Forecasting the Future of Afghanistan: Confederal Regionalism and National Liberation

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Mar 13, 2006      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
Bookmark and Share

Forecasting the Future of Afghanistan: Confederal Regionalism and National Liberation

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Afghanistan on the old Northwest Frontier of British India and Nagaland on the Northeast Frontier bounded by Burma, China and Tibet have never been conquered by any foreign forces, and undoubtedly they never will be.  The peoples in the region of Afghanistan battled the British to a bleeding draw, and the superb Naga guerilla fighters single-handedly defeated the Japanese army on its way from Burma toward the plains of Assam and India.

  The Fourth World War against “terrorism” and its impact on the people and peoples of Afghanistan is sad if one compares the now with the then when I was young, the British had left, and Afghanistan was a functioning confederation.  Ever since I read the book Pivot of Asia in 1947 as an 18-year-old on the way to Outer Mongolia before it was overrun by the Communists, I have specialized in Central Asian history, earning the first degree granted in America on Sino-Soviet studies.  In 1967, I also was the last Westerner in Nagaland, where I was doing field work as Richard Nixon’s foreign policy adviser for a position paper against the domino theory of Secretary McNamara who insisted on splitting the nation of Vietnam rather than supporting the national liberation forces who wanted to unite the country against foreign Communist manipulation.  The author of Pivot of Asia, Owen Lattimore, was branded as a Communist by Senator Joseph McCarthy because he accurately forecast the region’s future as a cauldron where three empires would clash in their common mission but conflicting politics to control the world.  He warned the United States against the temptation to succeed the British and French in their failing colonialist enterprise.

  In its March 27th issue, The Nation has published a routine article by Christian Parenti, entitled “Afghanistan: The Other War.”  Parenti is a regular contributor on Afghanistan and Iraq, especially on the national liberation struggle of the Kurdish nation.  His article as a sometime embedded reporter beyond the “Green Zone” of Kabul is remarkable only because it says more of the same, what few people know and those who do would rather ignore.   

  His reporting is strictly street-level, not the kind of stuff that free-lance think-tankers like to write, though over the decades as a professional in long-range forecasting I have insisted on field-reporting to cover Parenti’s beat in the most out-of-the-way parts of the world, wherever wars of justice and national liberation are “destabilizing” vested interests.

  In his latest article, appended below, Parenti writes as a modern John Steinbeck, author of Grapes of Wrath and other books that informed my youth, who gives the little details that nowadays counter-terrorism people study, since they simply cannot handle the kind of analysis that we publish in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org.
 
  Parenti’s article is depressing because what he describes did not have to be.  It is also depressing because the people who vote for Bush will never read it, and the people who have to do the dirty work, and know what is going on, also know better than to make waves. 

  There are alternatives, but they require the kind of paradigmatic revolution that upsets those who rose to power in the bankruptcy of the old paradigm.  One need merely consult, for example, the web-page of the American Revolutionary Party, http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us/partyplatform.htm, and some of its various links, including http://www.cesj/thirdway/comparison3rdway.htm, www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/csid-040528.htm, http://www.cesj.org/authors/cesj/craner-chechnya.htm, and www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/katrinaplan050907.html.

  The danger for the future is that without such paradigmatic change focused on justice not on mere stability as an ultimate goal, America may be overwhelmed by isolationism.  Policymakers therefore would lose any incentive to change policies in favor of economic and political initiatives designed to empower persons and communities based on a coherent understanding of human rights.

Permalink