SV: SV: Plight of Buddhist art

[rohan.oberoi at CORNELL.EDU]

No, I did not make any point about whether the West should have
"allowed the Soviets to occupy Afghanistan unopposed" and I am frankly
not interested in geopolitical arguments unblemished by a human
perspective.  I sympathise to some extent with the remark made here to
the effect that arguing about past blame is sterile, so I will point
out that there are two, not one, policies concerning Afghanistan in
effect _right now_, one with real effect, one symbolic.  The one with
real effect is the Washington policy (faithfully implemented by the
UN) of economically punishing a people (16 million Afghans) who are
already known to be in such drastic straits (leave aside for the
moment the actions of Washington that helped bring this about) that
many are at present starving to death; this in retaliation for no more
than the exercise by the government of the Taleban of their right of
sovereignty under the UN charter (the same right under which Norway
refuses to extradite suspects facing the death penalty to the US).
The other is the Taleban policy, only recently announced despite their
having been in power for almost five years, of destroying some of the
most visible pre-Islamic monuments in the country.

This being an academic list, I would expect people to be wary of
attributing 'inherent' qualities to whole populations (as Dr. Fosse
does when he accuses "Afghans" as a whole of "religious fanaticism")
before first considering contingent responses to circumstances.  Given
first that the rise of the Taleban coincided with utter despair among
ordinary Afghans that the ongoing war among gangs of rival mujahideen
-- all of them established with American arms and money -- could ever
be resolved and law and order established, there are excellent reasons
(not forgetting the alleged Pakistani support for the Taleban) other
than such inherent fanaticism for the Taleban's rise, and this has
been widely commented on.  Given second that the Taleban's
announcement coincides with increasing starvation and despair in
Afghanistan, where prices have at least doubled following the UN
sanctions, and given that the Taleban have been in power for over four
years without destroying the Bamiyan statues, there is every argument
for seeing their latest policy too as a contingent response to
desperate circumstances rather than as an inherent outgrowth of their
'fanaticism'.

Dr. Fosse - when you, as an Indologist, a Norwegian, a human being,
are complicit in the international policy that says the Taleban
government must be treated as international pariahs and the Afghan
people as legitimate casualties of an extradition dispute, what right
do you have to protest when they behave desperately and irrationally?
When the Afghans have been subjected first to widespread destruction
by the Russians, then to the funding and arming of disparate private
groups by the wealthiest country in the world to the point where the
nation's capital became the permanent battleground of those groups,
and then to the active and effective hostility of that same country
with all other nations (except a few like Pakistan and Turkmenistan)
acquiescing, by what logic can you attribute their adoption of extreme
ideologies and desperate (and unpleasant) actions to their inherent
failings rather than to the pressure of contingent circumstance?
Forgive me, but if your hypocrisy is not clear to you it is quite
revolting to me; you sound like a German of, say, 1941, complaining
that Poles are violent terrorists by nature.

Regards,
Rohan.






>As for responsibility, it has to be distributed. The Afghans cannot be
>blamed for trying to liberate their country. However, they can be blamed
>for in-fighting, tribalism, and religious fanaticism which are not
>conducive to restoring the country. The Soviets must take the main
>responsibility for destroying Afghan society and its vulnerable economy.
>The West must take responsibility for not helping (enough) after the war
>was over. Let me remind you, by the way, that the Taliban are relative
>latecomers. The Afghans that received American help (through Pakistan,
>which manipulated the situation according to its own needs) in the eighties
>were not quite so extreme as the Taliban.
>
>Are you suggesting that the West should have allowed the Soviets to occupy
>Afghanistan unopposed, by the way? I am not entirely convinced that India's
>generals would have been comfortable with the Soviets firmly established in
>Afghanistan. That would put them uncomfortably close to India, and if I
>remember my Kautilya, there should be at least one country between yourself
>and your ally.