The word “anniversary” usually brings about happy and memorable moments. But Aug. 15 marks one year since the Taliban takeover and occupation of Afghanistan, and it’s not a happy occasion for my homeland.

Recently, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released a report entitled “Human Rights in Afghanistan,” delving into the situation in the country since the takeover.

The report is troubling but not shocking as it highlights civilian casualties, restrictions on women’s rights and freedom of speech, extrajudicial killings and ethnic minority persecutions. Yet a lot is under-reported due to the difficulties in gathering evidence against the Taliban, which has censored the media and mistreated journalists.

The UNAMA report states that the Taliban have taken steps “aimed at the protection and promotion of human rights” and that the security has improved. UNAMA has proposed several recommendations to the Taliban as the extremist regime tries to enhance its reputation globally, but the fundamental human rights of Afghans continue to be violated.

War against women

Afghanistan is under occupation. There have been many reports detailing the forced displacement and systemic genocide against the Hazara population, targeted violence and eyewitness reports of the mass killings of 600 Tajik hostages, crimes against humanity in Panjshir, strip-mining of mineral wealth and the war the Taliban are waging against women.

As the Taliban send their daughters to schools overseas, secondary schools for other girls have been banned for almost a year.

Women are forced to wear the hijab or burqa, park visits are segregated by sex and women were recently sacked from their jobs at the Finance Ministry in favour of male relatives.

Amnesty International’s recent report describes the situation of Afghan women as “death in slow motion.” With the scrapping also of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, this is a gender-apartheid regime.

The Taliban have also instructed men to grow beards and not trim them, and to wear local clothing or face consequences.

Other tragedies are ongoing. Millions of Afghans have been displaced since the occupation. A powerful earthquake in June killed more than 1,000 people, leading to a cholera outbreak. The Doha Agreement, a peace pact signed between the U.S. and Taliban to mark the withdrawal of all forces in Afghanistan, has also been breached as terrorist groups reposition themselves under the Taliban.

Foreign interference

Between 1996 and 2001, only three countries recognized the Taliban regime: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While no country has formally recognized the current regime, the United States and co-instigators like Pakistan and the Arab Gulf states have destabilized Afghanistan.

Much of the destabilization and corruption found in Afghanistan dates back to American and Soviet involvement in infrastructure projects in the 1950s and 1960s that haunts the country to this day. The nation’s entire economy relied on foreign aid.

At a UN conference last year, Pakistan’s former prime minister not only defended Taliban occupiers, but claimed that the only way forward was to “strengthen this current government” and “stabilize it for the sake of the people in Afghanistan.”

This was based on the Taliban promise they would adhere to human rights, form an inclusive government, provide amnesty to former government employees and not allow the country to serve as a safe haven for terrorists. Almost a year later, none of this is true.

There have been anti-Pakistan protests in Afghanistan condemning the many frequent visits of Pakistani officials in Afghanistan and their support of the Taliban.

The discounted sale of coal to Pakistan was greeted with public outcry by Afghans, reaffirming views that the Taliban are a Pakistani proxy.

Qatar also has close ties to the Taliban and a security agreement is possible. China has engaged with the Taliban by expanding trade and investment plans.

Cruel treatment of refugees

The Afghan refugee crisis is unsettling. Iran has deported thousands of Afghan refugees and subjected them to abusive treatment by both the public and authorities, while Turkey has also forcefully deported more than 10,000 Afghan migrants.

Belgium has rejected asylum claims of hundreds of Afghan refugees, putting them at risk of being deported as authorities deem Afghanistan to be safe.

Germany has evicted Afghan refugees from their homes within a 24-hour period to make space for Ukrainian refugees.

Canada has capped the number of Afghan refugees at 40,000, yet there’s no cap for Ukrainian refugees, and the government has also waived some security measures for Ukrainians.

It’s estimated that more than 650,000 Afghans from neighbouring nations have been deported or returned to Afghanistan since August 2021. This puts many at severe risk under the Taliban regime.

Now with the passage of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, U.S. humanitarian aid delivered to Afghanistan via Defense Department resources has ended. The greatest humanitarian crisis in the world will continue to worsen as long the Taliban are in power.

An absence of war is not the same as peace when Afghans are continuously stripped of their human rights. The Taliban must not be whitewashed — they are patriarchal terrorists. Resistance forces continue to fight this illegitimate regime that is not in any way representative of Afghans — but the rest of the world needs to step up.

Ferdouse Asefi, PhD candidate, Sociology, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Afghanistan a year after the Taliban occupation: An ongoing war on human rights appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has asked for an urgent “Arria formula” meeting, an informal meeting called by a member of the UN Security Council to discuss the situation of journalists and media in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. They have also asked that an emergency plan for Afghan journalism be drawn up. Afghan journalists, and those of other nationalities working in Afghanistan have become a vulnerable community.

Scenes of CNN’s Clarissa Ward being heckled by Taliban fighters, were just the tip of the iceberg. She was reporting on the hurdles Americans and Afghans were facing trying to get to Kabul’s airport as Taliban fighters attempted to block access with gunfire and violence. Since then, women journalists have reported that they were stopped from going to work, women news anchors were replaced with male anchors the Taliban would approve of. Women under a Taliban regime are unsafe, and women journalists are the first targets. For that matter, even male journalists may well be on the Taliban’s hit list. 

A month ago, the Indian photojournalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Danish Siddiqui was killed in Kandahar, reportedly by Taliban militants who ascertained his identity before fatally attacking him. And that was much before the Taliban had officially seized control of Afghanistan.

Now journalists and their families are in even bigger danger in Afghanistan. A close relative of a journalist working with the German news group Deutsche Welle (DW) was killed by the Taliban. According to DW, the Taliban were “conducting a house-to-house search” to try and find the journalist, who now works in Germany. They then shot dead one member of his family and injured another. The rest of the family managed to escape. Peter Limbourg, director general of Deutsche Welle, has called on the German government to “take action” against the killing. Limbourg said, “The killing of a close relative of one of our editors by the Taliban yesterday is inconceivably tragic, and testifies to the acute danger in which all our employees and their families in Afghanistan find themselves. It is evident that the Taliban are already carrying out organised searches for journalists, both in Kabul and in the provinces. We are running out of time!”

Based on a report by the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, the DW had already reported that “Taliban have begun rounding up Afghans on a blacklist of people with suspected links to the previous Afghan administration.” This includes journalists.

The DW has also “joined the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV), Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Deutschlandradio, dpa, Reporters Without Borders, stern, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, taz, RTL, n-tv and Arte in publishing an open letter calling on the German government to set up an emergency visa program for Afghan staff.”

According to DW, the Taliban have raided the homes of at least three of its journalists. It also reported that another journalist, “Nematullah Hemat of the private television station Ghargasht TV is believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban, and Toofan Omar, the head of the private radio station Paktia Ghag Radio, was, according to government officials, targeted and shot dead by Taliban fighters.” Also being targeted are translators and others who have worked for or with forgien correspondents based in Afghanistan. Many who returned safely to their home countries have been trying to help their former colleagues and their families leave the country safely. The Taliban is suspected to have already shot and killed translator Amdadullah Hamdard, a frequent contributor to Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, on August 2 in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, reported DW.

According to DW, the German Journalists’ Association (DJV) has also asked the German government to take swift action, and give refuge in Germany to stringers who worked for Western media, as they are the most vulnerable. Frank Überall, the DJV chairman said, “Germany must not stand idly by while our colleagues are persecuted and even murdered.”

An entire generation of Afghan reporters is at risk

According to the Reporters Without Borders, Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid had told them on August 15 that “no threat or reprisal will be carried out against journalists” under the Taliban regime. However those words seem to have evaporated in just a few days. The RSF had reported in 2009, that “The reign of the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 was a dark period in Afghanistan’s history” adding that all media were banned except one, Voice of Sharia, which broadcast nothing but propaganda and religious programmes.

Now, the RSF states that “only a concerted response by governments can address the terrible challenge facing Afghan journalists and media workers today.” It has suggested that leading Afghan journalists be invited to address the Security Council, so that they “have a chance to appeal for the survival of Afghan journalism.” Such a meeting could lay the foundation of an “Emergency Plan for Afghan Journalism”, stated RSF. The plan they suggest could include:

• Guarantees for the safety and protection of Afghan journalists and media wherever they may be;
• Help for journalists who want to leave Afghanistan, in particular, simplified procedures for obtaining visas and payment of travel costs;
• The creation of a fund to cover the immediate needs of Afghan journalists and media wherever they may be;
• Coordination and consultation with regard to the sustainability of Afghan media outlets and their possible transfer abroad, including to neighbouring countries; 
• Assistance for Afghan organisations such as the Centre for the Protection of Afghan Women Journalists (CPAWJ) and the Afghan Journalists Safety Committee (AJSC).
   

The International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) has also called upon the international community to “ensure that the rights of women and girls are respected, with special regard to women journalists and media professionals.” It stated that now there is a threat that can “push back decades of hard-won progress for women and girls who are now terrified of a return to a repressive past under the Taliban.” 

Violet Gonda, IAWRT President said, “There are many journalists and female social activists whose lives hang in the balance and whose stories may never be told as the Taliban takes over – once again. These are the brave women who challenged the status quo fighting for fundamental rights, but have been left behind while terror strikes”.  The IAWRT, has called on the following:

• The current leadership must guarantee the safety of women journalists, media professionals, and activists in Afghanistan.
• Women’s organisations around the world should join in solidarity to call for the freedom of women journalists, media professionals, and activists in Afghanistan.
• The international community should immediately facilitate visas for Afghan journalists and media professionals, especially women and their families including elderly dependents and minor children.
• In light of the rapidly deteriorating situation at the airport and in the city, there should be protection provided for Afghan civilians being airlifted – from their homes till they reach the airport terminal building.
• The international community must continue its engagement in brokering peace in Afghanistan

Many media outlets have ceased operations in Afghanistan  

It has been reported that around “100 media outlets have stopped operating in recent weeks, while hundreds of journalists have gone into hiding or are trying to flee the country.” Those still working have been doing so “in accordance” with the conditions set by the Taliban. This time too, the control of the media is one of the biggest and most aggressive moves of a hardliner regime, which in the era of social media is more ‘image’ conscious than before. 

The committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said “an entire generation of Afghan reporters” is at risk, it has already “registered and vetted the cases of more than 350 journalists seeking safety as of August 19, and there are more than a thousand cases under review.” The CPJ asked the United States and other countries to “ensure the safety of Afghan journalists by facilitating safe passage out of the country and providing emergency visas.” However, many Afghan Journalists now fear that they “may not be alive by the time help comes” if it comes at all.      

Related:

Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation
Controversial comments on Taliban draw ire
Taliban 2.0: Old laws in newer package?
Zee proposes “Afghanistan Tour Package” for “Tukde-tukde gang”
We want our rights: Afghan women protesters
Hell on Earth
Will Taliban takeover of Afghanistan be used to attack Indian Muslims?
Gov’t will help Afghanistan’s Sikhs and Hindus to come to India: MEA
Afghan crisis: Women, activists demand immediate ceasefire, protection for civilians

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The ongoing crisis in Afghanistan, with Taliban capturing and taking control of several regions, has led to outpouring of grief and solidarity in India too. But certain people are seeing this as an opportunity to target Islam.

Ashwani Dubey, an Advocate on Record in the Supreme Court has drawn parallels between the Taliban and Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turkish leader who had destroyed the Nalanda University in Bihar, which led to the destruction of many religious texts, way back in the twelfth century.  

His Islamophobic tweet read, “Taliban burns library in Kabul Once upon a time Nalanda University Library was burnt by Bakhtiyar Khilji Time has changed not the Modus operandi #Talibans #Afghanistan”

Taliban burns library in Kabul

Once upon a time Nalanda University Library was burnt by Bakhtiyar Khilji

Time has changed not the Modus operandi#Talibans #Afghanistan

— Ashwani Dubey (@ashwani_dube) August 19, 2021

The purpose of the tweet was probably achieved if one looks at the responses to it. Some netizens pointed at the irony of a city in Bihar named after Muhammad Bin Bakhtiyar Khalji (Bakhtiyarpur). A tweet by one Aman Kumar also stated that the name of the city has not been changed yet because the government fears they will lose their minority vote bank!

Not long ago in 2019, the Akhil Bharatiya Sant Samiti, an umbrella body of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), had written to the Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar to rename the city and that it was time to “undo the sins of the past” by renaming the town and the railway station, reported The Print.

A look through Dubey’s Twitter handle tells us that he also sides with the idea of “Hindutva” that can prevent the country from turning into Kabul, insinuating that Muslims are capable of creating a Kabul like upheaval in the National Capital!

For how long is the question. The whole CAA charade was anything but a protest against policy. Bilkis Daadi would get better biryani @ Kabul. https://t.co/mIPsJVuhF1

— Siddharth Nayak (@_SiddharthNayak) August 16, 2021

A strange focus only towards the Indian Muslims to condemn the actions of the Taliban is bewildering. This opinion has also reached newsroom shows. News Nations’ “Desh Ki Bahas” show broadcasted a programme titled “Taliban ke kitne Hindustani hamdardi?” (How many Indian sympathisers for Taliban?) on August 18.

Deepak Chaurasia, the host of the show, at one point forced an All-India Muslim Personal Board member Yasmeen Farooqui, to condemn the Taliban, even when she said that she will not express any opinion before the Prime Minister issues a statement against Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan. To this, Chaurasia bizarrely reacted as to why she was so concerned about the opinion of the Prime Minister, when she blatantly disrespected the citizenship laws and participated in the Shaheen Bagh protests.  

A journalist unabashedly brought up the Taliban government and how the person she was tweeting against (poet Hussain Haidry) is perhaps a Taliban lover. This is just another instance to show how easy it is to target the already marginalised and vilified Indian Muslim community.

I don’t need certificates from you
An attention seeking rogue ( who was definitely called out by all of us every time,but u won’t find those tweets as they don’t suit u) is more dangerous than Taliban governing Afghanistan? Taliban govt looks too dear to u its seems https://t.co/yDQXQE2dsS

— Sakshi Joshi (@sakshijoshii) August 19, 2021

Days ago, the Zee News also came out with an insensitive piece in DNA suggesting an “Afghanistan Tour Package” for “Tukde-tukde gang” (a common pejorative for liberals and intellectuals), who allegedly supported the Taliban. The publication referred to the statement allegedly made by Shafiqur Rahman Burke, a member of the Samajwadi Party, who said that the Taliban fought in the same way as the revolutionaries of our country fought the British for freedom. As per media reports, he has booked under sections 124A (Sedition), 153A (promoting enmity amongst groups of people on the basis of religion, sex, caste, race, etc) of the Indian Penal Code.

Referring to liberals as ‘these people’, the article says that they don’t believe in democracy. The DNA News piece says that they could go to the Parliament in Kabul, have dinner with the Taliban leaders and members and go to theme parks with them!

Today, August 20, Hari Bhushan Thakur Bachaul, BJP MLA from the Bispi in Madhubani district of Bihar, said that those having problems living in India should go to Afghanistan. When a journalist asked him a question about rising petrol prices, he said that people who have an issue with this should go to Afghanistan where fuel prices are lower!

Related:

Controversial comments on Taliban draw ire
Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation
Will Taliban takeover of Afghanistan be used to attack Indian Muslims?
Zee proposes “Afghanistan Tour Package” for “Tukde-tukde gang”
Afghanistan Crisis: What is India’s plan of action?

The post Afghanistan crisis: A tool to target Islam? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.

Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.

Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.

Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.

Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.

Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

This article explains these points. Because this a short piece, we assert more than we prove. But we have written a great deal about gender, politics and war in Afghanistan since we did fieldwork there as anthropologists almost fifty years ago. We give links to much of this work at the end of this article, so you can explore our arguments in more detail.[1]

A military victory

This is a military and political victory for the Taliban. It is a military victory because the Taliban have won the war. For at least two years the Afghan government forces – the national army and the police – have been losing more people dead and wounded each month than they are recruiting. So those forces are shrinking.

Over the last ten years the Taliban have been taking control of more and more villages and some towns. In the last twelve days they have taken all the cities.

This was not a lightning advance through the cities and then on to Kabul. The people who took each city had long been in the vicinity, in the villages, waiting for the moment. Crucially, across the north the Taliban had been steadily recruiting Tajiks, Uzbeks and Arabs.

This is also a political victory for the Taliban. No guerilla insurgency on earth can win such victories without popular support.

But perhaps support is not the right word. It is more that Afghans have had to choose sides. And more of the Afghan people have chosen to side with the Taliban than have chosen the American occupiers. Not all of them, just more of them.

More Afghans have also chosen to side with the Taliban than with the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani. Again, not all of them, but more than support Ghani. And more Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban than with the old warlords. The defeat of Dostum in Sheberghan and Ismail Khan in Herat is stunning evidence of that.

The Taliban of 2001 were overwhelmingly Pushtuns, and their politics was Pushtun chauvinist. In 2021 Taliban fighters of many ethnicities have taken power in Uzbek and Tajik dominated areas.

The important exception is the Hazara dominated areas in the central mountains. We come back to this exception.

Of course, not all Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban. This is a war against foreign invaders, but it is also a civil war. Many have fought for the Americans, the government or the warlords. Many more have made compromises with both sides to survive. And many others were not sure which side to take and are waiting with different mixtures of fear and hope to see what will happen.

Because this is a military defeat for American power, calls for Biden to do this or that are simply silly. If American troops had remained in Afghanistan, they would have had to surrender or die. This would be a even worse humiliation for American power than the current debacle. Biden, like Trump before him, was out of options.

Why so many Afghans chose the Taliban

The fact that more people have chosen the Taliban does not mean that most Afghans necessarily support the Taliban. It means that given the limited choices available, that is the choice they have made. Why?

The short answer is that the Taliban are the only important political organization fighting the American occupation, and most Afghans have come to hate that occupation.

It was not always thus. The US first sent bomber planes and a few troops to Afghanistan a month after 9/11. The US was supported by the forces of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of non-Pushtun warlords in the north of the country. But the soldiers and leaders of the Alliance were not actually prepared to fight alongside the Americans. Given the long history of Afghan resistance to foreign invasion, most recently to the Russian occupation from 1980 to 1987, that would just be too shameful.

On the other side, though, almost no one was prepared to fight to defend the Taliban government then in power. The troops of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban faced each other in a phony war. Then the US, the British and their foreign allies began to bomb.

The Pakistani military and intelligence services negotiated an end to the stalemate. The United States would be allowed to take power in Kabul and install a president of their choice. In return, the Taliban leaders and rank and file would be allowed to go home to their villages or into exile across the border in Pakistan.

This settlement was not widely publicized in the US and Europe at the time, for obvious reasons, but we reported on it, and it was widely understood in Afghanistan.

For best evidence for this negotiated settlement is what happened next. For two years there was no resistance to the American occupation. None, in any village. Many thousands of former Taliban remained in those villages.

This is an extraordinary fact. Think of the contrast with Iraq, where resistance was widespread from Day One of the occupation in 2003. Or think of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, met with the same wall of anger.

The reason was not simply that the Taliban were not fighting. It was that ordinary people, even in the Taliban heartland in the south, dared to hope that the American occupation would bring Afghanistan peace and develop the economy to end the terrible poverty.

Peace was crucial. By 2001 Afghans had been trapped in war for twenty-three years, first a civil war between communists and Islamists, then a war between Islamists and Soviet invaders, then a war between Islamist warlords, and then a war in the north of the country between Islamist warlords and the Taliban.

Twenty-three years of war meant death, maiming, exile and refugee camps, poverty, so many kinds of grief, and endless fear and anxiety. Perhaps the best book about what that felt like is Klaits and Gulmanadova Klaits, Love and War in Afghanistan (2005). People were desperate for peace. By 2001 even Taliban supporters felt a bad peace was better than a good war.

Also, the United States was fabulously rich. Afghans believed the occupation could lead to development that would rescue them from poverty.

Afghans waited. The US delivered war, not peace.

The US and UK military occupied bases throughout the villages and small towns of the Taliban heartland, the mainly Pushtun areas of the south and east. These units were never told of the informal settlement negotiated between the Americans and the Taliban. They could not be told, because that would shame the government of President Bush. So the US units saw it as their mission to root out the remaining “bad guys”, who were obviously still there.

Night raids crashed through doors, humiliating and terrifying families, taking men away to be tortured for info about the other bad guys. It was here, and in black sites all over the world, that the American military and intelligence developed the new styles of torture that the world would briefly glimpse from Abu Ghraib, the American prison in Iraq.

Some of the men detained were Taliban who had not been fighting. Some were just people betrayed to the Americans by local enemies who coveted their land or held a grudge.

The American soldier Johnny Rico’s memoir Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green provides a useful account of what then happened next. Outraged relatives and villagers took a few potshots at the Americans in the dark. The American military kicked in more doors and tortured more men. The villagers took more potshots. The Americans called in airstrikes and their bombs killed family after family.

War returned across the south and east of the country.  

Inequality and corruption spiraled.

Afghans had hoped for development that could lift both the rich and the poor. It seemed like such an obvious, and such an easy thing to do. But they did not understand American policy abroad. And they did not understand the deep dedication of the 1% in the United States to spiraling inequality in their own country.

So American money poured into Afghanistan. But it went the people in the new government headed by Hamid Karzai. It went to the people working with the Americans and the occupying troops of other nations. And it went to the warlords and their entourages who were deeply involved in the international opium and heroin trade facilitated by the CIA and the Pakistani military. It went to the people lucky enough to own luxury, well-defended homes in Kabul they could rent out to expatriate staff. It went to the men and women who worked in foreign-funded NGOs.

Of course people in these groups all overlapped.

Afghans had long been used to corruption. They both expected it and hated it. But this time the scale was unprecedented. And in the eyes of the poor and middle income people, all the obscene new wealth, no matter how garnered, seemed to be corruption.

Over the last decade the Taliban have offered two things across the country. The first is that they are not corrupt, as they were also not corrupt in office before 2001. They are the only political force in the country this has ever been true of.

Critically, the Taliban have run an honest judicial system in the rural areas they have controlled. Their reputation is so high that many people involved in civil lawsuits in the cities have agreed that both parties will go to Taliban judges in the countryside. This allows them swift, cheap and fair justice without massive bribes. Because the justice was fair, both parties can live with it.

For people in Taliban-controlled areas, fair justice was also a protection against inequality. When the rich can bribe the judges, they can do anything they want to the poor. Land was the crucial thing. Rich and powerful men, warlords and government officials could seize or steal or cheat their way into control of the land of small farmers, and oppress the even poorer sharecroppers. But Taliban judges, everyone understood, were willing to rule for the poor.

Hatred of corruption, of inequality, and of the occupation merged together.

20 Years On

2001, when the Taliban fell to the Americans after 9/11, is twenty years ago now. Enormous changes happen to political mass movements over twenty years of war and crisis. The Taliban have learned and changed. How could it be otherwise. Many Afghans, and many foreign experts, have commented on this. Giustozzi has used the useful phrase neo-Taliban.[2]

This change, as publicly presented, has several aspects. The Taliban have realized that Pushtun chauvinism was a great weakness. They now emphasize that they are Muslims, brothers to all other Muslims, and that they want and have the support of Muslims of many ethnic groups.

But there has been a bitter split in Taliban forces over the last few years. A minority of Taliban fighters and supporters have allied themselves with Islamic State. The difference is that Islamic State launch terror attacks on Shias, Sikhs and Christians. The Taliban in Pakistan do the same, and so dp the small Haqqani network sponsored by Pakistani intelligence. But the Taliban majority have been reliable in condemning all such attacks.

We return to this division later, as it has implications for what will happen next.

The new Taliban have also emphasized their concerns for the rights of women. They say they welcome music, and videos, and have moderated the fiercest and most puritanical sides of their former rule. And they are now saying over and over again that they want to rule in peace, without revenge on the people of the old order.

How much of this is propaganda, and how much is truth, is hard to tell. Moreover, what happens next is deeply dependent on what happens to the economy, and on the actions of foreign powers. Of that, more later. Our point here is that Afghans have reasons for choosing the Taliban over the Americans, the warlords and Ashraf Ghani’s government.

What About Rescuing Afghan Women?

Many readers will now be feeling, insistently, but what about Afghan women? The answer is not simple.

We have to start by going back to the 1970s. Around the world, particular systems of gendered inequality are entangled with a particular system of class inequality. Afghanistan was no different.

Nancy did anthropological fieldwork with Pushtun women and men in the north of the country in the early 1970s. They lived by farming and herding animals. Nancy’s subsequent book, Bartered Brides: Politics and Marriage in a Tribal Society, explains the connections between class, gender and ethnic divisions at that time. And if you want to know what those women themselves thought about their lives, troubles and joys, Nancy and her former partner Richard Tapper have recently published Afghan Village Voices, a translation of many of the tapes that women and men made for them in the field.

That reality was complex, bitter, oppressive and full of love. In that deep sense, it was no different from the complexities of sexism and class in the United States. But the tragedy of the next half century would change much of that. That long suffering produced the particular sexism of the Taliban, which is not an automatic product of Afghan tradition.

The history of this new turn starts in 1978. Then civil war began between the communist government and the Islamist mujahedin resistance. The Islamists were winning, so the Soviet Union invaded late in 1979 to back up the Communist government. Seven years of brutal war between the Soviets and the mujahedin followed. In 1987 the Soviet troops left, defeated.

When we lived in Afghanistan, in the early 1970s, the communists were among the best people. They were driven by three passions. They wanted to develop the country. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and share out the land. And they wanted equality for women.

But in 1978 the communists had taken power in a military coup, led by progressive officers. They had not won the political support of the majority of villagers, in an overwhelming rural country. The result was that the only ways they could deal with the rural Islamist resistance were arrest, torture and bombing. The more the communist led army did such cruelties, the more the revolt grew.

Then the Soviet Union invaded to prop up the communists. Their main weapon was bombing from the air, and large parts of the country became free fire zones. Between half a million and a million Afghans were killed. At least another million were maimed for life. Between six and eight million were driven into exile in Iran and Pakistan, and millions more became internal refugees. All this in a country of only twenty-five million people.

When they came to power, the first thing the communists tried to do were land reform and legislation for the rights of women. When the Russians invaded, the majority of communists sided with them. Many of those communists were women. The result was to smear the name of feminism with support for torture and massacre.

Imagine that the United States was invaded by a foreign power who killed between twelve million and twenty-four million Americans, tortured people in every town, and drove 100 million Americans into exile. Imagine also that almost all feminists in the United States supported the invaders. After that experience, how do you think most Americans would feel about a second invasion by another foreign power, or about feminism?

How do you think most Afghan women feel about another invasion, this time by the Americans, justified by the need to rescue Afghan women? Remember, those statistics about the dead, the maimed and the refugees under Soviet occupation were not abstract numbers. They were living women, and their sons and daughters, husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.

So when the Soviet Union left, defeated, most people breathed a sigh of relief. But then the local leaders of the mujahedin resistance to the communists and the invaders became local warlords and fought each other for the spoils of victory. The majority of Afghans had supported the mujahedin, but now they were disgusted by the greed, the corruption and the endless useless war.

The Class and Refugee Background of the Taliban

In the autumn of 1994, the Taliban had arrived in Kandahar, a mostly Pashtun city and the largest in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban were like nothing before in Afghan history. They were products of two quintessentially twentieth century innovations, aerial bombing and the refugee camps in Pakistan. They belonged to a different social class from the elites who had governed Afghanistan.

The Communists had been the sons and daughters of the urban middle classes and the middle level farmers in the countryside with enough land to call their own. They had been led by people who attended the country’s sole university in Kabul. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and modernize the country.

The Islamists who fought the Communists had been men of similar class backgrounds, and mostly former students at the same university. They too wanted to modernize the country, but in a different way. And they looked to the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Alzhar University in Cairo.

The word Taliban means students in an Islamic school, not a state school or a university. The fighters of the Taliban who entered Kandahar in 1994 were young men who had studied in the free Islamic schools in the refugee camps in Pakistan. They had been children with nothing.

The leaders of the Taliban were village mullahs from Afghanistan. They did not have the elite connections of many of the imams of city mosques. Village mullahs could read, and they were held in some respect by other villagers. But their social status was well below that of a landlord, or a high school graduate in a government office.

The Taliban were led by a committee of twelve men. All twelve had lost a hand, a foot or an eye to Soviet bombs in the war. The Taliban were, among other things, the party of poor and middling Pushtun village men. [3]

Twenty years of war had left Kandahar lawless and at the mercy of warring militias. The turning point came when the Taliban went after a local commander who had raped a boy and two (possibly three) women. The Taliban caught and hung him. What made their intervention striking was not just their determination to put an end to the murderous infighting and restore people’s dignity and safety, but their disgust at the hypocrisy of the other Islamists.

From the first the Taliban were funded by the Saudis, the Americans and the Pakistani military. Washington wanted a peaceful country that could house oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia. The Taliban stood out because they brooked no exceptions to the injunctions they sought to impose, and the severity with which they enforced the rules.

Many Afghans were grateful for the return of order and a modicum of security, but the Taliban were sectarian and unable to control the country, and, in 1996, the Americans withdrew their support. When they did so, they unleashed a new, and deadly, version of Islamophobia against the Taliban.

Almost overnight, Afghan women were deemed helpless and oppressed, while Afghan men – aka the Taliban – were execrated as fanatical savages, paedophiles and sadistic patriarchs, hardly people at all.

For four years before 9/11 the Taliban had been targeted by the Americans, while feminists and others clamored for the protection of Afghan women. By the time the American bombing started, everyone was meant to understand that the Afghan women needed help. What could possibly go wrong?

9/11 and the American War

The bombing began on October 7th. Within days, the Taliban had been forced into hiding – or were literally castrated – as a photograph on the front page of the Daily Mail crowed. The published images of the war were truly shocking in the violence and sadism they portrayed. Many people in Europe were appalled by the scale of the bombing and the utter carelessness of Afghan lives.[4]

Yet in the United States that autumn, the mixture of vengeance and patriotism meant dissenting voices were rare and mostly inaudible. Ask yourself, as Saba Mahmood did at the time, ‘Why were conditions of war, (migration, militarization) and starvation (under the mujahideen) considered to be less injurious to women than the lack of education, employment and most notably, in the media campaign, western dress styles (under the Taliban)?’ [5]

Then ask again even more fiercely – how could you possibly ‘save Afghan women’ by bombing a civilian population that included, along with the women themselves, their children, their husbands, fathers and brothers? It should have been the question that ended the argument, but it was not.

The most egregious expression of feminist Islamophobia came little over a month into the war. A vastly unequal war of revenge doesn’t look very good in the eyes of the world, so better to be doing something that looks virtuous. In anticipation of the American Thanksgiving holiday, on the 17th of November 2001, Laura Bush, the President’s wife, loudly lamented the plight of the veiled Afghan women. Cherie Blair, the British Prime Minister’s wife echoed her sentiments a few days later. These wealthy war-mongers’ wives were using the full weight of the Orientalist paradigm to blame the victims and justify a war against some of the poorest people on earth. And ‘Saving Afghan Women’ became the persistent cry of many liberal feminists to justify the American war.[6]

With the election of Obama in 2008, the chorus of Islamophobia became hegemonic among American liberals. That year the American anti-war alliance effectively dissolved itself to aid Obama’s campaign. Democrats and those feminists who supported Obama’s war hawk Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, could not accept the truth that Afghanistan and Iraq were both wars for oil.[7]

They had only one justification for the endless wars of oil – the sufferings of Afghan women. The feminist spin was a clever ploy. It precluded comparisons between the undoubted sexist rule of the Taliban and sexisms in the United States. Far more shocking, the feminist spin domesticated and effectively displaced the ugly truths about a grossly unequal war. And it separated those notional ‘women to be saved’ from the tens of thousands of actual Afghan women, and men and children killed, wounded, orphaned or made homeless and hungry by the American bombs.

Many of our friends and family members in America are feminists who believed with decent hearts much of this propaganda. But they were being asked to support was a web of lies, a perversion of feminism. It was the feminism of the invader and the corrupt governing elite. It was the feminism of the torturers and the drones.

We believe another feminism is possible.

But it remains true that the Taliban are deeply sexist. Misogyny has won a victory in Afghanistan. But it did not have to be that way.

The communists who sided with the cruelties of the Soviet invaders had discredited feminism in Afghanistan for at least a generation. But then the United States invaded, and a new generation of Afghan women professionals sided with the new invaders to try to win rights for women. Their dream too has ended in collaboration, shame and blood. Some were careerists, of course, mouthing platitudes in exchange for funding. But many others were motivated by an honest and selfless dream. Their failure is tragic.

Stereotypes and Confusions

Outside Afghanistan, there is a great deal of confusion about stereotypes of the Taliban elaborated over the last twenty-five years. But think carefully when you hear the stereotypes that they are feudal, brutal and primitive. These are people with laptops, who have been negotiating with the Americans in Qatar for the last fourteen years.

The Taliban are not the product of medieval times. They are the product of some of the worst times of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. If they look backward in some ways to an imagined better time, that is not surprising. But they have been moulded by life under aerial bombardment, refugee camps, communism, the War of Terror, enhanced interrogation, climate change, internet politics and the spiralling inequality of neoliberalism. They live, like everyone else, now.

Their roots in a tribal society can also be confusing. But as Richard Tapper has argued, tribes are not atavistic institutions. They are the way that peasants in this part of the world organise their entanglement with the state. And the history of Afghanistan has never been simply a matter of competing ethnic groups, but rather of complex alliances across groups and divisions within groups.[8]

There is a set of prejudices on the left which incline some people to ask how the Taliban could be on the side of the poor and anti-imperialist if they are not “progressive”. Leave aside for the moment that the word progressive means little. Of course the Taliban are hostile to socialism and communism. They themselves, or their parents or grandparents, were killed and tortured by socialists and communists. Moreover, any movement that has fought a twenty-year guerrilla war and defeated a great empire is anti-imperialist, or words have no meaning.

Reality is what it is. The Taliban are a movement of poor peasants, against an imperial occupation, deeply misogynist, supported by many women, sometimes racist and sectarian, and sometimes not. That’s a bundle of contradictions produced by history.

Another source of confusion is the class politics of the Taliban. How can they be on the side of the poor, as they obviously are, and yet so bitterly opposed to socialism? The answer is that the experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class. But it did not change the reality of class. No one has ever built a mass movement among poor peasants that took power without being seen as on the side of the poor.

The Taliban talk not in the language of class, but in the language of justice and corruption. Those words describe the same side.

None of this means that the Taliban will necessarily rule in the interests of the poor. We have seen enough peasant revolts come to power in the last century and more, only to become governments by urban elites. And none of this should distract from the truth that the Taliban intend to be dictators, not democrats.

A Historic Change in America

The fall of Kabul marks a decisive defeat for American power around the world. But it also marks, or makes clear, a deep turning away from the American empire among Americans.

One piece of evidence is the opinion polls. In 2001, right after 9/11, between 85% and 90% of Americans approved of the invasion of Afghanistan. The numbers have been dropping steadily. Last month, 62% of Americans approved of Biden’s plan for total withdrawal, and 29% were opposed.

This rejection of the war is common on both the right and the left. The working class base of the Republican Party and Trump are against foreign wars. Many soldiers and military families come from the rural areas and the south where Trump is strong. They are against any more wars, for it is they and those they loved who served, died and were wounded.

Right wing patriotism in America now is pro-military, but that means pro-soldier, not pro-war. When they say ‘Make America Great Again’, they mean that America is not great now for Americans, not that the US should be more engaged in the world.

Among Democrats, too, the working class base is against the wars.

There are people who support further military intervention. They are the Obama democrats, the Romney republicans, the generals, many liberal and conservative professionals, and almost everyone in the Washington elite. But the American people as a whole, and especially the working class, black, brown and white, have turned against the American Empire.

After the fall of Saigon, the American government was unable to launch major military interventions for the next fifteen years. It may well be longer after the fall of Kabul.

The International Consequences

Since 1918, 103 years ago, the United States has been the most powerful nation in the world. There have been competing powers – first Germany, then the Soviet Union and now China. But the US has been dominant. That ‘American Century’ is now coming to an end.

The long-term reason is the economic rise of China and the relative economic decline of the United States. But the covid pandemic and the Afghan defeat make the last two years a turning point.

The covid pandemic has revealed the institutional incompetence of the ruling class, and the government, of the United States. The system has failed to protect the people. This chaotic and shameful failure is obvious to people around the world.

Then there’s Afghanistan. If you judge by expenditure and hardware the United States is overwhelmingly the dominant military power globally. That power has been defeated by poor people in sandals in a small country who have nothing but endurance and courage.

The Taliban victory will also give heart to Islamists of many different sorts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Mali. But it will be true more widely than that.

Both the covid failure and the Afghan defeat will reduce the soft power of the US. But Afghanistan is also a defeat for hard power. The strength of the informal empire of the United States has relied for a century on three different pillars. One is being the largest economy in the world, and domination of the global financial system. The second is a reputation in many quarters for democracy, competence and cultural leadership. The third was that if soft power failed, the United States would invade to support dictatorships and punish its enemies.

That military power is gone now. No government will believe that the US can rescue them from a foreign invader, or from their own people. Drone killings will continue and cause great suffering. But nowhere will drones on their own be militarily decisive.

This is the beginning of the end of the American century.

What Happens Now?

No one knows what will happen in Afghanistan in the next few years. But we can identify some of the pressures.

First, and most hopeful, is the deep longing for peace in the hearts of Afghans. They have now lived through forty-three years of war. Think how only five or ten years of civil war and invasion have scarred so many countries. Now think of forty-three years.

Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar, the three most important cities, have all fallen without any violence. This is because the Taliban, as they keep saying, want a country at peace, and they do not want revenge. But it is also because the people who do not support, indeed those who hate the Taliban, also chose not to fight.

The Taliban leaders are clearly aware they must deliver peace.

For that it is also essential that the Taliban continue to deliver fair justice. Their record is good. But the temptations and pressures of government have corrupted many social movements in many countries before them.

Economic collapse is also quite possible. Afghanistan is a poor and arid country, where less than 5% of the land can be farmed. In the last twenty years the cities have swelled immensely. That growth has been dependent on money flowing from the occupation, and to a lesser extent money from growing opium. Without very substantial foreign aid from somewhere, economic collapse will threaten.

Because the Taliban know this, they have been explicitly offering the United States a deal. The Americans will give aid, and in return the Taliban will not provide a home for terrorists who could launch attacks like 9/11. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have accepted this deal. But it is not at all clear that the US will keep that promise.

Indeed, something worse is entirely possible. Previous US administrations have punished Iraq, Iran, Cuba and Vietnam for their defiance with long running and destructive economic sanctions. There will be many voices raised in the US for such sanctions, to starve Afghan children in the name of human rights.

Then there is the threat of international meddling, of different powers supporting different political or ethnic forces inside Afghanistan. The United States, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia and Uzbekistan will all be tempted. It has happened before, and in a situation of economic collapse it could provoke proxy wars.

For the moment, though, the governments of Iran, Russia and Pakistan clearly want peace in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have also promised not to rule with cruelty. That is easier said than done. Confronted with families who have amassed great fortunes through corruption and crime, what do you think the poor soldiers from the villages will want to do?

And then there is climate. In 1971 a drought and famine across the north and center devastated flocks, crops and lives. It was the first sign of the effects of climate change on the region, which has brought further droughts over the last fifty years. Over the medium and long term, farming and herding will become more precarious.[9]

All these dangers are real. But the often insightful security expert Antonio Giustozzi is in touch with the thinking among both the Taliban and foreign governments and the Taliban. His article in The Guardian on August 16 was hopeful. He ended it:

Since most of the neighbouring countries want stability in Afghanistan, at least for the time being any fissures in the new coalition government are unlikely to be exploited by external actors to create rifts. Similarly, the 2021 losers will struggle to find anybody willing or able to support them in starting some kind of resistance. As long as the new coalition government includes key allies of its neighbours, this is the beginning of a new phase in the history of Afghanistan.[10]

What Can You Do? Welcome Refugees.

Many people in the West now are asking, “What can we do to help Afghan women?” Sometimes this question assumes that most Afghan women oppose the Taliban, and most Afghan men support them. This is nonsense. It is almost impossible to imagine the kind of society in which that would be true.

But there is a narrower question here. Specifically, how can they help Afghan feminists?

This is a valid and decent question. The answer is to organize to buy them airplane tickets and give them refuge in Europe and North America.

But it is not just feminists who will need asylum. Tens of thousands of people who worked for the occupation are desperate for asylum, with their families. So are larger numbers of people who worked for the Afghan government.

Some of these people are admirable, some are corrupt monsters, many lie in between, and many are just children. But there is a moral imperative here. The United States and the NATO countries have created immense suffering for twenty years. The least, the very least, they should do it rescue the people whose lives they have wrecked.

There is another moral issue here too. What many Afghans have learned in the last forty years has also been clear in the last decade of the torment of Syria. It is all too easy to understand the accidents of background and personal history which lead people to do the things they do. Humility compels us to look at the young communist woman, the educated feminist working for an NGO, the suicide bomber, the American marine, the village mullah, the Taliban fighter, the bereaved mother of a child killed by American bombs, the Sikh money changer, the policeman, the poor farmer growing opium, and to say, there but for the grace of God go I.

The failure of the American and British governments to rescue the people who worked for them has been both shameful and revealing. It is not really a failure, but a choice. Racism against immigration has weighed more strongly with Johnson and Biden than the debts of humanity.

Campaigns to welcome Afghans are still possible. Of course such a strong moral argument will come up against racism and Islamophobia at every turn. But in the last week the governments of Germany and Netherlands have both suspended any deportations of Afghans.

Every politician, anywhere, who speaks in support of Afghan women must be asked, again and again, to open the borders to all Afghans.

And then there is what might happen to the Hazaras. As we have said, the Taliban have stopped being simply a Pushtun movement and have gone national, recruiting many Tajiks and Uzbeks. And also, they say, some Hazaras. But not many.

The Hazaras are the people who traditionally lived in the central mountains. Many also migrated to cities like Mazar and Kabul, where they worked as porters and in other low paid jobs. They are about 15% of the Afghan population. The roots of enmity between Pushtuns and Hazaras lie partly in long standing disputes over land and rights to grazing.

But more recently it also matters a good deal that Hazaras are Shias, and almost all other Afghans are Sunnis.

The bitter conflicts between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq have led to a split in the militant Islamist tradition. This split is complicated, but important, and needs a bit of explanation.

In both Iraq and in Syria the Islamic State have committed massacres against Shias, just as Shia militias have massacred Sunnis in both countries.

The more traditional Al Qaeda networks have remained staunchly opposed to attacking Shias and argued for solidarity between Muslims. People often point out that Osama Bin Laden’s mother was herself a Shia – actually an Alawite from Syria. But the necessity of unity has been more important. This was the main issue in the split between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In Afghanistan the Taliban have also argued strongly for Islamic unity. The sexual exploitation of women by Islamic State is also deeply repugnant to Taliban values, which are deeply sexist but puritanical and modest. For many years the Afghan Taliban have been consistent in their public condemnation of all terror attacks on Shias, Christians and Sikhs.

Yet those attacks happen. The ideas of Islamic State have had a particular influence on the Pakistani Taliban. The Afghan Taliban are an organization. The Pakistani Taliban are a looser network, not controlled by the Afghans. They have carried out repeated bombings against Shias and Christians in Pakistan.

It is Islamic State and the Haqqani network who have carried out the recent racist terror bombings of Hazaras and Sikhs in Kabul. The Taliban leadership have condemned all those attacks.

But the situation is in flux. Islamic State in Afghanistan is a minority breakaway from the Taliban, largely based in Ningrahar province in the east. They are bitterly anti-Shia. So are the Haqqani network, a long-standing mujahedin group largely controlled by Pakistani military intelligence. Yet in the present mix, the Haqqani network have been integrated into the Taliban organization, and their leader is one of the leaders of the Taliban.

But no one can be sure what the future holds. In 1995 an uprising of Hazara workers in Mazar prevented the Taliban gaining control of the north. But Hazara traditions of resistance go much deeper and further back than that.

Hazara refugees in neighboring countries may also be in danger now. The government of Iran are allying with the Taliban, and begging them to be peaceful. They are doing this because there are about three million Afghan refugees already in Iran. Most of them have been there for years, most are poor urban workers and their families, and the majority are Hazaras. Recently the Iranian government, in desperate economic straights themselves, have begun deporting Afghans back to Afghanistan.

There are about a million Hazara refugees in Pakistan too. In the region around Quetta more than 5,000 of them have been killed in sectarian assassinations and massacres in the last few years. The Pakistani police and army do nothing. Given the long support of the Pakistani army and intelligence for the Afghan Taliban, those people will be at greater risk right now.

What should you do, outside Afghanistan? Like most Afghans, pray for peace. And join protests for open borders.

We will leave the last word to Graham Knight. His son, Sergeant Ben Knight of the British Royal Air Force, was killed in Afghanistan in 2006. This week Graham Knight told the Press Association the UK government should have moved quickly to rescue civilians:

 “We’re not surprised that the Taliban have taken over because as soon as the Americans and the British said they were going to leave, we knew this was going to happen. The Taliban made their intent very clear that, as soon as we went out, they would move in.

As for whether people’s lives were lost through a war that wasn’t winnable, I think they were. I think the problem was we were fighting people that were native to the country. We weren’t fighting terrorists, we were fighting people who actually lived there and didn’t like us being there.” [11]

Republished with permission from Anne Bonny Pirate 

REFERENCES

Fluri, Jennifer L. and Rachel Lehr. 2017. The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements. Athens OH: University of Georgia Press.

Giustozzi, Antonio. 2007. Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. London: Hurst.

—, ed. 2009. Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field. London: Hurst.

—, 2021. ‘The Taliban have retaken Afghanistan – this time, how will they rule it?’ The Guardian, August 16.

Gregory, Thomas. 2011. ‘Rescuing the Women of Afghanistan: Gender, Agency and the Politics of Intelligibility.’University of Manchester PhD thesis.

Hirschkind, Charles and Saba Mahmood. 2002. ‘Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency.’ Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2): 339-354.  

Hughes, Dana. 2012. ‘The First Ladies Club: Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush for the Women of Afghanistan.’ ABC News, March 21.

Jalalzai, Zubeda and David Jefferess, eds. 2011. Globalizing Afghanistan: Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building. Durham: Duke University Press.

Klaits, A. & G. Gulmanadova-Klaits. 2005. Love and War in Afghanistan, New York: Seven Stories.

Kolhatkar, Sonali and James Ingalls. 200. Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. New York: Seven Stories.

Lindisfarne, Nancy. 2002a. ‘Gendering the Afghan War.’ Eclipse: The Anti-War Review, 4: 2-3.

—. 2002b. ‘Starting from Below: Fieldwork. Gender and Imperialism Now.’ Critique of Anthropology, 22(4): 403-423, and in Armbruster and Laerke, 23-44.

—. 2012. ‘Exceptional Pashtuns?’ Class Politics, Imperialism and Historiography.’ In Marsden and Hopkins.

Lindisfarne, Nancy and Jonathan Neale, 2015. ‘Oil Empires and Resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.’ Anne Bonny Pirate.

—. 2019. ‘Oil, Heat and Climate Jobs in the MENA Region.’ In Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region: The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation, edited by Hamid Pouran and Hassan Hakimian, 72-94. London: Ginko.

Manchanda, Nivi. 2020. Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marsden, Magnus and Benjamin Hopkins, eds. 2012. Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. London: Hurst.

Mihailovič, Konstantin. 1975. Memoirs of a Janissary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Mount, Ferdinand. 2008. Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes. London: Bloomsbury.

Mousavi, Sayed Askar, 1998. The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study. London: Curzon. 

Neale, Jonathan. 1981. ‘The Afghan Tragedy.’ International Socialism, 12: 1-32.

—. 1988. ‘Afghanistan: The Horse Changes Riders,’ Capital and Class, 35: 34-48.

—. 2002. ‘The Long Torment of Afghanistan.’ International Socialism 93: 31-59.

—. 2008. ‘Afghanistan: The Case Against “the Good War”.’ International Socialism, 120: 31-60. 

Nojumi, Neamatollah. 2002. The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave.

Rico, Johnny. 2007. Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America. New York: Presidio.

Tapper (Lindisfarne), Nancy. 1991. Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tapper, Richard, ed. 1983. The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm.

Tapper, Richard, with Nancy Lindisfarne. 2020. Afghan Village Voices: Stories from a Tribal Community. London: I.B. Tauris.

The Guardian, 2021. ‘Afghanistan Live News.’ August 16.

Ward, Lucy, 2001. ‘Leader’s Wives Join Propaganda War.’ The Guardian, Nov 17.

Zaeef, Abdul, 2010. My Life with the Taliban. London: Hirst.

Zilizer, Barbie. 2005. ‘Death in Wartime: Photographs and the ‘Other War’ in Afghanistan.’ The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 10(3): 26-55.

[1] See especially Nancy Tapper (Lindisfarne), 1991; Lindisfarne, 2002a, 2002b and 2012; Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015; Neale, 1981, 1988, 2002 and 2008; Richard Tapper with Lindisfarne, 2020.

[2] Giustozzi, 2007 and 2009 are especially useful.

[3] On the class basis of the Taliban, see Lindisfarne, 2012, and many chapters by other authors in Marsden and Hopkins, 2012. And see Moussavi, 1998; Nojumi, 2002; Giustozzi, 2008 and 2009; Zareef, 2010.

[4] Zilizer, 2005.

[5] There is a vast literature on saving Afghan women. See Gregory, 2011; Lindisfarne, 2002a; Hirschkind and Mahmood, 2002; Kolhatkar and Ingalls, 2006; Jalalzai and Jefferess,2011; Fluri and Lehr, 2017; Manchanda, 2020.

[6] Ward, 2001.

[7] Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015

[8] Richard Tapper, 1983.

[9] For the drought in 1971, see Tapper and Lindisfarne, 2020. For more recent climate change, see Lindisfarne and Neale, 2019.

[10] Giustozzi, 2021.

[11] The Guardian, 2021.

The post Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation appeared first on SabrangIndia.

“Why are Indian muslims not condemning Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan?” This question is being posed all over social media for the second day running. Putting the onus on Indian Muslims for the actions of any Muslim, especialy Islamic groups such as the Taliban, anywhere in the world is not new, however, this time it has taken on a fresh new avatar. There has not really been an official condemnation from the Indian government of the Taliban’s takeover of control in Afghanistan. The sole “observation” rather than an outright “condemnation” from the right wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that backs the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came from Ram Madhav, member of the RSS’ National Executive, who also who served as the National General Secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He had said, “India needs to quickly reevaluate the situation with Taliban’s takeover of Kabul impending. We couldn’t prevent it but we must be prepared to prevent its fallout on our interests …”

India needs to quickly reevaluate d situation with Taliban’s takeover of Kabul impending. We couldn’t prevent it but we must be prepared to prevent its fallout on our interests … https://t.co/G0dMsIS3OE

— Ram Madhav (@rammadhav_rss) August 15, 2021

Soon, he was pointing towards Pakistan Tweeting, “Taliban hs over 30K mercenaries trained in Pak by ISI. In power in Kabul, Taliban leadership wl now deploy them ‘elsewhere’ wid d help of mentor Pak. India shud brace up for serious security challenges.” (sic)

Taliban hs over 30K mercenaries trained in Pak by ISI. In power in Kabul, Taliban leadership wl now deploy them ‘elsewhere’ wid d help of mentor Pak. India shud brace up for serious security challenges. Taliban may eventually consume Pak n China 2, but immediate threat is 4 India

— Ram Madhav (@rammadhav_rss) August 16, 2021

Rajya Sabha MP, Subramanian Swamy, also reminded his followers that India shared a border with Afghanistan in PoK, and so should “not be pompous about US withdrawal” adding that “India has been seen as weak before China (Depsang since 2013 and in other parts of Ladakh since April 2020) and now weak before Taliban. This is bad for our national integrity and image.”

India has been seen as weak before China (Depsang since 2013 and in other parts of Ladakh since April 2020) and now weak before Taliban. This is bad for our national integrity and image

— Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) August 17, 2021

On cue, a section of the media, led by News Nation television channel’s Consulting Editor Deepak Chaurasia, who has a reputation of peddling communal hate had begun whipping up a voice against Afghan Muslims, saying, “Aghani Muslims are seeking refuge in India to save their lives” and taunting Indians, for “creating a false atmosphere of fear”. He is of course hinting at those who raise their voices on the ongoing attacks against Muslims in India.

अफ़ग़ानिस्तानी मुसलमान अपनी जान बचाने के लिए भारत में पनाह माँग रहे हैं। अब बताओ इस देश में रहकर डर का झूठा माहौल बनाने वालों। शर्म बची है ? #AfghanWomen #AfghanistanBurning #kabulairport

— Deepak Chaurasia (@DChaurasia2312) August 17, 2021

In December 2020, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) filed a complaint with the News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA) in connection with Chaurasia’s highly communal show called Conversion Jihad. Here Chaurasia had alleged forceful conversion of Hindus by Muslims on the television news channel, News Nation. Deepak Chaurasia, who was the anchor of the show, openly claimed that there is a conspiracy by ‘one gang’ to do away with all ‘Hindus of Hindustan’. He, as the host, encouraged hate speech against Muslims by calling anti-minority propagandists to his shows. He continues to follow this pattern.

However, now he was outdone by ABP news, which then went way ahead and started tagging its usual coverage of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath’s announcement of a proposed commando training center of  the Anti-Terrorist Squad in Deoband, with #afghanistan crisis, #Taliban and #Deoband. This was a way to not only ride the trend wave, but also start the ‘news’ that the Darul Uloom Deoband, an Islamic seminary, was somehow connected to the Taliban. According to ABP news, “There is hardly any corner of the world where there are no Muslims who have studied from here”… and that the proposed “center will help in preventing Muslims of Western UP from becoming radicalised.”

The report on its website (https://www.abplive.com/news/india/taliban-crisis-uttar-pradesh-yogi-government-will-train-ats-commando-in-deoband-ann-1955125) added that “some Hindu organisations have also been accusing Darul Uloom of Deoband of having links with terrorists”.  

Shalabh Mani Tripathi, advisor to the UP CM, seems to agree.

तालीबान की बर्बरता के बीच यूपी की खबर भी सुनिए,योगीजी ने तत्काल प्रभाव से ‘देवबंद’ में ATS कमांडो सेंटर खोलने का निर्णय लिया है,युद्धस्तर पर काम शुरू भी हो गया है,प्रदेश भर से चुने हुए करीब डेढ दर्जन तेज तर्रार एटीएस अफसरों की यहां तैनाती होगी। pic.twitter.com/cBcFqwEtYK

— Shalabh Mani Tripathi (@shalabhmani) August 17, 2021

तालीबान की बर्बरता के बीच यूपी की खबर भी सुनिए,योगीजी ने तत्काल प्रभाव से ‘देवबंद’ में ATS कमांडो सेंटर खोलने का निर्णय लिया है,युद्धस्तर पर काम शुरू भी हो गया है,प्रदेश भर से चुने हुए करीब डेढ दर्जन तेज तर्रार एटीएस अफसरों की यहां तैनाती होगी। pic.twitter.com/cBcFqwEtYK

— Shalabh Mani Tripathi (@shalabhmani) August 17, 2021

e-Emergency X-Misc Visa

Meanwhile, India announced a new category of electronic visa called “e-Emergency X-Misc Visa” for Afghan citizens to enter India. However the six month visas which will now be given irrespective of religion, will be scrutinised and decided in Delhi after a “security review of the applicant will be done to check credentials”. This too had the usual bigots questioning why Muslims needed to be given refuge in India.

The visa listed at number 6 here: https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html but was not yet live at the time of publishing this report. 

On emergency e visas announced to Afghans by India

–Security angle will be kept on mind

–Those who will be given visas will be given for 6 months

–Visas will be given irrespective of religion https://t.co/5FjkzNAgeR

— Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) August 17, 2021

Here is a must read analysis from 1998 by SabrangIndia co-founder and human rights defender Teesta Setalvad titled Hell on Earth, that tracks the developments as they happened in Afghanistan, from April 1992. It showcases how first the Mujahedeens, and then the Taliban have misappropriated ‘Islam’ to serve theor own agendas, and how for hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghanis, women in particular, this meant an unending nightmare of terror and trauma. 

Related:

Gov’t will help Afghanistan’s Sikhs and Hindus to come to India: MEA
Afghan crisis: Women, activists demand immediate ceasefire, protection for civilians
Afghanistan Crisis: What is India’s plan of action?
Afghan President flees as Taliban enters Kabul

The post Will Taliban takeover of Afghanistan be used to attack Indian Muslims? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Human potential is destroyed by a wealth of factors derived directly or indirectly from the existing power relations.  Under early capitalism, it was destroyed by draconian labor conditions:  long hours, long days, in dangerous and difficult conditions.  I think of my eldest aunt, Eva, who could barely read and write because she went to work at the age of 13 and stayed home for years before that helping her mother with the household chores involved in raising 11 children.There was no doubt in my mind that my aunt was born with the potential to be an artist of some sort.  Given a free moment she would paint and color.  What is true of her is true of so many workers in general and child laborers in particular, all around the world today.

I think of all the people I know who might have been artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, poets, great doctors or scholar, but who chose another line of work because it was more lucrative.   What we do for money!  We sell not only our lives by the hour or day or year, but the possibility of becoming what it is we truly are.  I think of all the potential lost and what the loss of that potential has meant not only to individuals, but to our species.

I think of Srinivasa Ramanujan, writing out his formulations on the streets which themselves were controlled by the British.  I think of the racism he suffered and how, had it not it not been for G.H. Hardy, who recognized his extraordinary genius and arranged for him to go to Cambridge, he would have been just another Indian whose potential would have gone unnoticed and unrealized.   If it had note been for Hardy, Ramanujan and his potential would have been destroyed under the boots of British rule and racism.  I think of him and cry, not out of pity, but because I am so moved by his achievements.

I think of Momina often, and when I do, tears always come to my eyes.  You see, her potential was destroyed not only by poverty, or by racism, or by American imperialism, but also and primarily by sexism.

I have been for most of my adult life, a committed feminist.  In America, I had worked to establish battered women’s shelters, change police attitudes towards domestic violence, and realign attitudes on rape victims.  I had fought for reproductive rights.  And so, some ten years ago when I first came to Russia, I heard about a program which taught English to Afghan girls, and immediately signed up as a volunteer teacher.  Those were the days when the Taliban was bombing schools and throwing acid in girls’ faces for going to school.  Thus, these internet schools, sometimes hidden and secret, were set up to help them get their educations.  My first student, and, as it turned out, my last, would be Momina.  Momina wasn’t her real name, it was the name she had chosen for herself…the way in which she had redefined herself.

She was both bright and hardworking.  If she made a grammatical error, I would only have to correct in once; she never made the same mistake twice.  Over the course of the six years I taught her, her English improved dramatically.  By the fourth year we were carrying on conversations about evolution, which interested her greatly, as well as history and genetics.  She had a clear and present interest in these areas.

As she became fluent and we talked to each other more and more, I began to learn about her life.  At times I was quite ashamed of myself for viewing her life from my Western perspective.  I remember the time I asked her about her bedroom.  Of course, she had no bedroom.  She, her parents, her two brothers and their wives and children, along with her two sisters, lived in a two-room house.  She answered me that they just laid down on the floor where they could and slept.  When I asked what her mother cooked, the answer was pretty much always the same,  homemade noodles of one sort or another.  The males in the family supported the family by operating a small bicycle repair business.  However, as she informed me, it was difficult for them to go to work regularly.  In the Spring there was the Taliban offensive during which everyone stayed home.  If one of the children were sick and had to be taken to the clinic, the men had to take them as the women were not allowed out of the house.

I chided her once for being quite late to class and she told me that there had been a great rain and the streets of Kabul had been so flooded, she had to come to the school indirectly.  When she had done so

she had been followed by a man who “said things to her.”  That is all she would say, and I realized then how very brave she and the other girls were; more than that, how much it meant to them to get an education.

She told me how her mother did not ask her to do any housework because she wanted her to be able to do her schoolwork.  She told me how her brothers constantly asked their father why he was allowing her to study English when, after all, she would only get married soon.  She laughed when she told me how her father had replied to them: “She is mine not yours.”

Her brothers were right though. After almost six years of studying with me, Momina came to class and cried to me; she who I had never heard cry before, sobbed.  She was nearly sixteen and they were arranging her marriage.  I didn’t know what to say.  The first family who wanted Momina to be married to their son lived in Canada.   The mother flew from there to Kabul to make the arrangements.  But Momina would not, could not, leave her family and so the offer of marriage was declined.  There were others, all of whom Momina rejected.  And finally, there was the last one, and Momina’s family would accept no rejection.  He owned a small business in Kabul.  He was gentle and he was not violent.  Moreover, he had promised that he would allow her to continue her education.  On this basis, Momina’s mother told her she would marry him. 

The arrangements were made, they became engaged….and all this while Momina cried to me, and I could offer her no comfort, no escape.
Once married, Momina’s classes with me were few and far in between.  She lived far away from where the school was located.  But she came and she cried.  Her husband had told her he would support her education only if she became a medical professional.  Gone were her dreams of becoming a teacher.  It took only a few months for her to become pregnant, and then Momina’s classes came to a halt.  I still heard from her occasionally, she always cried.  Her pregnancy brought her no joy.  I told her she would be happy when her child was born.  She was not.  Her son was born with a defect, and this tortured her because she blamed herself as she had cried so much during the pregnancy.  I heard from her one last time, when her husband urged her to call me and ask me for money.

I told the director of the program that I would take no more students.  When she asked me why, I older her that I could not give these young women the false hope that they would realize their potential knowing that they would not.   I could not participate in the deception that I, or America, or time, could save them from the inevitableness of their lives.  I had committed the sin of encouraging them to believe that they could realize their potential when, in fact, they could not.

In Afghanistan the Taliban still reign, sexism still holds sway over the lives of women….and that means that the great sin of the destruction of human potential is still being committed.

Mary Metzger is a 74 year old semi retired teacher. She did her undergraduate work at S.U.N.Y. Old Westbury and her graduate work In Dialectics under Bertell Ollman at New York University. She has taught numerous subjects, from Public Sector Labor Relations to Philosophy of Science, to many different levels of students from the very young to Ph.D. candidates, in many different institutions and countries from Afghanistan to Russia. She has been living in Russia for the past 12 years where she focuses on research in the Philosophy of Science and History of the Dialectic, and writes primarily for Countercurrents. She is the mother of three, the grandmother of five, and the great grandmother of two.

Courtesy: Counter Currents

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The United States and the Taliban may be nearing an agreement to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan after more than 17 years of conflict.

When U.S. troops go home, ethnic militias will likely gain strength. REUTERS/Parwiz

In return, the Taliban would commit to refusing access to anti-American organizations such as al-Qaida on its territory.
How did we get to this point – and what will be the consequences of such an agreement?

How did we get here?

As a longtime scholar of Afghanistan’s wars and conflict dynamics, I suggest beginning with a bit of history.

The current conflict began when the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11.

It was on Afghan soil that Osama bin Laden hatched the plot to attack the U.S. The Taliban, the de facto rulers of much of Afghanistan in the wake of a bloody civil war, had given bin Laden and his supporters shelter.

Two months into the U.S. invasion, Taliban state institutions and defensive positions crumbled and the United States formed new state institutions led by Afghans who had fought the Taliban. The U.S. maintained a limited force to fight and capture al-Qaida and Taliban leaders but otherwise invested little in the Afghan economy or society.

It took the Taliban four years to reconstitute itself as an effective force of insurgents to fight the U.S. and the Afghan government, and they became stronger every year after 2004. As I explain in my research, the United States and the coalition of 42 countries it formed to defeat the resurgent Taliban was poorly organized, abusive and mismanaged.

Since 2001, the U.S.-led coalition has spent US$1 trillion dollars and committed a peak of 140,000 troops and 100,000 contractors to an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the Taliban. More than 5,000 American soldiers and contractors were killed.

Today, a U.S. force of 14,000 troops and massive U.S. Airforce assets are helping maintain the defensive positions of an Afghan government that is widely considered as one of the most corrupt in the world.

The Taliban are making territorial gains and killing hundreds of regime troops each month, and feel that they are on the cusp of victory.
Militias that recruit from the Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek minorities have rearmed in anticipation of the collapse of the regime in Kabul and fear of a coming civil war with the mostly Pushtun Taliban. Afghanistan is nearing an endgame.

What it means for the Taliban

An agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. would be an impressive accomplishment for the Taliban. From their perspective, it would be their reward for fighting the world’s strongest military power to a stalemate.

They already were rewarded by getting to negotiate directly with the United States, as they have always requested, instead of the Afghan regime which they despise. If the negotiations are successful, they would also be getting precisely what they asked for: an American withdrawal.

In return, they are making a commitment to do something they would likely have done anyway. Al-Qaida’s attack on the U.S. caused the Taliban to lose control of Afghanistan for years. They are not likely to risk having to pay that cost again once they regain control of Kabul, even if they don’t sign an agreement.

What it means for US

Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani meets U.S. Vice President Mike Pence in Munich, Germany, Feb. 16, 2019. REUTERS/Michael Dalder

Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani meets U.S. Vice President Mike Pence in Munich, Germany, Feb. 16, 2019. REUTERS/Michael Dalder
There is little hope for an outright U.S. victory over the Taliban at this point.

The remaining force of 14,000 U.S. troops is mostly meant to shore up Afghan state defenses. It is too small to reverse momentum on the battlefield. An agreement and withdrawal would therefore be attractive for those who value less military spending and stress on the military, including General John Nicholson, the previous commander of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The agreement, however, could undermine U.S. reputation in ways big and small. The Obama and Trump administrations never reversed a 2002 Bush executive order that added the Taliban to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, but they have simultaneously pleaded with them to negotiate in spite of claims that Washington does not negotiate with terrorists.

It also signals U.S. weakness and inability to fight a dedicated force of insurgents. Militants elsewhere, including Islamic State leaders, could find this lesson instructive. I believe such an agreement may well be remembered as a turning point in America’s ability to successfully project its military power around the Muslim world.

An agreement could also signal that the U.S. is an unreliable ally that abandons those who side with it. The United States is involved in numerous conflicts worldwide in places as diverse as Syria and Somalia, and many of its local allies would logically recalculate their own commitments after witnessing a U.S. disengagement from Afghanistan.

What happens to the state

As I describe in my book “Organizations at War in Afghanistan,” governments tend to unravel quickly in Afghanistan when foreign support, both military and financial, ceases.

This is precisely what happened after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and stopped their support to the Najib regime in the early 1990s. As I report in greater detail in my book, different regime militias and military units either disintegrated, joined their erstwhile Mujahideen opponents or became independent militias.

Similarly, today’s Afghan state officials at all levels have long hedged their bets by maintaining ties with the Taliban, their nominal opponents and minority militias. If history is any indication, we can expect that entire agencies and units will either fragment or collectively join any of several strongman-led ethnic militias when the rewards of working for the regime stop outweighing the risks of facing the Taliban. Some may even defect to the Taliban. This is expected behavior in dangerous environments such as Afghanistan, where everyone is expected to have a hedging strategy for survival.

Once the state gets pulled in all directions, Afghanistan will likely degenerate into a civil war very similar to the one that the United States interrupted when it invaded in late 2001. Other countries, including Russia, Iran and India will choose sides to back. I estimate that the Taliban, with their dedicated Pakistani and Arab Gulf backers will win that conflict, just like they almost did in 2001. We may very well reach a point where we see the 17-year American occupation as merely a futile, bloody and costly interruption of the Afghan civil war.

I consider a U.S.-Taliban agreement to be no more than a face-saving measure to conclude a failed and costly American military intervention. If there is a useful lesson to be learned from this misadventure, it is that leaders of even the world’s mightiest military power need to reconsider the merits of a militarized foreign policy in the Muslim world. U.S. military interventions are stoking resentment and inflaming a perpetual transnational insurgency across Muslim countries. If it doesn’t change its course, the U.S. may very well suffer more defeats such as the one in Afghanistan and will cause even more hurt and damage in other countries along the way.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Image: U.S. soldiers near Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, a few months after President Obama formally declared the war in Afghanistan over. (Photo: U.S. Department of Defense/cc)

'15 years later, lives lost, billions spent…'

U.S. soldiers near Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, a few months after President Obama formally declared the war in Afghanistan over. (Photo: U.S. Department of Defense/cc)
Despite a vow to withdraw thousands of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2017, President Barack Obama this week veered the opposite direction, widening the U.S. military's role in the entrenched, 15-years-long conflict.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday evening that the Obama administration's new measures "authorize U.S. troops, stationed in Afghanistan on a dual training and counterterrorism mission, to begin accompanying conventional local forces on the battlefield in a way that now occurs only with elite Afghan forces."

On Friday, AP noted that the new authorization will also "expand the military's authority to conduct airstrikes against the Taliban."

This week's expansion of the war in Afghanistan follows Obama's decision in September to send Special Forces back into combat in the war-torn nation to fight the re-emergence of the Taliban—less than a year after the president declared the war in Afghanistan over. (The United States also continues to unleash civilian-killing drone strikes on the beleaguered Afghan population.)

An anonymous senior Defense official attempted to defend the decision from critics in an interview with the Post, saying that Obama's authorizations will "maximize the use and effectiveness of our troops supporting the Afghan forces in those select instances in which their engagement can enable strategic effects on the battlefield."

"How widely commanders apply the 'strategic effect' measure will determine the extent to which the authorities thrust the United States back into operations like those it conducted before Obama ended formal combat operations at the close of 2014," the newspaper noted.

Moreover, "it's not clear what effect a small force in Afghanistan, even with new operational authorities, can have in the country’s vast and complex battlefield," the Post wrote. "So far, 2016 has provided no sustained break, with heavy fighting in Helmand and a series of terrorist attacks in Kabul. Even after the United States conducted a strike that officials believe killed former Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in Pakistan, officials expect a punishing fighting season this summer."

Peace-minded progressives decried President Obama's decision and the never-ending war on Twitter:
 
Source: Common Dreams

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For the rest of the world the victims of the Afghan war remain nameless and faceless. Not for us in Afghanistan. I myself have mourned a number of such victims, including my own uncle, my father’s brother. Three weeks back there was yet another suicide blast which killed only the bomber and his accomplice. The suicide bomber was reportedly on his way to ambush German troops in the north of Afghanistan. He was being driven to the potential scene of action on motorbike by his accomplice. On their way they were asked to stop at a police check post. Instead of stopping, they attempted to escape and were fired at. The biker lost his balance and both fell, setting off the explosives packed into a suicide jacket. Both died on the spot. Either the suicide bomber or his accomplice was my cousin, Abdul Latif. He was 22.

When the incident was reported on television, hardly anybody in my family noticed the name Abdul Latif even if we knew that he sympathised with the Taliban and used to support suicide bombings. Since many bear the name Latif, we did not think it could be the Latif we knew. We only learnt of his death after his parents became suspicious when he did not return home for a week. Since he often went missing for a couple of days, his absence was not initially marked. But a weeklong absence was unusual.

When his father contacted the authorities, he was arrested and had to spend a night in the lock-up. "The police were angry that I did not tell them about my son’s plan to blow himself up," my uncle later told family members after his release had been secured through tribal connections. Though Latif’s parents knew where his sympathies lay, they were not ready to hand their son over to the authorities. After all, one hears about the torture techniques employed at the notorious detention centres run by Americans in Afghanistan. However, Latif’s family, particularly his mother, had begged him to end his association with the Taliban. He would never argue. His only answer was: "I am seeking paradise."

His strong conviction about entering paradise had been inculcated into his mind over a period of 12 years which he spent at a madrassa in Pakistan where our respective families had migrated to during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In practice, the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan were run by the mujahideen even if the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) officially managed their affairs. In these camps, the education of girls, music, television or any liberal pursuits were banned. Women had to wear a burkha. My father wanted me to go to school. RAWA, an Afghan women’s organisation, ran underground schools for girls as well as boys. This is how my family came into contact with RAWA. It was not just me, all my brothers enrolled at these schools too, as boys had no choice but to go to a madrassa. Over a period of time supporters of RAWA were able to set up an entire refugee camp of their own where fundamentalists had no influence. Life in this camp was in sharp contrast to the camps run by fundamentalists.

Latif was not born in a RAWA camp. He grew up in a camp under the jihadis’ control and attended a madrassa where the primers were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines. Ironically, these textbooks were developed under a USAID (United States Agency for International Development) grant to the University of Nebraska and its Centre for Afghanistan Studies in the early 1980s. This fact was brought to my notice during a visit to the USA soon after 9/11, by a friend who showed me a report in The Washington Post which said that USAID had spent $51 million on such "education programmes" in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. Latif was one of those who became lettered through such textbooks.

His death therefore stirred strange feelings in me, who, as a RAWA spokesperson, has been on the Taliban’s hit list during Taliban rule (and perhaps still am). It felt as if Latif himself had been a victim, a victim of US-sponsored intellectual terrorism perpetrated through textbooks issued from Nebraska University. Or perhaps I was saddened by a youthful death.

I thought constantly about Latif’s mother, who received only three bones to bury in our village’s sprawling graveyard. Since his death, I have been thinking that if Latif (and youth like him) had had the chance to go to a good school, he would never have had such suicidal ambitions. Readers may wonder why he did not go to a RAWA school. Because of the fear of fundamentalists and the threats his father received from them. His father was told by fundamentalists that if he tried to educate his children at coed RAWA schools, he would either face dangerous consequences or else have to leave the camp.

The words of Latif’s elder brother, who helps his father run a small shop, have also been constantly ringing in my ears. On hearing of Latif’s death, his elder brother said: "Good that he only killed himself. Think if he had been sent to explode himself where he would have killed dozens of civilians. Imagine the tragedy he would have wrought." I have been wondering, ever since I heard these words, how Afghan society has been so brutalised that we don’t even know whether to mourn or to celebrate the deaths of our dear ones.

Courtesy: www.makepakistanbetter.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, January 2010 Year 16    No.147/ Ethos

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