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Afghanistan’s continuing agony

The newest foreign intervention in Afghanistan, after the military operations launched against that war-battered country by the Western powers, is to be a high-profile conference convened by the World Bank and other major Western-dominated international financial institutions to discuss the economic future of Afghanistan.

Significantly, perhaps inevitably, the news reports about this development, while listing a host of participating international institutions and foreign governmental representatives, do not mention the participation of any Afghani representatives let alone an official Afghani delegation representative of its economic interests. The lack of such official representation is inevitable at this stage because, given the chaos caused by the current war there, there is no Afghani State or Government that can represent Afghani economic interests.

It is possible that the global financial barons would be able to recruit various foreign-domiciled or exiled, Afghani ‘experts’. Nevertheless, such expatriates would be no more representative of contemporary Afghani society than the long-exiled ‘King’ of Afghanistan of Durrani clan origin.

The people of Afghanistan, given the strategic location of their mountainous homeland in the heart of the Asian continent, have, for millennia, been accustomed to foreign interventions, whether it be the migrating Vedic or ‘Aryan’ tribes heading for the lush valleys of the Sub-continent, or the military expeditions of the Greeks, the Mongol hordes, the Moghul imperial forces and the British colonial forces, or, the Soviet Russian occupation forces, or the intervention of Arab Islamic radicals led by Osama bin Laden.

Afghanistan yet remains a tribal society unified principally by the common socio-cultural characteristics of central Asian Islam and central Asian tribalism.

It would seem that even in this so-called enlightened and democratic day and age, this land and its people cannot be allowed to live their lives as they wish.

Even the retaliatory moves of the Western powers must focus on them rather than on the root international political problems that prompted the guerrilla strikes on the United States that are now being avenged.

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