Time & Perspective Quote by Lakhdar Brahimi

Diplomacy rarely sounds like a drumbeat; it sounds like someone carefully stacking priorities until the room has no place left to dodge. Brahimi’s line is built as a narrowing funnel: “international community” (the comforting abstraction), then “the powers that have influence” (the real decision-makers), then “even more importantly, Afghanistan’s neighbors” (the actors who can spoil or stabilize everything by geography alone). The syntax does the political work. Each clause politely demotes the earlier one, stripping away the performative consensus of global rhetoric to reveal where leverage actually sits.

The intent is pressure without accusation. “It does seem now” signals a diplomat’s calibrated optimism: a way to claim momentum while leaving an exit for the unconvinced. “High time” adds moral impatience, implying that delay has already cost lives and legitimacy. The phrase “work together, and not against one another” is almost childlike in its simplicity, which is precisely the point. In conflict zones, the most sophisticated analysis often collapses into one blunt truth: rival patrons turn a country into a proxy battlefield.

The subtext is Afghanistan as a convergence problem, not merely an internal one. Brahimi is quietly indicting the history of competing regional agendas - Pakistan’s security calculus, Iran’s influence, India’s interests, Russia’s anxieties, and Western intervention - that treat Afghanistan less as a polity than as terrain. In context, it reads like the worldview of a UN mediator who knows that peace conferences fail not because Afghans can’t negotiate, but because the surrounding states keep negotiating through them.