Afghan Commentary Post

  I spoke with my deceased uncle today. Let me tell you how that came to be. It’s been more than a month since California Gov. Gavin Newsom asked Californians to stay home to prevent the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus. The situation is vividly depicted in Kitty O'Meara ’s poem, And The People Stayed Home … “and read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still … Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.” In a New York Times op-ed, Taylor Lorenz advises us to Stop Trying to Be Productive.   She writes that t he internet wants you to believe you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you have now. But staying inside and attending to basic needs is plenty. I don’t like being told what to do. It’s my time, and I am going to spend it my way. This is because my sense of obligation to obey others who gi...

Lessons Learned from Coronavirus What we are experiencing now is not a prologue to a novel.This is reality. The place is ourworld, the time is now, and a happy ending is not promised. The streets in my Southern California neighborhood are unusually quiet because most of my neighbors are driving around in hopes of finding stores with bottled water, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, tissues and food. My wife and I also searched store after store for those items this morning. Box stores like Costco and Walmartare rationing some items, something I have never seen before. President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency. The stock market endured its worstlosses in 12 years. The pandemic led Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to accelerate his push for free health care coverage for every citizen. The panic makes me wonder what the U.S. would be like if we were facing an impending missile attack from NorthKorea, China or Iran’s mullahs.It seems we never im...

.  By Wahab Raofi   Published on Foreign Policy Journal As Taliban violence and peace talks simultaneously dominate headlines, it becomes increasingly clear that if there is to be a brighter future for Afghanistan, it needs to come from progress in the country’s combative relationship with Pakistan and a revamping of Afghanistan’s own government. Shortly after a Taliban official claimed that progress had been made during talks with senior Afghan politicians in Moscow, suicide bombs shook Kabul. First, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a military training center in the Afghan capital, killing at least six people. Then a car bomb targeting a U.S. convoy exploded in an eastern Kabul neighborhood, leaving four Afghan civilians dead and seven wounded, including four American forces. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid took responsibility for the attack. Since October, U .S. officials have held six rounds of talks with Taliban represent...

  By Wahab Raofi Afghans have a saying: “What comes out of a mug is what is inside the mug.” As Afghanistan faces a decades-long series of major crises, its best hope lies in “what is inside of the mug” – its own people and government. And if the latest news is any indication, it does not bode well for Afghans. The New York Times reported that a group of lawmakers “blocked the Afghan Parliament’s newly appointed speaker from taking his seat on Sunday, and security forces were dispatched after a scuffle broke out. Members of Parliament on Saturday picked Mir Rahman Rahmani … for the role of speaker despite his just failing to win the number of votes needed to take the job. The turmoil came just a few days after the newly elected Parliament started its first session on Thursday. The election in October was delayed by more than three years and was plagued by vote-rigging and bribery.”   Chaos in Parliament, rigged elections, corruption at many levels and stalled neg...

 

  By Wahab Raofi   In his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation ,” American psychologist Abraham Maslow described his “Hierarchy of Needs ,” writing that human beings are motivated first by the basics, and then, once those needs are met, they are free to devote more time to meeting emotional needs centering on relationships, productivity and self-esteem. Food, water and shelter are at the base of his pyramid; achievement and creativity are at the top. But if Maslow were alive today, might he add one more tier at the top of his pyramid to include deliberate indifference?   It appears that when all of the needs on Maslow’s list are met – arguably the case for many living in the United States – humans move to a level that is even more self-centered than the lower levels. They tend to ignore issues that don’t seem to affect them personally and focus mostly on getting what they want.    This is not to suggest they don’t contribut...

Published on Foreign Policy Journal In his famous essay “Why I write,” George Orwell (1903-1950) revealed, “When I sit down to write, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” To follow the path of George Orwell requires courage and dedication, if one wishes to dig out the truth. But sometimes, doing that can be costly. Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Journalist, was assassinated in Turkey last year, allegedly by Saudi authorities working at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Hundreds of journalists have been kidnapped, persecuted and even killed, like Khashoggi, simply for doing their jobs to expose wrong-doing, human-rights violations, corruption or crimes that have been covered up by governments or the powerful.  Consider the story of legendary Afghan singer Sadiq Fitrat, who adopted the pseudonym Nas...