Hussein Askary of the Schiller Institute paints a picture of a possible future for Afghanistan that is dominated by economic development and peaceful relations both internally and with neighboring nations, which should guide our actions in relation to Afghanistan today. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated on July 10, "after the hasty withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan, this country has become, for the moment but likely not for long, the theater of world history...In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!"
The upcoming events of the Schiller Institute will make clear that there is no need for humanity to suffer from the accelerating breakdown crisis of civilization. On July 24, we will present an in depth dialogue, "There Is No Climate Emergency;" on July 31, a conference on the opportunity to use the withdrawal of U.S.-NATO troops from Afghanistan to move out of the era of endless wars, into cooperation based on mutual benefit; and on August 14, what are the lessons of Lyndon LaRouche's forecast of the end of the Bretton Woods system, on August 15, 1971, and of the advances he made in physical economy to overcome the succession of increasingly bad policy decisions made after Nixon's move. In introducing this arc of events, Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke of the disastrous flooding in western Germany, which resulted from a lack of preparedness and a failure to invest in infrastructure — not so different from the lack of preparedness when it came to dealing with the COVID pandemic. Instead of compounding the effects of these crises by making more bad policy decisions, let us learn from the development of the science of physical economy by Lyndon LaRouche, so we can move from these deadly events into a new era of peaceful collaboration and development.
Something may be developing in Afghanistan, involving forces from the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, and several nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. You can tell, because everything in the power of British “Intelligence” is being done to force Biden to denounce China and Xi Jinping, now through re-running “RussiaGate” as “the Chinese hacked Microsoft.” The United States, the British declare, must not be allowed to do with China what it has just done with Russia through person-to-person talks between the heads of state. American representatives, however, have been involved in high-level discussions whose prospects for changing disastrous, decades-long failed policy are as promising as our efforts, and those of our allies, will make them. All concentration must be forced in the direction of undermining the axioms of Anglo-American failure that have characterized the past 20 years, since the still-unexplained events of 9/11, and the derived “Responsibility To Protect” preventive war policies—practices declared “crimes against humanity” at Nuremberg in 1949, policies that were also instigated, as in 2002-2003 through British Intelligence’s “dodgy dossier.”The international strategic deployment which is the subject of the three-movement organizing process of the next month, indicated by the “date-markers” July 24, July 31, and August 14, requires what Lyndon LaRouche referred to as “visualizing the complex domain.” In the spirit of “listening to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche,” it were advisable to consult his conception of creativity in music in order to understand how to better inform what we are actually trying to do in these next 30 days. The following is from a September 14,1995, memo, “Comment On Rene Sigerson’s Memo On Opus 131.” “How Musical Ideas Become “The relevant special significance of the Op. 131, is that its organization, as a whole, around transitions, forces the musician to attend to the reality, that the idea of the composition as a whole, is nothing other than a platonic ‘One,’ for which the ordering of the ‘Many’ according to nothing but a constant notion of change is the crucial feature of the development. Compare this with the case of our now-much-cited case of the Eratosthenes’ estimate of the curvature of the earth. It is the manifest inconsistency among a series of astronomical observations, which is the experiential referent for Eratosthenes’ idea of the curvature of the earth. It is the process of reducing that series of errors to a notion of ordered change, which leads to the idea of curvature. So in a musical developmental process, it is the adducing of the existence of an ordering principle which subsumes a series of developmentally ordered changes, which implies the idea of the composition as a whole. “Thus, if one states the formal expression of the developmental ordering of the entirety of the Opus 131, the idea of the composition as a whole is implicitly stated as the platonic idea of a unified process of Becoming. This implies the corresponding attempt to generate the notion of a Good.” Leibniz’s idea of the Good in politics, an idea which was the bedrock of the American Revolution’s “the pursuit of Happiness,” is what the Schiller Institute, as another form of expression of the intent of the LaRouche’s Presidential campaigns, is daring to promulgate through proposals like the present Afghanistan initiative that we have suddenly, without preparation or warning, “so nobly advanced.” The Good always poses the greatest threat to the self-doomed imperialists of several empires, most emphatically the British. The “arc” of our intervention including its July 24, July 31 and August 14 inflection points, is a single process of change, a “One,” intended to secure the establishment of an international agreement, among Russia, China, The United States, and India, to spearhead the successful and timely creation of a world health platform as the basis for the eradication of poverty and pandemic disease planet-wide. That proposal, not “zero carbon emissions,” is a worthwhile goal for 2030-2040. It should be adopted by those nations, as China adopted the ending of poverty for itself, and accomplished it; but, now, given to the world as the mission for Earth’s next generation (next 25 years.) Earth’s next 50 years as discussed in the eponymous work of Lyndon LaRouche, is the “envelope,” as well as the “pedal point” for the discussions of the next month, particularly that of August 14-15. Given “the march of folly” we see displayed once again in the completely predictable “resurgence” of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as in the foolish “war maneuvers and war games” against Russia and China, that health platform may be the only available pathway to avoid the self-immolation of trans-Atlantic civilization which the tragic, “Wagnerian” performance of many nations’ present leadership-circles foreshadows. Afghanistan has been proposed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche as the theater of battle upon which we must intervene for the adoption of that “reversal of fortune.” We can be the non-tragic exception to the rulers. We are capable of changing the axiomatic, compulsive doom. Afghanistan is only the graveyard for empires; for patriots and world citizens, it can be the land of a thousand cities, and the New Silk Road just as it once was, but better. What we propose may be opposite to every instinct of the world’s ruling bodies of the past half-century, but it is natural to those who consider humanity’s General Welfare to be the first and only truly human unit of measurement of progress. The too-long-deferred dream of FDR, Sukharno, Nkrumah, Nehru, JFK, Pope Paul VI, Martin Luther King, and many others, the dream of Hamilton’s First and Lincoln’s Second American Revolution, is achievable, if we choose to visualize it as Beethoven and LaRouche do.
A sign at an organizing table in New Jersey manned by The LaRouche Organization yesterday posed these alternatives for Afghanistan, and by implication for the world: “Terror, War and Drugs; or Peace Through Development.” The first option would have a devastating impact on every man, woman and child in the world, given the fact that a destabilized Afghanistan will continue as the source of 80% of the world’s opium and as a training ground for ISIS and al-Qaeda. The second option—by following the proposal offered by Lyndon LaRouche even before George Bush launched the war 20 years ago—would allow Afghanistan to end its history as the “graveyard of empires,” and to become the hub for an expanded New Silk Road, with rail lines connecting the landlocked countries of Central Asia to the ocean via a north-south rail line through Kabul and Pakistan, as well as east-west connections following the ancient Silk Road.LaRouche’s proposals began with the necessity that all the countries in the region—Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and the five Central Asian nations, meet and cooperate with the Afghanis to assure development, to the benefit of all, as the only means by which the terrorism and the drugs could be eliminated. There are now, over this past week, developments which convey the very real potential that this is possible. The U.S. military withdrawal after 20 years of useless, destructive, deadly warfare, has sparked actions by all of the regional nations, which held a series of meetings this week largely focused on the urgency of bringing real development to Afghanistan. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Foreign Ministers’ Council, which includes China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as ten other nations as Observers or Dialogue Partners, met in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on July 13-14. At the center of the discussions, including the sideline discussions, was the idea that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor could be extended, branching out from the rail line running from China through Pakistan to the Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. From Islamabad, the branch would pass through Peshawar, the Khyber Pass, to Kabul, then onward north to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and on to the Eurasian Land-Bridge lines connecting China to Europe. This plan was launched in February in a meeting of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, called the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor. This and other development plans were also on the table at a July 15-16 meeting in Tashkent of the “International Conference on Central and South Asia Regional Connectivity, Challenges and Opportunities.” Dilshod Saidjanov, an Uzbek spokesman, told India’s Asia News International (ANI): “Economic development is the way to make Afghanistan stronger and probably more peaceful. Everyone wants better development in Afghanistan.” Pakistan has proposed the establishment of an “SCO Development Bank,” to further generate credit for these development projects. Will the U.S. join these efforts, or allow the “war party” which dominates both U.S. political parties and the media to act against them, under the evil lie that they are simply another expression of China trying to “take over the world.” A sliver of hope that the U.S. will take the sane approach of cooperation in development was seen in a State Department release on July 16: “Announcing the U.S.-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan-Pakistan Quad Regional Support for Afghanistan-Peace Process and Post Settlement.” These are indeed the nations through which the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor would pass. The announcement states: that “the parties intend to cooperate to expand trade, build transit links, and strengthen business-to-business ties.” Such a shift in the now-normal U.S. policies of sanctions, wars and regime change subversion should be strongly encouraged. Next week’s issue of Executive Intelligence Review will contain a package on this critical moment in Afghanistan, a moment in which the fate of the entire world could be determined, for good or for ill. An international agreement to cooperate with Afghanistan and its neighbors to transform the region into a central hub for the global New Silk Road process would also serve as a model for ending other crisis spots, in the war-ruined nations of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. This is the principle of the Schiller Institute’s “Coincidence of Opposites”—bringing seemingly intractable conflicts to an end by addressing the higher-ordered principle located in the common interests of all people, for peace through development. Such an optimistic approach may seem impossible, but the alternative is unthinkable. Humanity has risen up out of Dark Ages in the past, creating a Renaissance when nothing less will work. This moment must find a people with no less of the creative will required to build such a new Renaissance.
In response to reports that an Israeli firm is serving clients by embedding spyware in the mobile phones of their adversaries, Edward Snowden called for ending the "international spyware trade." And while the Biden administration called on its allies to join it in a campaign against alleged Chinese cyber warfare -- charges which, like its charges against Russia, are evidence-free -- it is considering monitoring private texts on SMS carriers to "deter misinformation"! Are you tired of the hypocrisy of this "brave new world"? Then join the Schiller Institute for online conferences on July 24 ("There Is No Climate Emergency"), July 31 ("Afghanistan at a Crossroads"), and August 14, which will take up Lyndon LaRouche's initiatives to overturn the City of London/Wall Street central bankers actions since August 15, 1971, when they created the global casino economy to protect the swindles of the floating exchange system.
The Schiller Institute is preparing a conference at the end of this month with experts who are passionate about Afghanistan’s prospects of becoming, not only a rapidly developing nation, but the pivot of economic development in South Asia, and even the catalyst in a change of relations among the major powers. Our conference will be aimed as a spark, with many nations already meeting in the Central Asian region to discuss next steps after the NATO withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.The Schiller Institute’s meeting will be held at a true turning point of 21st Century history: The major powers and the regional neighbor countries alike need to eliminate terrorist threats and remove the scourge of Afghan heroin fed by decades of war; and this opens the possibility of development of healthcare and education, transport routes and power and water, with international cooperation in contributing capital goods. As Afghanistan’s ambassador to China, Javid Ahmad Qaem, expressed it in an interview with Global Times July 16, “The only place where they [China, India and the United States] could really cooperate, and at least there could be a starting point to cooperate between these rivals, if I can call them that, is Afghanistan.” The people of the United States and the European NATO members need this development more than Afghanistan does. As NATO forces have done to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya since the 1990s, so have we, in America and Europe, done to ourselves. Our industrial economies and our labor forces have been left to crumble and become impoverished while we trusted the endlessly deployed fighters and their spectacularly expensive equipment to make us “number one” in the world. We admired Wall Street speculating on decaying economic infrastructure until it has fallen apart. Only six months ago the United States electric grid could not keep scores of Americans from dying of cold in long blackouts, while millions of others huddled in misery during a freezing Polar Vortex. This past week Germany’s and Belgium’s flood control infrastructure was washed away in floods which have killed hundreds despite nearly a week of precise warning. America has done nothing for 25 years to counteract a steadily intensifying drought which is threatening to turn the West back into uninhabited desert. “Climate change” hysteria is not a policy to save the planet, but a threat to reduce the human race and push it back centuries in productive capacity. Between now and the meeting on Afghanistan’s development, the Schiller Institute on July 24 holds a combative conference with scientists, engineers and others to defeat the Green New Deal, stop power blackouts and prevent the wholesale shutdown of power supplies and industry. (“There Is No ‘Climate Emergency’—Apply the Science and Economics of Development To Stop Blackouts and Death”) The withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan is no setback if it is taken as an opportunity to make the contributions American technology can make to the progress of developing countries. Instead of tolerating think-tanks’ and Defense Secretaries’ talk about “winning” endless and fruitless wars, we can devote ourselves to the arts of peace against pandemic and famine, and rebuild our own economies into the bargain.
The doublespeak media leaders of the United States, New York Times and CNN for example, made clear yesterday their hope that hundreds of Germans will have died in the natural disaster to make it possible for Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock to rally and win the Chancellorship. The Times headline—“Germany Floods: Climate Change Moves to Center of Campaign as Toll Mounts”—is sufficient to give you the idea.The lead article in Neue Solidarität spoke instead to reality: “Gegen die Launen der Mutter Natur, hilfts nur der Ausbau der Infrastruktur!” (The Takedown of Infrastructure Helps the Moods of Mother Nature) That article says: "The worst flood to date in Central Europe, the so-called Magdalene flood in July 1342, occurred long before CO₂ levels rose in the atmosphere. At that time the water was in the cathedrals of Würzburg and Mainz, the cities on the Rhine, Main, Weser and Elbe were overrun by floods, and thousands of people were killed…. “The reconstruction of infrastructure must be used to rebuild the businesses hit by the floods, so that the people in the region can get back their jobs and thus their livelihoods. The goal must be that the people affected should be better off after the reconstruction than before the disaster…. “Whether such natural events, which are always to be expected, turn into catastrophes depends above all on whether people have created the necessary infrastructure in time to enable them to cope with them. We do not need a vague ‘climate protection,’ but rather concrete measures to protect people.” Touring the flood area, Chancellor Angela Merkel fell headlong into a torrent of climate hysteria, featuring the absurd statement, “The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been caused here.” She might have tried Nachlässigkeit, German for “negligence.” The government apparently had meteorological warnings beginning July 12-13 that heavy rains were likely to cause serious flooding in tributaries of the Rhine-Meuse River systems, but the warnings were turned into public service bulletins largely through certain apps rather than all-points alerts. Large numbers of people did not evacuate, despite being in known danger of inundation. Moreover these tributary rivers are, from EIR reports, not dredged or canalized, nor are the dams on them maintained. But to Merkel, the storms’ force “had something to do with climate change. We have to hurry, we have to get faster in the fight against climate change.” So Europeans in the Rhine and Meuse watersheds cannot expect in this government’s “recovery” package, any improvements in the flood-control and water management infrastructure, but only faster bans on energy sources and faster increases in their electric bills. The floods in the Elbe River system in the East of the country in 2002 followed a full week of heavy rains, and were more devastating and much more widespread than these; they spread across Eastern Europe and even into Russia. Perhaps global warming became even more extreme by 2002 than it had been back in 2021, when there were already hardly any German words to describe it? The situation is exactly the same in the North American West, where a gradually intensifying drought condition has been known to be developing for 25 years, with no action ever initiated to build “great projects” of water transfer infrastructure from wet regions of the continent, nor to build power plants capable of desalination along the surrounding oceans and seas of water. Instead, “global warming” (now “climate change”) is pronounced the reason that nothing can be done but sacrifice to “save the planet.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche, federal chairwoman of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party in Germany, said that the European Union’s so-called climate-change recovery package “could only have been devised by people who have no interest in people, who do not care about the development of the developing sector, but who want to continue the colonialist system.” Mark Carney, the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance and former Governor of the Bank of England, proposed buying CO₂ emission rights from developing countries — provided that they renounce economic development and the expansion of agriculture. There is already an agreement between Norway and Gabon, in which Gabon has committed itself to forgoing economic development of its rainforests — which cover 90% of the country’s area. For this they will get a ridiculous €150 million over ten years! Said Zepp-LaRouche: “I find that absolutely disgusting and I hope that the legitimate will of the majority of people in the world will prevail instead, to claim their right to development.”
"Man-made Climate Change" is NOT the cause of the catastrophic flooding in western Germany, despite the narrative in the mainstream media and coming from clueless leaders like Chancellor Merkel. There has been a monumental failure to dredge the tributary rivers, to upgrade the canal systems and to maintain dams, due to austerity policies and Green ideology, aka Fake Science. Given that there have been incidents of serious flooding before, why were no measures taken to prepare for the possibility of heavy rains? The same problem confronts the western states in the U.S., where no competent measures of water management or enhancement have taken place during the last 25 years of drought conditions. The problem is man-made idiocy, not climate change. Sign up for the Schiller Institute conference on July 24, "There Is No Climate Emergency", to learn what must be done.
July 17 -- How is it that a nation, whose leaders proudly assert their right to unilateral enforcement of a Rules-Based Order (RBO), based on their economic and military power, can get trapped into a series of unwinnable "endless wars"? Unless this question is answered, it is virtually certain that those leaders infected by this delusion will follow the same strategy responsible for the present wars, resulting in even more destructive wars, including a possible thermonuclear confrontation which could exterminate the human race.
The United States is quite literally descending into fascism, with the creation of a new federal intelligence agency to engage in a domestic war on terror, government-directed censorship of speech in the public commons of today (social media), and comparisons by Biden between the present moment and the Civil War -- in which millions of Americans were engaged in literal military combat against each other. Reversing this descent into authoritarianism requires identifying the threat, of course. But it also requires an affirmative statement of what the mission of the United States should be. And perpetual opposition to China and Russia ain't it!As the American military departs Afghanistan, will American engineers and contractors play a useful role in planning and constructing infrastructure in that nation, as part of a global development policy?Will feisty American farmers, ranchers, citizens, and energy experts overturn the Green New Deal fraud and demand reliable energy for the future?The shared enemy of mankind is that oligarchical outlook and financial-intelligence-media power that seeks to destroy productivity through a new "green" religion while creating chaos and the threat of war through color revolutions and intelligence assessments painting the world's major powers as implacable enemies.Lyndon LaRouche spend half a century fighting to institute a just world economic system, based on the dignity of each human individual as made in the image of a living God, a system committed to the development of new platforms of infrastructure and productivity, unlocked through advancements in science and technology fostered by long-term investments in such frontier areas as space and nuclear fusion.Next weekend, on July 24, the Schiller Institute will hold an event addressing the absolute conflict between seeing the future in terms of "green" power sources -- which have been promoted with the intent of preventing development -- versus major investment in transportation, power, industry, and trade. And on August 14, the LaRouche Legacy Foundation will hold a seminar on the economic work of Lyndon LaRouche, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Nixon's end of the Bretton Woods system, about which LaRouche achieved notoriety.From the standpoint of that future orientation, the Great Reset, the push for war with China and Russia, and the drive for fascism within the United States come together as a single goal of a financial oligarchy intent on preventing it.That oligarchy can be defeated, and a beautiful future can be created, if we make it happen.
Join us LIVE on Saturday at 2pm EDT, and register today for the July 24 Schiller Institute conference. It is essential to now end any respect for the assertion that there is a “climate emergency” which demands drastic reductions in human activity—agriculture, industry, power, and water use--to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. This is a lethal falsehood. The concept of ever-greater energy flux density—as put forward by statesman-economist Lyndon LaRouche, is essential for human progress. The drunken shift out of high-density electricity generation—coal, oil and nuclear--into low-energy dense, unreliable wind and solar, has reached the stage in the Trans-Atlantic of pending blackouts in the United States and Europe. The problem lies with the false axioms expressed 50 years ago in the destruction of the Bretton Woods financial system. Russia, China, India, and the United States must come to a set of agreements that promote scientific, technological, and medical progress throughout the world at unprecedented rates, if humanity is to knowingly survive the next decade. How that can be done is the subject of the July 24 assembly of the Schiller Institute
Friday Questions: Why does The LaRouche Organization talk so much about "Geopolitics"? The {Guardian} yesterday published new Fake News, claiming they have documents which "suggest" that Putin ordered Russian intelligence to elect Donald Trump. Why resurrect these lies again, now? With the U.S. withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, it is possible to break away from the imperial geopolitical doctrines which have controlled U.S. foreign policy since the assassination of JFK. The era of endless wars, to defend City of London and Wall Street financial swindlers, could be brought to an end -- that's why it is crucial that Americans understand what the Geopolitical doctrine is, to know who our enemies are, and what they are trying to do -- and how to defeat them!
In a series of over 300 letters between Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin a Partnership was formed which was the basis for the United Nations. A totally new paradigm for world relations. In a stunning new book" Roosevelt And Stalin: Portrait Of a Partnership" the most remarkable story emerges which totally contradicts what was later known as the cold war. It is a revelation as to what was possible which now in a different way is possible. Tune into this week's Fireside Chat featuring The LaRouche Organization's Gerry Rose.
LaRouche Independent candidate for U.S. Senate Diane Sare will be filming a short video statement later today to denounce Senator Schumer for trying to revive slavery in America with his now re-named draft legislation “The Marijuana Administration and Opportunity Act.”Just as horrific violence is exploding in Rochester, New York, the former hometown of African-American statesman Frederick Douglass, and after drug overdose deaths in the United States have soared to 93,000 in 2020, a 30% increase over previous years, Senator Chuck Schumer, flanked by sell-out Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and a very frail-looking Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), joined forces yesterday to promote their legislation to legalize recreational marijuana nationwide. Deliberately blurring the distinction between decriminalization, to eliminate mass incarceration and lengthy sentences for marijuana possession, and promotion of all-out recreational use and sale of marijuana, they used words like “prohibition,” and “justice for minorities” to disguise their evil intention, which is to enslave Americans to a dangerous drug, which is much more potent than the pot of the 1960’s, and which, contrary to Schumer’s lies, has been shown to have devastating effects in states where it has been fully legalized. Schumer sophistically claimed that the “’War on Drugs” has been a “war on black and brown people,” and therefore must be ended. The truth of the matter is that there never was a “War on Drugs” as intended by the late former presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. Under LaRouche’s program, the military would have been deployed, making use of space-age satellite imaging to locate and eradicate drugs at the source, in cooperation with governments of the nations which are the major producers. As NSA whistleblower William Binney has said repeatedly, given the mass surveillance of the planet right now, there are no secrets, only decisions not to pursue crime, in favor of collecting material to blackmail political leaders who wish to stop it. The complementary flank on drug trafficking is to actually jail the bankers who are caught laundering the money. HSBC was caught laundering $17 billion of drug money not so long ago, and not one person was even indicted for the crime, and the bank was let off with a fine. Finally, to really end this, a program of serious economic development is required. Poor people who have been caught up in the drug trade need an opportunity to become productive members of society, and to produce food and commodities that humanity actually needs. The United States should become an active collaborator with China’s Belt and Road Initiative to build transcontinental rail, power, and water management corridors from the mountains of Alaska to the tip of Argentina. We could begin this collaboration by working with all of the nations surrounding Afghanistan (which produces 80% of the world’s opium) to ensure that, as our soldiers exit that ill-conceived war of 20 years, a reconstruction program is put in place which replaces the drug trade with a fully modern economy with high-speed rail, nuclear power, modern agriculture, and especially a modern health care system which can address the problems of the pandemic and drug addiction in the region.
During a press briefing on Thursday, Jen Psaki explained that the White House is coordinating with social media companies to stop "disinformation" about Covid-19. "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation," she said, matter-of-factly. But the White House is not just making general suggestions -- it is pressing for their enforcement. And this violates the First Amendment.She said that the White House expects the platforms to "measure and publicly share the impact of misinformation... This should be provided not just to researchers but to the public." She also stated that the White House has proposed "a robust enforcement strategy."She said that the administration is urging social media platforms to "promote quality information sources" over "low quality information."Pushing for action, she reminded that "It's important to take faster action against harmful posts. As you all know, information travels quite quickly on social media platforms sometimes that's not accurate." Joe Biden, asked on Friday for comment about Facebook's role in Covid, responded that because the only pandemic is now among the unvaccinated, "they [Facebook] are killing people." Glenn Greenwald slammed the government calls for censorship: "The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as 'problematic' so that Facebook can remove them. This is the union of corporate and state power -- one of the classic hallmarks fo fascism -- that the people who spent 5 years babbling about fascism support." The White House is admitting that they're compiling lists of people who they claim are posting content they regard as "problematic" and that constitute "misinformation" and are demanding Facebook remove them. This is authoritarianism:https://t.co/gxrdUDblyS— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 15, 2021 While there is indeed an enormous amount of nonsense posted about Covid-19, one can ask whether banning discussion is even helpful. Given the absolute and complete discrediting of the media and expertariat generally, banning the discussion of a certain viewpoint may have the opposite effect! If a viewpoint cannot be publicly expressed on Twitter, then it cannot be met with thoughtful replies that encourage reflection (Although this is not the norm on Twitter, it does happen.) Some of the claims -- such as about VAERS figures -- are easily refuted. And the 180-degree turn on the Wuhan lab leak -- censored when Trump said it and now embraced to create a war with China -- hardly gives credibility to the would-be arbiters of truth!But more essentially, it is absolutely clear that if companies (whose private nature is much ballyhooed by censorship proponents) are taking actions due to pressure from the government, the First Amendment prohibition on limiting speech -- which applies to the government -- will apply to them as well! This not mere speculation. It comes from Supreme Court decisions:In a 1973 Supreme Court case, the Court held that Congress "may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." An article written by Glenn Greenwald in February -- on the occasion of social media CEOs being brought, yet again, to Congress to be scolded -- quotes an ACLU Director, Ben Wizner, "For the same reasons that the Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what information we can see and read (outside narrow limits), it also prohibits the government from using its immense authority to coerce private actors into censoring on its behalf." The ACLU had successfully defended the National Rifle Association in a 2018 suit against New York State and Gov. Cuomo on the basis that threats against business entities that facilitated the actions of the NRA constituted a viewpoint-based attack on the NRA's freedom of speech.A 1963 Supreme Court case took up the state of Rhode Island's issuing to bookstores lists of books the government considered "objectionable," with a "request" that they "voluntarily" cease selling the book. The Supreme Court ruled this a violation of the First Amendment, even though the state legislature did not directly pass a law preventing the sale of certain books: "The [Rhode Island] commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed 'objectionable,' and succeeded in its aim." The threat from the state was clear to the Court: "People do not lightly disregard public officers' thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around." The Court summed it up: "Their operation was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extra-legal sanctions; they acted as an agency not to advise but to suppress."What is required is either a Supreme Court ruling or new legislation to make clear the limits of government interference in social media discussions, and the limits of the social media companies themselves to censor viewpoints they consider objectionable, but which are not illegal.
Poverty, and the chaos it causes, are spreading worldwide, from Afghanistan and Myanmar to South Africa and Cuba. The specifics vary from country to country, but the root cause is the enforcement of neoliberal economic policies, which serve the interests of the U.S.-UK-NATO Military Industrial Complex. This was forecast by Lyndon LaRouche following Nixon's break with the Bretton Woods system on August 15, 1971. It is now affecting "advanced sector" countries, in the form of hyperinflation. LaRouche also proposed a solution, which is still waiting to be implemented. It begins with rejecting British neoliberal economic policies, and replacing them with national banking credit systems of sovereign nations, cooperating for mutual benefit. As this breakdown accelerates, the time is now for the LaRouche solution.
In reviewing the multiple strategic crises confronting humanity today, Schiller Institute leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche kept coming back to words such as "lunacy", "insanity" and "dangerous immaturity" to characterize the policies pursued by leaders of the U.S., the U.K. and the EU. In their zeal to confront and provoke Russia and China, impose austerity while bailing out bankrupt corporate cartels, cut funding for health care, and impose an anti-human Green New Deal, the corruption behind their genocidal intent has become ever-more obvious. Have we learned the lessons of the dangers implicit in allowing their imperial will to dominate international policy making? One example of the potential for change is coming from the neighbors of Afghanistan, who met under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and engaged in serious discussion of how to bring stability to the people of that damaged nation. Instead of using the withdrawal from Afghanistan to "pivot to Asia", to contain China and Russia, Wang Yi made a proposal for cooperative economic development.
The visit of UK Defense Secretary Wallace to Washington yesterday demonstrates that, in the minds of key Anglo-American officials, the "Special Relationship" between the U.S. and U.K. -- which allows the Brits to run U.S. foreign policy -- is still operational. If this is not dumped, the world will be headed toward more wars, eventually to nuclear war. How can we end an era in which the world is governed by imperial geopolitics? Read Helga Zepp LaRouche's memo: "Afghanistan at a Crossroads - Graveyard For Empires, Or Start Of A New Era"
Out of the frying pan, into the fire? Will the U.S. blindly follow the British lead to turn the retreat from Afghanistan into more provocations against Russia and China? Or can we learn from our catastrophic mistakes, and join Afghanistan's neighbors to engage in cooperative, mutually beneficial development policies, to bring peace to the war-torn country. Further, it is time to end the U.S. economic enslavement to British neoliberal economic/financial policies -- No to the Great Reset, instead, implement LaRouche's Four Laws!
Pessimists might be shocked by some recent developments. A Putin-Biden phone call ending in a call for joint action against cyber warfare? A unanimous U.N. Security Council vote to open the door for humanitarian aid to be distributed to "all parts of Syria"? How about a U.S. official commenting favorably on a Taliban-Afghan government meeting in Tehran, saying that what Iran is doing "may well be constructive"? The key is ending the dangerous application of British imperial geopolitics, which has dominated strategic relations for most of the last two centuries. For a road map to peaceful cooperation in Afghanistan, read Helga Zepp-LaRouche's statement, "Afghanistan at a Crossroads: Graveyard for Empires, or Start of a New Era?" Contact: harleysch@gmail.com
The U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan brings to an end 20 years of a misguided military operation and places squarely on the table the difference in outcomes achieved through geopolitics and through cooperative development. We never should have been in Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks were not organized by a group of 19 individuals coordinated from a cave. The hijackers drew on external support during their time in the United States, and it came not from Osama bin Laden operating in Afghanistan, but from Saudi Arabia. There was no military mission to achieve in Afghanistan.But it served as the first in a new series of wars, based on a new paradigm of geopolitics that flouted international law and asserted a Responsibility to Protect that demanded military action to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations based on the flimsiest (and most easily faked) of pretexts. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche writes in her Afghanistan at a Crossroads: “The strategic turbulence caused by the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, offers an excellent opportunity for a reassessment of the situation, for a correction of political direction and a new solution-oriented policy. The long tradition of geopolitical manipulation of this region … must be buried once and for all, never to be revived.” The world is not a zero-sum “Great Game.” Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan expressed the potential for U.S.-Chinese cooperation: “The biggest challenge for the United States is not China. It is in the United States itself. Its strategy toward China must avoid forming a vicious circle of misleading and misjudgment. As long as we uphold the concept of a shared destiny for all mankind, the issues between China and the United States will not be fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable, and a path of peaceful coexistence and cooperation will be found.” Finding the path towards cooperation requires thinking of the future, drawing us to look, as Hussein Askary expressed it on Saturday’s LaRouche Organization event, not at the mud under our feet, but towards the stars over our heads. International cooperation on the physical infrastructural development of the broader region will bring benefits to Afghanistan and its neighbors that far surpass what could be achieved without that integration. This will require engineering. It will require technical support. And it will require stable financing. This is an opportunity to bring neighbors to the table and to draw on expertise around the world. The how-to book has quite literally already been written—by EIR and the Schiller Institute—in the form of a program for trans-national infrastructure and large-scale industrialization and agricultural technology deployment. “For all these reasons,” Zepp-LaRouche writes, “the future development of Afghanistan represents a fork in the road for all mankind. At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of the opportunity that lies in the application of the Cusan principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites…. In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!” It is only by abandoning geopolitics and adopting domestic policies to launch an economic renaissance and crush the power of finance, that the United States could qualify itself to play a useful role in the world. America’s urgently needed missions will be the subject of an upcoming pamphlet from The LaRouche Organization. The work of the greatest recent American thinker on the issue of development—Lyndon LaRouche—is the topic of a LaRouche Legacy Foundation August 14 online seminar, on the occasion of “The 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971.”
Dramatic developments are taking place over the past days which make clear that the world is sitting at a crossroads. Two clearly distinct ideas about the nature of man are contending for the future of human civilization. One, which could well lead to the destruction of civilization itself in a nuclear holocaust, sides with the Aristotelian outlook of the British Empire, that some people are born to rule and others to serve, that human beings are as defined by Thomas Hobbes, as “all against all,” with nations following the same logic, locked into geopolitical laws of zero-sum “survival of the fittest.” The other view believes that: “Development holds the key to the people’s well-being, [and] no country should be left behind. All nations are equally entitled to development opportunities and rights to development.” While it would be understandable that one may think this statement came from Franklin D. Roosevelt as he planned his postwar vision for the role of a United Nations, it is in fact the words of Xi Jinping, speaking on July 6 to delegates of 500 parties and institutions from around the world, representing 160 countries, fully three-fourths of the human race, joining in support of the principle of “Peace Through Development,” as intended by China’s Belt and Road Initiative.Today, the Schiller Institute’s founder and president Helga Zepp-LaRouche released a statement titled: “Afghanistan at a Crossroads: Graveyard for Empires or Start of a New Era?” She posits that the policies taken by the world’s nations today on the future of Afghanistan not only affects every citizen of every country, in the sense that the danger of terrorism and drug proliferation affect us all, but also because it could well determine the fate of mankind itself. The only solution to the Afghanistan quagmire, she writes, is for the great nations of the world, and all the nations of the region, to join forces in a “Great Project” to develop Afghanistan as the hub for the New Silk Road, both East-West development corridors connecting East Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and North-South development corridors linking Russia, China, Iran, India and Pakistan. Is it possible? Or is it, as seen by the geopoliticians of the British Empire, contrary to their warped sense of “human nature,” which will always seek out an advantage against “the other”? Will Americans follow this British prescription for imperial “divide and rule,” or will they recall the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Was this intended only for those who follow so-called “Western values,” and who follow the so-called “rules-based order,” or is it indeed intended for all mankind?
After the hasty withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan—U.S. troops, except for a few security forces, were flown out in the dark of night without informing Afghan allies—this country has become, for the moment but likely not for long, the theater of world history. The news keeps pouring in: On the ground, the Taliban forces are making rapid territorial gains in the north and northeast of the country, which has already caused considerable tension and concern in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and they have captured the western border town Islam Qala, which handles significant trade flows with Iran. At the same time, intense diplomatic activity is ongoing among all those countries whose security interests are affected by the events in Afghanistan: Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, to name only the most important.Can an intra-Afghan solution be found? Can a civil war between the Afghan government and the Taliban be prevented? Can terrorist groups, such as ISIS, which is beginning to regain a hold in the north, and Al-Qaeda, be disbanded? Or will the war between Afghan factions continue, and with it the expansion of opium growing and export, and the global threat of Islamic terrorism? Will Afghanistan once again sink into violence and chaos, and become a threat not only to Russia and China, but even to the United States and Europe? If these questions are to be answered in a positive sense, it is crucial that the United States and Europe first answer the question, with brutal honesty, of how the war in Afghanistan became such a catastrophic failure, a war waged for a total of 20 years by the United States, the strongest military power in the world, together with military forces from 50 other nations. More than 3,000 soldiers of NATO and allied forces, including 59 German soldiers, and a total of 180,000 people, including 43,000 civilians, lost their lives. This was at a financial cost for the U.S. of more than $2 trillion, and of €47 billion for Germany. Twenty years of horror in which, as is customary in war, all sides were involved in atrocities with destructive effects on their own lives, including the many soldiers who came home with post-traumatic stress disorders and have not been able to cope with life since. The Afghan civilian population, after ten years of war with the Soviets in the 1980s followed by a small break, then had to suffer another 20 years of war with an almost unimaginable series of torments. It was clear from the start that this war could not be won. Implementation of NATO’s mutual defense clause under Article 5 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was based on the assumption that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime were behind those attacks, which would thus justify the war in Afghanistan. But as U.S. Senator Bob Graham, the Chairman of the Congressional “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” repeatedly pointed out in 2014, the then-last two U.S. presidents, Bush and Obama, suppressed the truth about who had commissioned 9/11. And it was only because of that suppression that the threat to the world from ISIS then became possible. Graham said at a 2014 interview in Florida: “There continue to be some untold stories, some unanswered questions about 9/11. Maybe the most fundamental question is: Was 9/11 carried out by 19 individuals, operating in isolation, who, over a period of 20 months, were able to take the rough outlines of a plan that had been developed by Osama bin Laden, and convert it into a detailed working plan; to then practice that plan; and finally, to execute an extremely complex set of assignments? Let’s think about those 19 people. Very few of them could speak English. Very few of them had even been in the United States before. The two chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, have said that they think it is highly improbable that those 19 people could have done what they did, without some external support during the period that they were living in the United States. I strongly concur…. Where did they get their support?” This question has still not been answered in satisfactory manner. The passing of the JASTA Act (Justice Against State Sponsors of Terrorism) in the U.S., the disclosure of the 28 previously classified pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry report into 9/11 that were kept secret for so long, and the lawsuit that the families of the 9/11 victims filed against the Saudi government delivered sufficient evidence of the actual financial support for the attacks. But the investigation of all these leads was delayed with bureaucratic means. The only reason the inconsistencies around 9/11 are mentioned here, is to point to the fact that the entire definition of the enemy in this war was, in fact, wrong from the start. In a white paper on Afghanistan published by the BüSo (Civil Rights Movement Solidarity in Germany) in 2010, we pointed out that a war in which the goal has not been correctly defined, can hardly be won, and we demanded, at the time, the immediate withdrawal of the German Army. Once the Washington Post published the 2,000-page “Afghanistan Papers” in 2019 under the title “At War with the Truth,” at the latest, this war should have ended. They revealed that this war had been an absolute disaster from the start, and that all the statements made by the U.S. military about the alleged progress made were deliberate lies. The investigative journalist Craig Whitlock, who published the results of his three years of research, including the use of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and statements from 400 insiders demonstrated the absolute incompetence with which this war was waged. Then, there were the stunning statements of Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Afghanistan czar under the Bush and Obama administrations, who in an internal hearing before the “Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction” in 2014 had said: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing. … What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking…. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … who would say that it was all in vain?” After these documents were published, nothing happened. The war continued. President Trump attempted to bring the troops home, but his attempt was essentially undermined by the U.S. military. It’s only now, that the priority has shifted to the Indo-Pacific and to the containment of China and the encirclement of Russia that this absolutely pointless war was ended, at least as far as the participation of foreign forces is concerned. September 11th brought the world not only the Afghanistan War but also the Patriot Act a few weeks later, and with it the pretext for the surveillance state that Edward Snowden shed light on. It revoked a significant part of the civil rights that were among the most outstanding achievements of the American Revolution, and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and it undermined the nature of the United States as a republic. At the same time, the five principles of peaceful coexistence, which are the essence of international law and of the UN Charter, were replaced by an increasing emphasis on the “rule-based order,” which reflects the interests and the defense of the privileges of the trans-Atlantic establishment. Tony Blair had already set the tone for such a rejection of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia and international law two years earlier in his infamous speech in Chicago, which provided the theoretical justification for the “endless wars”—i.e., the interventionist wars carried out under the pretext of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), a new kind of crusades, in which “Western values,” “democracy” and “human rights” are supposed to be transferred—with swords or with drones and bombs—to cultures and nations that come from completely different civilizational traditions. Therefore, the disastrous failure of the Afghanistan war—after the failure of the previous ones, the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, the Libya war, the Syria war, the Yemen war—must urgently become the turning point for a complete shift in direction from the past 20 years. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic at the very latest, an outbreak that was absolutely foreseeable and that Lyndon LaRouche had forecast in principle as early as 1973, a fundamental debate should have been launched on the flawed axioms of the Western liberal model. The privatization of all aspects of healthcare systems has certainly brought lucrative profits to investors, but the economic damage inflicted, and the number of deaths and long-term health problems have brutally exposed the weak points of these systems. The strategic turbulence caused by the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, offers an excellent opportunity for a reassessment of the situation, for a correction of political direction and a new solution-oriented policy. The long tradition of geopolitical manipulation of this region, in which Afghanistan represents in a certain sense the interface, from the 19th Century “Great Game” of the British Empire to the “arc of crisis” of Bernard Lewis and Zbigniew Brzezinski, must be buried once and for all, never to be revived. Instead, all the neighbors in the region—Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey—must be integrated into an economic development strategy that represents a common interest among these countries, one that is defined by a higher order, and is more attractive than the continuation of the respective supposed national interests. This higher level represents the development of a trans-national infrastructure, large-scale industrialization and modern agriculture for the whole of Southwest Asia, as it was presented in 1997 by EIR and the Schiller Institute in special reports and then in the study “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.” There is also a comprehensive Russian study from 2014, which Russia intended to present at a summit as a member of the G8, before it was excluded from that group. In February of this year, the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan agreed on the construction of a railway line from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, via Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar in Pakistan. An application for funding from the World Bank was submitted in April. At the same time, the construction of a highway, the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor, between Peshawar, Kabul and Dushanbe was agreed to by Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will serve as a continuation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a showcase project of the Chinese BRI. These transportation lines must be developed into effective development corridors and an east-west connection between China, Central Asia, Russia, and Europe as well as a north-south infrastructure network from Russia, Kazakhstan and China to Gwadar, Pakistan on the Arabian Sea, all need to be implemented. All these projects pose considerable engineering challenges—just consider the totally rugged landscape of large parts of Afghanistan—but the shared vision of overcoming poverty and underdevelopment combined with the expertise and cooperation of the best engineers in China, Russia, the U.S.A., and Europe really can “move mountains” in a figurative sense. The combination of the World Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) New Development Bank, New Silk Road Fund, and national lenders could provide the necessary lines of credit. Such a development perspective, including for agriculture, would also provide an alternative to the massive drug production plaguing this region. At this point, over 80% of global opium production comes from Afghanistan, and about 10% of the local population is currently addicted, while Russia not so long ago defined its biggest national security problem as drug exports from Afghanistan, which as of 2014 was killing 40,000 people per year in Russia. The realization of an alternative to drug cultivation is in the fundamental interest of the entire world. The Covid-19 pandemic and the risk of further pandemics have dramatically underscored the need to build modern health systems in every single country on Earth, if we are to prevent the most neglected countries from becoming breeding grounds for new mutations, and which would defeat all the efforts made so far. The construction of modern hospitals, the training of doctors and nursing staff, and the necessary infrastructural prerequisites are therefore just as much in the interests of all political groups in Afghanistan and of all countries in the region, as of the so-called developed countries. For all these reasons, the future development of Afghanistan represents a fork in the road for all mankind. At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of the opportunity that lies in the application of the Cusan principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. Remaining on the level of the contradictions in the supposed interests of all the nations concerned— India-Pakistan, China-U.S.A., Iran-Saudi Arabia, Turkey-Russia—there are no solutions. If, on the other hand, one considers the common interests of all—overcoming terrorism and the drug plague, lasting victory over the dangers of pandemics, ending the refugee crises—then the solution is obvious. The most important aspect, however, is the question of the path we as humanity choose—whether we want to plunge further into a dark age, and potentially even risk our existence as a species, or whether we want to shape a truly human century together. In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!
Intense diplomacy is underway concerning Afghanistan, with the U.S. pull-out now announced to be completed as of Aug. 31, according to President Biden’s press briefing Thursday. Taliban representatives were in Moscow the same day, and also in Tehran. They conveyed a message to China in an interview in “This Week in Asia.” Russian President Putin and other officials have been in close contact with Tajikistan leaders. Today, India Foreign Minister Jaishankar was in Moscow, after making a stop yesterday in Tehran, on late notice, but meeting with President Elect Ebrahim Raisi.This Monday, July 12, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi starts a four-day trip to Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, at the request of the foreign ministers of those three countries bordering Afghanistan. There will be a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers, of the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, which is expected to release a joint statement on regional security. On the ground, the Taliban, according to a cross-grid of various reports, control some 85 percent of the territory of Afghanistan, including two-thirds of the border lands with Tajikistan, and key locations on the border with Iran. Earlier this week, Some 1040 servicemen of the Afghan national security forces retreated over the border into Tajikistan for refuge. The danger of prolonged civil war is great, but with the many complicated dynamics, there can also be the contingency of tactical withdrawal in play. The only way forward is through international, strategic cooperation among the major powers, to create the context for development-based change. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp LaRouche addressed this July 7 in her weekly webcast, giving a short history of the geopolitical strife forced upon this region, up through and including the drug scourge. "If we now look at the situation, the drug production in Afghanistan increased by 45% in the last year. Afghanistan produces over 80% of the entire opium production for the world. Now, if you just leave the situation and don’t do anything to give encouragement and incitement to change that, the danger is that the different forces in Afghanistan will increase the drug production to finance whatever military operations they are conducting. ISIS is now in the north of Afghanistan. “So, I think there should be a serious review: Afghanistan is one of the obvious regions where a change from geopolitics to cooperation is really the reasonable approach. We have been pushing an economic development plan for Afghanistan and the entire region over many years, and for example, in 2012, the Russian representative for the fight against drugs, Viktor Ivanov had proposed from the Russian side a development plan which was quite extensive. It was the idea that Siberian science cities should be mobilized for the industrialization of Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries, and they wanted to make that proposal, which was a comprehensive proposal the subject of a summit of the G8. Now the G7, if people remember, kicked out Russia in 2014, so it became a G7 and that summit unfortunately never took place. But now it is very clear that the only way how you can stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, how you can have any hope for the improvement of human rights, for women, for education, is, you have to have a real plan for industrial development, bringing in infrastructure, industry, modernizing the country by making it wealthy, and that way you can effect the changes which are obviously important. “Now, the previous President Hamid Karzai has mentioned many times that he would welcome the New Silk Road in Afghanistan, and the Chinese have clearly expressed interest; the Iranians and also Pakistan is denying U.S. bases in Pakistan to operate from there inside Afghanistan, by making the argument that if you cannot win the war in 20 year, forget about doing it from bases in Pakistan. “My proposal has been, and is again: that if all the countries that are concerned about the opium, the potential danger of terrorism, should join hands—that is, Russia, China, India, which is also very much concerned about Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and then, the United States should cooperate. They should not have left; they should have brought in the Army Corps of Engineers, and joined hands with these other countries to build up Afghanistan. Now, under these conditions, I think some European countries could also want to be participants in that, because Afghanistan refugees are repeatedly not so great in terms of not being integrated in European countries. So there is an absolute interest of all the countries I just named, to stop thinking in terms of us defeating the other major power for geopolitical purposes, and move to a new phase and overcome the underdevelopment of Afghanistan, and the entire region! “The region should be taken as one, and rebuilt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen; there are lots of things to be done to make this region a prosperous region of the world. And there is a great tradition, the Abbasid dynasty in the 9th century A.D., that was a period where there was the high point of Classical culture, and that is something to reconnect to. I think the United Arab Emirates have done so recently by having a successful Mars mission. Now, that means leapfrogging over long periods of underdevelopment and catching up with the rest of the world in terms of vanguard technologies. And I think you need a vision like that for that region to bring peace and prosperity.”
