Why is it that a proud people like the Afghans continue to suffer in perpetuity?
You will not find the bodies of 14,500 Soviet soldiers who died during their government's obsessive nine-year occupation (1979 - 1989) of that war savaged country.
Nor will you see the body-bags containing the remains of 2,442 US troops killed, nor over 3,800 US private security contractors (The Pentagon does not track their deaths!)
Do not expect to see the corpses of 1,144 personnel from the 36-nation NATO coalition that supported the US retaliation for 9/11, nor a memorial to 72 journalists and 444 aid workers. These collateral casualties were shipped home for a dignified burial.
They died so that 70,000 Afghan troops could sacrifice their lives defending a US-backed regime. They died so that 47,000 plus uncounted Afghani civilians could become grist to the Pentagon's iron tread-mill. They died so that over 3 million would be forced to escape into Pakistan and 2 million more into Iran and Europe. They died so that another 4 million Afghanis could be displaced from their insubstantial homes.
To date, which means up to the date of the US's precipitate, ignominous departure, the US has expended over US $2.26 trillion in a still-born attempt to modernise Afghanistan's archaic tribal society. It leaves behind 5,000 troops as 'caretakers' in a war cemetery without tombstones.
Despite an almost 200-year long, unequal association between Afghanistan and Great Britain, Afghanistan escaped becoming a British colony and therefore a member of the Commonwealth.
It cannot benefit, therefore, from the assiduous attention of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, whose mission is to 'honour and care for the men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in the First and Second World Wars'. The CWGC maintains 23,000 graveyards of world war casualties across the globe, including one at Rawalpindi which was deemed important enough to be visited in 1991 by Diana, the Princess of Wales.
Since the conflict in Afghanistan began, the country has endured four US Presidents, 3 Afghani presidential puppets and 3 Heads of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
It has survived Pakistan's gratuitous appropriation (for its own security purposes) of inhospitable territory under the doctrine of 'strategic depth'. If its history is any measure, Afghanistan will remain sovereign without a sovereign, a state but no nation, unstable, never free, never at peace.
Afghanistan will never experience the post-war renaissance that post-1945 Germany and Japan did. It will not become the post-1975 tourist haunt that Vietnam is nor can it aspire to become another Lebanese phoenix.
The West has left it to scavenge for its future amongst its ruins, just as ragged Iraq, Libya and Yemen are being forced to do.
Days after its troops fled their show-pice air bae at Bagram, the US government, in an act of posthumous generosity, delivered 1.4 million Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines under the Covax Facility's dose-sharing scheme. Another 1.9 million doses are in transit. How a rump Afghani government, besieged within its beleaguered capital Kabul, will vaccinate so many Afghans across the country no one knows, nor cares?
Covid-19 is a scourge of Biblical proportions. It has ravaged mankind, disturbed social orders, wrecked economies and exposed luxurious vanities such as wedding extravaganzas and the Olympic Games.
One can understand why, in 1964, the Japanese were keen on hosting the Summer Olympic Games. They wanted to demonstrate that, within twenty years of being defeated in the second world war, they had 'arrived', were at par with the victors. The same ambition motivated the Chinese to host the Summer Olympic Games in 2008 (Being an underdog can be a powerful, painful spur). The Chinese are now determined to repeat their summer success at Beijing in 2008 by hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics. The Chinese should anticipate a boycott.
In 1980, a sanctimonious US and 65 of its acolytes boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow. They had condemned the Soviets for invading - guess where? - Afghanistan!!!
- Forwarded.
Tailpiece.
Got up at 6, the chores and was ready by a 10' to 10. It was raining during the forenoon. Lekha had gone across to the ration shop, along with the maid, to collect the ration kit.
Sreejith had come by and we drove across to the Geeyem Motors at Puzhakkal - by about a half past 12 - to hand over our Chevy for a relook of the work done on the clutch, the defective a/c system and any other defect.
By the way, it was bright and sunny all through the afternoon!
The grand finale of the PN Panicker Reading Day/Reading Month activities was held in a public meeting, at the courtyard of the Foundation, presided over by the state's education minister, Mr Sivankutty.
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