Sipping sugary brown tea gives way to thumping the Blackberry
We sat on our haunches drinking tea with extraordinarily red-bearded old men on the dusty pavements of Kandahar. That was in 1970. I was driving a bus overland from Liverpool to Varanasi in India. From time to time, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we would stop and absorb the atmosphere and life as our journey moved us ever further east.
No more. It is unimaginable, 40 years on, to think of innocent young white men and scarved young European women even making such a journey. The satanic scenes out of Peshawar last night were a searing reminder that the world has turned in a devastating way.
The clatter and din of the market in the middle of the town, the dense warrens of shops and homes pile atop one another, that had stood unmolested since the early British imperialists had cantered here on horseback in the nineteenth century, are done.
Suddenly, apparently live on camera, these tall dust strewn piles were tumbling into the alleyways. Makeshift stretchers, wet red blood, dry dark red dead blood interspersed with wails, cries and bangs. A vision of hell.
This is our ‘AfPak’ war. Do we know what we are doing? Do we know what ‘they’ are doing? Do we know who ‘they’ are?
Interference is the watchword in this region – the British, the Great Powers, the Russians – we have all been here – playing the ‘Great Game’. Today ‘we’ – whoever ‘we’ are – are back. So are the Chinese, the Indians, the Saudis and the Gulf States. These last, the Wahabis, the Sunni radicals, have a coherent strategy of religious expansion. What are ‘we’ about? 9/11? Fear? Fear of what? Nuclear? Islamic? Terror exports?
In our lives, that is in the life of every age reading this blog, we shall not sip sugary brown tea with those old red beards in the streets of these old towns again with ease. A small passing of a moment. But as Obama weighs more troops. What will we be able to do in these once mellow places? Do we have a clue. Is it really about Peshawar and Kandahar coming to visit Leicester, Burnley and beyond, or are we out to create a world in which haunch sitting, tea drinking, and such uncivilised inactivity, make way for the Blackberry?