No Escape from Empire s Graveyard

They buried him in the graveyard by the church.

And I worked on this Permian extinction, camping by this Boer graveyard for months at a time.

Unless these conditions are fulfilled, the International Olympic Committee should seriously reconsider whether holding this summer s Olympic Games in a country that includes a peaceful graveyard remains a good idea.

And one documentary writer, who was here and looked at this two months after I was here, described this not as beehives but as a graveyard, with these empty white boxes with no bees left in them.

The West seems to have lost its orientation in the Hindu Kush that graveyard of empires, as it was called after the British disaster in January 1842, when only one man survived an expedition 16,000. What, many people are asking, is NATO really fighting for in Afghanistan?

Erich Fromm, the late German psychologist and philosopher, once said that history is a graveyard of cultures that came to their catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned and rational voluntary reaction to challenges. We cannot predict our fate, but we can be certain that security will only come through real solidarity and global partnership.

Even as we write, it is clear that China s rulers are trying to reassure the world that peace, quiet, and harmony have again prevailed in Tibet. We all know this kind of peace from what has happened in the past in Burma, Cuba, Belarus, and a few other countries it is called the peace of the graveyard.

The central objective is to cut a deal with the Taliban so that the US and its NATO partners exit the graveyard of empires without losing face. This approach aimed more at withdrawing forces as soon as possible than at ensuring enduring peace and regional stability is being dressed up as reconciliation, with Qatar, Germany, and the United Kingdom getting lead roles in facilitating a settlement.