BY 11 SEPTEMBER 2021, twenty years after the Twin Towers fell, all American combat troops will have left Afghanistan. At the cost of a trillion dollars and upwards of 2,000 American lives, the United States’ sojourn in this apparently unconquerable nation will have come to an end. Like the Russians, and the British before them, the Americans will leave behind them not a modern society, but a patchwork of tribal fiefdoms stitched together by a common religion. Once again, theocracy beckons the Afghan people and, once again, they seem disposed to follow.
It would be interesting to hear former “nation builders” from the Soviet Union compare notes with their American, NATO, Australian and New Zealand counterparts. What were the principal advantages and disadvantages of their respective appeals to the Afghan people? The Soviets invited their best and brightest to become socialists, the West invited them to become rich. Neither strategy worked, because neither superpower could invite Afghans to become what the Taliban commanded: holy.
Of the two superpowers, the Soviets came closest to cracking the Afghan nut. In the post-war period, up till the 1980s, the way forward for patriotic Third World politicians appeared to lie in emulating the planned and extremely rapid industrialisation pioneered by Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s. In the former colonies of the old Western empires, and in their satellites (like Afghanistan), there was very little confusion about which of the allied powers had defeated the Third Reich. It was the Soviets who appeared to have cracked the code for moving nation states out of the ruins of imperialism and into the modern age. Even in Afghanistan, the Soviets found willing converts to “developmental socialism”.
Not enough converts, however, to bring about a genuine modernisation of the nation. Outside the towns and cities, science and secularism found little purchase – and Soviet-style socialism even less. In the mountains, medievalist Islam still reigned supreme. Frustrated and divided, the ‘progressive’ Afghan forces lost political momentum. Impatient as always, Moscow decided to hurry things along and sent in the Red Army to shore up its preferred faction.
The 1979 Soviet intervention came very close to success. Against Moscow’s terrifying attack helicopters the poorly equipped mountain tribes could make no military impression. Slowly but surely, Afghanistan’s holy warriors were being wiped out.
Such a prospect was intolerable to the USA. A modern, secular and socialist Afghanistan could – and probably would – destabilise the whole of the Middle East. American “Stinger” missiles would take care of those deadly Soviet attack helicopters.
Funded by the Saudis, trained by the Pakistanis and equipped by the Americans, the mujahadeen were encouraged to give the Soviets their very own Vietnam experience. In 1989, bled white financially and militarily, the Red Army slunk back across the border. The Soviets left behind not a modern, secular and socialist Afghanistan, but a collection of ruthless, ambitious and heavily-armed warlords – fighting over a broken country.
Since the Taliban did not at that time exist to unify this broken country, the Pakistanis found it necessary to invent them. These highly-motivated “students of the faith”, indoctrinated in Salafist madrassas and marshalled by the Pakistan security forces into a fast-moving motorised army, were pledged to create a Sharia-guided Islamic republic. Sweeping their enemies before them, the Taliban dumped all but a handful of charismatic warlords unceremoniously into the dustbin of history.
The rest of the story we know. How the Taliban banned television, popular music, dancing, kite-flying and clean-shaven male cheeks. How opponents of the new Islamic theocracy were hanged by the neck from crane-hooks until they were dead. How all working Afghan women (including doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists and engineers) were dismissed from their jobs and sent home. How Afghan girls were told that, in future, education would be for their brothers only. How women found guilty of flouting Sharia law were executed with AK-47s in front of cheering crowds in soccer stadiums. How Salafist fanatics dynamited the iconic Buddhas of Bamiyan while the civilised world looked on in impotent horror. How the Taliban leaders granted asylum to Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi-born mujahadeen who had fought alongside them against the godless communists. How Bin Laden’s organisation, Al Qaida, convinced that it had helped to bring down one superpower, plotted from the safety of Afghanistan to bring down another.
When the USA did exactly what Bin Laden predicted it would do after 9/11, and invaded Afghanistan, he, his Al Qaida comrades, and the Taliban itself, did what Afghans have always done – they melted away into their country’s mountain fastnesses, regrouped, resupplied (thanks again, Pakistan) and emerged to inflict those small, but steadily accumulating wounds that drive an occupying army mad with rage and frustration. Like all guerrilla armies fighting on their home soil, the Taliban didn’t need to outfight the Americans and their allies, they only needed to outlast them.
For an impatient superpower like the United States, an occupation of twenty years has indeed seemed like a “forever war”. For the tribes of Afghanistan, whose forefathers drew their swords against Alexander the Great’s Macedonians long before Christ was born, and whose grandfathers left a thousand British and Indian dead on the battlefield of Maiwand in 1880, twenty years is a mere blink of History’s tear-filled eye. No one but Allah has ever united, or ruled, the Afghans – and no one but Allah ever will.
POSTSCRIPT: When the Taliban is finally established in Kabul and Sharia Law once again reigns supreme in Afghanistan, it will be fascinating to observe the gyrations of our own and other Western feminists as they rehearse all the arguments advanced a quarter-century ago to justify their failure to launch an international campaign on behalf of Afghanistan’s sequestered and suppressed women and girls. No doubt we will hear again the proposition that it is not for privileged White women to tell the indigenous people of Afghanistan how to organise their society. That the liberation of Afghan women and girls is not a matter for “White Saviours”, but for the women of Afghanistan themselves. To suggest otherwise is to demonstrate white supremacist tendencies and Eurocentric values. In short, it is racist. Will Golriz Ghahraman, so passionate in her defence of the Palestinians, speak out with equal fervour when women are herded into stadiums and shot in the back of the head? We shall see.