Afghanistan’s Plee for Renaissance: Return to Modernity
It is the time, now, when black-clad shells fall from the sky, the mouths of rivers are skirted with dirt and stones and in place of roaring debate, bronze bullets shriek and pierce the wind. To a child in the neighborhood playground, this is likely a common nuisance and no reason to stop kicking the dust with one’s soles. What more can one do, when the municipal school has closed its doors for safety concerns or perhaps the teacher’s fear of pupil protection.
Sand-blasted, grey armoured automobiles, labouring its treads through the uneven stretch, drag an emotionally sodden platoon through the unknown, for the noble sake of chartering their cause. Meanwhile, the bodies of those deceased are hung out and left to dry by the roadway with absolute nonchalance. Perched upon the dividing line of tectonic plate, it is surely difficult to hear the last voice of resistance for Afghanistan’s historical significance.
For in the quest for stability, what little concern for a superpower, gathering and imposing their troops into a fraught hotbed of unrest, carefully trotting on eggshells as they attempt to reach a resolution for a constitution.
It is the voice of the quest for a return to Afghanistan’s Golden Age that has been squelched and suitably sutured by incompatible visions of a self-governing state. The many wounds of an already fragmented fabric of people is only brought even greater dismay by the glaring totem of death; drowning in images of hallowed crusaders walking upon blighted land.
While political insights and opinions might vary, we should be aid ourselves to look beyond and focus on the true victims of this conflict – the civilians and especially the children, who will grow up merely guided and reassured for the prosperity of things to come, by the stories and memories of fathers and forefathers.
“There was once a time”, I believe they would say, “where a University mall stood there, and a booming coffee shop operated beside it, choking with smoke and laughter. Next door to the opium den and beside the promenade and car-park was the city medical centre, where worldly wisdom and medicine were prescribed treatments as opposed to our present-day emergency rations and infinite squalor. Things will turn around, given time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.html
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