This Brave New World, XVIII
written on the eve of the Afghanistan withdrawal deadline
endless war
or full troop withdrawal ?
at the airport fence
an Afghan girl stares at clouds
with darker shades of gray
FYI: Incorporating five of my tanka about the Afghanistan war into one tanka sequence for reflections:
All That Remains
endless war
or full troop withdrawal ?
at the airport fence
an Afghan girl stares at clouds
with darker shades of gray
NeverEnding Story, August 30, 2021
last Americans
lifted off the embassy roof
in Saigon --
now some hundred Afghans
cling to a moving US plane
NeverEnding Story, August 18 2021
the face
of an Afghan girl
who stares
into the camera
at us ... at Death
Revision, Cattails, October 2018
Death
a dust-faced coalman
unfolds
one body bag, then another ...
gathering dark in Kabul
Revision, Bright Stars, III, 2014
breakthrough cases surge
sheltered in my attic room
I feel safe ... for now
The modern history of Afghanistan repeats itself as a graveyard of empires. It started from the United Kingdom during the imperial era to be followed by the former Soviet Union during the Cold War and the U.S. over the last two decades.
ReplyDeleteAfghanistan is also back to square one before former U.S. President Bush launched the war against terror following 9/11 in 2001....
Afghanistan will likely emerge as a source of regional instability. It will threaten to turn the region into a new arc of instability with immediate spillover to the Sunni Pakistan through the existing Pakistani Taliban network and to the Shiite Iran as well as the Central Asian countries which share borders and tribal links with northern Afghanistan. China will be also closely watching if and how the Taliban and affiliated groups may try to inject energy to the separatist Islamic movement in Xinjiang.
A power vacuum and safe haven for terrorist groups may be created if and when the internal conflict rages again in Afghanistan. Opium trade to neighbors and beyond may spike under the protection of various rogue elements and the loose government control. ...
-- The Korea Times, August 29: "Double deja vu of Afghanistan with volatile future," by Kim Won-soo, accessed at https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2021/08/638_314583.html