Other parts of Asia can offer multireligious lifeline to Afghans

Afghanistan has a rich history that could be pivotal in the much-vilified South-Central Asian country´s restoration.

With links to ancient India’s Gandhara civilization, part of the area was immortalized as Kandahar, a name some Westerners trace to Iskander, or Alexander the Great. The Macedonian warrior stretched his empire in 334 BC to the borders of the Sassanian Empire. Another part was Bactria, homeland of Zarathustra, founder of Zoroastrianism.

In the first Christian century, Saint Thomas the Apostle preached the Gospel in the region, leading eventually to the growth of nine dioceses and an archdiocese. The area also includes Bamyan, which had links with the Buddhist-Taoist Jesus sutras. Sadly, in 2001 the city became better known for the desperate Taliban’s destruction of 6th-century Buddha statues.

Hector Welgampola

Over cyclic phases of Islamization and Talibanization, the region became the cockpit of Western powers after Britain midwifed the birth of modern Afghanistan in the 19th century. As noted in Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Glimpses of World History,” the landlocked country was created as “a buffer State between the two great empires of Russia and England.”

Soon thereafter, the puppet state and a transitory monarchy became political toys of British colonialism and Russian imperialism. The heirs and cousins of the two empires have continued to control the destinies of the nation, whose Pashtun resentment of Western influence hardened unsurprisingly into warlordism. Terror became entrenched as a local lifestyle after the United States and Pakistan took turns nurturing the Mujahideen and the Taliban.

The cycle of human history is a great leveler. Just as Alexander had failed to ensure his empire’s continuity even after siring a son through an Afghan wife, Genghis Kahn too failed to hold Afghanistan for long. More recently, the Soviets’ Afghan war hastened the collapse of Communism. Tad Szulc’s biography of Pope John Paul II says Brezhnev’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan “undermined the Soviet Union’s destiny vastly more than Pope John Paul could have hoped to accomplish.”

Not long after being trapped in the Cold War, Afghanistan became the new target in the so-called US “war on terror.” And the campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban has become a proxy war for the survival of capitalism by showcasing Western-style democracy. Even this week’s political show in Kabul to re-legitimize the country’s Western-backed presidency will mean little to the Afghans.

Since all these exploits have contributed toward making Afghanistan a failed state, all the allied powers must re-examine their guilt from the viewpoint of the long-abused nation. The fingers pointed at the native population charging them with drug dealing, terrorism and warlordism have to be directed at the political patrons who nurtured all these evils. And the current abuse of military might to impose the panacea of Western-style democracy on an unconvinced people only pushes them to copy Western-style political corruption.

Today, Afghanistan needs a lifeline to pull itself out of that mess, though at the people’s own pace. And help must be free of frenetic time frames dictated by other countries’ political agendas.

Poverty-stricken Afghans have been pushed into arms peddling and poppy cultivation for survival, but as much as they need food and economic aid, they also need to regain their selfhood through education and moral upliftment. And such help cannot come from those who demonize the troubled nation as human scum, but from sectors with a capacity to empathize with its people and their culture.

Despite the current grip of fundamentalism, the Afghan blend of Pashtun and Persian traditions has been enriched over centuries by Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Taoist and Zoroastrian religious cultures. Traces of such centuries-old heritage hold out hope for the nation’s future. And civil society rooted in religio-cultural traditions may be better trusted by Afghanistan than political lobbies, which have bled it throughout history.

As noted in some recent UCAN reports, Indian Jesuits and India-based Missionaries of Charity have been able to establish rapport with Afghan society. Such service-oriented outreach at an even broader level may be able to win the hearts and minds of the harried nation.

Perhaps a broad-based multireligious alliance, which shuns the language of power, may open to the Asian Church a path of dialogue, which the Federation of Asian Bishops´ Conferences (FABC) secretary general proposed at the recent African Synod held in Rome.

The FABC reflections on relations with Muslims need to be taken beyond the discussions in Kuala Lumpur in 1979 and in the Indian city of Varanasi in 1983. In this instance, the Indian Church is best suited to take forward the stalled Varanasi mandate. Citing Biblical and Qur’anic “challenges” to do good, the FABC message will now require a Gandhian service commitment that goes beyond narrow ecclesial concerns.

This will have to go beyond the sui juris Church presence for expatriates in Kabul or dreams of Holy See diplomatic relations or FABC membership. The commitment will require the faith dynamic of missioners like Blessed Joseph Vaz and Blessed Teresa of Kolkata. Asian groups like the Bishops-Ulama Conference in the Philippines, Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia as well as Asian chapters of the World Conference of Religions for Peace could be effective partners.

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Hector Welgampola, a Sri Lankan journalist, was Executive Editor of UCA News from 1987 until he retired in December 2001. His email address is welgampo@gmail.com