Features

From Saigon to Kabul: Questionable approaches of the West, and future of Afghanistan

Published

5 years ago

2021/08/25

By Dr. Laksiri Fernando

US decision or Joe Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan was correct in terms of ‘original sin’ and the socio-political, and cultural contradictions, created during the ‘colonial occupation’ since 2001. However the way they are withdrawing creates the impression that the US and other Western allies are in a terrible mess.

Without much common sense, the American and allied troops were withdrawn before their civilian supporters or citizens were evacuated. Academics and students were among them. That is why we still have a chaotic situation at the Kabul airport. Twenty odd people have already been killed. At least some of them fell from the first aircraft leaving. The scene was very much similar to Saigon, 46 years ago.

Joe Biden blamed the Afghan forces that they recruited, trained and armed during the last 20 years. ‘What can we do if they cannot fight the Taliban?’ was his explanation for the apparent betrayal. In that case why the hell did the US go to Afghanistan and virtually occupy this other people’s country? Biden did not blame President Ashraf Ghani who fled the country before anyone else.

Hypocrisy of US policies

So many ambiguities and contradictions are exposed in respect of US foreign policies, as a result of the present crisis. Biden claimed, like other previous presidents, that US foreign policies are guided by international human rights. In the same speech he said that there is nothing more to gain by the US being in Afghanistan. His reasoning was that the US invaded Afghanistan because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and to punish Osama bin Laden as a way of meting out justice that the American victims and people deserved.

Osama bin Laden was caught and killed in 2011. Then why didn’t the Americans leave Afghanistan immediately after that? Ten more years have gone by since then. Bin Laden was not killed in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. Even if the US wanted to eliminate not only Bin Laden but also al-Qaeda, which might make sense, why did they want to occupy the whole of Afghanistan?

There is no question that not only the US, but Western countries in general, are interested in promoting human rights and democracy in their foreign policies. But their self-interests are the cornerstone, and these interests as well as their human rights policies are overwhelmingly still marked by a form of colonial mentality. This has been the crisis from Saigon to Kabul.

History

Some people believe that the US intervention in Afghanistan started in 2001. That is not the case. It goes back to the beginning of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and the US wanted to keep Afghanistan as a client state. During the period of Daoud Khan (1953-1978), Afghanistan zig zagged between the two superpowers. The opportunity was taken up by the Communists and created a revolution in 1978. Afghanistan was named a People’s Democratic Republic. That was when the US started directly funding and arming Mujahideen movements of various types through Pakistan. Then the Soviet Union intervened and first invaded the country.

Understandably, any type of socialism was anathema to the US. It was not on the basis of human rights but for economic or profit reasons. It is not true that only the US backed regime after 2001 created circumstances that ensured women’s right to education and work. Those were introduced between 1978 and 1990. The communist regime also was repressive and the ordinary or rural people disliked some of the policies on religious grounds. That was the basis for the people-based Mujahedeen movements. There is evidence that the US, perhaps unintentionally, prompted some Arab Mujahideen groups to get involved in the Afghan civil war. Certain origins of Al Qaeda goes back to these efforts, if not Taliban.

Personal experience

I had to visit the UNHCR office in Peshawar in 1989 as a World University Service (WUS) representative. WUS Pakistan was assisting refugees independently and apolitically. The visit involved visiting refugee camps in Azakhel and further towards the Pakistan-Afghan border. There was no possibility of crossing the border or visiting Jalalabad in Afghanistan given the heavy fighting.

The wounded who were treated at Medicine San Frontier makeshift hospitals were disheartening to look at. In many makeshift camps, young boys carried heavy arms, perhaps guarding their mothers and sisters. These were supposed to be the future Taliban. I was not allowed to take many pictures except of some male refugees/activists (picture 1) and a side view of the Basic Health Unit at Azakhel Camp (picture 2). The streets in Peshawar at that time were largely deserted due to the war (picture 3).

My visit from Geneva was after the Geneva Accords in 1988 between Afghanistan and Pakistan, guaranteed by the US and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union withdrew and the US promised not to support any faction, true or not. The civil war continued and resulted in a Taliban governed Islamic Emirate in 1997 with many other insurgency (terrorist) groups still operating in the country. The new Emirate was recognised only by a few countries, mainly Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE. And it fell quite quickly in 2001 when the US invaded.

This bit of history shows how the US, Soviet Union now gone, was involved in the Afghan debacle from the beginning, and the consequences would be extremely difficult to eliminate in the foreseeable future.

What is created?

The speed of the collapse of the US backed Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani shows the futility of what the US and some other Western governments were doing in Afghanistan during the last twenty years in the name of ‘democratic nation building.’

Democracy or human rights could be ensured primarily through internal forces and changes. These cannot be achieved through occupation or colonialism. External examples or diplomatic influence can be useful, if implemented in a friendly manner and not in an arrogant way. Even at present, the way many Western countries reacted to the first press conference of the Taliban was dismissive and arrogant.

It may be true that what they said about the rights of women, female children, the press, and amnesty to those who supported the last government cannot be fully trusted. All might depend on the circumstances. However, those should be welcomed instead of condemned outright for the sake of promoting them in a positive direction. Qualifications must be warranted, instead of sarcasm or condemnation.

What was created by the Western occupiers in Afghanistan appears to be shallow. It is true that some of the middle class sections in urban Kabul and the suburbs embraced Western values, democracy and human rights. That is good. But the great majority of the rural and remote communities were left out. They may have different values or be oblivious of democracy or human rights. Education ought to take precedence over propaganda.

What the occupation largely created were refugees. At present the population in Afghanistan is estimated to be around 40 million. According to the UNHRC, around six million Afghans are living in Iran and Pakistan as refugees. Some of them are reported to be coming back now with some national hope. The UNHCR estimated that Afghan refugees in other, mainly Western, countries amount to nearly three million. They would not come back. Who is unwilling to live in a developed country instead of a poor and a conflict ridden country? The present exodus at the Kabul airport might include not only those who worked for the occupied government but also those who aspire to live in a Western country. Large disparities in living conditions between rich and poor countries is the main reason for such an exodus.

Future challenges

It would be an extremely difficult task for any future government in Afghanistan to run the economy, day to day administration, while rectifying confusions and conflicts created by the occupiers as well as the Afghans themselves over the past 50 years. Infrastructure development might be a top priority. One hope might be China who would offer to build destroyed or absent infrastructure in the country. There are of course skyscrapers and KFCs built in Kabul. But those are not for the poor or the ordinary.

However, international forces may intervene. China might not be in a position to sort them out at all. China anyway cannot be a panacea. It still does not have much leverage in the UN system or the international community. Therefore, going by the colonial mentality of most of the Western countries, not to speak of the US, there can be future challenges including certain invasions and external influences. There may be a need to look for friends in the West as well. This is what Vietnam did after Saigon.

Of course, there would be major internal challenges as well. Apart from the Taliban, there have been half a dozen other armed groups in Afghanistan. Many have now been integrated into the Taliban, but not all. There can be challenges from ISIS or the remaining Al Qaeda. Whether Afghanistan would again become a haven for international terrorism is also a question. Even about the Taliban itself, we really don’t know much. Therefore, we really have to keep our fingers crossed but not be completely pessimistic, negative or arrogant like the Western pundits.

There is an apparent difference in the Taliban between, for example, 2001 and 2021, that may bring hope for a progressive world. The lessons from Saigon to Kabul are very clear. Diplomacy without interference might be the best for the world in promoting democracy and human rights.

Pics by Laksiri Fernando

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

8 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

9 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

9 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins