It has been a grim start to the New Year and the new decade in South Asia. Vested interests, hardened obsessions, and old habits continue to push India and Pakistan in the direction of ruinous conflict. While military planners in both countries plan and prepare for the next war, politicians and diplomats remain determined not to talk except on their own terms.
Seven stories of 2009 that deserved more attention than they received.
The Afghan problem can’t be addressed, let alone solved, by force. Nor can it be solved through negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. The conflict, after all, is not between two distinct segments of the population. Negotiation is an appropriate strategy when there is indeed a two-party conflict—as in a civil war—and both sides have support among different factions of the population. But neither the government nor the Taliban has much popular support. The problem is not the presence of the Taliban; it’s the absence of good governance.
Turkey’s constitutional court banned the country’s only pro-Kurdish party on December 11. Likely to result in an increased number of ethnic conflicts across the country, the decision is both typical and paradoxical.
On November 29, a majority of the Swiss population decided to ban the construction of new minarets in their country. Many Muslim leaders and laypeople were “surprised” at the Swiss decision, viewing the decision as an aberration from Western ideals and voicing anti-Swiss criticisms in return. Turkish minister for EU Affairs and chief negotiator Egemen Bağış, for example, argued that Switzerland wouldn’t have taken this decision if it were an EU member. Yet the Swiss decision on minarets reflects a far deeper fear shared by thousands of people in Western Europe. Members of the Christian Democratic Union party in Germany, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, and the Danish People’s Party have already applauded the decision.
Six months ago, President Obama dazzled audiences from Cairo to Jakarta—and everywhere in between and beyond—with his call for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world. It came after the new president made a series of confidence-building statements, speeches, and diplomatic overtures with a consistent, sobering message: It is time for relations based on “mutual respect” and “mutual interest.” Obama declared at Cairo University that there “must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.”
Split This Rock offers the following poems for your vigils, demonstrations, and actions.
The first poem at a reading
Should always shock and awe
It should be a love poem
Of overwhelming force
Maybe the mother
Of all poems
War reduces everything
To silence
Every soldier’s grave a place
Too loud for sleep
E. Ethelbert Miller
From D.C. Poets Against the War (Argonne House Press, 2004). Used with permission.
President Barack Obama recently announced an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, outlining plans to send an additional 30,000 troops. In search of an “end game,” he also declared that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan would end in the summer of 2011, though the administration has since stated this will be a long and slowly phased withdrawal. The additional troops — even had they been the 40,000 originally requested by General Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan — will be unable to score a military victory. Washington realizes that military force is not enough, particularly in the face of the loss of public support in the United States and the recent failure of democratic elections in Afghanistan. The end game will require a political settlement.
When President Barack Obama laid out his plan for winning the war in Afghanistan, behind him stood an army of ghosts: Greeks, Mongols, Buddhists, British, and Russians, all whom had almost the same illusions as the current resident of the Oval Office about Central Asia. The first four armies are dust. But there are Russian survivors of the 1979-89 war that ended up killing 15,000 Soviets and hundreds of thousands of Afghans as well as virtually wrecking Moscow’s economy.
There was one way in which President Obama’s escalation speech brought significant relief to the 59% of people in this country, as well as the overwhelming majorities of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and elsewhere who oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan: It was a pretty lousy speech. That is, it had none of the power, the lyricism, the passion for history, the capacity to engage and to persuade virtually every listener, even those who may ultimately disagree, that have characterized the president’s earlier addresses.