Today, I want to remind us of some of the unnecessary wars and conflicts in the world and our responsibility to talk about them – in the midst of the United Nations General Assembly, where Pakistan focuses on its initiatives to help broker an end to the USA-Israel war in Iran, which began over half a year ago and which should never have begun. To be self-critical of Pakistan and India, the Kashmir issue should by now have been on the way to a solution, with or without UN help; if the parties cannot agree, maybe some kind of joint jurisdiction, with international supervision, might be a way forward.

As for the world’s lack of contact with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, five years after the end of the two-decade-long, illegal USA-led Western war in Afghanistan, it is a failure on all sides that very little constructive contact seems to have opened with the Taliban regime – and also that we have not publicly taken the West to task for the destruction and suffering inflicted on Afghanistan’s people during the long war years, which achieved few positive results, but many negative ones.

Last week, it was the 25th memorial anniversary of the terrible 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. There is still no full explanation, justification and apology for the USA’s and the West’s reaction to 9/11. Whether the ‘War on Terror’ led to less terror is unclear. True, the Al Qaeda network was reduced, and Osama bin Laden was killed, but new terror groups have also emerged.

The long invasion of Afghanistan and the attacks on Iraq were wrong – and when the USA and the West pulled out of Afghanistan in 2022, the Taliban came back into power. It should also be admitted that the current Taliban rulers in Afghanistan, although not recognised by many, are better than the way the West behaved in most fields, but not all fields. Alas, certainly not as regards girls and women, especially blocking them from further and higher........

© The Nation