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Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Good neighbors
Who knew that international relations in the 21st century would descend into a Robert Frost poem?
Mending Wall
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!"
We've got the Mexican-American fence, the Israel-Palestine fence, and now the Afghanistan-Pakistan fence:
Washington is backing a plan to build a 1,500-mile fence along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan to prevent Islamic insurgents and drug smugglers slipping between the two countries.
Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, yesterday made the proposal during a 75-minute meeting with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, ahead of Sunday's parliamentary election in Afghanistan. The run-up to the vote has been marred by outbreaks of violence.
The cordon, officials said, would deter infiltration in both directions and there would be arrangements for controlled crossings. A spokesman for the US state department, Sean McCormack, told reporters that Washington thought it was "important that Pakistan and Afghanistan take up this idea".
It is a beautiful, instructive little poem:
The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side.
You can't mend a fence alone. We can't do it across our southern border. Israel can't do it. Pakistan can't do it. A fence is only going to work where the people on both sides want it. And, in the mountains regions of Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier Province, no one on either side of the fence will want it there.
