Tom Tugendhat: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think is the case for medium-term semi-optimism about Afghanistan, or is there no such case? Medium-term, I think it’s really hard to make even a medium-term optimistic case. I think there’s a long-term optimistic case, but it requires some really fundamental changes to several of its neighboring states. Because the reality is, Afghanistan hasn’t been either in civil war or been the death of empires, as people claim. It’s been the playground of others. You constantly see that bits of Afghanistan are dominated by bits of their neighbors, and that domination leads to internal frictions and frictions between the two neighbors. You look at the way in which parts of Afghanistan are effectively played over by different political interests from the region, and you see the effect on the lives of particularly women and girls, but actually everybody in Afghanistan. It’s hard to see, without the regional changes, any real optimism. How did studying Arabic in Yemen affect your life trajectory?…

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