A few days ago, a news report by the BBC caught my eye. It said the Red Cross reported some 800,000 people as disabled by the ongoing war in Afghanistan. It struck me as odd, since I didn’t think Afghanistan was such a large country. So I saved the link to check up and found time today.
The previous post is the result of that. In brief, it states Afghanistan’s population – 34,385,068 as of latest figures. That would mean that about 1 in every 43 people is disabled by the war or 2.3% of the entire Afghan population. Seeing as how the disabilities wouldn’t be uniform, it means that areas with greater conflict have even more disabled people than this.
It seemed unbelievable, so I asked for help from other journalists to confirm the Red Cross number. Got about ten replies. All of them confirmed it. The Red Cross doesn’t fake such information. It is correct.
It is amazing that no one has thought of the implications of this. Either from a humanitarian perspective, or even strategic. How does NATO expect Afghanistan to defend itself after their exit with such large numbers of disabled people – a majority of whom, I assume would be men? And this is without the illnesses, deaths and what nots completing the picture.
A few days back, I read a report in USAToday, which spoke of IED attacks in Afghanistan setting a record. There were 9,304 “IED Events” in 2009, 15,225 in 2010 and 16,554 in 2011. “IED Events” is the number of Improvised Explosive Devices cleared or detonated, not a social event. Kind of like the “Nuclear Park” at Jaitapur. We have ways of making things sound acceptable.
Astonishingly, that very same report quoted:
“If insurgencies are about winning the support — or at least the acquiescence — of the local population, this is a concerning trend for the Taliban,” said Seth Jones, an expert on Afghanistan at the RAND Corp., a think tank.
Yeah, right. Like Nadeem F. Paracha had once famously described Imran Khan stopping missiles with his bare chest.
In other words, no matter what happens, people supposedly professionals in thinking are able to see only advantages in it. No wonder the US is winning this war and is all set to exit Afghanistan after the transfer of power as a few other reports from around the same time claim.
In still other news, the Taliban is forcibly collecting Zakat, or tax from residents of northern Jawzjan province. Yeah, they are really desperate.
In other words, this war is in the exact same limbo and circular propaganda in media that it has been for a decade. Unnoticed, the toll on the population is growing. The people already disabled aren’t going to get better. The more this war continues, the more their numbers will rise.
Frankly, this war was lost the day US partnered with Pakistan [READ] and got to micro-managing Afghanistan. They lack understanding of the culture, or any sense of engagement beyond aggression. Three countries at least are paying a massive price. US, Pakistan and Afghanistan itself. Other NATO countries are suffering losses too.
France recently wanted and Nicolas Sarkozy declared out after French soldiers were attacked and killed by Afghan soldiers over some disrespect of the dead bodies of the Taliban by American soldiers Urinating on the dead bodies, to be specific. No, America simply doesn’t understand alien cultures – or try to – or find it necessary to other than psyops. Hillary Clinton not only didn’t see this as any indication that France would pull out, she knew better that they didn’t mean it, and so it was. China, Iran and India are going to have a big mess on their hands once this farce ends, because the stubborn refusal to look at reality has meant this story has devolved to chaos and the Pakistan borders in particular leak terrorism like a sieve and there is going to be an unemployment problem like after the Soviet jihad, and these are the countries that will win that harvest – India in particular.
And the more reality is ignored, the worse the chaos will be. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. Insanity is harmless if it is limited to the insane, but this macabre dance has too many players, too many lives devastated.
Pakistan in particular is at the verge of devastation and if Pakistan collapses, even winning in Afghanistan will not matter, because the Frankenstein’s monster will consume the entire region, if not the world. While Pakistan’s problems are largely of its own creation, and many of Afghanistan’s problems too, simply calling every problem a nail because you have a hammer is not working.
Like I have pointed out earlier too – when Pakistan’s trolls stop hounding you on the internet with bizarre versions of history, that is a disillusionment that is shaking their very foundations of identity among civilians. And, as the US likes to remind us, Pakistan is a nuclear power, so this collapse is an epic disaster waiting to happen.
A friend who knows such things had once likened terrorists to bed bugs. It is very difficult to get rid of an infestation unless you know exactly what you are doing, you have a plan and you stick with it or you just end up making it worse. I can’t think of a better metaphor for this parody of a war where there have been so many strategies and contradictions – including US eroding its own values and laws – that no one at all knows what exactly is happening and everyone except the Taliban have immobilized themselves through paradoxes of their own creation.
A journalist from Afghanistan had once tweeted – why are we spending so much to fight the guy with the sandals and AK-47? Good question, if anyone paused to think of it. And I think he’s been asking that for a long time.
In the meanwhile, in this maze of strategies, paradoxes, claims, realities, propaganda… there are people who are getting devastated, who rarely make news. News from Afghanistan is no longer about Afghans – hasn’t been for a long time.
There is a desperate need to find creative solutions. To listen to the Afghans instead of telling them. To give them what they need to fight rather than training them to alien standards from scratch. To give them the ownership of their war to do what they will, and support them solidly rather than employ and train them to become inferior shadows of the West and at prices the tax payer back home increasingly can’t afford.
If Obama is listening, he should get someone following what Afghan commentators are saying, what they are suggesting and mine ideas. This Emperor hasn’t had worn clothes for a long time.