Cross-cultural communication （93）　

93) The Sinners and the Saints of Afghanistan
This is a translation of an article by Philip Stephens, chief political commentator for the Financial Times, that appeared in the morning edition of the Nikkei newspaper on January 8th, 2020. The title is as above, but can you tell who the sinners are and who the saints are?　The answer is that the sinner is the US government and the saint is Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, who met an untimely end in Afghanistan the other day.

First, the sinner, the US government. President Trump, who not only ordered US troops stationed in northern Syria to abandon their Kurdish allies and return home in October 2019, but is also trying to bring home the 12,000 US soldiers deployed in Afghanistan, may seem to be the main culprit, but that is not the case. According to internal documents obtained and published by the Washington Post, despite the mobilization of up to 150,000 troops by the US and NATO forces under former President Obama, those in charge of the operation knew absolutely nothing about the history and culture of Afghanistan. The initial aim of the US invasion of Afghanistan was to defeat Al-Qaeda and eliminate the leadership of the Taliban, and most of these objectives were achieved within a year. After that, the objectives were replaced with the establishment of Western-style democracy, the eradication of the opium trade, and the end of discrimination against women. To quote the Washington Post, officials admitted that they had “adopted a seriously flawed combat strategy based on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand.”

In contrast, Dr. Nakamura understood Afghanistan. In the 1990s, he established a clinic in Afghanistan and worked to provide medical care for the local people, and he realized that the cause of most of the diseases he was treating was poor nutrition and a lack of water sources. So he decided to become a civil engineer himself, and from the early 2000s he began to oversee the construction of an irrigation canal network, bringing life back to the vast desert. During this time, Dr. Nakamura kept his distance from politics and avoided commenting on the raging war around him. He stressed that his goal was to save lives. However, he did make some astute observations. He noted that many of the people involved in the fighting in Afghanistan had been forced to become mercenaries in order to feed their families, and that once the farmland was restored, violence decreased significantly because the men of fighting age were busy farming. It may be a simple insight, but none of the wise men commanding the war in Washington noticed this. I think that those who have seen the Japanese TV documentary about Dr. Nakamura's waterway construction project will agree that he lived a life that could be read as that of a modern-day saint.

The above summary of a well-known column in the British newspaper Financial Times compares the methods of intervention in war-torn Afghanistan since 1900, those of the US government and those of Dr. Nakamura personally, and, as the title suggests, describes the government of the United States, the only superpower in the world that boasts the world's greatest economic and military power, as guilty, and Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, who continued to fight on his own despite the support of NGOs, as a saint. It is true that the tragic ending of his life has increased the newsworthiness of his story, but if you continue to carry out selfless activities at the risk of your life for many years, there will always be someone in the world who will be watching over you. Reading this article made me feel a sense of passion, and it has renewed my determination to work hard for the next 20 years of my life.

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