Afghanistan: Taliban, the West and the imperatives

REUTERS

The international community, and that essentially means western nations, have made it clear that their engagement with the Taliban in Doha is not to be construed as a recognition of the Islamist group’s political hold on Afghanistan. That position does not quite promise a solution to the problems the West sees as having arisen in Kabul following the takeover of the country by the Taliban in mid-August.

The self-evident truth is that for the first time in a very long time, it is Afghans, of course in the shape and form of the Taliban, who are today in control of their country. The old story of the country being hostage to Soviet hegemony between the late 1970s and 1980s now belongs in the past. Again, the Taliban, dominated as it was by al-Qaeda and in the looming shadow of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) before the Sept 11 attacks on the United States, has nearly faded from history. And with the sudden, one would say precipitate, withdrawal of US and Nato forces from the country in August and a resurgent Taliban, there is refreshingly an absence of foreign presence in Afghanistan at this point.

But, wait. Given that ISIL-K has claimed responsibility for the violence which has left hundreds dead in the country in the aftermath of the Biden decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, to what degree can the global community be reassured that Afghanistan is finally at peace, that the road ahead for it lies smooth and clear?

There can be little reason for complacency here, in the light of the path Afghanistan has taken or has been struggling to take, since August. The Taliban will certainly need to do more to convince the world that internal security will be ensured and that Afghanistan will be a safe place not only for its people but also for those --- diplomats, international agencies, and the media --- who choose to travel to Kabul and beyond. That is of course easier said than done, for the Afghan government led by the Taliban clearly does not have the resources it needs to guarantee security in the country.

With conditions being dire economically, with hunger threatening its people, the country is in obvious need of assistance from the global community. To be sure, the European Union has promised aid to the tune of $1bn that it says will be handled by development agencies and not by the Taliban. Trust is thus yet in deficit when dealing directly with the Taliban leadership. Given that honour is paramount in the lives of the Pashtun community -- and Pashtuns constitute the government operating in Kabul today -- one wonders if treating the government in such a cavalier manner might not backfire.

From the point of view of a large number of Asians, especially in nations geographically close to Afghanistan, the Taliban have been bending over backwards in their efforts to reassure the international community that they are a legitimate government capable of administering the country in a way at variance with the record they left behind 20 years ago. But, truth be told, the Taliban cannot be expected to govern to the satisfaction of the world without the resources they so badly require. And those resources are locked away in Washington, those billions of dollars that belong to Afghanistan but which the Biden administration refuses to release. That was the point the Taliban have been making in Doha, the clear argument being that without a lifting of sanctions on Afghanistan it will be a strenuous job bringing stability to the country.

There is little question that Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has done a fairly good job of convening a G-20 meeting on Afghanistan, the objective being to find a way out of the impasse which has grown around Afghanistan since August. The conference in Doha, involving the Taliban, the Americans and the European community was a reiteration of the basic point, which is that Afghanistan remains a question mark. And it remains that despite all the sympathy one has or might have for the Taliban at this point.

The question mark is for the Taliban leadership to erase through concrete action on the ground. While there is no question about the legitimacy the Taliban enjoy -- do not forget that the Taliban are not a foreign occupying power but an indigenous force -- there are very appropriate concerns about the modalities they mean to employ in administering the country. For one thing, they need to have an inclusive government in place. Not that the Taliban need to go for such a government, given that they are in sole authority over the country, but with the world’s attitude to the group being what it is and given too very proper concerns that go back to the sordid past of the Taliban, the men who have reclaimed their country must convince the global community that they aim to be different this time around. Abolishing the ministry of women’s affairs was a bad move and replacing it with another, the feudal-sounding ministry for the promotion of virtues and prevention of vice, was not a confidence-building measure. Additionally, clamping an embargo on women media practitioners -- think back to the brusque manner in which they were turned away from the doors of their organisations when they turned up for work after the Taliban gained control of Kabul -- certainly did not endear the Taliban to people around the world.

For another, if the Taliban mean to earn the respect of the world, they will be required to reassure the international community that girls will continue to have educational opportunities in Afghanistan and that women will be free to work in line with their professional calling without the state coming in to define moral parameters for them. Afghan women since the early 1970s, before and after Sardar Mohammad Daoud overthrew the monarchy and continuing to the times of Ashraf Ghani (barring the Taliban interregnum of 1996-2001), have played a major role in the socio-political development in the country. In recent years, Afghan women have served as eloquent lawmakers and have taken part in dialogue with the Taliban.

It is this legacy Taliban must not tamper with. It will be a tragedy if the government were to deploy the moral police to observe the movements of women. At the same time, another confidence-building measure will be for the Taliban all across the country not to insist on behavioural uniformity among the country’s male population, specifically through the provision of keeping beards in conformity with their medieval version of Islam.

When all this is said and done, it will be necessary for the Taliban regime to transform Afghanistan into a broad tent that can and will accommodate all its ethnic and religious groups. The Hazara community continues to bear the brunt of not just racial injustice but is also a regular target of unbridled Taliban cruelty as well as of forces such as ISIL-K. Ignoring Afghanistan’s diversity will not be helpful and indeed could well mean a slow but sure revival of the civil war which during the period of the Pakistan- and Reagan administration-backed Mujahideen devastated the country. A tolerant approach to politics, to groups the Taliban perceive as their enemies will be a boon for Afghans and will surely be a step toward rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. Afghanistan remains a broken country, which is an argument for the Taliban to convince the world that they stand ready to cooperate with nations abroad on the idea that reconstruction is a fundamental objective of the regime. Villages and towns have in these many decades been ruined by ceaseless military conflict, a situation from which Afghans are in grave need of clawing back to a respectable state of things. Only the Taliban can point to that possibility.

The responsibility of the global community will be to ensure that engagement with and not hostility toward the Taliban will be the principle in its diplomatic dealings with the new rulers of Afghanistan. One would be sorely disappointed if a new Cold War were to erupt on the Afghan question, specifically where an acknowledgement of the primacy of the Taliban in present-day Kabul is the question. It will be futile for the West to continue to give formal diplomatic space to Afghans who no longer speak for the country, but it will certainly be expected that western governments will insist that the Taliban do not go for bellicosity in an outlining of their diplomatic objectives. By the same measure, the international community ought to realise that it cannot continue to ignore the reality of the Taliban running the show in Kabul; and because it cannot, it will need to come to terms with Taliban demands that the regime in Afghanistan be taken cognizance of in terms of diplomatic acceptance.

The recent appointment by the Taliban of Suhail Shaheen as Kabul’s new permanent representative to the United Nations has not been recognised yet. A delay in letting the Taliban take their country’s seat in the world body will be an unwarranted provocation, seeing that it will mean leaving Afghanistan unwisely out in the cold. The West, particularly Washington, must not repeat the mistake committed in Iran, whose ayatollahs have had little reason to accommodate those whose constant propaganda against the Islamic government in Tehran has impeded better ties between the Iranians and governments in the West. A similar approach to dealing with the Taliban would be foolhardy and may well contribute to a situation where the government in Kabul could well be inclined toward a withdrawal from the outside world. No one would like to see a revival of the Taliban as they were in the times of the late Mullah Omar.

That said, there is yet the matter of the authority the men who are in control of Kabul exercise on Taliban fighters in the villages and outside the capital. Reports have emerged since mid-August of such fighters swooping on men and women to compel them into submission to their rules of behaviour. Reports of an anti-Taliban poet murdered by fanatical Taliban have been making the rounds on social media. Images of men working for the media beaten black and blue by the Taliban have alarmed people in and outside Afghanistan. The capture of Panjshir valley from the followers of Ahmed Massoud, the son of the legendary Ahmed Shah Massoud, has not been followed by any update on the situation in the region. There have been no reports on the whereabouts of Amrullah Saleh, the vice president under Ashraf Ghani. On a bigger scale, the fate of a large number of families known for their closeness to or alignment with American and Nato forces in the last twenty years remains unknown. The Taliban are not the Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia nor are they the beheading squads of the so-called Islamic State in the deserts of the Middle East. And yet there are memories of the horrific manner in which they murdered and mutilated the corpse of Dr Najibullah, the last communist president of Afghanistan, and that of his brother in the mid-1990s. It is a legacy which calls for a rolling back. In effect, the Taliban cannot but do a whole lot more to convince global leaders that they have changed, that they are willing to be part of the international community through adhering to all the standards of international behaviour and law, through ensuring that the dispensation of justice by them will not be a medieval exercise but will be based on a thorough concept of law as practised in modern times.

The Taliban remain notorious for their anti-cultural behavioural patterns. Music is not part of their thought process and neither is any other aspect related to the arts and aesthetics. Such attitudes impede the growth of a society of men and women free to be able to shape their lives and thoughts, away from state or religious regimentation. The Taliban, let it be said again, are not the Khmer Rouge, who abused Cambodia by yanking it back to Year Zero, a measure directed at brazen repression of the educated and intellectual classes. Cambodia was pushed back by decades and even today struggles to restore a semblance of order restored through rebuilding society. The Taliban would do well to bear such a precedent in mind. That Afghanistan’s people will follow Islamic patterns of social behaviour is not in doubt, but the Taliban must do nothing that will kill the spirit of enterprise, indeed the heritage of the country going back hundreds of years, as it governs the country they have claimed back for themselves.

The world owes it to itself to ensure that after decades of war and foreign occupation, Afghanistan steps onto the international stage to play its due role in the shaping of positive global politics. The gross poverty it is suffering from, government servants not coming by their salaries, the deteriorating health of its children, and the empty bags where food should have been are a clarion call to the world to pave the path to better and more productive relations with the Taliban government in Kabul.

Providing aid for a rebuilding of Afghanistan cannot be a guarantee of good accruing from it unless such aid is directly received and utilised by the Taliban in tackling the mess they have inherited from the governments led by Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani and certainly from twenty years of what was patently a period of pointless foreign occupation. Lest Afghanistan is forced into becoming a pariah state or isolates itself from the outside world, the Taliban’s efforts in reaching out to the world must be reciprocated. With its long history of being a battleground, indeed a burial ground, for global powers, dating back in modern times to British attempts through to the Soviet invasion of 1979 followed by the intervention of the Reagan administration and Pakistan’s Zia dictatorship in the 1980s to the post-2001 presence of US and Nato forces to subdue the country, Afghanistan has consistently sent out the warning that it is no place for foreigners.

But foreign interests in Afghanistan’s natural resources are there, as the outlook of the Russian and Chinese governments on the existing circumstances in Afghanistan has already demonstrated. A Taliban team has been to Moscow. Links with Beijing have been opened. In the near future, the thought that Afghanistan will be establishing ties with the Central Asian republics, perhaps even with Turkey and Iran, cannot be dismissed. Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan over the years, none too edifying for the world, will remain focused on developing fresh ties with the country. It will be something the Narendra Modi government in India will be wary about, considering that such terror outfits as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan yet operate in Pakistan.

Afghanistan will remain a cause for global concern, now and in the immediate future. The expectation remains, though, that both the Taliban and the global leadership will continue to remain engaged in negotiations on the best means of Afghanistan getting reintegrated into the international community.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a politics and history analyst