HThe way the story moves to the next chapter surprises or shocks the Afghan people. Afghans were surprised in October 2001 when American commandos, supported by local militias in the north and south, drove the Taliban from the country, but they were shocked when the Taliban took power in August 2021. How and why history repeats itself viciously. The life cycle in Afghanistan is a question that leaves few hypotheses for appropriate answers. However, overall, the historical dynamics in Afghanistan lie in a chain of causes and effects of local conflicts and international geopolitics.
Historically, the nation-state, as it characterizes Afghanistan, is not the result of a true development of sovereignty, but rather a geopolitical creation. In the 19th century, at the height of the power struggle between the Barakzai and Sadozai tribes, the British Raj fought two wars to subdue the Afghan kingdom, but failed. Although the British failed to gain control of Afghanistan, the Russian-obsessed British Raj eventually succeeded in restoring the Barakzai dynasty to power in 1890, aligning Afghan foreign policy with that of the British Empire. With subsidies provided by the British, Amir Abdul Rahman laid the foundations of a centralized government that arguably created the first patron-client relationships in Afghanistan. That the creation of the nation-state in Afghanistan was existentially dependent on geopolitical changes became clearly evident after the April 1978 coup. The April coup, instigated in part by himself and partly by external circumstances, brought an end to the old regime and marked a bloody war. beginning: the cold war.
In truth, the Cold War could only have been avoided if the bipolar world – Soviet communism and Western liberalism – had not existed. In Afghanistan, a country already divided between left and right, the Cold War was a combination of historical grievances growing under the skin of Afghan society and geopolitical objectives developed in Moscow and Washington. Unlike the Americans, who needed political Islam as a weapon to destroy Soviet communism, the Afghan mujahideen needed it to create a political regime. The atheistic nature of communism and its historical evolution in the Russian version, as encountered during the Cold War, gave rise to Islam as an ideology now armed by the American bloc and defended by the mujahideen in Afghanistan. This has militarized Afghan society.
But what was interpreted in crude idealism as the “sacred duty of the Muslim brothers” during the war against the Soviets turned out to be disastrous fratricide after the Russian withdrawal. Afghanistan was left to its fate when the Russians were defeated and the threat of Soviet communism faded. The country descended into civil war in the early 1990s, born of a “local fearful psyche capable of manipulating power” into a state of anarchy where almost “everyone (had) the capacity to kill” (Hobbes ). Afghanistan’s neighboring states, preoccupied with preemptive policies aimed at securing some strategic depth in a war-torn country, also added fuel to the engine of the 1990s civil war. 1990, the rapid rise of the Taliban initially surprised many at home and abroad. Regional governments, alarmed by geostrategic interests, reacted differently.
If there is a problem between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it lies in state reason and if there is a problem between India and Pakistan, it lies in the Himalayan mountain ranges: Kashmir. In 1947, when the British withdrew from the Indian subcontinent, they drew the border between Pakistan and India, but left Kashmir intact. (Since then, the two states have fought four wars over Kashmir). In the same year, During the creation of Pakistan, Afghanistan expressed distrust of Pakistan’s membership in the UN. War broke out between the two countries in 1960, when the Afghan government sent troops across the border to unite Pakistan’s Pashtun population under the name Pashtunistan, but it came to nothing. In the 1970s, the Afghan government harbored Baloch separatists fighting the Pakistani state, while Pakistan gave sanctuary to Afghan Islamists fighting the Afghan government.
During the Cold War, India, a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, enjoyed good relations with the Soviet-backed Afghan government, while Pakistan served as the main channel of access to the United States. With the end of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the conflict between pro-Pakistani jihadists and Indian forces intensified in Kashmir, but at the same time and in terms of clear opposition in Afghanistan, the Pakistani-Indian rivalry has ended here, with India maintaining relations with the Tajik-dominated government in Kabul and Pakistan supporting the Pashtun-majority Hikmatyar faction of Hizb-e-Islami to overthrow the government. In between, and in a country where ethnic politics is part of a complex response to the nature of access to power, the Afghan Uzbek and Hazara political parties formed a short-lived fragile alliance with Hikmatyar, but when the Hizb-e-Islami failed to achieve its goal, Pakistan shifted its support to the newly emerged Taliban, while India continued to aid the newly born resistance formed by the Tajiks, Uzbeks and the Hazaras to fight a common enemy: the Taliban. Pakistan today is home to a large Pashtun population divided on the question of national identity: some support the idea of a Greater Pashtunistan, others advocate friendly relations between the states. Successive Afghan governments have refused to officially recognize the border between the two countries, while it is out of the question for the nuclear state of Pakistan.
With a 580-mile border with Afghanistan and a strategic location between the Middle East and South and Central Asia, Iran saw the rise of the Sunni extremist Taliban as a clear victory for rivals like Saudi Saudi. For Russia, the loser of the Cold War, the emergence of the Taliban was a sort of tornado that would explode the wave of instability in Central Asia. Therefore, Iran and Russia supported the resistance group to protect their geostrategic interests. China did not recognize the first Taliban regime, but established reports with the regime after the emergence of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in Uyghur. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates have recognized the regime. Throughout the 1990s, the US government, preoccupied with the Balkan War and the conflict in East Africa, pushed Afghanistan into oblivion. Few American media were interested in it.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States sent troops to Afghanistan when the Taliban refused to hand over the main suspect behind the attack. Hamid Karzai, a U.S.-backed man, served in office twice, but things deteriorated for him as the U.S.-led campaign against Taliban insurgents intensified. Karzai, once a loyal US acolyte, has become a vocal critic of US policy in Afghanistan. His relationship with the United States was like a happy marriage that runs into problems in the middle and ends in a paranoid divorce.
The optimism that allowed the emergence of a new political climate opened something uncertain when the Taliban consolidated their control over swaths of territory and disappeared when the Obama presidency withdrew 123,000 American troops. The Taliban had pushed government forces into a defensive position in 2014, when Ashraf Ghani came to power. The insurgents, whose leaders were based in Pakistan, recruited fighters to fight the U.S.-backed government. During Ghani’s term, internal divisions deepened and corruption reached its peak. In August 2021, when American troops left Kabul, the Taliban took power. The US-backed Afghan government was born with the US “war on terror” and died with the US peace with the Taliban.
What will happen to Afghanistan in the future is uncertain. So far, no government has recognized the Taliban regime, although some countries do business with them. For the past two years, the Taliban regime has refused to allow girls to return to secondary school. He banned women from working and excluded non-Pashtun ethnic groups from administration. Armed resistance to the Taliban regime has formed and is making its way. Almost the entire population lives in poverty. Women pay the most. Afghan politicians in exile are repeatedly warning world leaders about the risks of benevolent diplomacy toward the Taliban regime.
As for negotiations on a possible change in the shape and format of the Taliban’s de facto government, the regime is not signaling any change in its policies. Under the regime, the ghost of the state and the instrument of power remain institutions controlled by extremist mullahs and fanatical military leaders. What helps the Taliban stay in power, if not entirely, at least essentially, is the usefulness of Sharia law and the means of violence that flow from it. Sharia not only provides the Taliban with an advantageous instrument to exercise power, but also the ability to control all areas of life, since Sharia exists in its applicability and does not require any legal justification. Unlike “a good law, which defines its essence and limits its applicability” (Arendt), sharia is an instrument that facilitates the regime by providing it with a tool to run its government. This gives the Taliban regime the divine ability to rule under a regime of decrees that is beyond human understanding but applicable in human society. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan remains a tragedy.
(Header image – Taliban fighters in a captured Humvee after the fall of Kabul, August 2021. Credit: Voice of America News, via Wikimedia Commons)
Asad Kosha is an editor exiled from Afghanistan. Asad worked as the editor-in-chief of Kabul Now, an English website affiliated with Daily Etilaatroz. He is interested in studies of local conflicts in Afghanistan. Asad Kosha writes about current issues in Afghanistan. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
