Afghanistan: Broken promises, burning nation

Afghanistan remains on a knife-edge. Looming famine, widespread malnutrition, and the forced repatriation of refugees are signs not of a nation in crisis — but one already collapsed, hollowed out to its core.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

What we witness now is the brutal depth to which a country can fall when gutted by decades of foreign intervention and abandoned in its ruins. In the arid camps near the Iran-Afghanistan border, thousands of Afghans - mostly women and children queue not just for bread, but for the return bus to a country ravaged by the West and its yesteryear darling boys extremist factions it nurtured during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. Since early June, almost 450,000 Afghans have been repatriated from Iran.

Iran has discovered, with alarming clarity, that some among the flood of Afghan refugees were not innocent victims of Taliban rule, but clandestine agents spies, informants, operatives - aligned with foreign intelligence services. Tehran's recent internal assessments suggest that these "refugees" played a significant role in intelligence collection that aided the decapitation strike conducted by Israel during the 12-day war a conflict so sharp, so surgical, that it dismantled the upper echelons of Iran's military leadership. Some of Iran's most decorated commanders, long feared for their reach in the Shi'ite axis, were eliminated in what now appears to have been a masterclass in preemptive warfare.

This is no accident of modern conflict. It is the outcome of an intelligence matrix decades in the making. And while the dust of that brief war is still settling over Gaza and Tehran, across the Mediterranean one can already hear the humming of American-funded military construction projects in Israel. One does not need clairvoyance to see the writing on the wall: the United States and Israel are preparing, not for "possible contingencies", but for the final war against Iran. Whether it will unfold in six months or before 2029, its inevitability now seems axiomatic. The American empire, battered by the blunders of its interventions, is not retreating it is refocusing.