4 days ago
Afghanistan under the Taliban: Four years on
COMMENT
As the Taliban celebrate their fourth-year reign of terror in Afghanistan, the country suffers from an unprecedented episode of political, social, cultural and economic crises in its modern history.
The terrorist group has set back Afghanistan by decades in the name of a self-centred brand of Islam that does not exist anywhere else in the Muslim world. The country today is at the bottom of all human development and living conditions indices.
The Afghanistan tragedy is man-made and largely an outcome of betrayal by its own leaders and foreign powers
As an ethno-tribal and fragile Muslim country, situated in a zone of regional and major power rivalries, the country has historically been vulnerable to internal conflicts and outside interventions.
But it had never experienced what struck it during the first round of the Taliban rule from 1996 to the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States, orchestrated from Afghanistan.
The United States' retaliatory intervention and toppling of the Taliban regime, with a promise not to allow Afghanistan to become a terrorism hub again, brought a sigh of relief.
However, as detailed in my book How to Lose a War, the US, backed by its allies including Australia, failed miserably, just as the Soviet Union had in its occupation of the country in the 1980s.
The US lacked an appropriate strategy grounded in a clear understanding of Afghanistan's complexities and those of its region, which also thwarted its efforts to secure effective and reliable Afghan governments.
After two decades of a very costly intervention, the US bowed out. Its protégé government in Kabul disintegrated, with President Ashraf Ghani fleeing to the United Arab Emirates, and the Taliban re-assumed power in mid-August 2021.
Taliban 2.0 was expected to be softer and gentler than that of the group's previous exercise of power.
But to the contrary, it has proved to be more brutal, tribal, exclusionary, and misogynistic.
Women and girls have been stripped of all their rights and virtually caged.
The degree of political and social freedoms as well as social and economic development that occurred under the US aegis have now totally been reversed.
According to various United Nations agencies' reports, hunger, starvation, malnutrition, child mortality, death from curable diseases, girls' and women's suicide, and summary execution of many who worked for the previous government as well as the US and allies, have become rampant across the country.
More than half of the population live off foreign handouts from a few international humanitarian organisations under the strict watch of the Taliban who ensure a cut for themselves.
The Taliban is led by a self-styled supremo, Hibatulla Akhunzada, who presides in the southern city of Kandahar – the birthplace of the group – and is not publicly seen.
He is under an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Akhunzada and his cohort do not believe in any form of political pluralism or participatory government or any international legal and humanitarian laws.
They have instituted a system of sharia (Islamic law) based on their version, which is not approved by the respected centres of Islamic studies and organisations in the Muslim domain. They have turned educational institutions into all-male jihadi madrassas to serve their ideological and political standing.
Many school age children are trained as soldiers and recruited for suicide bombings.
The Taliban have remained totally impervious to international criticism and demands for change.
The Taliban are well armed, courtesy of the $7.8 billion worth of weapons left behind by the US and allied forces. They are the first terror group in history also to possess an air force.
As reported by the UN, Afghanistan has once again become a sanctuary and breeding ground for various violent extremist groups, most importantly al-Qaeda, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Islamic State of Khorasan (IS-K), which have been, with the Taliban's support, responsible for many terrorist acts in the region and beyond.
Yet, despite lacking national and international legitimacy, with only Russia according their government formal recognition, the Taliban keep consolidating their rule. This is so for several reasons.
Chief amongst them are the regional and global geopolitical rivalries that are played out in Afghanistan. The country's neighbours have increasingly found it expedient to deal with the Taliban in pursuit of conflicting interests or to prevent the group from spreading its jihadi version of Islam into their countries.
They include more prominently Pakistan, Iran and Uzbekistan. Even the Qatar-UAE competition has made a footprint in Afghanistan with both seeking to influence the Taliban, though at different levels. A similar dictum has motivated major powers in the context of US-China and US-Russia rivalry.
These actors also want to benefit from trade with Afghanistan and the country's mineral deposits, including coal, iron, copper, and lithium. China has moved in a big way and made lucrative deals with the Taliban to exploit such resources as oil and copper. Russia has been very accommodating of the Taliban, and the US has closely interacted with the group. Washington has held regular meetings with the Taliban in Doha and allowed, though indirectly, $40 million from its humanitarian aid to end up in the Taliban treasury on a weekly basis. Although the financial spin off is being reviewed by Donald Trump's administration, it nonetheless indicates Washington's concerns about China's and for that matter Russia's growing involvement in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Afghan political and armed opposition groups operating from exile have been very divided, a historical curse of Afghanistan. They have been of little or no help to a couple of brave female resistance groups inside the country.
As the situation stands, the future of Afghanistan appears as bleak as its prevailing darkness. With the plight of the Palestinians and the Ukraine war dominating the world's focus, the tragedy of Afghanistan has been pushed onto the backburner. Yet, this is not to claim that the Taliban are infallible. Afghanistan has seen five distinctly different political and ideological groups rule the country one after another in the last four decades. Taliban 2.0 may well go down in the same way as a result of either internal conflict or change in the internal and external circumstances of Afghanistan, as has been the case during most of its modern history, but not soon enough for the suffering people of Afghanistan.
