After the war is ‘won’

‘Warlords’ notorious for their wrongdoings, rightly or wrongly and in their own way, balance book of Afghan humanity.

There will be no winners, only losers, when and if — a very big ‘if’ indeed — the last soldier of occupation leaves Afghanistan, a country repeatedly raped and looted, its people routinely persecuted, especially so, since 1979, when the Soviet invasion ignited a series of wars which are, sadly — whether foreign troops remain or not — far from over.

Ongoing ‘peace talks’, participated in, at least at ‘tamasha level’, by publicity seeking, multiple-faced personalities and the governments behind them, are completely meaningless in the face of a stark reality: a reality which includes the brutal fact that the so-called ‘Taliban’ are just one of over 1,250 known and recognised ‘subversive’ groups currently active throughout the length and breadth of Afghanistan and, no doubt, there are a large number of  ‘unrecognised’ groups too, and while these may range in size from small to miniscule, the results of their violent actions are no less destructive.

It is all too easy to dismiss these groups, irrespective of their size and structure, as religious radicals or self-serving bandits yet, when examined in the clear light of day, the majority are guilty of nothing more than surviving the only way they know how: with a gun in their hands.

The odds are that any Afghan born after 1970 — this is the majority of the resident population — has had, if they are male and lucky, a rudimentary education at best and, if they belong to a rural area, probably no education at all and it is the same for their sons and now their growing up grandsons, too. The single thread stitching these three generations together is that of, against all odds, ‘winning’ enough to keep their body and soul, and those of their dependents, together and strong enough to face whatever hits them next. Without education, without regular access to even low-paying labouring jobs, these thousands — goodness knows how many thousands and the figure could actually run into millions — have, out of sheer necessity, resorted to ancestral, tribal ways of survival and if these happen to be ‘illegal’ in this ‘modern’ day and age in which, exactly as in days of yore, warfare and violence increasingly rule the roost, then, as far as they are concerned, ‘tough’!

‘Warlords’ are notorious for their wrongdoings but, it must also be admitted, that, rightly or wrongly and in their own way, they do balance the book of Afghan humanity: despite mass  ‘propaganda’ to the contrary, warlords, big ones and lesser ones, still — and they always will — maintain their very own private armies, their troops garnered from the areas over which they hold sway and from amongst the rank upon rank of uneducated, otherwise unemployable, gun-toting men who would otherwise flock to join the 1,250-plus subversive groups rampaging through the countryside.

It can, of course, be argued that warlords’ armies do exactly the same thing but, while this is true of some, it is far from being true of all as some warlords do have, believe it or not and as their ancestors had before them, the welfare of their tribes and the areas under their control, at heart and the provision of paid for employment does go a long way to help.

Wipe the warlords off the face of the earth and both unemployment and poverty will escalate: despite the nasty taste it brings to the mouth — bringing all warlords, irrespective of their previous atrocities, into the fold, is the only way to stave off, possibly already unavoidable, chaos.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 20^th, 2013.