After Afghanistan

What has happened in Afghanistanho does not directly affect us. It affects the United States, and how America then reacts in a manner that will affect its relationship with its allies – us. How will the Taliban rule? This question is asked in my story Olvidon to Dr. Salvador Puro, a Filipino doctor returned from the United States. If the Communists won in the 1970s, how will they rule? Dr. Puro replies, “They will rule just as badly because they are Filipinos – hostage to family, ethnicity and the many cultural obstructions to development.”

So will it be with the Taliban. Sure, they have religious goals but they cannot avoid the duties and obligations of government. They will have to raise money to run the country and support a large military. They have to produce not just to feed their people but to sell. They have to join the global community. The Taliban may have united Afghanistan. I recall Japan before the Tokugawa clan triumphed, the many clans fighting one another. It will take a lot of superb diplomacy to keep the country united, least of all, under a dictatorship. One reason the dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba lasted all these years is because their population is homogenous.

Whatever branch of Islam a country belongs to, I think the leaders of these countries are motivated by modernization, to seek in their faith the path to modernity, including the acquisition of the atomic bomb. Mind you, modernity does not mean Westernization. Some leaders much much earlier, like Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, regarded Westernization however as modernization; ditto with leaders of the United Arab Emirates who built Dubai out of the desert. And Westernization is almost equated with Americanization. We can see in such developments American influence in Asia, in China itself whose dynamic progress was assisted by the United States. Many Japanese themselves admit their country’s recovery and present prosperity is American made.

Almost a hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler wrote “The Decline of the West.” And today, and more specifically, the pessimists are chanting the same foreboding, that America is done for. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, while necessary, should have been better planned, not only for the Americans, but for the thousands of foreigners, including some 30 Filipinos, working there. As for the United States, while certainly humiliated by this Afghan debacle, is certainly not militarily emasculated. It still has the world’s most powerful military with bases encircling the globe, its industrial might and intellectual superiority intact.

America is an open society, aware of its deficiencies and capable of renewal. It is also open to immigration, a haven for the world’s finest minds that are rejected in their own countries. In my lifetime, I have seen the United States rise again and again. In my lifetime, too, I have also seen countries fall and empires collapse. As the English historian Alfred Toynbee observed, these countries, these empires that collapsed were unable to meet the major challenges they faced – most of the time, the internal rot that drained these people of their will.

Let us pause from the Afghan turmoil. Look at yourself at the mirror. That human being you see in front of you is the greatest mystery, the greatest joy and the greatest sorrow. I recall the advice of my Random House editor, Samuel Vaughan, when I told him I was conceptualizing my novel, “The Feet of Juan Bacnang.” I asked, “Can evil be redeemed?” And he said, “No man is all good or all evil.” So then, this phenomenon that is man – he knows that nothing in this world endures, so he built all those megalithic monuments with his creative prowess. With his indomitable will, he has challenged nature, harnessed the atom and dammed the rivers, and he may yet destroy this planet and himself. He has founded new belief systems to convince himself that when he dies, he will be reincarnated or assume a new life form. In doing all these, he has become heroic, godlike, almost to be enshrined in history books. However, there is one man who, too, was heroic, far more heroic than all the rest, who was born in the humblest of stations, who performed miracles, then was persecuted and crucified. He preached love and founded a religion with just twelve disciples.

And so, as Christians, let us now look at ourselves, at the countries around us, at our church; some will disagree with me when I describe the Vatican as an empire – but it is, with an entrenched international bureaucracy as well. Though without “divisions” of soldiers, it has lasted more than a thousand years and, from the looks of it, it will probably last another millennium.

Islam is not just a religion but also a way of life with codified laws on food, clothing, appearance, etc., with sanctions. Unlike the Catholic Church, it has no bureaucracy.

It is growing rapidly all over the world. In France, which has one of the biggest Islamic communities in Europe, a recent bestseller, a brilliant science fiction thriller, depicts a country finally Islamized. The reasons for the dramatic conversion of non-Muslims to Islam are often very personal in the sense that the converts don’t find their present faith (including Christianity) spiritually satisfying. They find Catholicism, for instance, too permissive. In this particular criticism, they find fault in Pope Francis’s liberalism and within the Catholic Church itself, this criticism of the pope is growing. This is not the first time though that such tremors are shaking the papacy. One thing is sure, the Catholic Church acts only when its very existence is threatened.

For now, the Catholic Church has become impersonal. It has not really involved itself with community building the way the Iglesia Ni Cristo does. This is one reason why the seminaries have less and less students.

While Islam continues to flourish, many of those who joined Jihadist movements have emerged, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), for instance, that have laid waste to their countries and starved their own people. This tragedy is not lost on them. This is why I am anxiously following the developments in Afghanistan, never forgetting that the Taliban aided Osama bin Laden. Remember not just 9/11 but the fact that ISIS was also in Marawi and that today, the atom bomb can be transported in a suitcase. The war on terror is not just an American cause. It is global.