About 2,500 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured due to strong earthquakes in Herat province. Some villages in the Zindajan region were destroyed, with the United Nations estimating that the number of houses destroyed exceeded 3,330, and another 2,731 were heavily damaged.
Author: Rustam Rushangar, analyst, especially for Sangar
In photographs of the ruins after the Herat earthquake, I see three things:
1 - Economic backwardness. Clay houses, without foundations and substandard, disheveled and ragged people and remote villages without the most basic amenities for life.
2 - Cultural and civilized backwardness. I did not see any signs of cultural and civilizational development in any of the images. Perhaps the recognition of cultural and civilizational backwardness is questionable and everyone has a definition of this type of backwardness from their point of view. But I mean the words of the survivors of the earthquakes. Cultural underdevelopment can be seen in most of their performances. Most of them consider disasters and accidents to be the work of God and the result of their sins, and their concept of life and accidents is like that of pre-modern man. None of them points to the government as the culprit of this incident and its consequences, and they do not consider the disorganization of their lives to be the reason for such incidents.
3 - Lack of government. In this incident, the absence of government can be observed in three areas: first, the absence of government in the area of discourse, that is, defining and limiting the incident, as well as clearly defining priorities and clearly stating needs; Secondly, the lack of government in the field of rescue operations, which can be seen in the lack of equipment and flexible and experienced rescue teams; And third, the government's lack of ways to provide comfort and moral support to survivors, and to give hope to those experiencing homelessness.
Now it would be long to discuss the issue of cause and effect of the above. This the lack of a government led to economic and cultural backwardness or vice versa. There has been much discussion about this in political, economic, and social sciences.
In Afghanistan, it appears that the absence of a government is an effective factor in economic and cultural backwardness. We have failed to create a modern and useful government and administration.
The Pashtuns are usually blamed for this situation. The Pashtuns have been declaring the creation of a state for almost three centuries, but they have not succeeded. But they do not allow others to build a government. As they say, the dog in the manger won't eat the oats or let anyone else eat them. For many reasons, the ability of Pashtuns to build states is very low. They have enough greed and thirst for the government, and from the demands of the government, they only use coercive force and naked violence.
But aren't non-Pashtuns also to blame for this? I think they are also to blame. Non-Pashtuns have avoided solving the problem of nation-building due to isolation, fear, cowardice, evasion, lack of political thinking centered on power, historicism and other such factors. They thus leave the scene under various excuses and leave the battlefield in favor of the Pashtuns. Non-Pashtuns think about participating in the Pashtun government rather than their government. At the level of discourse, the nature of the government desired by the Pashtuns was questioned, but its operational and military plan was not clearly and seriously discussed among non-Pashtuns. If this does not happen, we will not have an effective government.
I hope that the Second Resistance will put an end to the tyrannical and ignorant rule of the Pashtuns and this reality will become a good impetus for the historical development of nation-building.
