declared a Republic. Then it was the Communists' turn to display stupidity till America enabled Pakistan to turn the country into an utter shithole.  Some were foolish enough to think that Obama Mama would help that country. But after he killed Osama he went cold on that deal. Why? Pakistan was what Pakistan always will be- i.e. a snake-pit. 

So, in some ways, the aftermath of 9/11 became, not a war between Islam and the West, but states of all kinds and radical Islamic groups whose playbook was shaped in the aftermath of 9/11.

The West went to war with various types of Islamic nutters. Then it gave up because nutters should be killed by their own. It's cheaper that way.  

India, despite being a prime target, weathered the storm relatively well, because

the police torture and jail family members of 'militants'. Killing nutters is a good way of discouraging them. If Liberals keep saying 'Modi is the Hindu Hitler' Islamists decide to give India a wide berth.  

democracy provided a safety valve and inoculation against the temptations of apocalyptic terrorism.

No it doesn't. The only thing that works is killing bad guys.  

Its biggest challenge came from support for cross-border violence in Pakistan.

Till Pakistan started getting bombed in retaliation. 

Countries like Pakistan spectacularly played both sides of the argument, positioning themselves as indispensable allies to the West, while doing their best to create an environment propitious for terrorism.

Which is why America had to pull the plug. Meanwhile China is consolidating its hegemony of Eurasia.  

In one sense, the twin crises that 9/11 unleashed, the crisis of liberal statecraft,

This cretin thinks Dubya and his neo-cons were 'liberals'.  

and the crisis of authority from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, are still with us.

What fucking 'crisis of authority' is there in Saudi Arabia? Anyone can be locked up and forced to disgorge their ill gotten gains. Visiting a Saudi Embassy- even one on Turkish soil- could be a one way ticket to decapitation. 

Afghanistan may still have resistance fighters. But there is no crisis of authority there. Why? Coz fucking with the Taliban will get you your head chopped off.  

Biden would like to think that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan might help mitigate the first crisis.

In other words, Mehta thinks the 'crisis of liberal statecraft' is mitigated from running away and crawling under your bed to hide. Good to know. 

But the victory of the Taliban on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 will likely politically exacerbate both crises.

How? There is no fucking liberal statscraft around anymore. The US will only do 'over the horizon' intervention. It won't put its troops in harm's way. There is no longer any semblance of a rules based international order. There are two camps- the American and the Chinese. If the Americans start handing out nuclear subs to Australia and then Taiwan and then India and Vietnam- well and good. If not, America returns to the isolationism it renounced around the time Biden was born.  

It will deepen the contest over authority in a number of states and embolden fundamentalists.

Unless they are killed. That's what works. The thing aint rocket science.  

Critics of liberalism will seize on its seeming inability to push back the Taliban.

No. They will snigger and say it eats its own shit.  

Domestic divisions within democracies will likely make a coherent response difficult.

Nope. The majority can always agree to give short shrift to nutters from unassimilable minorities.  

While all established states fear the destabilising effects of transnational terrorism, they will also be tempted to both fish in troubled waters, and secure themselves first.

No they won't. Let foreign nutters run amok in foreign places. Kill them if they try to run amok on your soil.  

So a coherent international response is also unlikely.

Because people who talk about 'international responses' eat their own shit. This makes them incoherent and very smelly. 

Twenty years, and hundreds of thousands of lives later, we are back where we started: In grip of a fear we still don’t know how to address politically.

Mehta is constantly in the grip of fear. That is why he shits himself uncontrollably and keeps trying to find positions he can resign from. Poor fellow! Some nasty Hindus have been going around saying 'Jai Sri Ram!' This is very triggering for Mehta. Why won't some nice Ivy League College give him a job so he can get away from those disgusting Hindooos and their horrible religion?