Catastrophic Kabul collapse, Colombo camouflage and Opposition oddity

President GR’s new Cabinet appointments were a disappointment. With the pandemic worsening, he could have appointed one of three doctors in the Government, Prof. Tissa Vitarana, Dr. Sudharshini Fernandopulle or Dr. Ramesh Pathirana, as Minister of Health, but chose not to. According to SLMA President Dr. Padma Gunaratne, the association’s written request to the President seeking a meeting with him remains unanswered

The catastrophic outcome in Afghanistan impacts negatively on South Asia and the Asian balance. It emboldens Islamist fundamentalism which will now believe that divine providence permitted it to prevail over both the USSR and the USA. It had three intertwined root causes: 

(1) The great folly of President George W. Bush (a favourite of the Rajapaksas and Ranil Wickremesinghe, by the way) who invaded Iraq on false pretexts while the war in Afghanistan was far from over. 

(2) The failure of Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter’s NSA) and later, Reagan, to understand that in its engagement in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was holding the line against barbarism and objectively defending modern civilisation at its vulnerable periphery. Instead, in its perverse urgency to undermine the USSR, the West, together with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China, ‘unleashed the Kraken’—of Islamist-jihadi fundamentalism. 

(3) The terrible, bloody, internecine strife unleashed by sectarian ultra-leftist Hafizullah Amin (Afghanistan’s Rohana Wijeweera, and Wijeweera’s favourite Afghan communist) within the Afghani communist movement which had made the revolution of April 1978. This ravaged the Communist party, opening space for the Islamist-tribalist counterrevolution and drawing in the Soviets who eliminated Amin in order to stabilise the situation on its southern underbelly but ended up in a quagmire which contributed to the fall of the USSR itself. (See ‘Afghanistan: Cadre Consumption’, in ‘Part 2: The Revolution Self-Destructs’, Dayan Jayatilleka, The Fall of Global Socialism: A Counter-Narrative from the South, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2014, pp. 61-64.)  

Taliban trouble

Despite the conversations with the Taliban in Moscow, the Taliban victory cannot but alarm Russia and the “Stan” members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO). Dr. Kissinger would have used this potential conflict of strategic and security interests to introduce some daylight between Russia and China and make the global game ‘tripolar’ again, but Kissingerian realism is out in today’s Washington DC and has been so for quite a while.

If it becomes necessary to contain the ‘Taliban effect’, it will take the joint effort of the USA-Russia-India, which is highly improbable.

The best-case scenario is that when the Taliban’s ‘reasonable’ face is replaced by its ultra-reactionary provincial mullah-and-field commander dominated reality, society’s new contradictions will mesh with the old—clan, tribal, provincial—and the disintegrated Afghan military will throw up elements which can generate one or more (guerrilla) resistance movements. It is heartening that some key elements have already announced their determination never to capitulate, and the Panjshir valley remains unconquered. 

That apart, the 1978 Afghan revolution, and the Soviet and the American presences, though lost causes, may have left a residual layer of modernity in the social consciousness, especially of the women of Afghanistan.     

COVID cannibalism 

President GR’s new Cabinet appointments were a disappointment. With the pandemic worsening, he could have appointed one of three doctors in the Government, Prof. Tissa Vitarana, Dr. Sudharshini Fernandopulle or Dr. Ramesh Pathirana, as Minister of Health, but chose not to. 

Dr. Padma Gunaratne, President, Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA) confirmed that the Association’s written request to the President seeking a meeting with him, remains unanswered. 

Sri Lanka registers the highest percentage of daily deaths from COVID-19 (Sri Lanka’s daily case-fatality percentage exceeds global figures, adaderana.lk – http://www.adaderana.lk/news/76165/sri-lankas-daily-case-fatality-percentage-exceeds-global-figures) and the highest ‘Weekly confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people’ according to Our World in Data, of the Johns Hopkins University, dated 15 August. So, in the matter of COVID control, SL is doing the worst, going by two international indices, not just the one. 

An excessive number of casualties reveals that something is going wrong. Innocent citizens are dying in misery not only because of the pandemic but because of its mishandling by our Government. If not, all other countries should have had the same average daily death percentage and weekly confirmed deaths per million as Sri Lanka. They don’t. 

If we were managing things better, we’d have a percentage lower than the daily global average, and a lower number of death (per million) than others. We don’t. That is not the citizens’ fault. The people don’t make the decisions, and the decisions were either bad (reopening for international travellers) or delayed (procuring vaccines; priority for over-60s). 

President GR was correct in urging that priority should be given to those over age 60. However, Prof. Tissa Vitarana said that to the Sunday papers several weeks before the President’s decision. At the time, the Presidential directive was to vaccinate everyone over 30. If the new decision had been implemented when Prof. Vitarana urged it, many lives could have been saved. 

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ‘snap lockdown’ of the country initially for three days, after the discovery of a single COVID patient in Auckland. Last week, even before the single-patient discovery and the snap lockdown, she said it will be early 2022 when her country reopens its borders, and that too in a phased manner, permitting only revaccinated travellers. New Zealand is the gold standard. It celebrated liberation from COVID with a rock concert that had 50,000 attendees and did not spark-off a fresh outbreak. 

NZ leveraged its island character with a closure of borders—not to be confused with merely inter-provincial travel as in Sri Lanka—and still maintains it. Border closure was one of the hallmarks of the successful NZ strategy, as was tracking-tracing-testing.     

Despite this, on another island, Sri Lanka, the Government in its wisdom, did not close its borders and keep them closed. Tracking-tracing-testing dropped in Sri Lanka as the Government made the switch to vaccination. New Zealand never dumped the one for the other.

Surely, the Sri Lankan experts assembled by the WHO Sri Lanka should have constituted the vanguard of the Presidential apparatus fighting COVID? 

South Asian shift

The increasingly existential material interests of the SLPP voters are in contradiction with, and subordinated to, the status, material interests and mentality of President Gotabaya’s ‘military/security bloc’. 

The militarisation project and the ideology of militarism take precedence, and define the ethos. This has more than a purely national dimension. In the great global contestation, the main allies of China, namely Pakistan, Myanmar, Cambodia, have a power-bloc of a particular configuration and content. They are hardly pluralist liberal-democracies.  Pakistan has an elected democratic government led by a politician I admire and respect, but the Pakistani State is hardly a civilian democracy; it is a heavily militarised state in which the intelligence service (the ISI) plays a key role. The democratic instincts and impulses of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa are far less than those of Prime Minister Imran Khan. The militarisation of Sri Lanka cannot be separated from the regime’s Sinicisation of Sri Lanka. 

What makes Sri Lanka different is that, as Asia’s and Afro-Asia’s oldest democracy, it is the laboratory for systemic transition/transformation. Because it has strong democratic roots, a democratic popular ethos ‘from below’, it has a chance to resist the new state ethos of autocracy and Sinicisation.

The victory of the Taliban is to the direct disadvantage of India and therefore of the Quad. The Taliban was born in madrassas across the border in Pakistan and has had decades-long relations with the ISI. A Taliban-ruled Afghanistan gives India’s traditional foe Pakistan greater defence in depth, which may partially offset India’s advantage. It may also enhance the morale of Islamist-jihadist terrorists in their operations in Kashmir. The Taliban’s old handlers may view Kashmir as a potential Afghanistan. Prime Minister Modi’s polarising, pre-emptive Netanyahu-type rearrangement in Kashmir may prove counterproductive.

With the fall of Kabul, Pakistan and indirectly China have expanded its strategic space. The China-Pakistan axis will have a distinct advantage on India’s northern tier, with the contiguity by road of China and Pakistan, the recent construction in Bhutan and the shift in Afghanistan in favour of China’s ally Pakistan. 

In his extended interview in 1946 with Anna Louise Strong, Mao Zedong amazingly predicted the rise and potential power of Islam. A half-century later, Samuel Huntington warned about a ‘Sinic-Islamic’ convergence as a challenge in a ‘clash of civilisations’, but he was talking about a China-Iran axis, and that is not where and what this is. Iran will also be concerned by the Taliban victory. 

Colombo’s cammies 

While the situation deteriorates on India’s northern tier, the Rajapaksa regime is building a garrison State which embeds, entrenches and extends Chinese influence on the island of Sri Lanka on India’s southern flank. Thus, China has potential clamps on India, all around the compass. 

So long as India ‘Acts East’, but not South, that policy has been undeterred and risk-free for Colombo, but with the grand strategic picture becoming clearer with Kabul’s fall, Indo-US strategy in the Indian Ocean could pivot to sweep and secure the South.   

Beijing’s best friend in the Indian Ocean, Colombo, is buying time to camouflage the geopolitical realities that: 

(1) This strategically placed island in the Indian Ocean is transitioning uninterruptedly and not without assistance, from the camp of democracy to that of autocracy, in the great global contest of systems. 

(2) The regime’s project is that Beijing backstops the militarisation—the molecular Myanmarisation—of the Sri Lankan State, while that militarisation in its turn backstops the extension and deepening of China’s entrenchment on the island.

(3) The buffer against the growth of China’s influence in the island’s north-east, proximate to India, would be the immediate reactivation of elected Provincial Councils as per the Indo-Lanka Accord, but any other, more elastic agenda would only delay and divert that possibility, bypassing the Accord altogether, and amounting to its dismantling.

(4) The more time bought by Colombo’s dilatory and diversionary moves, the more delayed the countermoves to countervail and compensate for, or at least hedge against, the impact of the shift on India’s northern tier and the corresponding strengthening of China within the South Asian sub-system of the world system. 

(5) The Quad needs a win. 

Colombo attempts to camouflage China’s entrenchment on this nodal island by playing the old ‘good cop’ (Basil Rajapaksa-GL Peiris-Milinda Moragoda)/ ‘bad cop’ (ex-Defence Secretary, now President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa) game with the USA, the Tamils and India. The new moves at engagement are the old moves, dating back to the days Colombo manipulated Romesh Bhandari. 

China’s entrenchment will consolidate and harden, while time is bought by Colombo’s old playbook of disguises, delays, deflections and diversions.      

The Sri Lankan road-map presented in Delhi doesn’t once mention the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, the Sri Lankan Tamil question, the 13th Amendment, and Sri Lanka’s solemn wartime pledges to India (not only by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, but also Secretary/Defence Gotabaya as a troika member) to implement the 13th Amendment. It is a Jared Kushner road-map.  

It deals with everything except (a) Tamil autonomy and (b) the expansion of China’s footprint on India’s doorstep. The foothold offered Delhi is a toehold. 

Colombo is attempting to bypass Delhi on the Tamil question and trick the TNA into talks with tacit, sporadic US facilitation, thereby hoping to use the TNA as a human shield, leverage the Tamil lobby, and deflect Washington from focusing on China’s geostrategic gains and entrenchment, as well as the larger systemic question of democracy vs autocracy.  

The Government will discuss everything with the TNA—say, for instance, the mirage of the “Union of Regions” plan of 1995-1997 minus of course the merger, financial powers and law and order. 

What will not be placed on the table is what has survived all vicissitudes and can be quickly activated with a timeline: the full (if phased) implementation of the 13th Amendment that Delhi and Geneva have repeatedly asked for. 

Not being the strategically smart Sinn Fein, the Tamil parties will avoid the low-hanging fruit of fully implementing the 13th Amendment. It will go instead for the piece of coconut in the rusty rat-trap: the ‘union of regions’.    

On accountability, the Government will expect India and the USA to dial down the pressure in Geneva. It won’t pledge the verifiable, immediate implementation of the recommendations of the LLRC, Udalagama and Paranagama Commissions appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Resentful rivalry 

In Latin America, whenever centre-right or centrist Christian-Democratic parties split, producing a populist spin-off, the Left takes serious note and reaches out. (Sometimes the populist spilt-off from the centre-right, proves more progressive than the traditional left). 

Not so in Sri Lanka, where the UNP’s implosion yielded the populist-centrist SJB, which has prompted resentful rivalry from the JVP-NPP. (Nietzsche read the role of “ressentiment” right.)

JVP Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake says the JVP-NPP is “ready to give leadership for a new governance model to overcome the crisis.” (Malima) An academic-parliamentarian asserts that the NPP offers “a real choice…of an alternative socioeconomic and political model”. 

Lenin’s label of ‘leftwing communism’ as ‘an infantile disorder’ would apply to such hubristically adventurist political ‘putschism’. 

Unlike all the Latin American Left parties (including ex-guerrilla movements) that have been elected to lead their countries, the JVP hasn’t governed a Province or held the Mayoralty of a city (or big town for that matter). It had one brief ministerial episode followed by a drop in its vote/seats at the next election. 

It has yet to prove that it can be trusted with national security and the macroeconomy; that its “new governance model” and “alternative socioeconomic and political model” are practicable; and that it can govern and improve even a city. 

That proof is lacking after 56 years of existence because the citizenry hasn’t developed the trust and confidence to electorally confer the JVP such responsibility—except once at the national-level, safely contained as junior partner of the SLFP.  

If the JVP-NPP has edged the UNP into fourth place it is entirely due to the eruption of Sajith’s SJB sinking the UNP. 

No politics is viable without comprehending the balance of forces. A calculus of the balance of forces must be based not upon how it might evolve in one’s collective imagination, but as it is in reality. 

The SJB is easily the largest party in the Oppositional space and its leader has easily the largest single vote-base of any Oppositional figure. As the Leader of the Opposition, he also holds vital political real-estate; the high-ground of the oppositional space. There aren’t two leaders of the Opposition; only one. 

The global systemic choice is ‘autocracy or democracy’. Sri Lanka’s challenging historic task is the restoration of democratic normalcy, emancipated not from an elected presidency but from the aberration of a militarist-autocratic regime ‘superstructure’. 

Lanka’s democracy is based on the two-party system (whatever the name of those two parties). The JVP-NPP, a third party, cannot change that nor aspire to be the second party in a short time. A General Strike and Hartal, necessary, legitimate and laudable as they may be, cannot change that structural reality. 

Sajith’s SJB is a reformist yet systemic player which will alarm neither the world’s democracies nor the officer corps of the Sri Lankan armed forces. 

The only—albeit transitional—space available is as strategic ally of one of the two major parties. As Friedrich Engels said “impatience must not be confused for a theoretical argument”.