“Over the centuries, trying to understand the Afghans and their
country was turned into a fine art and a game of power politics by the
Persians, the Mongols, the British, the Soviets and most recently the
Pakistanis.But no outsider has ever
conquered them or claimed their soul.
An Open letter from Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
the Leader of Hezbe-Islami and the former prime minister of Afghanistan, to
President-elect Barak Obama and to congress members of Democratic Party of
America
The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes.
Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city
– and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid
Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi
cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now
carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in
remote areas of the country.
For Pushtuns, poetry probably doesn't get any better, and the translators, Momin Khan and
Robert Sampson, share the same enjoyment and stimulation of Rahman Baba's poems
that people all along the Frontier have for more than 300 years!
