Friday, August 19, 2022

As Hearts Break

 [NOTE: I first published this essay a year ago as the Taliban seized power. Nothing has happened in the interlude to cause me to revise it.]

The roots of Afghanistan's problems are inextricably linked historically to the Great Game that has been waged by Britain, Russia, India, America, China, Iran, Pakistan and countless other empires and neighbors for as long as the history of the region has been recorded.

One result of the endless conflicts and invasions of this windswept mountainous desert of a land is an Islamic society struggling to modernize. Afghanistan has been an Islamic nation the 7th century and historians tell us that that was completed by the 10th century with final mop-ups in the 19th century.

But I can attest that there were still at least some people who were not anything like Moslems as late as the late 20th century in an obscure part of the country made famous in Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King," also a 1975 movie.

They lived in Nuristan, which was previously known as Kafiristan, or "Land of the Nonbelievers," because of their ancient worship of idols.  That practice persisted at least into the 1970s when I made a visit to the town of Kamdesh (Pashto: کامدېش‎, Persian: کامدیش‎). 

What I witnessed was wild exotic dancing by men and unveiled women around campfires under the influence of  charas (hashish) and it was as far from devout Islamic behavior as could be imagined high in the mountains where foreigners rarely ventured.

***

In the 1980s, while the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they mercilessly bombed the countryside into ruins, while they occupied Kabul and other cities. In response, the U.S. decided to covertly fund the fundamentalist mujahideen that had arisen in opposition. Soon the Taliban  emerged from the refugee camps where the victims of Russian aggression were clustered.

The Russians eventually lost that war, and by the mid-1990s the Taliban came to power. Though they reflected the general population's united opposition to foreigners, they were distrusted by the educated, urbanized people in Kabul and other cities.

Cut to 2001: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration vowed to hunt down those responsible and hold them accountable. That meant going to Afghanistan where the terrorists had trained.

One immediate problem with the U.S. response is it was overly personalized -- the mission was to get Osama bin-Laden and also his Al-Qaeda cohort. Intelligence sources quickly determined that he was somewhere in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. 

Remarkably, the U.S. forces almost caught bin-Laden at Tora Bora but he escaped. As the search continued, it obscured the fact that Al-Qaeda was only one part of the problem in Afghanistan. The terrorists were primarily Saudis and Egyptians, while Afghanistan itself was split between the rural Taliban and the educated urban elite.

The U.S. seemed to conflate the Taliban with Al-Qaeda, lumping them together as radical extremists, which was partly true but obscured again what was going on among the Afghans internally.

It took many years and billions of dollars and thousands of innocent lives lost, but during the Obama administration, bin-Laden was finally hunted down and killed in Pakistan and the remnants of Al-Qaeda appeared to scatter to the winds.

But by then, the war in Afghanistan had become impossible to win; the opposition led by the Taliban was entrenched in the countryside, while the urban population did not want to fight wars at all, they wanted to live modern affluent, educated lives.

The U.S. and its allies did a good job in the cities, helping build modern infrastructure and educating millions of people, including women. As the years passed, however, the U.S.-built national Afghan "army" was rife with corruption, low morale and a lack of will to fight their countrymen in the form of the Taliban.

The Taliban by contrast had no problem attacking their brothers who sided with the national government, which was seen as a puppet of the U.S. 

In seeking to negotiate an end to the war, the Trump administration confirmed that status by excluding the national government officials from peace talks with the Taliban. To make matters worse, Trump's aide Stephen Miller implemented policies that would slow down special exit visas for Afghans when the Americans would eventually leave, setting up the current evacuation crisis.  

In the end, the Biden administration has simply done what Bush, Obama, and Trump wanted to do but couldn't by getting out of Afghanistan and putting an end to the endless war. 

But to the surprise of no one who has been paying attention all these years, the withdrawal instantly led to the collapse of the puppet government, and the home-grown resistance movement that had sheltered bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda leading up to 9/11 returned to power.

What is already clear is that the Taliban does not the ability to govern the country. Al Qaeda will be back as will the homegrown Haqqani Network, yet another faction of violent extremism.

Meanwhile ISIS, which is the enemy of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, is already on the scene.

So it appears that extreme instability will continue to reign in Afghanistan. The Americans may be gone but the problems remain and can only grow from here.

***

There is no part of the Taliban takeover more distressing for many of us than the danger it poses to the right of Afghan women.

The news on this topic is not good:

* The entire staff and student body of the country's only girls boarding school has fled to Rwanda.

* The women students at the American University of Afghanistan are in hiding with their fate unknown.

* The Taliban has warned women to stay of the streets because its soldiers are not "trained" to respect them.

* Throughout the country, women are staying out of sight, according to my sources and multiple news reports.

The status of women as extreme second-class citizens in Afghanistan has long angered many of us who have worked in the country and love its people. Many have done what they could to change that.

It is simply heart-breaking to think that decades of improvement in getting girls educated is now being threatened by men who either are so ignorant (due to lack of education themselves) or so cruel as to set women back to pre-modern status.

I don't know how, but the advanced countries of the world must find a way to prevent Afghan women from losing the precious rights they have won.

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