Only a few weeks short of the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, the United States under President Biden withdrew all US troops from Afghanistan. Weeks after the US announced the impending withdrawal, the Taliban swiftly began capturing large swathes of Afghan territory. Now, the Taliban are back in control in Afghanistan, as undeterred as they were prior to the US invasion of the country. For Pakistan, the present moment calls upon us to reflect on our previous policy of alignment with US foreign policy goals and the price we have paid for aiding and abetting America’s War on Terror in our backyard. At this critical juncture, it may be helpful to revisit the ideals that gave rise to the NAM, Non-Aligned Movement. Given the failure of American intervention in the Middle East, in Ira , Syria, Libya, Yemen, and in Afghanistan, is a strategy of Non-Alignment then the best way forward for states in the Global South?
The premise of a Non-Aligned Movement was first proposed during the Bandung conference of April 1955, six years before the Non-Aligned Movement was formally initiated in Belgrade in 1961. The premise for the Non-Aligned Movement was based on the conviction of many of the leaders present at Bandung that it would be in their common interest to form an independent third bloc that would remain impartial to the Cold War – the economic and ideological war being waged between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union. Attended by leaders of 29 newly decolonized countries across Asia and Africa, most notably Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia, and Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt, Bandung is remembered as “…the seminal moment in the political formation of postcoloniality.” (Young, 2006) Together, the leaders present at Bandung represented some 1.5 billion people, which was at the time equal to 54% of the world’s population.
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