DailyPost 1803
THE KABUL STORY – POLITICAL PROMISES & DATABASES
The world had thought that Afghanistan had changed. Two decades of intensive act of building / rebuilding of every element of human existence inclusive creating democracy seems to be happening as planned. The visuals and the actions on the face of it displayed so. The agony and the battle within, were generally thought to have become a distant dream. How long can a country carry the burden of another country to maintain sanity of every kind? That too at an expense; human, military and financial which have been humongous. These questions will never be answered, and so will the enigma of who we are and what we intend to uphold? This is the first question to the US and to many other nations who form a united front.
The world has lived on political promises since the onset of democracy, that is it’s staple feed. If we study the democratic decisions with a long follow through, there would be few and far between. How do decisions well thought out, methodical, and the best at that point in time, would play out, no one knows. All inputs would never be available nor would there be endless time for deliberations and decision making. Maybe even with such an exercise, the results could not have been different. Promise to the commitments is at the core of decision making. You cannot fail people who are the facilitators in the success story or the likely success story, or the accomplishments which have come by, during the journey.
A twenty year engagement enmeshed into every element of Afghan life, certainly produced hundreds of thousands of local collaborators. Nothing could have been achieved without them. The political promise, might be unstated, was that they would be taken care of, in the distant and unimaginable eventuality of a Taliban takeover, which has finally befallen them. They have been left high and dry. An UN document says the Taliban are ”intensifying their hunt for people who worked for and collaborated with NATO and US forces.” We couldn’t have expected anything else. The fall out would be devastating to them. What makes it crazier is the technology element of it. The Taliban sits on a database of wonderful precision.
In a normal occupation scenario, it would have been the word of mouth and hearsay circumstantial evidence which could have pinned some or more of these guys depending on the effort made by the Taliban. Making aircrafts not airworthy and wiping data bases are two different tech issues. The second is a powder keg. The database of Afghan collaborators with every possible data point has fallen in the hands of the Taliban. Biometric to organization to movements data with date and time stamp and whole load of meta data of the collaborators they got on a silver platter. Taliban knows how best to use that data. Where will the collaborators hide for cover? The data clinches it all.
DATABASE IN A STONE AGE SCENARIO IS TURNING OUT LITERALLY TO BE THE KILLER.
Sanjay Sahay