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The Schiller Institute is preparing a conference at the end of this month with experts who are passionate about Afghanistan’s prospects of becoming, not only a rapidly developing nation, but the pivot of economic development in South Asia, and even the catalyst in a change of relations among the major powers. Our conference will be aimed as a spark, with many nations already meeting in the Central Asian region to discuss next steps after the NATO withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.

The Schiller Institute’s meeting will be held at a true turning point of 21st Century history: The major powers and the regional neighbor countries alike need to eliminate terrorist threats and remove the scourge of Afghan heroin fed by decades of war; and this opens the possibility of development of healthcare and education, transport routes and power and water, with international cooperation in contributing capital goods. As Afghanistan’s ambassador to China, Javid Ahmad Qaem, expressed it in an interview with Global Times July 16, “The only place where they [China, India and the United States] could really cooperate, and at least there could be a starting point to cooperate between these rivals, if I can call them that, is Afghanistan.”

The people of the United States and the European NATO members need this development more than Afghanistan does. As NATO forces have done to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya since the 1990s, so have we, in America and Europe, done to ourselves.

Our industrial economies and our labor forces have been left to crumble and become impoverished while we trusted the endlessly deployed fighters and their spectacularly expensive equipment to make us “number one” in the world. We admired Wall Street speculating on decaying economic infrastructure until it has fallen apart. Only six months ago the United States electric grid could not keep scores of Americans from dying of cold in long blackouts, while millions of others huddled in misery during a freezing Polar Vortex. This past week Germany’s and Belgium’s flood control infrastructure was washed away in floods which have killed hundreds despite nearly a week of precise warning. America has done nothing for 25 years to counteract a steadily intensifying drought which is threatening to turn the West back into uninhabited desert.

“Climate change” hysteria is not a policy to save the planet, but a threat to reduce the human race and push it back centuries in productive capacity. Between now and the meeting on Afghanistan’s development, the Schiller Institute on July 24 holds a combative conference with scientists, engineers and others to defeat the Green New Deal, stop power blackouts and prevent the wholesale shutdown of power supplies and industry. (“There Is No ‘Climate Emergency’—Apply the Science and Economics of Development To Stop Blackouts and Death”)

The withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan is no setback if it is taken as an opportunity to make the contributions American technology can make to the progress of developing countries. Instead of tolerating think-tanks’ and Defense Secretaries’ talk about “winning” endless and fruitless wars, we can devote ourselves to the arts of peace against pandemic and famine, and rebuild our own economies into the bargain.