I often hear repeated the notion that politics is local, and we should not be too worried about issues taking place in other parts of the world. However, there is a fundamental problem with such an idea. Perhaps in the old days, when the fastest means of travel was a fresh horse, that argument could have carried some weight, even though different civilisations contacted and influenced each other despite the distance between them.
But we do not live in the old days anymore. Our world today is highly connected and interactive – news can spread almost instantaneously to every part of the globe. And it’s democratising – the decades-old tyranny of Col Gaddafi was challenged by the rise of common people on the streets of Libya. Not only did they upload videos of Gaddafi’s brutality on YouTube, their actions even led to an increase in fuel prices in Ireland. What happened there had a real effect here.
We should not be under any illusion that whatever is happening in the Middle East today will not have an impact here in Ireland and the rest of the world. This is why it’s important that our Government should get its act together and stop supporting other nations in their military adventures that result in agony for innocent people throughout the globe. You only make enemies that way.
This was our message to the government of Pakistan from the very first days that followed 9/11. Most certainly a terrible crime had been done on that day, but two wrongs never make a right. America in its myopia went into Afghanistan supposedly looking for Osama bin Laden, but could not find him till a decade later.
Pakistan paid heavily for its support of the US in billions in dollars and thousands in innocent lives. Meanwhile, America went with Britain into Iraq based on the lies of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that were never there. Soon enough the world bore witness to atrocity after atrocity.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only helped the capitalists at the expense of countless innocent lives and a widespread hate for America across the world. But then there are still people who ask why Muslims hate America. Are they victims to selective blindness, perhaps?
World history is witness to the fact that the tables can turn and the weak of today can become the strong of tomorrow. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it was a superpower with the biggest military in the world. The Communist leadership never thought that with a little help from the Americans and Pakistan, its army and air force would be defeated by the Mujahideen.
But even as Soviet troops butchered innocent Afghans and firebombed and rocketed their villages, a power greater than America and the Soviet Union combined was watching. This power then decided to put an end to the experiment of communism in the USSR and gave them the pain of the Chernobyl disaster, with the ensuing economic disaster finally breaking the back of the bear. These are the sentiments of the last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev himself.
It’s some food for thought. And it makes me wonder, perhaps the economic problems that face Ireland today are the result of the greed of its politicians who allowed the use of Shannon Airport by the American military. Maybe that greater power is still watching after all.
Qasim Afridi is a member of the think tank Glór Mos-lamach
glormoslamach@gmail.com
