Editorial

When former U.S. President Trump supporters storm the American Congress, the American system goes to work gauging Trump’s role in this seeming insurgency. We are not aware of a ‘Nepali system’ that probes and brings to light the many incitement cases that our politics encourages. Indeed, it is now fairly routine to ask politicians what the impact this or that foreign visitor to Nepal will have on Nepali politics and security. What we have accepted, in other words, is that foreigners will leave their mark in Nepali politics and our politicians are mere watchers or lackeys. How this impacts our national security is for security experts and agents to fret over perhaps. But, what is inexplicable and is perhaps outright escapism is how quickly we allow third-country developments to help us form our opinions. Inevitably perhaps the quick collapse of the Afghan government and reemergence of the Taliban in government has set minds reeling and tongues wagging in learned circles here. While parallels can certainly be drawn with Nepali politics and events there may have some of the other bearings on Nepali politics, that it must necessarily be so in some minds can only be a perversion from which our impoverished politics suffers. For one thing, the Taliban in emergence was hardly the sudden phenomenon made out to be by the affected media. Afghans themselves had been calling their president snidely the Kabul mayor suggesting that the government’s reach in the countryside was, at best limited. The pre-announced Western pull-out certainly helped the Taliban to poise the strike. The notion that the Taliban overwhelms can, furthermore, be premature. How the regression will allow for regrouping and the redistribution of foreign resources will have to be evaluated in due course. A population fighting Soviet or American occupation is certainly different from a population wary of previous Taliban excesses and the Pakhtoon base of the Taliban cannot be unbeknown to other tribesmen and sects. One thing is for sure though — a Western-style democracy is unlikely to emerge as a solution to the Afghan problem. A solution will have into account traditional tribal, sectarian and religious factors in order to re-discover the previous cohesion of the Afghans. Of course, the extent of capital spent in reconstruction will be a lure for cohesion too. But, as in Nepal, opting for anything Western as anything modern will have been discarded now by the Afghans as it should in Nepal too. The idea is to begin at the beginning. With the people who have their feet firmly in the ground, the development will mean no easy shortcuts. It will mean education and the Western presence has given the country quite a start. It will mean professionalism for which the current educated force can be quite a leverage. It will also mean that the religious leadership that is now at the top of politics is being oriented towards valid development goals that will impact societal uplift. The Taliban then and the Taliban now, it is being made out, is different. Let us wait and see the difference. This having been said though, so much proliferation of foreign interests and capital in that country will have groomed so many vested interests that a logical course to the change in Kabul will perhaps be prevented from within demanding tougher standpoints by those who have forwarded themselves as the new change agents.