"Two thousand years since the start of Mission, there are still vast geographical, cultural, human and social areas which have not yet been penetrated by Christ and his Gospel."There will be a special collection for the Missions next Sunday.
(Pope John Paul II)
It is a difficult time for America; It is a dangerous time for the world; but it is a disastrous time for Afghanistan itself. A landlocked country, no bigger than the state of Texas, it has had a most troubled history. It is a desperately impoverished country with a population of 16 million (see box below); since it is 70% mountainous, it is geographically inhospitable. It is ethnically fragmented, with seven major and mutually antagonist ethnic groups.Despite these draw-backs, it has down through history attracted the successive attentions of a variety of outsiders: Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Tartars, British, Russians, and now, America and its allies. Historically, outsiders were attracted by its strategic location rather than its potential resources: whoever controlled the Khyber Pass acted as porters at both the gateway to India and the back door to Russia. During the 1920s, for example, Britain attempted to use Afghanistan as a buffer state between India and Russia.
Afghanistan has always been a cockpit, with terrible consequences for both the occupiers and the occupied. The most recent casualty of this ‘adventuring pattern’ has been the old Soviet Union. They entered the country on Christmas Day, 1979 with 80,000 troops and infinitely superior armoury. In February 1989, the Soviet army withdrew northwards after almost ten years of humiliating torment. The consequences of this debacle are still being identified by historians. Many will argue that the Russian corpses returning from Afghanistan brought the reformer Gorbachev to power in 1985. That conclusion is open to question. But no one will question the fact that, after the Afghanistan venture, the Soviet system never recovered, and its international significance dwindled dramatically.
But, despite an apparent victory, the Afghanis suffered terribly too. Over one million innocent civilians lost their lives and, according to the UN, 6,000,000 people fled the country altogether, mainly to Pakistan. Whatever semblance of political stability preceded the Soviets, none whatsoever remained after them. Every since, anarchy, of varying intensity, has reigned. It is clear from the above that dabbling in Afghanistan is a highly precarious exercise. It is unique in that history has yet to provide a clear victor there, from any side in its many conflicts. Only losers and victims!
So what is new in the present situation? It could be said that America’s ambitions there are very limited: the capture of the those ultimately responsible for the September 11 massacre. Politically and morally, President Bush was compelled to act. But the risks are enormous, the most obvious being the creation of a whole new generation of Bin Ladens. The next most obvious and related risk is that the war will be interpreted in the Muslim world as a ‘war of civilisations’. Instead of isolating the terrorists, this would install them as heroes at the heart of a newly resurgent, and viciously belligerent Islam. For the sake of the world, and for the sake of Islam itself, we should pray that this scenario will not develop. But the history of that region yields no crumbs of comfort.
-D.L.AFGHANISTAN: THE COLD FACTS
COUNTRY: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
AREA: 652,090 sq km [251,772 sq mls]
POPULATION: 16,433,000
CAPITAL (Population): Kabul (1,127,000)
GOVERNMENT: Islamic Republic
ETHNIC GROUPS: Pashtun ('Pathan') 52%, Tajik 20%, Uzbek 9%, Hazara 9%, Chahar, Turkmen, Baluchi
LANGUAGES: Pashto 50%, Dari Persian
RELIGIONS: Sunni Muslim 74%, Shiite Muslim 25%
NATIONAL DAY: 27 April; Anniversary of Saur Revolution
CURRENCY: Afghani = 100 puls
ANNUAL INCOME PER PERSON: $450
MAIN INDUSTRIES: Agriculture, carpets, textiles
MAIN EXPORTS: Natural gas 42%, dried fruit 26%, fresh fruit 9%, carpets and rugs 7%
MAIN EXPORT PARTNERS: CIS nations 55%, Pakistan 16%, India 12%
MAIN IMPORTS: Wheat 5%, vegetable oil 4%, sugar 3%
MAIN IMPORT PARTNERS: CIS nations 62%, Japan 13%
POPULATION DENSITY: 25 per sq km [65 per sq ml]
INFANT MORTALITY: 162 per 1,000 live births
LIFE EXPECTANCY: Female 44 yrs, male 43 yrs
ADULT LITERACY: 20%
PLIGHT OF REFUGEES
“People denied the minimal conditions for a life free from terror and allowing them a basic dignity are entitled to call on others to grant them such conditions. To deny this is to hold that we have at most only negative duties towards strangers: that, for example, we may not kill them, but have no duty to protect them from being killed. This is quite false. To refuse help to others suffering from or threatened by injustice is to collaborate with that injustice, and so incur part of the responsibility for it.”
-Michael Dummett, ‘On Immigration and Refugees’.BERLIN UNPERTURBED!
Interviewed on BBC television in 1997, shortly before his death, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, was asked what had been the most surprising thing about his long life. He was born in Riga in 1909 the son of a Jewish timber merchant, and was seven and a half years old when he witnessed the start of the February Revolution in Petrograd from the family’s flat above a ceramics factory. He replied, “The mere fact that I shall have lived so peacefully and so happily through such horrors. The world was exposed to the worst century there has ever been from the point of view of crude inhumanity, of savage destruction of mankind, for no good reason, . . . And yet, here I am, untouched by all this, ... That seems to me quite astonishing.” More conventional histories of the 20th century concentrate on a familiar canon of political-military events: the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression of the 1930s, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, decolonisation, the Cold War. It is an awful catalogue. The atrocities committed by Stalin and Hitler have still not been measured in full, and now, in all probability, never will be. The numbers are too vast. And yet someone like Berlin, whose family remaining in Riga was liquidated, led what he called elsewhere in the BBC interview ‘a happy life’.
- from Peter Watson in ‘A Terrible Beauty.’THOUGHTS AFTER A TRIP
When I have packed my bags and gone, I’ve always left something behind,
Some tie or shirt or one left shoe for the next one after me to find.
I do deplore this trait of mine, sometimes it, really hurts -
Especially when I’m home again, minus my ties or shoes or shirts.
But maybe there’s a little man living inside my bags,
Who makes his meals of cracker crumbs, his clothes from laundry tags,
And maybe it is he whose job it is to see that where I’ve been
Something of me is left behind, to be remembered -felt or seen.
For I’ve been remiss in all my stays, my travels lead
To leave behind some memory of thought or word or deed.
So I must rely on my little man to do as he choose,
And leave for me a littered trail - of shirts and ties and shoes.
-Anon.