United Nations, Aug 19 (FN Bureau) The world needs to focus on the unfolding catastrophe in Afghanistan, and must intervene to declare it as a humanitarian crisis, including think of deploying the UN Peacekeeping forces there, an Afghan delegate at the UN Security Council said in an impassioned speech on Thursday. Davood Moradian, founder and director-general of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS), speaking at the briefing on ‘Threats to International Peace and Security caused by Terrorist Acts’, chaired by India, said that he was in Kabul airport when hundreds of Afghans were running alongside a moving US Air Force C-17 plane in the hope of getting on board. “It was sheer human desperation and fear”, that made the people want to flee Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover on Sunday. He said one of the men who fell to his death from the plane after it took to the skies on August 16 was a member of the Afghan national football team. “He represents millions of Afghans from diverse fields.
The world must intervene in Afghanistan to prevent a human tragedy and declare it as a humanitarian crisis,” said Moradian, and added that the UN Security Council must hold serious deliberations on Afghanistan, and think about deploying UN Peacekeeping forces there and work towards a political solution to “mitigate the catastrophe”. He said the fact that the UNSC is holding a session on the Daesh shows that the world has failed to act on terrorism in the past 20 years, with the US set to observe the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He termed it a collective failure of the world body. He also said while the bulk of perpetrators of the terror attacks have remained Muslim, “sadly the Muslim world has remained quiet” on the issue. He observed that the “intellectual stagnation” of the Muslim world has led to the rise of terrorism and extremism in the world. He also said it is wrong to treat terrorism as a non-state subject “when in reality it is a product of state system”. “In some cases there are a group of like-minded states supporting terrorism.. like in the case of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan,” he said.
He said that the UN system unfortunately allows member states “to use terrorism as state policy”, and added that there is divergence between the UN’s political statements and its actions. He cited the case of “vaccine nationalism” in which “rich nations used self-interest over collective interest”. “Many governments sadly focused on their own territories than on global good,” Moradian said, adding that it was similar to the case of Afghanistan. He remarked that it was strange that many countries are advocating a political solution to deal with the Taliban, which had been designated a terrorist group, while in contrast the same countries were advocating a military solution to tackle terror groups like the Daesh. “If there is a political solution for the Taliban, then why not for the others,” he asked, adding that they share fundamental characteristics despite being different in the way they operate. Drawing a parallel with the Covid-19 variants, he said the terror groups “are the same originally, but only mutated in different versions like the Alpha Beta and Delta” versions of the coronavirus.