America's flawed imperial policy

Photo: AFP

The much-touted American century practically began with the end of the Second World War, when a new shape of things emerged in all economic, socio-cultural and politico-strategic arenas with the world's centre of gravity shifting to the other side of the Atlantic. Notwithstanding a rival superpower America, with her tremendous power, enjoyed undisputed primacy in global affairs, with a pax Americana surreptitiously replacing pax Britannica in a world exhausted with the blood-letting of the devastating war.
America's meteoric ascendancy, and its place at the apex, was vindicated after the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The nerve-wracking Cold War was won by America, further confirming its superiority at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
But only seventeen years later, the American century seems to be heading towards a premature and catastrophic finale. But, in the meantime, she also, in a differently nuanced bid undertook an imperial enterprise like her British predecessor -- making, however, no headway and getting stuck deeper in a morass.
In Afghanistan, for example, the Talibans, whom the Americans routed in a swift military invasion in 2001, are now ascendant, and without the presence of Nato forces the US-installed government of Hamid Karzai would have melted like an ice-cream sundae by now. Yet, the writ of that government doesn't extend beyond Kabul, the highly fortified capital. In Iraq, too, five years of occupation, brutal military action and hundreds of millions of dollar in expenditure failed to cow down its defiant people. Notwithstanding occasional surges, the US is apparently staring strategic defeat in the face there.
Anti-Americanism pervades the world, forming public opinion on a global scale against its neo-imperialism under the cover of an anti-terror stance. This leaves the US allies round the world domestically vulnerable. Her attempts to promote and export democracy abroad has already resulted in burlesque of a kind. This anachronistic exercise in a globalised world has further exposed her shenanigans and depravity in occupied Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy.
Those are what are heroically resisted by Hamas, Hizbollah, the Baathist insurgents, Shia militants of Iraq as well as Taliban andAl qaida fighters collectively in the vast swathe stretching from the Asian shore of the Mediterranian Sea to the Oxus and the Indus in the East, turning it into a zone of futility for the United States whose writs are challenged by open defiance.
It's however not because of any dearth of smart bombs or cruise missile in US's arsenal. What it lacks, instead, is enough of effective administrators capable of understanding the world and changing it to suit the US' positive objective, if any.
Unfortunately, for an imperial America, and also for the recipients of its missionary ardour, there reigns only chaos and lack of coordination between and within the institutional components of the imperial enterprise. The policy makers aren't interested either in facts and figures or the prevailing realities on the ground, as markedly demonstrated by the Iraq invasion and growing signs of failure in spite of a quick victory in Afghanistan. Instead, only their hubris is upheld by compliant executors of their policies.
In its imperial venture, the worldwide presence of Americans seems to be a disjointed mass of contractors, advisers, consultants, brokers, political appointees or earnest college graduates and underpaid officials. They are all deployed without either a clear concept of the imperial mission or the skills that are required to garner success. Most of them sit cowering in the highly protected Green Zone churning out reams of meaningless "policy guidelines."
They perforce rely on private armies like "Blackwater" or privatised corporate intelligence gathering, which alone is a $ 50 billion a year industry. In spite of all these forces arranged to enforce order in occupied countries, the Americans have brought only chaos to societies like Iraq and Afghanistan that already had stable internal order. In so doing, the US has managed to destabilise and radicalise a large part of the world.
Compared to the motley collection of agencies for imperial management, the British Empire was the only truly global empire in modern history that had the distinction of leaving behind functioning administrative and political institutions capable of maintaining order in successor states. The British Empire, for all its faults, brought order in chaotic conditions and created potential for the spread of democratic liberalism that still survives.
Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.