The disaster of a twenty-year Afghanistan policy is complete. The West is facing the broken pieces of its policies and the future of Afghanistan, with the Taliban in power, is uncertain. The situation is so complex that it is difficult to find convincing answers to the many open questions.

The US and the German governments just agreed on a compromise about the controversial and long-debated Nord Stream 2 pipeline that is planned to supply natural gas from Russia to Germany. The supply of natural gas by Russia is not new.

After almost a year of being community COVID-free, Fiji Islands, one of the popular tourist destinations in the Pacific, is currently experiencing an exponential increase in active cases since the Delta variant, second wave of the Corona virus, landed on her shores in April 2021. The outbreak has recorded, to date, a total of 22,443 active cases and 177 deaths over the past three months.

More than 1/3 of those tested for Covid-19 in Myanmar now test positive. The crematorium in Yangon can hardly handle all the bodies. Many health workers remain on strike since the February 1 coup. When they try to help people on a voluntary basis, they risk arrest. Social media is full of desperate requests for oxygen.

For more than thirty years, a majority of people in Myanmar have seen Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as their legitimate leader. Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won the 1990 elections for a national assembly that was never allowed to meet. On November 8 2015 and November 8 2020, the NLD again twice won by a landslide. Yet, when the elected MPs were to convene in Naypyidaw on 1 February 2021, they were instead placed under arrest.

In 2009, as I gazed at the gaping hillside holes in Bamiyan where once two imposing Buddha statues had stood as silent sentinels for more than 1,500 years, two emotions were dominant. The first was the internalisation of the northern limits of India’s borders in the ebb and flow of history. The second was sadness at the cultural vandalism of religious fanatics, little knowing that 11 years later, the UK and US would themselves be consumed with the destruction of statues honouring historical figures based on a Manichean reinterpretation of the past through the prism of current faddish morality.