 Northern Alliance fighters at Bagram Airport |
  AFGHANISTAN: A Showdown Foretold "The superpowers invested their Afghan client armies with the power of sudden death, not the gifts of reason and mercy." -- Arthur Kent, The Observer newspaper, London, April 19, 1992 As the people of Afghanistan, ordinary families like yours and mine, bear the terrible consequences of the horrific Sept. 11th terrorist outrages in the United States, please remember that this impoverished Southwest Asian nation's descent in to chaos and bloodshed has been caused not only by internal conflict, but by foreign interference. Our governments, in the West, knew full well what was unfolding in Afghanistan during the 1990s. The Taliban, Osama bin Laden's terror networks both are consequences, in part, of Western indifference to the plight of the Afghan people, who are victims of 23 consecutive years of warfare. |
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Diplomats, aid workers, journalists and the Afghan people themselves warned the world community of the mounting crisis. In April of 1992, one Afghan writer told me in Kabul: "Our society was once rich and diverse, but now we have been bred only for the arena of war." Today's latest phase to the war in Afghanistan represents a last, best chance for the world community to finally end the bloodshed. For the security of people and nations everywhere, let's pray our leaders finally get it right. "Unless the lords of battle on all sides can find a means of talking their way out of the arena, the city of Kabul, magnificent still despite years of war, will once again be defiled in blood, to the shame of all those who took up arms and every nation that made those arms available." -- Arthur Kent, The Observer, April 19, 1992. See below for my latest writings from the region. These pages will be updated as frequently as events and my travels in the region permit... |