Inside India's COVID-19 Surge

By Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker

06 May 21

 

ajat Arora, an interventional cardiologist, is the managing director of the Yashoda Hospital and Research Centre, a medical system that operates several hospitals in and around New Delhi. For the past year, Arora and his team have designated two specific hospitals for their system’s COVID-19 patients. Situated in the city of Ghaziabad, just east of Delhi, the hospital that Arora looks after is large and modern, with a full range of subspecialties; it has two hundred and forty COVID beds, including sixty-five in the adult I.C.U. and fifteen in a pediatric I.C.U.

India, like the rest of the world, has struggled with the coronavirus. The number of patients at the COVID hospital reached a hundred and thirty in the fall. Still, by December of 2020, life in Delhi had almost returned to normal. Temples had been opened for worship, political rallies had resumed, and India’s famously large wedding celebrations were back on. Arora’s COVID hospital was never stretched beyond capacity and was always flush with supplies and medications; in February, it was caring for fewer than ten coronavirus patients at a time, and many had symptoms of long COVID, not acute infection. The rest of the hospital provided cardiac care, elective surgeries, and labor and delivery services. It came as a surprise to Arora, therefore, when he contracted the virus, in late January. “Everyone said, ‘COVID is gone—where the hell did you get COVID? This is such a random time to get COVID,’ ” he told me. All around him, he recalled, a sense of triumph had settled in: people asked, “Are we immune to this disease?” and “Did we win the war?”

For Arora, as for many Indians, the apocalyptic COVID-19 surge the country now faces was unexpected. In March, cases started to rise in the western state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai. “We thought it would be like the first wave,” Arora said. “We thought things would pick up but pretty much be manageable. You always reason from your past experience.” Today, India is home to the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world—a medical and humanitarian crisis on a scale not yet seen during the pandemic. Though the reported case numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, some experts estimate that millions of Indians are infected each day; thousands are dying, with more deaths going uncounted or unreported. More than one in every five coronavirus tests returns positive—a marker of insufficient testing and rampant viral spread. Hospitals are running out of oxygen, staff, and beds; makeshift funeral pyres burn through the night as crematoriums are flooded with dead bodies.

Arora, like leaders at other Indian hospitals, now regularly hears that critical supplies and medications could run out at his hospital in days or hours, if they haven’t already. He is constantly working the phones to procure what’s needed for basic COVID-19 care: oxygen, ventilators, immunosuppressive medications, antiviral drugs, and the like. Day and night, these calls are interspersed with pleas from increasingly desperate patients or their families, who ask and sometimes beg for admission. Almost always, Arora has to refuse. His hospital can admit around thirty patients per day, based on the number of discharges and deaths; he estimates that he and other hospital administrators receive upward of a thousand requests daily. Arora’s cousin, a woman in her thirties, is currently admitted. After arriving, she required escalating doses of oxygen and needed I.C.U.-level care, but Arora was unable to get a bed for her until nearly half a day had gone by. “There’s nothing we can do until someone gets better or someone dies,” he said. “If I put up a thousand-bed hospital today, it would be full in an hour.”

Not infrequently, Arora receives messages from families of patients to whom he refused admission and who later died. The other day, a loved one of a previously healthy, thirty-nine-year-old man texted Arora that if he had given her just two minutes of his time the man would have survived. Not long afterward, Arora received a message from another man’s son: “My father left us,” he wrote. “I begged you Doctor.” Last week, a young girl called him in the middle of the night on behalf of her father, whose breathing was rapidly deteriorating. The I.C.U. was filled past capacity, and Arora couldn’t admit him. The next day, the girl told Arora that her father had died and that now her mother was struggling to breathe. Arora treated the mother in the emergency room, and she survived.

In addition to a shortage of beds, Arora’s hospital doesn’t have enough medications. Supplies of the immunomodulator drug tocilizumab, which is given to patients to treat the immune-system storm that can devastate the lungs and other organs, are in short supply. The scarcity of the antiviral drug remdesivir has given it an almost mythic status. Some studies have found that the medication confers a modest benefit—shortening the duration of COVID-19 symptoms by a few days—but others suggest that it’s no better than a placebo. (It’s routinely given in the U.S., but the W.H.O. recommends against it.) Nonetheless, “everyone is desperate for it,” Arora said. “We don’t have much else in our armamentarium.” He estimates that his hospital has enough remdesivir for about a fourth of eligible patients. At some Indian hospitals, patients are able—even encouraged—to bring in scarce medications and supplies, if they can procure them. Some of Arora’s patients have turned to the black market, paying thousands of dollars for a vial of remdesivir, only to learn that it’s counterfeit. “Families buy these vials, desperate to save their loved ones,” Arora said. “Then we find out they’re filled with coconut water and milk.”

The tale of the Indian pandemic is both mysterious and familiar. For much of the past year, the world’s largest democracy—with a population of some 1.4 billion living on a landmass a third the size of the U.S.—escaped the worst. Researchers have advanced all sorts of theories to explain this outcome. They point out that India is a young country, with a median age of twenty-eight; that it instituted an early and strict lockdown; that it has undercounted cases and deaths; and that Indians may have had some level of preëxisting immunity to the novel coronavirus, owing to exposure to similar viruses in the past. Studies have indicated, perplexingly, that more than half of the residents in some dense urban centers had previously been infected, even though their hospitals hadn't filled up. None of these explanations have been fully proved, and, separately or in combination, they may not account for why India was spared last year. That debate will likely continue for a long time to come.

The reasons for the country’s current surge, on the other hand, appear straightforward. Since the New Year, there’s been a substantial relaxing of public-health precautions. Mask-wearing declined; sporting events, political rallies, and religious festivals brought large numbers of people close together. Lacking a sense of urgency, the country’s vaccination campaign proceeded slowly: India is the world’s leading manufacturer of vaccines for a wide range of diseases, but has fully immunized roughly two per cent of its population against COVID-19.

Many assume that the rise of more contagious variants is accelerating the damage. Almost certainly, B.1.1.7—originally identified in the U.K. and now dominant in many countries, including the U.S.—is contributing to India’s viral spread. But a new variant, known as B.1.617, has also captured headlines and the attention of scientists and the general public. The predominant form of the variant, misleadingly referred to as the “double-mutant”—it has at least thirteen mutations—was first detected in December. B.1.617 has several mutations on its spike protein, including E484Q and L452R, which seem to increase the virus’s ability to bind to and enter human cells, and which may improve its capacity for evading the immune system. Some scientists have hypothesized that another mutation, P681R, could improve the variant’s ability to infect cells.

Still, the role played by B.1.617 in India’s crisis is uncertain. India has sequenced only about one per cent of positive coronavirus tests, rendering claims about the relative contribution of variants hard to disentangle from other factors, such as a rise in unrestricted gatherings in a densely populated country with limited health-system capacity. In any case, Covaxin—India’s domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine—appears to work against both B.1.1.7 and B.1.617. Arora told me that, although several fully vaccinated clinicians at his hospital have recently contracted the virus, none went on to develop severe disease—exactly the kind of protection the vaccines are designed to deliver.

Last week, the Biden Administration announced that the U.S. would send a hundred-million-dollar aid package to India, including testing kits, ventilators, oxygen cylinders, and P.P.E. The U.S. has also removed restrictions on exporting raw materials for vaccines so that India can increase its production. Last weekend, syringes, oxygen generators, and ventilators poured in from across Europe, and a hundred and fifty thousand doses of Sputnik V, Russia’s vaccine, landed in Hyderabad. The Indian diaspora has committed tens of millions of dollars in aid.

Whether these interventions will be enough remains to be seen. In a country as large, diverse, and bureaucratically complex as India, the logistical challenges of converting aid into impact cannot be overestimated. Meanwhile, the Indian experience holds a deeper lesson for the world—especially for wealthy countries that have hoarded vaccines and supplies. The constellation of forces that led to India’s crisis—pandemic fatigue, the premature relaxation of precautions, more transmissible variants, limited vaccine supplies, weak health-care infrastructure—is not unique; it’s the default in most of the world. Absent a paradigm shift in our approach, there’s no reason to believe that what’s happening in India today won’t happen somewhere else tomorrow.

When we spoke, Arora told me that most patients arrive at his hospital in taxis or in vehicles driven by their families. Few can afford the luxury of an ambulance, either because none are available or because private companies have raised prices amid endless demand. When they arrive, many patients linger in emergency rooms, where they can receive some oxygen—and a modicum of relief—even if they are ultimately refused admission to the hospital. At other hospitals, people have died in the parking lot.

As hospitals, emergency rooms, and the streets fill with younger and younger COVID-19 patients, Arora said, an all-consuming, unrelenting despair has taken hold among health-care workers. At Arora’s hospital, even the pediatric I.C.U. is now full, with children as young as six struggling to breathe. (In India, more children than in the first wave now seem to be falling ill; data is limited, and it’s not clear whether there is a higher proportion of children getting sick or just a higher over-all number.) Many of the deceased are people middle-aged or younger.

“Our staff is struggling,” Arora said. “Many are on the brink of a complete breakdown. Every day, they come to work and see nothing but death. They go home, and their own family has gotten COVID and can’t breathe or have died. This is the situation. There’s no end in sight.”

The True Meaning of the Afghan 'Withdrawal': Will the Nightmare of Saigon's Fall Return in Kabul?

By Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch

06 May 21

 

---

Shouldn’t we be amazed? After all, for almost 20 years, the U.S. military has been supporting, equipping, training, and building up the Afghan military to the tune of more than $70 billion. The result: a corrupt mess of a force likely to prove incapable of successfully defending the U.S.-backed Afghan state from the Taliban once our troops are gone — that is, by this September 11th.

I mean, what were the odds? All too high, I’m afraid, given the U.S. military’s record in Afghanistan and elsewhere in these years. (Think about the collapse of the American-trained and armed Iraqi military in the face of ISIS in 2014.) In fact, for those of you who are old enough, a few Vietnam War-era bells should already be ringing as well, given the fate of the South Vietnamese military, supported in a similar fashion, once the U.S. pulled out of that conflict.

Recently, three New York Times reporters interviewed Afghan officials and military and police figures across the country and concluded that Washington had

“produced a troubled set of forces that are woefully unprepared for facing the Taliban, or any other threat, on their own… Afghan units are rife with corruption, have lost track of the weapons once showered on them by the Pentagon, and in many areas are under constant attack… Prospects for improvement are slim, given slumping recruitment, high casualty rates and a Taliban insurgency that is savvy, experienced and well equipped — including with weapons originally provided to the Afghan government by the United States.”

Consider that also a verdict on the crew that America’s taxpayers have invested in so staggeringly in these years. I’m thinking about the Pentagon. In a set of conflicts that used to go under the title of “the war on terror,” but now are generally just called our “forever wars,” that military has essentially won nothing and, in return, continues to get ever more taxpayer dollars (just in case you think that only the Afghan military is corrupt).

As the American war in Afghanistan winds down, perhaps the only question is: Who’s been on what drugs all these years? It’s a subject that TomDispatch regular and author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power Alfred McCoy takes up in his always striking fashion today. In fact, he offers us a unique look at the Afghan War as, in so many senses and at so many levels, both a drug and a drugged war. In the process, he gives the very word “withdrawal” new meaning. In his treatment of America’s disastrous Afghan War, he also offers a hint of the striking analysis to come in his new imperial history of the world, his latest Dispatch book due out this fall, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

---

any of us have had a recurring nightmare. You know the one. In a fog between sleeping and waking, you’re trying desperately to escape from something awful, some looming threat, but you feel paralyzed. Then, with great relief, you suddenly wake up, covered in sweat. The next night, or the next week, though, that same dream returns.

For politicians of Joe Biden’s generation that recurring nightmare was Saigon, 1975. Communist tanks ripping through the streets as friendly forces flee. Thousands of terrified Vietnamese allies pounding at the U.S. Embassy’s gates. Helicopters plucking Americans and Vietnamese from rooftops and disgorging them on Navy ships. Sailors on those ships, now filled with refugees, shoving those million-dollar helicopters into the sea. The greatest power on Earth sent into the most dismal of defeats.

Back then, everyone in official Washington tried to avoid that nightmare. The White House had already negotiated a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese in 1973 to provide a “decent interval” between Washington’s withdrawal and the fall of the South Vietnamese capital. As defeat loomed in April 1975, Congress refused to fund any more fighting. A first-term senator then, Biden himself said, “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” Yet it happened anyway. Within weeks, Saigon fell and some 135,000 Vietnamese fled, producing scenes of desperation seared into the conscience of a generation.

Now, as president, by ordering a five-month withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by this September 11th, Biden seems eager to avoid the return of an Afghan version of that very nightmare. Yet that “decent interval” between America’s retreat and the Taliban’s future triumph could well prove indecently short.

The Taliban’s fighters have already captured much of the countryside, reducing control of the American-backed Afghan government in Kabul, the capital, to less than a third of all rural districts. Since February, those guerrillas have threatened the country’s major provincial capitals — Kandahar, Kunduz, Helmand, and Baghlan — drawing the noose ever tighter around those key government bastions. In many provinces, as the New York Times reported recently, the police presence has already collapsed and the Afghan army seems close behind.

If such trends continue, the Taliban will soon be primed for an attack on Kabul, where U.S. airpower would prove nearly useless in street-to-street fighting. Unless the Afghan government were to surrender or somehow persuade the Taliban to share power, the fight for Kabul, whenever it finally occurs, could prove to be far bloodier than the fall of Saigon — a twenty-first-century nightmare of mass flight, devastating destruction, and horrific casualties.

With America’s nearly 20-year pacification effort there poised at the brink of defeat, isn’t it time to ask the question that everyone in official Washington seeks to avoid: How and why did Washington lose its longest war?

First, we need to get rid of the simplistic answer, left over from the Vietnam War, that the U.S. somehow didn’t try hard enough. In South Vietnam, a 10-year war, 58,000 American dead, 254,000 South Vietnamese combat deaths, millions of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian civilian deaths, and a trillion dollars in expenditures seem sufficient in the “we tried” category. Similarly, in Afghanistan, almost 20 years of fighting, 2,442 American war dead, 69,000 Afghan troop losses, and costs of more than $2.2 trillion should spare Washington from any charges of cutting and running.

The answer to that critical question lies instead at the juncture of global strategy and gritty local realities on the ground in the opium fields of Afghanistan. During the first two decades of what would actually be a 40-year involvement with that country, a precise alignment of the global and the local gave the U.S. two great victories — first, over the Soviet Union in 1989; then, over the Taliban, which governed much of the country in 2001.

During the nearly 20 years of U.S. occupation that followed, however, Washington mismanaged global, regional, and local politics in ways that doomed its pacification effort to certain defeat. As the countryside slipped out of its control and Taliban guerrillas multiplied after 2004, Washington tried everything — a trillion-dollar aid program, a 100,000 troop “surge,” a multi-billion-dollar drug war — but none of it worked. Even now, in the midst of a retreat in defeat, official Washington has no clear idea why it ultimately lost this 40-year conflict.

Secret War (Drug War)

Just four years after the North Vietnamese army rolled into Saigon driving Soviet-made tanks and trucks, Washington decided to even the score by giving Moscow its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. When the Red Army occupied Kabul in December 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, crafted a grand strategy for a CIA covert war that would inflict a humiliating defeat on the Soviet Union.

Building upon an old U.S. alliance with Pakistan, the CIA worked through that country’s Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI) to deliver millions, then billions of dollars in arms to Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet guerrillas, known as the mujahideen, whose Islamic faith made them formidable fighters. As a master of geopolitics, Brzezinski forged a near-perfect strategic alignment among the U.S., Pakistan, and China for a surrogate conflict against the Soviets. Locked into a bitter rivalry with its neighbor India that erupted in periodic border wars, Pakistan was desperate to please Washington, particularly since, ominously enough, India had only recently tested its first nuclear bomb.

Throughout the long years of the Cold War, Washington was Pakistan’s main ally, providing ample military aid and tilting its diplomacy to favor that country over India. To shelter beneath the U.S. nuclear umbrella, the Pakistanis were, in turn, willing to risk Moscow’s ire by serving as the springboard for the CIA’s secret war on the Red Army in Afghanistan.

Beneath that grand strategy, there was a grittier reality taking shape on the ground in that country. While the mujahideen commanders welcomed the CIA’s arms shipments, they also needed funds to sustain their fighters and soon turned to poppy growing and opium trafficking for that. As Washington’s secret war entered its sixth year, a New York Times correspondent travelling through southern Afghanistan discovered a proliferation of poppy fields that was transforming that arid terrain into the world’s main source of illicit narcotics. “We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers,” one rebel leader told the reporter.

In fact, caravans carrying CIA arms into Afghanistan often returned to Pakistan loaded with opium — sometimes, reported the New York Times, “with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.” During the decade of the CIA’s secret war there, Afghanistan’s annual opium harvest soared from a modest 100 tons to a massive 2,000 tons. To process the raw opium into heroin, illicit laboratories opened in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands that, by 1984, supplied a staggering 60% of the U.S. market and 80% of the European one. Inside Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts surged from almost none at all in 1979 to nearly 1.5 million by 1985.

By 1988, there were an estimated 100 to 200 heroin refineries in the area around the Khyber Pass inside Pakistan operating under the purview of the ISI. Further south, an Islamist warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s favored Afghan “asset,” controlled several heroin refineries that processed much of the opium harvest from the country’s southern provinces. In May 1990, as that secret war was ending, the Washington Post reported that American officials had failed to investigate drug dealing by Hekmatyar and his protectors in Pakistan’s ISI largely “because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.”

Charles Cogan, director of the CIA’s Afghan operation, later spoke frankly about the Agency’s priorities. “We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t think that we need to apologize for this… There was fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.”

There was also another kind of real fallout from that secret war, though Cogan didn’t mention it. While it was hosting the CIA’s covert operation, Pakistan played upon Washington’s dependence and its absorption in its Cold War battle against the Soviets to develop ample fissionable material by 1987 for its own nuclear bomb and, a decade later, to carry out a successful nuclear test that stunned India and sent strategic shockwaves across South Asia.

Simultaneously, Pakistan was also turning Afghanistan into a virtual client state. For three years following the Soviet retreat in 1989, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI continued to collaborate in backing a bid by Hekmatyar to capture Kabul, providing him with enough firepower to shell the capital and slaughter some 50,000 of its residents. When that failed, from the millions of Afghan refugees inside their borders, the Pakistanis alone formed a new force that came to be called the Taliban — sound familiar? — and armed them to seize Kabul successfully in 1996.

The Invasion of Afghanistan

In the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Washington decided to invade Afghanistan, the same alignment of global strategy and gritty local realities assured it another stunning victory, this time over the Taliban who then ruled most of the country. Although its nuclear arms now lessened its dependence on Washington, Pakistan was still willing to serve as a springboard for the CIA’s mobilization of Afghan regional warlords who, in combination with massive U.S. bombing, soon swept the Taliban out of power.

Although American air power readily smashed its armed forces — seemingly, then, beyond repair — that theocratic regime’s real weakness lay in its gross mismanagement of the country’s opium harvest. After taking power in 1996, the Taliban had first doubled the country’s opium crop to an unprecedented 4,600 tons, sustaining the economy while providing 75% of the world’s heroin. Four years later, however, the regime’s ruling mullahs used their formidable coercive powers to make a bid for international recognition at the U.N. by slashing the country’s opium harvest to a mere 185 tons. That decision would plunge millions of farmers into misery and, in the process, reduce the regime to a hollow shell that shattered with the first American bombs.

While the U.S. bombing campaign raged through October 2001, the CIA shipped $70 million in bundled bills into Afghanistan to mobilize its old coalition of tribal warlords for the fight against the Taliban. President George W. Bush would later celebrate that expenditure as one of history’s biggest “bargains.”

Almost from the start of what became a 20-year American occupation, however, the once-perfect alignment of global and local factors started to break apart for Washington. Even as the Taliban retreated in chaos and consternation, those bargain-basement warlords captured the countryside and promptly presided over a revived opium harvest that climbed to 3,600 tons by 2003, or an extraordinary 62% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Four years later, the drug harvest would reach a staggering 8,200 tons — generating 53% of the country’s GDP, 93% of the world’s illicit heroin, and, above all, ample funds for a revival of… yes, you guessed it, the Taliban’s guerrilla army.

Stunned by the realization that its client regime in Kabul was losing control of the countryside to the once-again opium-funded Taliban, the Bush White House launched a $7-billion drug war that soon sank into a cesspool of corruption and complex tribal politics. By 2009, the Taliban guerrillas were expanding so rapidly that the new Obama administration opted for a “surge” of 100,000 U.S. troops there.

By attacking the guerrillas but failing to eradicate the opium harvest that funded their deployment every spring, Obama’s surge soon suffered a defeat foretold. Amid a rapid drawdown of those troops to meet the surge’s use-by date of December 2014 (as Obama had promised), the Taliban launched the first of its annual fighting-season offensives that slowly wrested control of significant parts of the countryside from the Afghan military and police.

By 2017, the opium harvest had climbed to a new record of 9,000 tons, providing about 60% of the funding for the Taliban’s relentless advance. Recognizing the centrality of the drug trade in sustaining the insurgency, the U.S. command dispatched F-22 fighters and B-52 bombers to attack the Taliban’s labs in the country’s heroin heartland. In effect, it was deploying billion-dollar aircraft to destroy what turned out to be 10 mud huts, depriving the Taliban of just $2,800 in tax revenues. To anyone paying attention, the absurd asymmetry of that operation revealed that the U.S. military was being decisively outmaneuvered and defeated by the grittiest of local Afghan realities.

At the same time, the geopolitical side of the Afghan equation was turning decisively against the American war effort. With Pakistan moving ever closer to China as a counterweight to its rival India and U.S.-China relations becoming hostile, Washington grew increasingly irritated with Islamabad. At a summit meeting in late 2017, President Trump and India’s Prime Minister Modi joined with their Australian and Japanese counterparts to form “the Quad” (known more formally as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), an incipient alliance aimed at checking China’s expansion that soon gained substance through joint naval maneuvers in the Indian Ocean.

Within weeks of that meeting, Trump would trash Washington’s 60-year alliance with Pakistan with a single New Year’s Day tweet claiming that country had repaid years of generous U.S. aid with “nothing but lies & deceit.” Almost immediately, Washington announced suspension of its military aid to Pakistan until Islamabad took “decisive action” against the Taliban and its militant allies.

With Washington’s delicate alignment of global and local forces now fatally misaligned, both Trump’s capitulation at peace talks with the Taliban in 2020 and Biden’s coming retreat in defeat were preordained. Without access to landlocked Afghanistan from Pakistan, U.S. surveillance drones and fighter-bombers now potentially face a 2,400-mile flight from the nearest bases in the Persian Gulf — too far for effective use of airpower to shape events on the ground (though America’s commanders are already searching desperately for air bases in countries far nearer to Afghanistan to use).

Lessons of Defeat

Unlike a simple victory, this defeat offers layers of meaning for those with the patience to plumb its lessons. During a government investigation of what went wrong back in 2015, Douglas Lute, an Army general who directed Afghan war policy for the Bush and Obama administrations, observed: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.” With American troops now shaking the dust of Afghanistan’s arid soil off their boots, future U.S. military operations in that part of the globe are likely to shift offshore as the Navy joins the rest of the Quad’s flotilla in a bid to check China’s advance in the Indian Ocean.

Beyond the closed circles of official Washington, this dismal outcome has more disturbing lessons. The many Afghans who believed in America’s democratic promises will join a growing line of abandoned allies, stretching back to the Vietnam era and including, more recently, Kurds, Iraqis, and Somalis, among others. Once the full costs of Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan become apparent, the debacle may, not surprisingly, discourage potential future allies from trusting Washington’s word or judgment.

Much as the fall of Saigon made the American people wary of such interventions for more than a decade, so a possible catastrophe in Kabul will likely (one might even say, hopefully) produce a long-term aversion in this country to such future interventions. Just as Saigon, 1975, became the nightmare Americans wished to avoid for at least a decade, so Kabul, 2022, could become an unsettling recurrence that only deepens an American crisis of confidence at home.

When the Red Army’s last tanks finally crossed the Friendship Bridge and left Afghanistan in February 1989, that defeat helped precipitate the complete collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its empire within a mere three years. The impact of the coming U.S. retreat in Afghanistan will undoubtedly be far less dramatic. Still, it will be deeply significant. Such a retreat after so many years, with the enemy if not at the gates, then closing in on them, is a clear sign that imperial Washington has reached the very limits of what even the most powerful military on earth can do.

Or put another way, there should be no mistake after those nearly 20 years in Afghanistan. Victory is no longer in the American bloodstream (a lesson that Vietnam somehow did not bring home), though drugs are. The loss of the ultimate drug war was a special kind of imperial disaster, giving withdrawal more than one meaning in 2021. So, it won’t be surprising if the departure from that country under such conditions is a signal to allies and enemies alike that Washington hasn’t a hope of ordering the world as it wishes anymore and that its once-formidable global hegemony is truly waning.

---

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author most recently of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His latest book (to be published in October by Dispatch Books) is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.