EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SUNDAY, JULY 11, 2021

Zepp-LaRouche on Afghanistan: ‘The New Name for Peace Is Development’

July 10, 2021 (EIRNS)—Dramatic developments are taking place over the past days which make clear that the world is standing at a crossroads. Two very distinct ideas about the nature of man are contending for the future of human civilization. One, which could well lead to the destruction of civilization itself in a nuclear holocaust, sides with the Aristotelian outlook of the British Empire, that some people are born to rule and others to serve, that human beings are as defined by Thomas Hobbes, as “all against all,” with nations following the same logic, locked into geopolitical laws of zero-sum “survival of the fittest.” The other view believes that: “Development holds the key to the people’s well-being, [and] no country should be left behind. All nations are equally entitled to development opportunities and rights to development.” While it would be understandable that one may think this statement came from Franklin D. Roosevelt as he planned his postwar vision for the role of a United Nations, it is in fact the words of Xi Jinping, speaking on July 6 to delegates of 500 parties and institutions from around the world, representing 160 countries, fully three-fourths of the human race, joining in support of the principle of “Peace Through Development,” as intended by China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Today, the Schiller Institute’s founder and president Helga Zepp-LaRouche released a statement titled: “Afghanistan at a Crossroads: Graveyard for Empires or Start of a New Era?” She posits that the policies taken by the world’s nations today on the future of Afghanistan not only affects every citizen of every country, in the sense that the danger of terrorism and drug proliferation affect us all, but also because it could well determine the fate of mankind itself. The only solution to the Afghanistan quagmire, she writes, is for the great nations of the world, and all the nations of the region, to join forces in a “Great Project” to develop Afghanistan as the hub for the New Silk Road, both east-west development corridors connecting East Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and north-south development corridors linking Russia, China, Iran, India and Pakistan.

Is it possible? Or is it, as seen by the geopoliticians of the British Empire, contrary to their warped sense of “human nature,” which will always seek out an advantage against “the other”? Will Americans follow this British prescription for imperial “divide and rule,” or will they recall the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Was this intended only for those who follow so-called “Western values,” and who follow the so-called “rules based order,” or is it indeed intended for all of humanity?

Zepp-LaRouche writes in the statement on Afghanistan:

“It was clear from the start that this war could not be won. Implementation of NATO’s mutual defense clause under Article 5 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was based on the assumption that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime were behind those attacks, which would thus justify the war in Afghanistan.

“But as U.S. Senator Bob Graham, the Chairman of the Congressional ‘Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,’ repeatedly pointed out in 2014, the then-last two U.S. Presidents, Bush and Obama, suppressed the truth about who had commissioned 9/11. And it was only because of that suppression that the threat to the world from ISIS then became possible.”

She also pointed to the leaking of the “Afghanistan Papers” in the New York Times in 2018, exposing that the Afghanistan War had been the unrelenting disaster from the start, with official reports on the war being absolute lies, as had also been the case in the failed Vietnam War, as exposed in the Pentagon Papers, made public in June 1971 when the recently deceased American hero then-Sen. Mike Gravel read them into the Congressional Record. The Afghanistan Papers, Zepp-LaRouche writes, included

“the stunning statements of Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Afghanistan czar under the Bush and Obama administrations, who in an internal hearing before the ‘Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’ in 2014 had said: ‘We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing. … What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking…. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … who would say that it was all in vain?’ ”

Zepp-LaRouche concludes:

“Therefore, the disastrous failure of the Afghanistan war—after the failure of the previous ones, the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, the Libya war, the Syria war, the Yemen war—must urgently become the turning point for a complete shift in direction from the past 20 years....

“In February of this year, the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan agreed on the construction of a railway line from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, via Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar in Pakistan. An application for funding from the World Bank was submitted in April. At the same time, the construction of a highway, the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor, between Peshawar, Kabul and Dushanbe was agreed to by Pakistan and Afghanistan. It will serve as a continuation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a showcase project of the Chinese BRI....

“For all these reasons, the future development of Afghanistan represents a fork in the road for all mankind. At the same time, it is a perfect demonstration of the opportunity that lies in the application of the Cusan principle of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. Remaining on the level of the contradictions in the supposed interests of all the nations concerned— India-Pakistan, China-U.S.A., Iran-Saudi Arabia, Turkey-Russia—there are no solutions.

“If, on the other hand, one considers the common interests of all—overcoming terrorism and the drug plague, lasting victory over the dangers of pandemics, ending the refugee crises—then the solution is obvious. The most important aspect, however, is the question of the path we as humanity choose—whether we want to plunge further into a dark age, and potentially even risk our existence as a species, or whether we want to shape a truly human century together. In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!”