1998
Included in a report published in Kyrgyz, Russian and English by Kyrgyz State National University, this op-ed reports on a successful “PeaceGame” held in Central Asia. As of 2005 this series continues to bring students from all over Central Asia together.
From a distance, Afghanistan seems an impossible mess. In the name of religious purity, the mysterious Taliban group imposes bizarre restrictions on its citizen-captives while fighting murky battles to finish its takeover of the whole country. Safe behind our newspapers, we can do little more than empathize with the daily agonies of these people who have been immersed in war for twenty years.
For Afghanistan’s neighbors, no such insulation is possible. Afghanistan is close at hand and big. A country about the size of Texas-Texas with mountains and a Texas-sized population-it is the world’s second-largest drug producer. Many billions of drug profits flow back to the Taliban and the other factions as the land-locked Afghani growers export opium and morphine base through their neighbors. The drug exports and the fighting in Afghanistan have serious side effects: weapons slosh around going in all directions, impoverished refugees fetch up in neighboring countries, and Islamist extremists seek to extend Taliban’s “purity” into the adjacent cultures, while the drug money corrupts border guards and police throughout the region.
What can you do if you live in the middle of this? If, especially, you are a young person preparing for life, career, and family in one of the neighboring countries? And if your country itself is young and poor, just feeling its way forward to independence and democracy in the aftermath of the Soviet Empire?
Those were the questions before a group of Central Asian college students gathered recently at a university two mountain ranges north of Afghanistan to consider how to defend to their own lives and communities from the threats of “Afghanization”. Five teams of students-one from each of five universities in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan-spent a day of serious fun competing with each other in a “PeaceGame”, an upside-down wargame designed to help officials and citizens think through ways to prevent conflict and avoid humanitarian crises.
The students like their first years of post-Soviet democracy and they liked this “democratic” way of learning. Rather than reciting rote ideological formulas, they were actively thinking out loud about how to solve a common problem. Local news cameras filmed part of the PeaceGame. Seeing the students on television, government officials were impressed with the clear thinking of the younger generation.
Here are some of their ideas.
We need more information. Afghanistan is almost as mysterious to those in the neighborhood as it is to us in faraway countries. To prepare, the students had been studying Afghanistan and conflict prevention for two weeks before the PeaceGame. That had been enough to teach them how little anyone knows about the exact conditions in the country. They found no reliable teacher-experts, no local think tank gurus ready with all the answers.
For the students, this underscored one of the main ideas many had developed in their few years of post-Soviet education: They need more information-about everything. In the Soviet era facts and analyses were the province of the Center, of the Party bureaucrats in Moscow. International relations was to be studied in Moscow, not in Bishkek. Now, teachers in Kyrgyz universities hunt for textbooks with unvarnished facts and balanced perspectives while the students organize research projects to create information about their country and their region. They know they need to know much more before they can lay practical plans to avoid being pulled down into the Afghan morass.
No country can handle this alone. The students are instinctive coalition-builders. Afghanistan is big, the drug trade is huge, Islamic extremism is powerful. If they are to build prosperous careers and happy families, all of the people in the region will have to band together to fight Afghanization. The five Central Asian states are new and poor. All face formidable risks to their internal political development; each has tended to seek its own course in the first few years of independence.
For the students, national individuality will be best protected by collective efforts which see the five core countries working together for economic development. Cross-border cooperation will be essential to counter the extremists’ pressure on the many ethnic fault lines in the region. The students hearken back centuries to the heyday of the Silk Road when Central Asia prospered as a trading hub connecting China with the West and Russia with Persia and India. They hope for a new version of that cosmopolitanism as a direct antidote to the isolating stringencies of the Taliban.
Afghani human rights are an international problem. Like students everywhere, the PeaceGamers in Bishkek are outraged by the Taliban’s vicious policies which isolate all women at home, forbid education for girls, and jail men for having beards the wrong length. But they know outrage will change nothing. The self-righteous Taliban leaders and the local, uneducated thugs who “police” Afghan neighborhoods are impervious to ordinary logic and local pressures.
What to do? The students ask for a massive effort by the entire international community to condemn the Taliban’s policies. In the students’ thinking, it will take a solid front by all nations and the UN institutions to force the Taliban to back away. They propose a strategy to cut off support from states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia who encourage the Taliban. Human rights are universal and the response must be universal, they say. A positive side effect: a global campaign to stand up for the rights of the people in Afghanistan will also buttress the positive forces of democracy in Central Asia.
The students did not “solve Afghanistan” in one school day. But what they did achieve may be even more important: they discovered for themselves their own capacities to tackling the hardest problems that face them as they start out in adult life.
Impressed with the educational value, the university host decided to make this “college bowl” a twice-a-year feature. They hope to involve student teams from other countries in the region and soon, via the Internet, to cross-connect the Central Asian students to other teams in an international PeaceGame series. Afghanistan will bedevil them-and us-for a long time to come. Perhaps this new generation can make a difference. In Bishkek, they certainly showed the potential.
Larry Seaquist, Chairman of The Strategy Group in Washington, DC, organized the PeaceGame in Bishkek with co-sponsorship by the Director-General of UNESCO and the State Secretary of Kyrgyzstan. He wishes to thank Professor Iris Beybutova of the Kyrgyz State National University who designed and hosted the student PeaceGame.