“Fundamentalism is a key component of the Afghan elite” and “the Taliban are a part of Afghanistan”, wrote the special foreign correspondent Domenico Quirico of the newspaper La Stampa on the latest news coming from Kabul
Now everything has really worn out. Even Kabul surrendered to the Taliban while the president of Afghanistan Ashiraf Ghani fled who knows where after seven years of mandate and countless visits abroad, even at the Quirinale by Sergio Mattarella, also giving him a representation of his country – I’m afraid – to say the least unrealistic, saying more what his western interlocutors wanted to hear to console themselves for the money spent and the victims suffered in their missions. Now Kabul really looks like Saigon in 1975, where the Americans only served to help escape the last ones who believed in them. The Taliban did not have to fire a single shot of their weapons, or lose a hair of their very black beards,
We Italians too, let’s face it, we have done our part, albeit with the usual air of “good people”, more like rescuers than warriors, in this mixed tragedy of presumption and conformity. Which made us dismiss even the best and late Gino Strada as a half-coward or, indeed, a traitor, colluding with the “enemy”.
It is difficult, let’s even say impossible, not to recognize oneself in the words of the historical correspondent of the Press Domenico Quirico when he writes, as he did not later than yesterday, that to read and even understand Afghanistan “we just needed the photographs of bearded men wrapped in clamids miserable, in threatening poses with their Kalashnikovs ”, so“ we never really dealt with who the Afghans are ”and what“ their troubles ”were and still are. Which, on the other hand, were not “the reason why we went” to those lands to give our contribution, including blood, as well as incompetence or approximation, to an action of retaliation alternating with education for a democracy, ours, for export. But of which – let’s face it – not even we Westerners know how to make good use of it at home,
Now that everything, as I wrote at the beginning, has really taken place in Kabul as it was perhaps not difficult to foresee, even if, for heaven’s sake, sharing the cries for help that have been raised there in recent days, and not refusing the help that we have. are asked both by those who want to flee and by those who have the courage to stay, let us acknowledge with honesty and simplicity in Quirico’s observation that “fundamentalism is a key component of the Afghan elite”, or that “the Taliban are a part of ‘Afghanistan “.
But only of Afghanistan
, I ask myself thinking of the homegrown populisms that, with explicit reference to the grillin-contiana pentastellati rather than to the Northern League, the “Corsican-Trastevere” optimism of a tough and very nice Marcelle Padovani saw in retreat, if not defeated, in a beautiful and enchanting interview with Repubblica published yesterday about his 50 years spent in Italy as in a continuous social and political “laboratory”. Not even we according to Marcelle – who still does not forgive us for having underestimated and treated badly Giovanni Falcone in his exemplary fight against the mafia – do not show that we are aware, even though we are the actors, indeed the protagonists.
