Afghanistan – The Charmed Hallway of Asia

Afghanistan is a charmed, spell-bound country. It lies in the middle of nowhere, its only asset being its strategic location right between Central Asia, South Asia and the Middle East. Lacking resources of significance or access to the sea, it is very much like a hallway with no furniture: you can’t live there but you can’t do without it for the access to other rooms.

One thing about hallways is that you can’t stay there for too long unless it’s the only thing you know since your birth. You can hang out there for a while, maybe even bite the bullet and stay a few nights, but you won’t possibly settle down there.

Many conquerors tried to defy that, all of them failed. No amount of digging your heels in the ground worked. The place is charmed. Alexander the Great, Assyrian kings and Shahs of Persia, the Mongols and Timur, Moguls of India and Arab Caliphs, all did their brief stunt in this magic land only to withdraw before too long or, at utmost, to claim its nominal dependency.

Afghanistan was a buffer zone in the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires, wisely enough, neither side wished to claim it. The Wakhan Corridor is a lasting legacy of that thoughtful arrangement. Afghanistan was left alone for many decades until the Soviet Union, oblivious of history's lessons, decided to barge in. Contrary to Western propaganda, Soviets did introduce progressive developments there: gender emancipation, free education and healthcare. But once again, nothing was enough to get rooted there in any meaningful way. The arid Afghani soil rejects any foreign seed.

Now we are having a whole international force stationed there. Billions are spent in aid, development and military expenditures. So far the only achievement was a major boost in opium and opiates production. Contractors, parliamentarians and other carpetbaggers are having 300-dollar sushi dinners in Kabul while the country folks, disenchanted with yet other self-proclaimed liberators, start again siding with the Taleban. Ever-so-irresistibly smiling President Karzai may keep squeezing multi-billion aid pledges from Western governments but it is not him or his ilk – not even the foreign troops consuming 100-million dollars worth of bottled water a year - who will inherit Afghanistan, but the hardy Afghani farmers wasting away from dysentery and malnutrition in their earth dugouts. Remember, the place is charmed.