Schiller Institute Afghanistan Conference:
Toward a Higher-Level Solution

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this editorial]

Aug. 1—It has been a hallmark of the half-dozen international conferences organized by the Schiller Institute over the last 18 months, that at the end of each of them many of the participants have thanked Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche for presenting creative, new policy ideas for solving the world’s pressing crises, for thinking outside the box and for helping them to do the same. In a few cases, this was stated begrudgingly; in most cases, it was animated and appreciative. This thoughtful recognition has come from policy leaders and scholars in numerous fields from China and Russia, Germany and Italy, Syria and Yemen, India and Mexico. And, conspicuously, from the United States as well.

The July 31 five-hour dialogue on “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era,” continued and enriched that process. Zepp-LaRouche convoked the conference on short notice because of the grave danger and unique opportunity, which the American and NATO troop withdrawal from Afghanistan has opened up for global strategic cooperation among otherwise contending powers. She made a concrete proposal for Russia, China, the United States, India, and regional partners such as Iran and Pakistan, to present a concrete development program for Afghanistan within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, and to use that to help organize a stable power-sharing agreement among the contending parties inside Afghanistan. She stressed that a required starting point would be the building of a modern healthcare system in that country, as in all countries around the world, to fully address the COVID-19 pandemic. “Peace through development” has to be the operant approach, she emphasized.

The discussion period reflected the impact of such a vision—not universal agreement, but thoughtful consideration. Exemplary were the comments during the discussion period from Ambassador Anna Evstigneeva, Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, who stated:

The Afghanistan issue [is] one of the problems we are working on really hard—relatively, I must say that, effectively—with all these rivals previously mentioned. Russia, U.S., China, Pakistan, [and others].… So, this can be a turning point, and a very good forum for cooperation, because our goals are the same. It’s important also to have a common strategy, and to build on trust, and work together to reach a stable Afghanistan.

Upcoming LaRouche Legacy Foundation Seminar

The process of these international Schiller Institute conferences was initiated by Helga Zepp-LaRouche shortly after the February 2019 passing of her husband, Lyndon LaRouche, to ensure the continuity of his thinking and strategic approach. Two weeks from now, on Saturday August 14, the LaRouche Legacy Foundation will hold its first international on-line seminar, “So, Are You Finally Willing to Learn Economics?” which will explore in depth Lyndon LaRouche’s fundamental discoveries and breakthroughs in the field of the science of physical economy.

In an article that he wrote on November 6, 2000, Politics as Art, Lyndon LaRouche was prescient about the breakdown crisis that was upon us, and about the concepts needed to solve it:

Tomorrow, U.S. election-day, November 7, 2000, we shall witness an awful real-life tragedy on the world stage, the threat, if not yet the actuality, of a new Dark Age. That threat is today’s outgrowth of a long-standing, widespread violation of those Classical principles of statecraft which every citizen should have been given the right to know, something that any citizen should have known by no later than the time he or she had completed a secondary education.

My life’s professional work, during more than fifty years to date, has been focused on precisely that subject-matter so urgently needed under today’s conditions of global crisis: the interdependency of the history of politics and economics with those Classical methods which underlie competence in both art and science.

Lately, I had been prompted by a number of developments, especially because of the increasingly acute quality of the onrushing world crisis, to place much heavier emphasis on my students’ and co-workers’ rigorous mastery of that function of Classical art. Here, I consolidate and recapitulate what I have said in the content of unpublished manuscripts which were recently written for those collaborators’ private use. I do this here, in as popular a form as competent exposition permits. I do this for the benefit of you as a member of an, unfortunately, still largely unwitting population, a population which the aftermath of this election would tend to overwhelm with despair, unless you are informed of those certain means of remedial action which I outline for you here.

I offer you thus a method for action, which contains the much-needed Classical alternative to today’s real-life tragedy of our nation. I present that to you here, with the intent to afford you a guide to the means by which we may escape from the awful consequences, into which the immediate aftermath of a brutish electoral farce, now threatens to plunge our nation, and also the world at large.