An American drone struck North Waziristan
located on the Pak-Afghan border at dawn break. Somewhere in the killing fields
of the Levant, an Iraqi suicide bomber blew himself up, killing fourteen. And
that too before breakfast. Is it a bloodbath today? No, just another Sunday
morning.
Now the Middle East has always been a hotbed of political turbulence. Trying to oversimplify this enormous labyrinth of political ideologies would be tantamount to insulting the intelligence of countless men who have gone before me. Men, whose eminence, charisma and power I cannot even hope to match in this life or the next. All I can do is offer my humble, and very normative (due to the nature of this piece) opinion on this issue.
It is time for NATO to come out of its false supremacist ideologue that the world is Eurocentric, and that it must be involved in every little incident that goes on round the globe. They have to come to terms with the fact that they cannot do much if North Korea or Iran develops nuclear weapons. Or the Taliban starts massacring innocents in Afghanistan. They must allow ‘nature’, for lack of a better word, to take its course and carry out timely purges against such elements in the form of civil war.
That is exactly how things are at this
moment. These occurrences have become so common that we regard such incidents
with a very vocal expression that is a cacophonic medley of abhorrence, disdain
and anger. But then let us examine such incidences a bit more closely. Let us
ask ourselves a question that is long overdue. Where did it all begin?
Now the Middle East has always been a hotbed of political turbulence. Trying to oversimplify this enormous labyrinth of political ideologies would be tantamount to insulting the intelligence of countless men who have gone before me. Men, whose eminence, charisma and power I cannot even hope to match in this life or the next. All I can do is offer my humble, and very normative (due to the nature of this piece) opinion on this issue.
I see this conflict as a sea which is calm
with the pallor of death. And along sails this huge oil tanker, causing ripples
in the water. Because this is one word that it all comes down to -oil. The oil
must come through, and lives must be traded for it. The only thing I blame
Europe for as far as this aspect of the war is concerned is,let’s see,
developing the internal combustion engine in the first place.
Now, I do recognize that all the
belligerents in the present war are to blame, and some of the powers opposed to
the United States even more so. But as a
liberal, I feel that the NATO, as a responsible power has a responsibility to
quit acting with such petulant childish anger at every small occurrence in the
world. The world has already seen the inefficacy of such devices as sanctions
that NATO employs. We have seen how the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions plan
against Israel, however uncalled for, backfired. No amount of sanctions could
deter Russia from invading Ukraine or Crimea. On the other side of the fence,
the American war efforts in Vietnam and Afghanistan proved to be debacles that
that cannot be repaired ever even by a generous application of the political
antihistamine that is apologetics.
It is time for NATO to come out of its false supremacist ideologue that the world is Eurocentric, and that it must be involved in every little incident that goes on round the globe. They have to come to terms with the fact that they cannot do much if North Korea or Iran develops nuclear weapons. Or the Taliban starts massacring innocents in Afghanistan. They must allow ‘nature’, for lack of a better word, to take its course and carry out timely purges against such elements in the form of civil war.
Events in the contemporary world have
conclusively proved that any interference may tip the balance of a war in the
short run. But if you stay involved in the long run, or 'camp', such wars end
up to be much more disastrous than they would have otherwise been. I can give
you detailed analyses of such wars, but as I mentioned, this piece is intended
to be normative in nature, and more importantly, short.
The bottom line is that the NATO must now
realize that every country must go through certain stages of political
significance, before it blossoms into a peace-loving and responsible world
power. Sometimes this is attained in a matter of years, while sometimes it
takes decades, even centuries to come about. Interference if it is at all
required, must, therefore be limited to a point till which it is conducive to
the political maturing of the country AS WELL AS popular aspiration. It must
evaluate the opportunity cost of military expenditure over economic growth at
every stage of the war, and should care more about the popular aspirations of
the countries they have a presence in.
Vibhor Kashmira
Y13 Undergraduate, The LNMIIT
Y13 Undergraduate, The LNMIIT
