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206 — TALIBANin Afghanistan - to end the drain on its resources from funding the anti-Taliban alliance, stop the drugs, weapons and sectarian spillover fromAfghanistan and move towards a further rapprochement with the USA.Ironically, the Taliban's extremism had also helped bring Iran and SaudiArabia closer together and weakened Pakistan's relationship with bothcountries. The big loser from Iran's return to the diplomatic mainstreamwas Pakistan. However, to end its isolation from the West, Iran neededto demonstrate that it was a responsible and stabilizing member of theinternational community. Its first and biggest test could be in helping tobring peace to Afghanistan.16CONCLUSION:THE FUTUREOF AFGHANISTANA fghanistan has become one of 'the world's orphaned con-/-\ flicts - the ones that the West, selective and promiscuous•L 3L in its attention happens to ignore in favour of Yugoslavia', saidformer UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1995. 1 The worldhas turned away from Afghanistan, allowing civil war, ethnic fragmentationand polarization to become state failure. The country has ceased toexist as a viable state and when a state fails civil society is destroyed.Generations of children grow up rootless, without identity or reason tolive except to fight. Adults are traumatized and brutalized, knowing onlywar and the power of the warlords. 'We are dealing here with a failedstate which looks like an infected wound. You don't even know where tostart cleaning it,' said UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi. 2The entire Afghan population has been displaced, not once but manytimes over. The physical destruction of Kabul has turned it into theDresden of the late twentieth century. The crossroads of Asia on theancient Silk Route is now nothing but miles of rubble. There is no semblanceof an infrastructure that can sustain society - even at the lowestcommon denominator of poverty. In 1998 the ICRC reported that thenumber of Afghan families headed by a widow had reached 98,000, thenumber of families headed by a disabled person was 63,000 and 45,000people were treated for war wounds that year alone. There was not evenan estimate of those killed. The only productive factories in the countryare those where artificial limbs, crutches and wheelchairs are produced bythe aid agencies. 3Afghanistan's divisions are multiple - ethnic, sectarian, rural andurban, educated and uneducated, those with guns and those who have