A little over a century ago, George Bernard Shaw defined history as what every Englishman should learn and every Irishman should forget. He spoke of a long and seemingly unresolvable imperial conflict, in which envoys who certainly had “the” solution and medal-laden generals who understood it to kill the rebels and co-opt others abounded. The Irish conflict was resolved by making the islanders “democratic”, whenever possible Anglicans and loyal subjects. This is how it was, for these strategists, as it was and continues to be for those who thought so by the Afghans, a people who seem to have built their national identity gun in hand and have just conquered another empire.
This US withdrawal is the third international humiliation that Afghans give a superpower. The last foreigner to dominate, albeit for a while, the country was Alexander the Great a few millennia ago. Everyone tried, the Persians and the Mughals, the Tsars and the Turks, and it was all the same. The British invaded at the time of the Raj, when it was the United States of the Victorian era, to deter an entirely imaginary Russian danger. They were massacred and invaded again with pride, during the few days they had to collect the corpses, hoist the flag and burn Kabul. The next time anyone saw a British uniform was in this young century, when the Royal Army paraded the Americans.
The current Afghan civil war began in 1978, when the country’s first more or less legitimate president tried to get rid of the powerful Communist Party. The president had dealt a coup on the king, who between 1933 and 1973 had piloted a miracle, forty years in peace. Five years after the coup, the local communists returned his courtesy with a bloodier blow: in the seizure of the palace, they killed him, his family, his custodians, his ministers and everyone they encountered in the corridors. The new government dropped into immediate entropy, with factions killing each other and mass executions of political prisoners. When the chaos reached the point where it was learned that 27,000 detainees had been shot in a single prison, the Soviets invaded on December 24, 1979.
Special forces, in an action that is still taught in Russian military schools, took over the palace, killing 200 soldiers and the president. With a new, more confident leader in power, the Soviets began to reorganize the Afghan army, mobilizing its troops and launching a counterinsurgency war against virtually the entire country. The factions were regional, political, or simply loyal to this or that warlord, and were collectively known as Mujahideen. The United States began sending arms, Pakistan to provide shelter and training, and the Arab petrodollar powers financed the war.
The Soviets showed more sanity than their rivals in Washington because, instead of twenty years, there remained ten. They retreated with a parade of armored vehicles on the Bridge of Friendship, the same one on which right now there is a river of fleeing refugees. The regime they left managed to survive three years and, in fact, managed to build a very efficient army. The collapse followed that of the USSR in 1991 and the defection of a general with his own ambitions in 1992. After a bloody civil war, the factions accepted Pakistan’s mediation and created the Islamic State of Afghanistan, a marvel of instability.
Iran, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, and by anyone else any power you can imagine, had their favorite faction and sought to “keep” Afghanistan. The policy was triggered, public money disappeared in real time and most of the population didn’t even notice a bad government in the distant and bombed capital. From this chaos and specifically from the southern region, the poorest and most anarchized, a small group of puritans who call themselves Taliban emerged in 1994. Two years of heavy fighting followed, including the demolition of much of Kabul with gunfire, until the Taliban entered the capital and proclaimed the Emirate of Afghanistan. They had won with Saudi funds and Pakistani weapons, making others believe they would be their puppets,
But there is more than foreign support behind the Islamists’ hard triumph. Afghanistan has a political system that respects the old Kenyan phrase: “now it’s our turn to eat.” Everyone who comes to power takes all, and the idea that national funds are not owned by the leader and his allies, but by the entire nation, is something of an abstract novelty. The Taliban offered more than honesty, purity, with everything that dangerous word implies when it comes to religion. Ascetic with money, the new powerful banned everything that their version of Islam rejected: television, movies, music, photography, non-technical books or commentaries on the Qur’an. They also banned shaving, wearing Western clothes and being more than just a wife locked in the harem. Like so many Puritan groups, the Taliban could not conceive of a woman out of her father’s or her husband’s control, speaking out or making decisions.
And like so many Puritan groups, the Taliban did not engage in politics but created the divine kingdom on earth. Anyone who opposed, who did not show enthusiasm for building this utopia, was a traitor, a sinner, a heretic. The Taliban set up a veritable archipelago of torture centers, shot thousands and used all the women they were interested in, that the reward of a jihadist is to have his harem…
But not the entire country was under his control, so the war continued, with foreign aid. Tens of thousands of Pakistani volunteers fought on the side of the Taliban, as well as a true Muslim international under the banners of Isis and Al Qaeda, staunch allies.
These alliances proved dangerous. Al Qaeda organized the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 on Afghan soil, and in just over a month the United States was bombing the Taliban in support of factions that continued to resist. On October 27 of that year, the first American troops landed, withdrawing what was basically a light-arms militia force supplied by Pakistan. Those who could run to the mountains and wait twenty years, rebuilding their arsenals and playing politics, while Washington spent a fabulous fortune, lost thousands of soldiers, killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans, and thought it was building a democracy.
This illusion simply melted away in a matter of weeks, after it became clear that the Americans were indeed withdrawing. It remains to be seen whether the Taliban learned anything from their own history or whether everything they promised in the peace talks was what the diplomats wanted to hear and then we will see. The calculation can be made in the future by adding up the executed and the women who went back to the Middle Ages.
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