Partition of Afghanistan
Making enemies out of friends.
So today I tweeted one sentence and it brought out a long list of comments, critique, applaud and a couple of insults here and there. The tweet was simple:
“Maybe partition is the solution”.
Now, I have never publicly spoken about or discussed partition or federalism and there was a good reason for it; Afghans are not yet ready to discuss these things with an open mind for a few reasons which are obvious to many and it’s been discussed in detail across all platforms throughout the years. The most obvious reasons are 1) Federalism and partition has been used by certain politicians driving certain narratives with the malicious intent of gaining political foothold which has pushed the people to stand against it, 2) Fear of “Balkanization” of Afghanistan especially with the recent foreign policies of the neighboring countries toward Afghanistan in the recent decades, 3) constant wars, migrations, displacement, foreign intervention has left all Afghans desiring peace and unity and partition seems like the one idea that would forever destroy that dream of a unified and peaceful Afghanistan.
Now, people who know me, know that I have always believed in a country where all the people living in this country regardless of their religion, ethnicity, nationality, and other relevant can co-exist and live together under one single banner and flag and believe in something bigger than ethnicity and provinces or languages because to me they mean nothing and they never have. Not many people even know where I am from and what my ethnicity is. My vision for Afghanistan was better than that. The questions that I surmised from the whole conversation/exchange was:
What exactly is unity? What does it bring us? Can you force unity? Can you force people into being “united”? Isn’t that a self-defeating endeavor in itself?
Let me bring your attention to a few points:
Partition - throughout history and the world - has been a case of equal success and failures. Partitions of states have been a significant feature of the global system for centuries but have not stimulated as extensive and intensive a scholarly literature as that devoted to ethnic and national conflict. In this seminar, we consider the various modalities of partition—e.g., of continents, empires, nations and regions by rival states (external) and decolonizing states (internal)—by studying the cases of Europe (mainly Germany), India and Palestine, which occurred relatively simultaneously in the second half of the 1940s. How did the reconfigured global system address one of the conundrums that the League of Nations confronted in the interwar period: whether national borders should always coincide with national/ethnic identities, and the status of minority populations? Far from ‘solving’ these problems, it could be argued, these partitions resulted in civil wars, forced population movements and unstable polities. Alternatively, the conflict could have been worse, argued British imperial elites; partition averted even greater disaster. In fact, some realist political scientists contend, partition secured long-term peace, at least in Europe. That’s for your academic senses that you could look into for a discussion.
Partitions in its essence does NOT have to be based on ethnic lines but rather on CHOICES and PRINCIPLES. This is what illudes most Afghans as their criteria for partition always seems to fall onto ethnic lines where multitude of people with multiple-ethnic ancestry raise the question of “Where will I go”? Trust me, I am one of those multi-ethnic ancestry people and I have an answer. The answer is simple: Go where you will live in peace and have a life and a future.
Idealism: This is another issue plaguing us Afghans where we think that we need to stay united no matter what happens and no matter how it goes. You can’t force unity. Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Nuristanis and others all want their own share of this nation and country and when/if they don’t get it, it is their right to want to have their own land and peace. You can’t force someone else to be what you want them to be unless they want it themselves. I think it should be a choice of every human being to decide what they want to be called and how, even if sometimes it doesn’t make any logical sense. For years we have pushed this narrative of unity, either from the diaspora side who believe in a fairy-tale Afghanistan that doesn’t exist and probably never existed, or from the idealists who still think there’s a chance or sometimes for the corrupt whose personal gains are achieved through pushing this pseudo-unity propaganda campaign. I personally belonged to the category of idealists who believed we could actually accomplish this. We have groups of people believing in this but the truth that we all choose to ignore or pretend it doesn’t exist is far from this.
My only grievance and especially from the feedback that I got from the twitter was that almost all of the “Pro-Unity” and “Pan-Afghanism” group was that they all lived in other countries and most of them had left Afghanistan a long time ago and some of them had never been. This to me is unacceptable at a personal level because I see the hypocrisy of it. Because when we needed these class of educated, untainted, not-corrupt and patriotic people in Afghanistan, they didn’t give a shit. They didn’t leave the safety, comfort and privileges to come and work in Afghanistan and protect the country and the nation from the snakes and looters of various factions, hezbs, groups and puppets. They just lived their happy lives and NOT ONCE gave a shit. And now their patriotism is awake? Now they care? I apologize for the outburst but the hypocrisy of the twitter patriots is quite absurd and stupid. To be a patriot, you need to be here and to know what is happening, to know how people suffer, to know how we failed our country and our people, and to know that we let the corruption grow because we didn’t grab the politicians and bring them to the streets to tell them that we as people wouldn’t take this shit.
Conclusion: In my opinion, partition is an issue that is expected of the so-called educated class to discuss and talk about and do it without pushing ethnic lines and do it for the betterment of the country and nation, if there is still any actual hope left. I understand the value of unity, the value of a united nation standing up for itself and defending itself against all enemies; foreign and domestic.
But…
But we are not there yet, I don’t think. I think we are still stuck with our petty squabbles, lack of tolerance and respect, understanding and empathy. Rest assured, all Afghans are hurt and this pain won’t be going away anytime soon.
So the question remains:
What matters to you?
Side note: I do have to apologize in advance for disappointing a lot of people but I must confess that I am not pro-anything; NRF, Talibaks, diaspora, or whatever else you kids have got going for you and your twitter wars. What I want and what I have been doing are purely selfish; a better future for myself, for my children, for my people. That is the only thing I care about. And the only thing I ever cared about.