The Taliban Victory

I have so far not commented on the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. This is partly because my comment could be summed up in the few words ‘I told you so’.

From Day 1, there was never any doubt in my mind that the Afghan government created by the US and her allies would not last much beyond the Western military occupation of the country. Looking back through history, there are numerous examples of Western powers trying to force their own puppet regimes and their own values on other countries very different from their own. Usually, such efforts have failed miserably sooner or later.

This is hardly surprising, given that it is a basic human instinct to group together against others who speak different languages, who come from very different cultures, and who have very different values. Especially when such others are occupying your country militarily and are trying to force through changes based on their culture rather than yours.

Now, after 20 years, at least a trillion dollars of taxpayers money, innumerable unnecessary deaths, and immense suffering, the Western powers have learned anew the hard lesson outlined above. Hopefully, it will finally sink in, although I am not holding my breath, knowing the nature of governments.

This is not to say that I applaud the victory of the Taliban. The Taliban is about as nasty as its worst detractors claim. However, Westerners need to understand that there are parts of the world that they simply cannot control. If they really want to help the unfortunate Afghans who want a life different from the one stipulated by the Taliban, there is, however, one thing they can do: Open the borders!

Allowing the persecuted Afghans to escape from the Taliban is the one obvious and humane solution that simultaneously avoids the West getting entangled in Afghanistan. However, surprisingly few of the people who claim to have the best interests of the Afghans at heart are open to this solution. Yes, they want to help the Afghans, but only if the Afghans stay well away from them. Such is the hypocrisy of the West. No wonder if the Afghans find such Western values rather lacking in both sincerity and consistency.

The Cost of Xenophobia

In the afternoon of 28th March 1997, the Albanian motorboat Kateri i Radës sailed towards Italy with some 142 people on board. They were all desperately trying to escape the political and economic mayhem in their home country and make a better life for themselves abroad. Still within Albanian territorial waters, the boat was challenged by the Italian naval vessel Sibilia on suspicion of carrying ‘irregular migrants’. The Italian vessel ended up colliding with the motorboat, causing the boat to capsize and sink. Some 83 people, aged between 3 months and 69 years, drowned as a result. Thus, 83 Europeans were arbitrarily killed by other Europeans in just one such event of the supposedly enlightened 1990s.

 

The wreck of the Kateri i Radës was raised and for years laid neglected in a corner of the Italian port of Brindisi. It was eventually converted into a memorial with the fitting title L'Approdo. Opera all'Umanità Migrante (The Landing. A work dedicated to Migrating Humanity):

 

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Fast forward to 2020 and the development of the first approved vaccine against Covid-19. The vaccine was created by two scientists from the German company BioNTech. But the scientists - Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci - are, in fact, 1^st and 2^nd generation migrants from Turkey. In other words, they are not even of European extraction.  

 

This beggars the question how many brilliant minds are lost to the world due to the paranoid fear in Western countries of migrants from elsewhere. How many Uğur Şahins have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea or died of thirst on the US-Mexican border? How many parents of Özlem Türecis have been prevented from leaving their blighted home countries in search of better lives, thus condemning their children to lives in obscurity?

 

As Johan Norberg writes in his book Open - The Story of Human Progress:

 

If people were allowed to move to the place where their labour is paid the best, the gains to world income would be astronomical. According to a back-of-envelope calculation, world GDP would increase by around $80 trillion, in effect doubling world GDP, and those gains would be accrued every year.

 

Abolishing all barriers to goods and services would increase global GDP by a couple of percentage points – nothing to be sniffed at – but abolishing barriers to people would increase it by 60 - 150 per cent, according to several different estimates. And even partial eliminations of barriers to labour mobility could increase global wealth by trillions. This is why economists talk about ‘trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk’ when they refer to the simple policy of allowing people to go and work where they want to go and work. …

 

… it is startling that no policy in today’s world could be more controversial than picking up trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk, especially since new cultures often inject energy into our own, and it helps people to escape poverty and hopelessness, flee persecution and to be with their loved ones.”

 

Even so, the world seems to be going in a different direction. Witness, for instance, the recent end of free movement between the UK and the remaining countries of the EU, and Trump’s relentless campaign against migrants from Mexico and Muslim countries.

 

So when you encounter a taxi driver or a peasant by the roadside on your next visit to Morocco, Turkey, or Mexico, please do remember that they are not lesser beings than you, and that they might have been even more successful than you if they had simply not committed the unforgivable sin of being born in the wrong country.