The Carnegie Endownment has a speech and q&a with the foreign minister of Afghanistan. Minister Abdullah is blunt and insightful. I was surprised at his candor. He is not critical of Bush policy in his country, but he does not shy away from the truth. Here are some important points from his speech and his responses:

• While no longer a base for Al-Qaeda, Afghanistan has become a land-bridge or a hub that allows terrorists to travel between different parts of Asia.


• Terrorists activites within Afghanistan (including help to the movement of terrorists) has been funded and armed from abroad, and terrorist activities have been legitimized by calls for jihad from clerics in Pakistan. These are the fundemental foreign policy challenges for Afghanistan.


• The government is greatly concerned for the narcotics trade: it sees the irradication of narcotics production as necessary for maintaining foreign aid.

Finally, I want to note a question asked by a rep from the Cato Institute:

what defines a people? What defines a nation? British India divides into India and Pakistan, two nations. Pakistan then divides into Pakistan and Bangladesh, two further nations. We had this problem in the United States. We had a Civil War. Before the Civil War, it's "The United States are." After the Civil War, "The United States is." How do you create national identities, for example, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, that supersede the Pashtun identity of people on both sides of the border?

Where did he get the inspiration for this question? A high school textbook? I am so sick of conservatives who take the US case as the normative case: every nation must form in the manner of the US. Guess what? There have been many roads to nationalization, and not all of them involved a civil war. Get over it! Read some other histories! Educate yourselves!