USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011219.1150 (On Screen): There's no such thing as "cold". Cold is a fiction. What there is is absence of heat. Equally, there's no such thing as "darK"; there's rather absence of light. (Which is why no-one has yet perfected the Dark-Emitting Diode.) You can't make cold. What you have to do is to remove heat, and then cold results. You also can't make dark; but you can remove light.

There's no such thing as "Peace". It's a fiction. What there actually is, though, is absence of conflict. You can't make peace, but you can remove or prevent conflict. So a "peacekeeping mission" is on the face of it a contradiction in terms; it's not "keeping peace", it's preventing conflict. (Or it isn't, if it fails.) If you want peace, you have to give people a reason to stop fighting.

Which is why we have two international efforts regarding trying to create a peaceful situation in Aghanistan right now. One is going to succeed, and one is going to be a pointless waste of time (assuming they can ever work out the details of it and get it going).

First, there's going to be a force of "peacekeepers". But if the locals are determined to continue to fight each other, they'll be no more successful than they were in Bosnia. The most they can hope for is to become one of the parties in conflict, which is a forlorn hope indeed.

The real way to achieve peace in Afghanistan is through the other means: conditional aid. I believe that's going to work. Donor nations of the world are going to promise a couple of billion dollars worth of aid to Afghanistan per year for many years if and only if civil war doesn't break out again. That means that no matter how frustrated any given warlord may feel about being snubbed in a given government, if he starts a war then he and everyone else lose out on the flow of foreign loot. That's a powerful incentive for everyone to play nice. (discuss)