The recent Bonn conference on the ‘Future of Afghanistan’ was an evocative illustration of how great tragedies of our age stem from economic disparities that are untreatable with military or political misadventures.
How the great powers refuse to address inequality, the root cause of the age of terrorism, at any cost.
Has it occurred to the reader that, almost exclusively, every lunatic Islamist terrorist is based in a country that does not have electricity or running water outside its capital?
Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan are countries that are heart-wrenchingly under resourced. They are the disowned second cousins of the international family.
These countries have people that are disenfranchised of every ‘ism’ you can throw a stone out. They are both disenfranchised citizens and consumers. They are the great unwashed who are thrown our crumbs.
American Express Gold card members are thin on the ground in Northern Sudan but intelligence is not the monopoly of the wealthy.
With the penetration of cable television and Internet, untold millions are now witness, in streaming video, to just how shamelessly ostracised they are by the players of global business and politics.
A powerful motive
Jealousy is a powerful motive (imagine underemployed Abdul, watching the hedonistic Kardashians on YouTube).
In conjunction with the biting shame of poverty, you will have no dearth of combatants who will be spellbound by the teachings of prophets who envision a just world.
During the 1960s, smelly, opinionated students everywhere worshipped Che Guevara, the bearded Argentine Marxist revolutionary leader, who did not hesitate to kill and imprison Cubans who detracted from an overwhelmingly radical philosophy.
He was responsible for the execution of hundreds of homosexuals and former regime leaders who did not fit into his insane mold. Not dissimilar to another bewildered bearded prophet who killed scores of Americans who did not enroll into his cockeyed school of Islam.
Modern Guevara
Both Guevara and Osma bin Laden had philosophies that nourished themselves on the biting indignity of exploitation, namely the genesis of inequality.
Bin Laden, who was as mad as a March hare, was the modern Guevara, same manure different bucket. Both were figureheads of ideology that is strongly driven by the wrongs of inequality.
The war on terror, a stillborn idea from the fact that you cannot wage battle against an emotion, should be a war against poverty.
How many Talibanis could be patrolling the deathly cold Khyber Pass if they could be at home watching football on a two-metre wide plasma television, with a goat roasting in an oversized barbeque that looks like a milk factory? Or more seriously, how many Afghan patriots would pursue violence if their children had access to the same health services that westerners afford their pets?
Hard basket
Giving violent misfits a middle class life would have cost a fraction of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have reportedly cost $US1,292,164,039,372.
If I am not wildly off mark, that is $US1.2 trillion.
That would buy textbooks and hospital beds in any borough.
India’s own litany of mutinies is painted over with the same brush.
In the Indian Government’s eyes, Maoists are terrorists who must be eliminated.
This is the easiest way of addressing the real problems of acute poverty, that is breeding armies of youth who literally have nothing to lose, is well and truly stuffed into the ‘too hard basket’.
Bureaucrats studiously ignoring the numbing fact that hunger is the worst form of terrorism.
How different are the motives for Kashmiri Azadis? Nagas? ULFAS?
How much of their revolutionary zeal is driven by ethnic and religious identity?
How much of their hatred stems from suffering poverty?
From not having a ticket on the great Indian economic miracle?
With Governments internationally refusing to acknowledge the true motives behind terrorist behaviour, how can they can they win this abstract war?
Roy Lange is our Correspondent based in Melbourne, Australia. He is a New Zealander with a passion for India, truth and anything in-between.
