Can Angry Men Make A State – OpEd
Despite the fact that our country is a landlocked but still the Geo-strategic, Geo-Economic and Geo-political locality plays a major role in magnetizing both regional and distant powers to have their foot prints inside Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is full of natural resources and yet we did not have a stable government to dig out all those raw resources and make better use of it for the Afghan poor population which has been starving to find good meal twice a day. Afghanistan provides a corridor to central Asia which is full of natural resources e.g. Gas, oil and the global powers do need to have access to these natural resources in order to safeguard their nations’ interests & future. Afghanistan is like a hub that connects different parts of the world so controlling Afghanistan means, you are controlling Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia and of course Middle East & bonus is the full grips on the natural resources that Afghanistan itself offers which is estimated in between 3-5 trillions of dollars.
Afghanistan is already a sick country whose economy is mostly dependent on the foreigners’ presence. The foreigner’s committed blunders by bringing the most notorious people among Afghans into main stream politics that looted & are looting Afghanistan and brought it on the verge of its knees. USA and its allies ignored the silent majority and brought the very biased rich and corrupt minority to take charge of the government and they did not waste a single second to marginalize the already marginalized poor Afghans.
They are busy sucking the blood of the bloodless nation, filling their accounts. The USA wrong policies and the presence of corrupt politicians led to create distance between Afghan government and the people and that distance itself helped the resistance to win the hearts and mind of the people. For instance the globalpost.com reported that most of the people refer to the Taliban local established courts in order to receive justice rather going to the government courts where their cases are prolonged by the lawyers sheer to earn money. The government also includes so many fanatics and corrupts warlords that had created rift among different ethnic groups of our society.
There is a saying in this region that “the only thing that we learn from history is that we don’t learn anything”. We Afghans never learn from our past mistakes and we keep repeating it. Most of the educated and intellectual lot of Afghanistan is still very much emotional and they are trying to pave way for problems and problems that Afghans and Afghanistan can’t afford. They are always furry in their lingo and portray themselves as the champions but most of them are those people who had done notorious actions and now we are paying that price for it from 36 years. In today’s global politics being emotional and angry in your approach will not leave you with anything except problems. The sad reality is that angry people can’t make a state.
I have an inherent conviction that angry men in their nature do not possess the tools that help in dealing with politics as per the game’s rules. In their nature, they are angry, rebellious and confrontational. They reject all means of dealing with others upon the principle of interests, negotiations and attaining the possible. They reject dealing with others according to the circumstances they can over overcome.
The countries that emerged victorious from WWII like the Soviet Union, with its blind revolutionary ideology, did not stand their ground for long, as revolutionarism without a mind is a total failure.
The Soviet Union failed to sustain itself as a political regime because the basis of its ideology was based on confrontation and rejection of the outside world. That’s why it stood its ground for a while and later reached the brink of the abyss. Thus it collapsed amid a confrontation with an international pragmatic political wit, and countries, within the union and outside it, which lobbied as per their interests. And so we were left with a group of independent countries where each adopted the political regime it saw the best. These regimes served the interests of their politicians who worked in secrecy to dismantle the union from within.
The same thing will happen with us if we keep going on with emotions and encourage our people to be more violent with the neighbor countries and the rest of the world. First and foremost thing in current time we need is to make sure that our country has all institutions and working independent and properly & the economy is robust and we forge healthy relations with every country as long as it is serving our national interests.
Our country is landlocked and for the time being we do need our neighbors and the rest of the world help. Today’s world is like a global village and all the countries are interdependent. Problems in Afghanistan will enormously implicate the situation inside Pakistan and it’s a vice versa. Thus Pakistan is in dire need of us as we provide them a rout to have access to the central Asian states and at the same time they do have a historical enemy in the south which is India while can’t tolerate to have an enemy in the East to be eaten like sandwich. So we as Afghans should make better use of this opportunity of rivalry between India and Pakistan.
We are so much dependent on our neighbors in terms of everything. For instance take the example of Pakistan, we Afghans pour 3-5 billions $ per year to the Pakistan economy. More than 50% of the population goes to Pakistan for medical treatment and millions of Afghans are living in Pakistan. They have very good businesses there and it helps our country a lot in terms of economic grow as well.
Time demands us to put our emotions back and work on mind. If we go with emotions and being furious instead of being diplomatic this will debilitate us more and we won’t be able to achieve our long terms goals and public will suffer more and more. Until or unless we are not standing on our own feet we can’t tolerate any rift in relations with anyone. The government needs to pursue policies with every state based on mutual interests so that we can easily keep this smooth process going on until we get strong & have a strong say in the international politics and demand our due rights.