TRAGEDY OF ERRORS

THE AMERICAN DEFEAT AND THE TALIBAN’S RETURN IS JUST THE NEXT ACT OF AN UNENDING TRAGEDY, BUT ITS IMPACT WILL AGAIN BE BORNE BY THE AFGHAN PEOPLE

- NAVTEJ SARNA

“Now I shall go far and far into the north, playing the Great Game….” —Rudyard Kipling (Kim, 1901)

THE EPITHET OF the Great Game attaches itself far too easily to Central Asia and Afghanistan, evoking lazy 19th century images of powerful empires jostling for influence among the Khanates. Unfortunately, it is not a game, great or otherwise, that is unfolding in Afghanistan, but the next act of an unending tragedy, the impact of which will again be borne by the Afghan people.

Like during the last four decades: thousands of innocent lives lost, thousands of childhoods cut cruelly short, countless other lives wasted away in the shadow of mindless conflict. The rugged landscape littered with unexploded ammunition, and the streets full of fighters with lethal weapons in their hands and the fundamentalist’s zeal in their eyes. A curtain falling over peace, development, education, women rights, shutting out the uncertain light that shone dimly for a few years. Ahead, only a night without end.

The tragedy is all the more acute since it is not entirely of Afghan making. One external power or the other has sought to use the country for its own ends and it is little comfort to the Afghan people that external powers do not succeed. They get bogged down, they suffer attrition, they leave; the chaos is left behind for another generation of Afghans to suffer.