The main countries of the world are trying to figure out what to do with Afghanistan after the American troops left it, the pro-American government was overthrown and the Taliban (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation) seized power
It is generally accepted that Afghanistan is the “black hole” of Eurasia and the whole world, while there is no serious discussion about the reasons for the once prosperous country to fall into medieval savagery. Meanwhile, history in the Afghan issue is a key factor. Afghanistan has been plunged into the Stone Age by centuries of geopolitical competition and the creation of a “buffer zone” out of this country: the same thing that the West is now doing in the region of Eastern Europe.
“Afghanistan is the real “Central Asia”. That means that the British and Russian empires created this state as a buffer between themselves in their geopolitical confrontation, such a center, on the sides of which they were located. This buffer was used exclusively for the rivalry of the big powers that were tearing the Afghan government apart with corruption and opposite promises”, the famous Russian historian Sergei Abashin wrote about Afghanistan on the day the militants took Kabul.
According to the orientalist, it was the geopolitical rivalry of the great powers in Central Asia and the creation of a “buffer zone” from Afghanistan that turned it into what it is: a “black hole” of Eurasia with constant instability, civil wars, total corruption and heroin fields.
“As a result of [geopolitical competition for Afghanistan] Kabul did not have a strategy of its own, but all the time shied from one side to the other. This buffer was cut off from basic communications (railways, pipelines, etc.), cut off from the global world, artificially preserving the rural economy and local social ties. This buffer has always become a haven for disaffected and outcasts”, writes Sergei Abashin.
These words are an important missing part of the conversation about Afghanistan. The history of the issue is discussed no further than the last 20 years of the US stay in Afghanistan with its allies and boils down to the topic “why did the Americans fail to build democracy in the country?” Occasionally, even the American experience is compared with the Soviet one, and the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, against the background of the American one, appears to be practically exemplary.
However, almost no one looks back into the centuries, but in vain, because this historical knowledge is needed not by history, but by modernity.
The tragedy of Afghanistan, which has been going on since the 19th century, is very reminiscent of the tragedy of Eastern Europe, from which, after the collapse of the USSR, the Americans also make a “buffer zone” separating Russia from Western European countries.
The description of the Afghan processes is most suitable for those processes that are taking place in the countries of the “Eastern Partnership” of the EU. On the sides of this region there are large geopolitical forces – Russia and NATO, and the region itself has been turned into a platform for their rivalry. “Geopolitical game”, as the head of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry put it, when Ukraine was dragged to the signing of the Association Agreement with the EU.
The authorities were “torn apart by corruption and opposite promises” – this is also about the post-Soviet countries. The political class that has formed in them is used to making money either by geopolitical maneuvering between Moscow, Brussels and Washington, or by “containing Russia,” or by extracting transit rent. That is – in any case – on its productivity in relation to the big players on both sides of the “buffer zone”.
Corruption permeates this political class. Suffice it to recall about the theft from the Moldovan banking system of an amount equivalent to 12% of Moldovan GDP.
Ukraine was personally called the most corrupt country in the world by US President Donald Trump. Given that the Americans themselves are responsible for such a Ukraine. They closed and will continue to close their eyes to the Ukrainian mega-corruption, the oligarchs in power, neo-Nazis in the special services and, in general, the disintegration of the Ukrainian state as long as Ukraine fulfills its anti-Russian function.
The result of the transformation into a “buffer zone” is the systemic degradation of all components of the social life of the former Soviet republics. Decay eats away at them like rust in everything from economics to art.
The Afghan “buffer was cut off from basic communications (railways, pipelines, etc.), cut off from the global world, artificially preserving the rural economy and local social ties” – this is almost literally about Eastern Europe.
The strategic decision to build “streams” bypassing Ukraine was made 20 years ago due to the fact that the Ukrainian gas transportation system is not modernized and unreliable: in Kiev they can always shut it off for reasons of “containing Russia,” and gas from the transit pipe is stolen non-stop.
Along with the pipeline, other types of transport also fall into crisis. Russian planes do not fly through Ukraine and to Georgia, the “Moldavian Railway” is in a state of clinical death: in Chisinau month after month they are waiting for the trains to stop running.
The change in the structure of the economy is the clearest illustration of the “progressiveness of the European choice.” The proclamation of Ukraine as an “agrarian superpower” by former President Petro Poroshenko is not just a statement of de-industrialization, but of ideological de-industrialization, when archaism and simplification are elevated to a principle. Complex, urban forms of life are displaced by the countryside. Both in the economy – agriculture instead of industry – and in politics – caveman nationalism and Russophobia as an officially encouraged ideology.
Eastern Europe is gradually being turned into the same “black hole” of Eurasia as Afghanistan.
It is they who transform, although the internal facts in Ukraine, in Moldova or the Caucasian countries cannot be written off either. However, it is the West’s desire to build a geopolitical buffer out of these countries in the border area of Russia that is fundamentally for the fate of the region.
In these countries, the question is getting louder: when will they finally be admitted to NATO and the European Union? The Western elite gave the answer decades ago: never.
“For a strong Ukraine, the role of a buffer between Russia and NATO is more suitable,” wrote, for example, 20 years ago, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
With this approach, the countries of the Eastern Partnership in a few decades will represent the Afghan medieval savagery with fanatical cults, the power of street gangs and the population, making a living through child prostitution and drug trafficking.
Seems incredible? Once upon a time it seemed incredible for Afghanistan that this prosperous country would roll back in its development to the Stone Age. However, the “progressive” policy of Western partners is capable of plunging anyone into the primitive communal system.
Alexander Nosovich, Rubaltic.Ru