Irish Examiner view: Rejection of tribal hatreds can't come soon enough in Afghanistan

Kabul blast last kills at least 50 near school

An injured woman is transported to a hospital after a bomb explosion near a school west of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday. AP Photo/Rahmat Gul

It may seem incongruous, even as another political leader from one side of this island’s unending tribalism, Ulster Unionist leader Steve Aiken, announced his resignation so soon after DUP leader Arlene Foster resigned as party leader, to compare this island’s travails with those inflicted on the people of Afghanistan.

Yet, as shown by the Saturday bomb attack outside a Kabul school that murdered at least 50 people, many of them children, and injured scores more, the dynamic of tribal hatred is more or less the same anywhere it chokes and
divides. The Kabul perpetrators have no better argument than that they believe their set of beliefs are an authorisation to destroy those who hold different, less strident views.

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One of the very positive developments on this small island is that a growing number of people refuse to be pigeonholed as either nationalist or loyalist, an evolutionary rejection of tribalism that will hopefully leave the horrors of the past in the past. Such a change, such a rejection of old hate and fears, cannot come soon enough for the people of Afghanistan.