The Chinese, who are battling the global accusation that China midwifed the coronavirus in a laboratory in the Wuhan city of Hubei and spread it far and wide including in Afghanistan, wouldn’t vouch for opium’s prowess to beat the coronavirus. The fabled Opium War is a tale not told these days of China’s resurgence. But United States President Donald Trump, whose love-hate ‘thing’ with Chinese President Xi Jinping has a November deadline to survive, probably understands the Afghans’ fetish for opium because broad swathes of America are fed on "legal" marijuana and its so-called healthier benefits.

Trump’s best fast friend Narendra Modi, meanwhile, is on another high which has nothing to do with anything plus either/or narcotic. Nor chai/tea, for that matter. Mr. Modi is happy dealing mountainous lessons to China/Xi across the LAC while maintaining nay insisting that the PLA did not intrude this side/our side of the LAC, inviting the barb that if that was so, why were the PLA troops “withdrawing” if they had “never broken through” into Indian territory in the first place, after all the “finger” pointing, from “finger 1” through “finger 4” to “finger 8?”

Yeah, opposition to Modi is not yielding. A la the coronavirus, which is also refusing to go away despite all-out battles against it in 218 plus countries across the world including in Afghanistan where because of a heavy density of the coronavirus positive and an acute shortage of ventilators, enterprising Afghans are selling oxygen in pumped-up balloons to those fighting a shortage of breath because of the wanton spread of Covid-19. Last heard the oxygen-balloons were selling like “hotcakes” and they buyers included the Taliban.

That said Afghanistan and its epic opium-distilled fight with the coronavirus is largely going globally unnoticed. Not even the World Health Organisation (WHO) is bothered or interested. Except for the WHO warning to the “world” in general – with no particular love or concern for Afghanistan – that the global community is staring at a soon-to-be established Covid-19 future. In the words of WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “too many countries are headed in the wrong direction” with political leaders “sending mixed messages.”

Being uncharacteristically specific, China’s all-weather friend Ghebrayesus warned that “if the basics aren’t followed, there is only one way this pandemic is going to go…It’s going to get worse and worse and worse.” ‘What’s Tedros up to?’ was the Social Media fallout. ‘Can’t he keep his dark thoughts to himself, what right does he have to scare the world which is as it is ultra-scared?’ Well, Tedros himself is a mite scared. A WHO team is in China to trace the origins of the coronavirus and Tedros is on record that China is innocent of the stigma/stain/strain!

China and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will be looking toward India to bail China out of this loss in trust/face following the outbreak of the coronavirus-Covid-19 pandemic which has taken tens of thousands of lives across the world. And the WHO has been, to the anger and outrage of the United States, the shield that’s giving cover to China; so much so, the United States has “withdrawn” from the WHO, leaving the world health body and its mandate largely to the “superpower-in-waiting” China.

Well, for China to take over from where Trump left, the world has to be rid of the coronavirus and that includes the United States where it seems history is repeating itself in a macabre replay. American history tells us that the early Americans “conquered” America from east to west, from the eastern seaboard (Atlantic) to the western seaboard (Pacific), and that the further they went west, the wilder and bloodier it got. And from what we’re hearing the march of Covid-19 is also east to west, from New York to California. The coronavirus is the most pestilence-like in the wild-west states of Texas and Arizona, and in places California.

The latest is that even Donald Trump, the one most against the facemask, is today giving more than lip service to the facemask. POTUS wearing a facemask is all over the place and even Melania Trump wore one in solidarity with her so far unheroic “Zoro!” For the record, the United States is in a bad coronavirus way, the worst, they say, echoing Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Ask Xi Jinping and he will vouch that Tedros is no friend of Donald Trump. Xi will also flavor the remark with “there will be no return to the old normal for the foreseeable future”, and that Florida recorded the highest single-day spike in coronavirus positive cases the other day!

Health experts in Florida and around say unless the “nation pulls together” in this time of crisis, there will be no succour from the virus. Deaths from the virus have been rising in the U.S and that the deaths will keep mounting unless Donald Trump himself goes missing along the way because of the coronavirus or not because of the coronavirus! As far as paradoxes go, Donald Trump is an oxymoron or plain moron!

But let’s not waste time and pelf on the United States and Donald Trump. Let’s give unto ourselves our entire attention on the neglected people of Afghanistan, some 39 million Afghans who have no great hospital infrastructure or other means to survive this ugly pandemic that apart from killing them in sizeable numbers also mocks at them for having to gather oxygen in balloons to breathe new life in them for short periods of time. For millions of Indians, there cannot be a worse epitaph for the legendry Kabuliwalla! (IPA Service)