Can America Reboot?

US’s greatest strength is sci-tech & culture economy. Post Kabul exit, it should recognise that

- Chidanand Rajghatta

The United States has a blessed geography. It is bound by two vast oceans to its east and west, and by two benign countries to the north and south. This should have afforded it the finest natural protection from adversaries. Yet it attracted the world’s biggest terrorist attack on 9/11 originating from distant Afghanistan, a hapless, landlocked country trod on by invaders for as long as it has existed.

A principal reason attributed for the terrorist strike was the American policy of maintaining its political and economic primacy across the world by show of force, often by prescribing and dictating its ideals to foreign societies with different civilisational and historical experiences.

Exhilarated by its victories in the World Wars that led to the 20th century being described as an American Century, and driven by a military-industrial complex that arose from the wars, Washington raised a permanently expeditionary military, its leaders locking into alliances in far corners of the world. Among its biggest footprints was in the Gulf Arab region, an excursion that was aimed at securing its oil supply, but which bred local and regional resentment. The end result was 9/11.

Regardless of the motivation for the attack, there was merit in Washington responding to it, attested by the global support it received at the outset. As it turned out, the riposte was scattershot, ill-directed and disproportionate.