by PAUL BUHLE
Tariq Ali’s book, The Forty Years War, is an event, within the larger event of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. No one, Left or Right, has followed the misadventure of US policy there with such dogged attention and keen insight. Nor, within the UK itself, of much higher visibility. From the pages of the Guardian to the London Review of Books and even in public dialogue with a key British foreign advisor (under Labour), his views have been discussed and debated, we can imagine, at the highest levels. Recent turns of the wheel (or screw) have vindicated him a thousand times over.
Tariq Ali, a Marxist theorist and historian of note, lecturer across continents, an editor of New Left Review, longtime contributor to CounterPunch and so on, happens also to be very much a participant in the regional events around the Indian subcontinent and nearby Afghanistan. He is Pakistani by origin—or rather in the part of India that would become Pakistan—as everyone knows. Far away from his homeland more than a half-century, apart from visits, he commands intimate knowledge of the people of the region, the contradictions, hopes and despair marking the post-colonial era. All this is part of him.
Here is a source, if by no means the only source, of his unique insights. There is no “Afghanistan Question” without a “Pakistani Question.” The flow back and forth across the borders artificially created by the colonial powers has not ceased, but rather accelerated with the internal strife, the blundering Russian effort to perpetuate a buffer state against Western instrusions, and the following catastrophe of US invasion and occupation.
Ali explains and explores briefly the deep reality of geography and demography. Afghanistan is one of the poorest regions of the world, under any or all ideological or military or any other leadership. The names of the rulers do not alter the multiplicity of different populations divided by tradition more than ideology, nor do the claims made for “change” or “modernization” create more water or arable land. Poppies thrive, now 90% of the world’s source for heroin, because alternatives do not allow survivable conditions.
Thus follows the geopolitical nightmare of US efforts, a redux of the British imperial project in the same valleys, updated by vast military technology and the capacity to create an almost American Suburban lifestyle that British soldiers would have envied (perhaps only the invaders’ access to the local sex traffic has remained largely the same). As the text reveals, beyond the boundaries of the invaders’ temporary holdings an artificial civil society can be created (we can be sure yesteryear’s British Afghanistanis read English novels and played cricket), the rest of society is lagely untouched except by devastating attacks on all sides, endless poverty and misery.
Counterpunch for more