Operation Enduring Freedom almost eight years ago. It has caused untold misery and suffering to the Afghan people, and even now many parts of the country are plagued with militancy and insurgency. Meanwhile, the warlords of old continue to exercise effective control over many of the other parts, and their arbitrary and unhelpful rule continues. Amid this large expanse of tragedy, the new Afghanistan's first national park would seem a trivial non-event.
Let us, though, not be too hasty to dismiss it entirely. OEF set off shocks which will reverberate around the region---one of the sad consequences of this being Pakistan's border regions going all awry---and the world for decades to come. But it cannot have been all bad for the Afghans. Their plight is still pretty lousy, but it is perhaps at least somewhat better than it had been under the Taliban. The national park is just one of many signs of a slow, shaky, uncertain, but definite return to normalcy, to a functioning state. Schools are opening, the police is being cleaned up, Kabul's writ is slowly extending outside Kabul. Afghanistan will still be a mess for a while. But a clean-up is surely in progress, and, hopefully, it will eventually achieve something substantial.
I am in no way arguing that Bush was, in the final analysis, justified in attacking Afghanistan in the first place. Only that, now that it has happened, we can still hope for the best.
(Image courtesy of the Earth Observatory)
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