CSotD: Afghanistan update
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I've mentioned that Matt Bors is one of the cartoonists visiting Afghanistan, along with Ted Rall, whose cartoons I've had here. Well, here is Matt's latest.
I think this trip is very important and I wish it were getting more coverage, though perhaps its safer for them if it stays a little below the radar. They're already finding a few impediments to getting around, though nothing the average Afghan wouldn't encounter, except that the average Afghan wouldn't be trying to get across the entire country because, well, there would be impediments.
But back in the spring of 1969, I began to date a Canadian girl who went to the U of T (actually, St. Joe's, a college there), and in visiting her, I met a Vietnamese girl who lived in her dorm. For all the sturm und drang of that issue in that era, for all the rallies we held, for all the opinions we formed, it was the only time during that entire war that I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to a Vietnamese person.
It was a perfectly casual conversation. Of course, the fact that she was going to college in Canada meant that she wasn't an "average" Vietnamese. But she was non-aligned, and, while she told me that her family had had to pay bribes to the nationalists (VC) to get her out of the country safely, it also became clear that she didn't have much loyalty to the Saigon government, either. Her family wasn't poor, but they weren't wealthy, either, and they weren't Catholic and they just didn't identify with that group.
She said the average peasant over there didn't care who was in charge and really didn't understand all the talk about freedom and self-determination and democracy and communism; they just wanted to have a harvest where nobody ran tanks through their rice paddies. They wanted to not have soldiers from either side coming through their villages. They wanted to be left alone to live their lives.
It seems obvious now, particularly in light of the normalcy that has descended on Vietnam, now that the transition seems largely to be over. I suspect that the average Vietnamese person is glad the war is over, not because the Communists won and not because the Imperialists lost but because now they can plant a crop of rice and nobody runs a tank through it.
I don't really expect Bors, Rall and Cloud to find anything more stunningly obvious than that in Afghanistan, and you can see its reflection in Matt Bors' current cartoon. But they've also been reporting on the state of the infrastructure and on the hassles of getting around, and their stories of normal, daily life there are potentially the most important reporting Americans could be reading right now.
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