The empire’s orphans: Pakistan and Afghanistan in the ruins of American strategy

President Reagan with Afghan Mujahideen

Oval Office in 1983

Afghanistan and Pakistan are once again at war, each claiming to have struck devastating blows against the other. Kabul says hundreds of Pakistani soldiers lie dead; Islamabad responds with air raids deep inside Afghan territory. 

It is a grotesque irony—two nations that once fought together in the name of faith and freedom now destroy each other in the name of security. But this is not a new tragedy. It is the final act in a drama written long ago by Washington’s pen and executed with Islamabad’s hand.

Since the 1970s, Pakistan has served as the principal instrument of American power in South Asia. It was in Pakistan’s madrassas and military camps that the jihad against the Soviets was conceived, funded, and armed. The United States provided the dollars, and Pakistan provided the zeal. 

In the 1980s, Pakistani generals and politicians openly celebrated their role as “the sword arm of the free world.” They spoke of Afghanistan as their “strategic depth,” a phrase that revealed both ambition and arrogance. The Taliban, born from the refugee camps of Peshawar, was not an accident of history; it was Islamabad’s deliberate project—what its leaders once proudly called their greatest foreign-policy achievement.

The destruction of Afghanistan was thus not merely collateral damage of the Cold War; it was the intended price of Pakistan’s regional fantasies. When the Soviet Union fell, the West walked away, but Pakistan stayed, cultivating the Taliban as a tool of control over its war-scarred neighbor. 

Through the 1990s, Pakistani advisers shaped Kabul’s policies, its economy, even its ideology. Afghanistan was reduced to a protectorate in everything but name. What was once an ancient civilization became an experimental ground for geopolitical engineering.

Then came 9/11. The monster that Pakistan had built and America had sponsored turned against its makers. Washington called for Pakistan’s help once more, and the generals in Rawalpindi obliged—turning on their own creation with one hand while secretly shielding it with the other. 

This double game defined the next two decades. The U.S. poured billions into Pakistan’s military and intelligence networks, only to discover that the Taliban’s sanctuaries lay across the border in Pakistani territory. Islamabad played both arsonist and fireman, ensuring that the flames never died completely. The longer the fire burned, the more aid flowed.

When America finally withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, it left behind the same Taliban it had overthrown twenty years earlier. The circle was complete. The irony was cruel: Pakistan had again helped bring the Taliban to power—only to find itself their next target. Today’s war between Kabul and Islamabad is not a clash of civilizations or religions; it is the implosion of a forty-year deceit. 

The Taliban’s protégés in Pakistan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), are now laying siege to their old patrons. The “strategic depth” has become a strategic grave.

The deeper tragedy is that both Pakistan and Afghanistan have spent half a century mistaking servitude for strategy. They fought wars not for their people, but for the illusions of empire—first Soviet, then American. The geography of their suffering has remained constant: villages bombed, schools closed, refugees displaced, futures erased. The Americans left, but their architecture of dependency remained. Pakistan’s generals still see power through foreign eyes, and Afghanistan’s rulers still wield it through borrowed guns.

History offers its verdict without emotion. Nations that build their politics on the approval of outsiders end up fighting wars they never truly chose. Pakistan may blame Kabul for harboring terrorists; Kabul may denounce Islamabad’s airstrikes. But both are prisoners of a past they helped create. The smoke rising over the Durand Line today is not just the sign of a border at war—it is the funeral pyre of sovereignty sacrificed to ambition.

Until Pakistan and Afghanistan free themselves from the ghosts of American patronage and their own delusions of control, they will continue to fight not for territory, but for the very meaning of independence. For now, they remain the empire’s orphans—armed, abandoned, and endlessly at war with themselves.

Russia plays Chess, China plays Go, America plays Poker: The games that shape our century

“Russia plays chess, China plays Go, and America plays poker.” ~ With this one line, economist Jeffrey Sachs captures the essence of global strategy—three civilizations, three games, three ways of thinking about power. 

Russia plots its moves for positional dominance, China builds patient encirclements that last centuries, and America plays a fast, deceptive, high-stakes game—one that dazzles in the moment but often collapses when the cards are revealed.

In these metaphors lie not just clever comparisons but the essence of our age. The 21st century is no longer a clash of armies—it is a war of time horizons. Russia and China play for eternity; America plays for the evening, the next election, or a one-night stand.

Russia’s moves on the global chessboard are deliberate and cold. Every gambit in Ukraine, every energy pipeline to Europe, every alliance in West Asia is a calculated step to protect the king—the Russian state and its sphere of influence. Chess is not about speed; it is about control of the center. It rewards foresight, not frenzy. 

And that is the Russian temperament: to suffer losses, endure isolation, and emerge with the board rearranged in its favor. In Putin’s Eurasian vision, even setbacks are sacrifices—pawns given up to strengthen the position of the empire.

China, meanwhile, plays Go, not chess. It does not seek checkmate; it seeks quiet encirclement. Each port, each investment, each fiber-optic cable is a stone placed on the vast board of influence. Go is about patience and space—it is the art of conquest without confrontation. 

The Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Digital Silk Road—these are not mere economic programs; they are the slow accumulation of presence. When Go is played well, there is no single battle won, only a landscape transformed.

Xi Jinping’s China thinks not in election cycles but in dynastic arcs. It measures time in centuries, not years. Its strategy is to create dependencies so subtle that rivals do not even realize they have been surrounded. A mine in Africa, a highway in Central Asia, a satellite over the Indian Ocean—all are stones on the board. As Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

America, however, sits at a different table—the poker table, loud and luminous. Its strength lies in theatre, in the ability to bluff, to make the world believe it holds the winning hand. For decades, it worked. The U.S. projected an aura of invincibility—military bases in a hundred countries, the dollar as the global reserve, Hollywood as soft power, Silicon Valley as modern Olympus. Yet poker is a game of perception, not patience. You win until someone calls your bluff.

The American system, Sachs implies, thrives on short-term wins: a war here, a sanction there, a revolution elsewhere. It operates in news cycles, not historical cycles. Each “victory” becomes the seed of the next crisis—Iraq after Afghanistan, Libya after Iraq, Ukraine after Libya. The moves come fast, the pot grows huge, but the debt piles higher. Poker, unlike chess or Go, has no endgame—only exhaustion.

The tragedy is not that America lacks power, but that it mistakes momentum for strategy. It fights wars of choice but loses wars of consequence. It spends trillions to control oil, only to be overtaken by nations that invest billions in chips and data. Its greatest weapon—its image—is now its greatest vulnerability. You can bluff once, twice, a hundred times; but in the long game of civilizations, the truth of the hand is eventually revealed.

The world today reflects this collision of games. Russia defends its core; China expands its periphery; America doubles down on the next round. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—India, Brazil, Indonesia, the Gulf nations—watches closely, learning the rules of all three. 

In this emerging multipolar order, the cleverest players are those who can combine patience with agility, endurance with deception. The future will belong neither to the bluffer nor to the conqueror but to the strategist who can see through the illusion of the table itself.

History reminds us that every empire eventually meets its game’s limit. The Soviet Union ran out of moves. The British Empire ran out of colonies. The American empire risks running out of credibility. But China and Russia, for all their calculation, also face internal fragilities—demography, dissent, debt. In the coming decades, the world may witness a battle of fatigue, not of firepower—a test of whose system can endure chaos without collapsing.

“Power,” wrote Henry Kissinger, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” But desire without discipline breeds ruin. The empires that endure are those that master the rhythm of restraint—knowing when to act and when to wait. Russia and China may not always win, but they play as if the board is infinite. America plays as if the table will always be there.

In the end, the metaphor extends beyond geopolitics—it is a parable of civilizations. Chess demands calculation, Go requires patience, poker rewards risk. But the 21st century demands something rarer: wisdom—the ability to know when to change the game itself.

When the pieces settle, and the cards are down, it will not be the loudest player who prevails, but the quiet one who has been planning all along.

The price of NATO’s shield: Europe’s strategic autonomy in American custody

When Russia sells uranium to the United States, it is deemed a matter of strategic necessity. But when Europe attempts to import Russian oil or gas, it becomes an act of treachery. 

Why this double standard? 

The answer, as President Vladimir Putin recently remarked, lies in sovereignty—or rather, its loss. In the first half of 2025 alone, Russia earned $800 million from uranium sales to the U.S., exceeding the total for all of 2024. Power, profit, and politics—three forces intertwined in one transaction—reveal the deeper fault lines of the global order.

Putin’s claim is more than a rhetorical flourish. Europe has, in many ways, ceded its sovereignty to Washington. What was once a transatlantic partnership of equals has evolved into a hierarchical arrangement where security patronage is exchanged for obedience. 

NATO, conceived as a defensive alliance, now functions as a mechanism through which the United States exerts disproportionate influence over Europe’s foreign and even economic policy. As one European diplomat recently quipped off record, “We provide the flag, Washington writes the script.”

This dynamic is most evident in the energy domain—the lifeblood of modern economies. The decision about where Europe can purchase its oil and gas is no longer made solely in Berlin, Paris, or Brussels. It is shaped, and in many cases dictated, by Washington’s strategic calculus. 

Even as the U.S. continues to import Russian uranium—a fuel critical to its nuclear energy sector—it pressures its European allies to “decouple” from Russian hydrocarbons, regardless of the cost to their own industries and households. The result is an energy policy that prioritizes ideological alignment over economic rationality.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has intensified this pattern. While Europe bears the brunt of the conflict—its economies disrupted, its societies unsettled—the geopolitical agenda that drives much of the West’s response originates across the Atlantic. 

This is not to diminish Ukraine’s suffering or Europe’s agency entirely, but to highlight how the United States has leveraged the crisis to consolidate its leadership within NATO and secure a pliant European bloc. The security umbrella comes at a steep price: the erosion of strategic autonomy.

For India, this European experience holds an urgent lesson. Nations that outsource their security eventually compromise their sovereignty. Dependency is never neutral; it reshapes the very architecture of decision-making. 

If India, lured by the promise of protection or partnership, were to surrender its strategic autonomy to Washington, it would find itself in a position akin to that of Europe today—an informal protectorate where foreign and economic policies are calibrated not to national interests but to the preferences of a distant capital.

India’s post-independence foreign policy—whether under Nehru’s non-alignment or today’s multi-alignment—has been animated by a single principle: autonomy. Strategic partnerships are valuable; strategic dependence is fatal. In an age of shifting power blocs, it is tempting for middle powers to “rent” security from a superpower. 

But as Europe demonstrates, the rent soon becomes tribute.

Sovereignty in the 21st century is not merely a question of territorial integrity; it is a question of decision-making independence. The true measure of freedom is not who guards your borders but who sets your policies. Europe chose security at the cost of autonomy. India must ensure it does not repeat that mistake.

As Kautilya observed in the Arthashastra, “Dependence upon another is the root of all weakness.” Today, that ancient warning rings truer than ever.

Between the spinning wheel and the steel mill: Gandhi and Nehru’s contrasting visions of India

Jawaharlal Nehru is often remembered as Mahatma Gandhi’s chosen disciple, yet the two men embodied strikingly different Indias. Gandhi’s India was woven around the spinning wheel, ascetic self-sacrifice, and the radical ethic of non-violence. Nehru’s India, by contrast, was built on the scaffolding of secularism, socialism, and modernization through public sector undertakings and Soviet-style Five-Year Plans.

If Gandhi was the fabian saint—a Western-educated utopian cloaked in homespun simplicity—Nehru was the fabian autocrat, the pukka sahib, who combined the airs of a Westernized intellectual with the instincts of a ruling Maharaja. Gandhi tested his ideals in the crucible of his own body and spirit: experiments with truth, celibacy, diet, and the renunciation of possessions. He demanded from his family and followers the same relentless discipline, often at great personal cost to them. 

Nehru, by contrast, supported Gandhi’s experiments but felt no compulsion to replicate them. Convinced of his own moral and intellectual sufficiency, he instead sought to refashion Indian society from above through institutions, plans, and ideologies imported from Europe.

Gandhi’s ethic was centripetal: he dissolved the self into the community, seeing the nation itself as an extension of family. Nehru’s ethic was centrifugal: he founded a dynasty, binding India’s political destiny to the fortunes of his progeny, a legacy that persists with remarkable tenacity. Gandhi sought liberation through renunciation; Nehru through statecraft. Gandhi’s politics was spiritual and moral; Nehru’s was technocratic and statist.

Yet both men shared a common inheritance: they were products of Western education, steeped more in European thought than in the depths of India’s own civilizational traditions. Their grasp of ancient Indian philosophy, theology, and history was at best cursory. Gandhi distilled Hinduism into the single principle of non-violence, overlooking the religion’s vast and contradictory traditions of dharma, power, and transcendence. Nehru, meanwhile, embraced secularism not as a pragmatic framework but as a kind of fundamentalism, scorning the spiritual pluralism that had long defined Indian civilization.

The irony is sharp. Gandhi, in seeking to spiritualize politics, ended up politicizing spirituality. Nehru, in seeking to modernize India, created institutions that became monuments to inertia. Gandhi dreamt of an India that would resist the machine; Nehru of an India that would master it. Between them, they set in motion two contradictory currents: one of renunciation, the other of control. India has lived ever since in the uneasy confluence of these two legacies—torn between the fabian saint’s spinning wheel and the fabian autocrat’s public sector steel mill.