Latest update February 8th, 2025 6:23 PM
Aug 17, 2021 Editorial
Kaieteur News – It is a tragedy that is still unfolding on many fronts. Afghanistan is, and this is regardless of who and what is to blame, where the politics has started and inevitably will settle. Meanwhile, the Afghans stare at the grimmest future imaginable.
Afghanistan started out in response to a cataclysmic tragedy, a world from its forbidding rocky precipices. It was the object of the first and brutally direct, in some ways efficient, expression of American power and American will. What started as an angry reaction to an American tragedy created countless tragedies along the two-decades long way. It was almost inevitable that the American well-intended ‘war on terror’ was going to end in the ignominious retreat that now gives birth to countless other tragedies in the making. What the Russians first found out in places with historic names like Kabul and Kandahar, Herat and Helmand, the Americans are finding out today in 2021. Just like the long, endless line of adventurers and would-be conquerors, starting from as early as Alexander the Great. Not for nothing is Afghanistan called the ‘graveyard of empires.’ It is a name that it has lived up to again, because it is proven yet again, despite all the military hardware, the economic might, the sophisticated technology of those who come from whichever direction, time and again.
As the Americans rush out, more like limp away, with stairways of planes crowded thick, there is a sense of déjà vu, with those stark and somber images reminding of another forced evacuation from 45 years ago, in another distant outpost called Saigon. The scenes are there, the pictures convey the ominous reality of how things have deteriorated so badly, and so quickly. The greater concern is of what is left behind, what will come about as the new and dominant political governing structure, and its implications for an already volatile region, with tentacles sure to extend still farther across a now suddenly worried globe.
There is a humanitarian crisis brewing, with much bloodshed promised and the age-old settling of feuds. In a society long-powered by the idea and ideal of vengeance, such will be swift and savage. Women will return to what is believed to be their rightful places, which is in the homes unseen, in submission, in fear, and in surrender of any little gains that were made. The opium trade and other feared businesses could flourish, and bring about a new era of lawlessness that spans many places and people.
For sure, other powers are already calculating how they can best profit from what is a nation in pieces. The jockeying among the alphabet people, in both the Western and Eastern dominions, are under emergency considerations, with new plans even more urgently reconfigured to meet this rapidly delivered contingency. But whatever those plans are, there can be no doubt that Afghanistan is a country that is in shambles, where iron rule by ruthless men will hold both sway and the day, for a while to come.
As all of this is reflected upon, the role of America, though now dwindling to a trickle there for the time being, must be looked at in a certain way. It went there with rage flaring, the strongest of commitments, and then that withered, before the demands of the long haul. When the going got tough and tougher, America decided it was time to go. To say in a different way: the Afghans are on their own. They now have to go through the painstaking and perilous process of working through self-destructive issues and memories, and reach resolutions that meet their own visions.
This is concerning to us because, thanks to American interest and assistance, we now have what is called the beginnings of a democracy here. Its diplomatic presence has been most instrumental in bringing that about, even though furious challenges linger that democracy could be truly said to be here. Local pressures are circulating. Passions can surge just as easily and quickly, like Afghanistan. What will America do then? Most likely, Guyanese will find themselves in the same situation as the Afghans. They are on their own, and forced to sort out their affairs on their own.
Feb 08, 2025
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