A Tragedy Live-Streamed

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

What has been happening at Kabul's HKIA airport from 15 August 2021 onwards has been surreal, incredulous and depressing all at the same time.

Having been through this airport many times, and seen the many layers of its heavily armed perimeter,  it was amazing to see how thousands of people managed to get past its gates, all the way to military aircraft on the runway. It has been a week now and thousands of people continue to remain there all day, blocking the approach roads, clambering atop aircrafts, sitting inside jet-engine air-vents, getting shot at by security guards, and getting killed in the resulting stampede.

Much has already been said about the levels of desperation and panic in parts of Kabul. What has come as a big surprise to me is that for a city that has been under blanket electronic and police surveillance for decades, mobile networks continue to function normally, streaming live video from people all over the place. 

One particular video clip stands out.  This is a C-17 US military plane attempting to take off from Kabul airport. It is a monster of an aircraft - over 50m long, and capable of carrying over 275 tonnes, but here, as it lumbers on the runway, we see thousands of men were running alongside; some are waving cheerfully at the cameras, a few perched on the wheel carriages or flaps. Among them was one man in a dark Pathan suit, sitting precariously over on a winglet, looking intently looking into his mobile phone!

Incredibly, there is also a clip titled "Last video from the plane" in which we have a man in the same group recording the almost festive spirit of the group perched precariously there. Even as the jet engines rev up into a roar, he is talking a selfie shot, smiling into the camera, panning it around to show his companions waving cheerfully at his friends. Apache helicopters can be seen flying alongside, trying in vain to disperse the crowds. One can almost feel the wind lashing on on those faces, the roar jet engines drowning out the crowds. 

Then another phone records the C-17 taking off. As it climbs up sharply a few men can be seen slipping off and falling to their deaths. One was seen tangles in the concertina wires of a boundary wall, another spattered on a rooftop, and in yet another mobile, recording from inside the aircraft, the body of a man can be seen flailing in the winds, like a rag-doll stuck on a dumpster.

Not one of them would have survived. One can only imagine the levels of desperation and ignorance that led these men to their deaths. One wonders how the "last video" managed to reach FB and Twitter, and how many of them really thought they could get away sitting out there?

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LINKS

*  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/17/human-remains-found-c-17-wheel-well-after-takeoff-kabul/8170724002/

Gokhale's China

 Indians have been suckers for more than six decades. This was my main takeaway from Vijay Gokhale's recent book, "The Long Game - How the Chinese Negotiate with India".

In this elegantly written book, Gokhale traces the path taken by India-China relations from 1950 onwards - from the time when the government of India became one of the first to recognise the communist regime, of giving it a leg up to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, through its military take-over of Tibet, escape of the Dalai Lama, the 1962 war, nuclear tests, all the way to the border dispute that festers to this day. 

All through this, the author may have wanted to show the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in favourable light but seems to have just the opposite effect. One gets the impression that even though the  IFS may have had some of our brightest officers, as an institution it was slow on the uptake, and, as far as China is concerned, it has been incapable of guiding the political leaders through a prudent course of action. 

One of our weaknesses is that we love to talk. Combine this with our lack of meticulous preparations, the ease with which we can be flattered and what you get is a long line of ineffective negotiators. The Chinese, on the other hand, were always better prepared, weighed each word that was spoken and recorded everything and clearly saw that our eagerness to please, to play the 'good neighbour', was a weakness that could be exploited to tie us down with unilateral commitments.

Over the years, it seems some Chinese tactics have become predictable -- setting the agenda by insisting on 'principles' that suit them; things that they do not want to discuss are stonewalled through silence or deemed "not ripe for settlement"; the interpreter ploy of pretending not to know a language to gain time to think through and formulate a response, etc..

We also seem to have realised that that Chinese diplomats are ideological agents of the communist party- not government representatives amenable to logic or reason. Also their leaders, who prefer to stay in the background to "save face" are actually thin-skinned, and that unsettling them by impugning their self-image and how they want the rest of the world to view them can work to the other side's advantage.

Gokhale laments that the dignified and gracious Chinese negotiators of the past have been replaced by the assertive 'wolf warriors' who tend to display aggression, arrogance, irritation and other disagreeable traits. 

Maybe this is just as well because we seem to be better at handling in-your-face aggression rather than the gentle art of gracious negotiations. 

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LINKS

* Gokhale, Vijay (2021): THE LONG GAME - How the Chinese Negotiate With India, Penguin- https://www.amazon.in/Long-Game-Chinese-Negotiate-India/dp/0670095605