Saving Afghanistan – again

Take a good, long look at the euphoric welcome being afforded to the talks process between the United States and the Taliban. There can be no two ways about it. An end to the eighteen-year war in Afghanistan could be a win for everyone – the Afghan state, the Taliban, the US, Pakistan, and the wider spectrum of other regional and global powers seeking to influence outcomes in Afghanistan. Yet it is hard to see how any of these five key actors involved in Afghanistan could lay claim to have acted with the hindsight of what has already taken place in that country for over forty years.

The five key groups of actors in Afghanistan are a sobering profile of not eighteen years, but in fact nearly four decades of failure. We can attribute good intentions to all of them – or as selectively as we please – but to afford them even the most miniscule pretence of competence would be wild and irresponsible.

The most important actor in this tragedy is the Afghan state. From Dr Najeebullah, to Hamid Karzai, and from Mullah Omar to Ashraf Ghani, there is a long tradition of a corrupt, petty, warring Afghan elite that is happier to serve foreign agendas, and build properties abroad, than it is to serve the incredible people of Afghanistan. Perhaps the most poignant reminder of just how dysfunctional the Afghan elite truly has been for the last forty years is the recent appointment of Asadullah Khalid as the country’s defence minister. Accused of running rendition and torture cells within his personal residences, accused of widespread human rights abuses, accused of sexual violence during his time as governor in both his home province, and in Kandahar, and accused of being involved in illicit narcotics trade, Khalid also happens to be a trusted anti-Taliban warrior.

A once proud member of the Mujahideen, when he helped tear Kabul into pieces, attempting to de-throne the Soviet Union’s Afghan strongman, Dr Najeebullah, he now sings odes to the same Najeeb – because they now have the same enemy: the Taliban. As defence minister, the very same Khalid will be expected to eventually help integrate his fellow Pakhtun Taliban fighters with an Afghan National Army that has been blooded in anti-Taliban narratives for the entirety of its existence. Of course, for all its sins, at least the current Afghan elite – led first by Hamid Karzai and later by Ashraf Ghani – has tried to engage in an effort to build a modern state. This is more than can be said for its principal adversary, the Kandahari Taliban.

The Taliban are the second most vital actor. Established nearly a quarter century ago as a collective of simpletons from a dusty old town, in pursuit of a medieval concept of peace and stability, the Taliban chose to reduce their entire country and culture to rubble. To assess the Taliban, one need take only a cursory look at what Afghanistan has turned into since Mullah Omar first took over his country. As the global ground zero for global violent extremism in the name of Islam, the Taliban’s Afghanistan was the Petri dish in which Al-Qaeda was cultured and bred. It is where the ideologues and drivers of a global drive to radicalise young Muslim men into becoming human missiles took root.

All the destruction and depravity that we see across the Daesh landscape today finds its roots, eventually, in the Petri dish that the Taliban converted their country into. But their worst victims were their own Afghan brethren, and especially, their sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters. Afghanistan is one of the world’s worst places to be born a girl: and this is in a neighbourhood that includes India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – not exactly a region that can take pride in how it treats women. The Taliban represent among the worst responses to war, poverty and modernity that any place has come up with, anywhere. Yet today, the same Taliban are negotiating a heroic return to the Afghan mainstream. Who could have imagined, when George W Bush proudly announced his intention to destroy Al-Qaeda and its facilitators, that his own Republican Party would oversee such a capitulation?

The third key actor in Afghanistan is the US. American national power has a long track record of supporting and sustaining indefensible people and groups in Afghanistan. If the Taliban are an ugly version of how to resist war and, in their words, “occupation”, then the Mujahideen that preceded them may have been even uglier. Unlike the simpletons of the Taliban, the Mujahideen were divided into hundreds of groups and, despite Pakistan’s best efforts, only ever consolidated into seven disparate and often warring factions.

Who was the original financier, sponsor and supporter of those same Mujahideen? It was the very same United States that today, after having financed the fantasies of savage Afghan warlords, and duplicitous dictators from Pakistan, has sent thousands of its own young to their deaths in the valleys and mountains of Central Asia. For what? In the 1980s, at least Ronald Reagan could to point to the Soviet Union’s defeat and disintegration. George W Bush, and especially, the incomprehensibly weak Barack H Obama, can point to no such achievement.

American incoherence in Afghanistan is among its most unforgivable foreign policy failures. Today, to Donald Trump’s credit, at least it finally knows what it wants: a clean exit. It is ironic that this exit depends so much on Pakistan, given that American national power has invested nearly a decade and a half in demonising and blaming that very Pakistan for its insatiable appetite to have some kind of influence over who does or does not rule Afghanistan.

The fourth key actor in Afghanistan, sadly, is Pakistan. Of all the toothy smiles that have the least to be smiling about, Pakistani leaders may well top the list. In 1979, this country exploited the genuine sense of piety and solidarity of its own people for the sake of wider security objectives – none of which have been realised. Forty years after offering open borders passage to millions of refugees, and supporting generation after generation after generation of destructive Afghan elites, Pakistan is weaker, at home, in the region and on the global stage. Bitten by monsters it has reared, and humiliated roundly, even when it does the right thing (by Kashmir and by Afghan refugees, for example). Yet feted today, by the likes of Lindsey Graham, not because of its contributions to commerce, or innovation, or entertainment – but because of the toxicity of those that the world accuses it of patronising.

No matter what happens in the next few months, Pakistan is staring a generational challenge in Afghanistan, not unlike the one that existed throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: Afghans do not like and do not trust Pakistan. Today, this includes the Taliban, and includes the millions of young Afghans that have grown up in Uncle Sam’s war economy up north. Whilst Pakistani dissent can be managed with a few menacing tweets, paycheques and the denial of ads, young Afghans and old Taliban won’t be quite as pliable. But Pakistan is not a country that likes to learn from history.

The fifth and final group of actors in Afghanistan are ‘The Others’. Unlike Pakistan, they don’t have to suffer the direct brunt of repeated collective failure – save perhaps Iran. Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and a host of European Union countries, including those in the process of Brexit. They too are garlanded in epic, historic failure.

The Afghanistan that emerges from the seemingly successful peace talks between Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban will not be dissimilar to the Afghanistan that emerged from the Geneva Accords of 1988. Anyone with any sense of history would be rushing to read Riaz Mohammad Khan’s books. No one should expect a stampede to the library. A new generation of Afghans, Taliban, Americans, Pakistanis and others will go forth boldly to learn the same old lessons.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.