When the regime of President Ashraf Ghani fell in Kabul on August 15 and Taliban militants entered the city, I was in Ukraine. Judging by the tweets, many people in Latvia felt heartbroken, sympathizing with the poor people who were scrambling up the fuselages of planes already on the runway at Kabul Airport just to get away from their country - Afghanistan.
Seeing how very many people were emotional about what was happening in Afghanistan I tweeted, I admit, a little cynically: "I see no reason why we should cry about the fall of an absolutely corrupt, unpopular regime openly based on foreign money and foreign armed forces."
Well-known journalist and publisher Inga Gorbunova replied: “Fall of a regime is one thing. But how will people who are already accustomed to a more or less normal life live now (if at all)? Women? Young people who grew up without Taleban savagery and Sharia? That's the problem. "
Since in further discussions the developments in Afghanistan were reflected against the situation in Belarus, Russia and, ultimately, the situation in Latvia, not to mention the conflicts in the Washington corridors, it is clear that the issue is not limited to Afghanistan and requires more detailed analysis.
First of all, about the Taliban or Taleban itself. I am not a Pashto language specialist, and there seems to be no consensus, even at an international level, on how the name of this movement should be written correctly. All that is clear is that when translated, its name - students - does not sound as menacing as the movement's activists look. The Taliban, that is, theology students. The original core of the movement was students of madrassas in Kandahar province, led by Mullah Mohammed Omar (who died from uncertain reasons, presumably from tuberculosis in 2013). There is no photo of Omar that is undoubtedly his. His only photograph, circulated by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, is dated 1989.
Legend has it that in 1994 he had a dream in which Allah had given him the task of freeing Afghanistan from a government of murderers, fraudsters and scumbags who took power in 1992 after the fall of the regime of the USSR puppet Najibullah. Given that Islam as a religion originated when the Prophet Muhammad receiving direct instructions from God on the canonized Night Journey and Ascension, stories of similar dreams "sell" just as well in Muslim culture. In October 1994, about 50 theology students formed a religious-military group in Kandahar. They were later joined by other students (Taliban), choosing black turbans and white clothes as a distinguishing mark.
In 1996, the Taliban managed to seize power in most of Afghanistan. It is believed that it was thanks to a higher level of education and stricter discipline, compared to other military and civilian units. However, we must not forget another factor that many experts simply ignore or pretend to overlook. This is the unequivocal support of a significant part of the population for the ideas put forward by the Taliban. That was the case in 1996, that is still the case in 2021.
When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 1996, the government of then-President Burhanuddin Rabbani (ethnic Tajik) took refuge in the north of the country, controlled by Tajik military units led by Ahmad Shah Massoud. The world continued to recognize Rabbani as the legitimate president of Afghanistan, even though he had conditional control of no more than 10% of the country's territory. It must be emphasized that the Taliban was and still is a very ethnic formation, with the Pashtuns at its core. As a result, Tajik, Uzbek and other communities are either cautious or even hostile to the Taliban (especially Tajiks).
After gaining power, the Taliban introduced a strict religious regime under Sharia law during their first term. It should be noted here that Sharia court means a court of justice, according to strict standards of the rule of law (even from the point of view of Western law, when irrefutable evidence is required and the number of credible witnesses is determined). Sharia court in the sense of Muslim culture means a fair court, although from the Western point of view, some of its norms (especially the types of punishments) can create, to put it mildly, bewilderment.
From 1996 to 2001, while in power in Afghanistan, the Taliban showed themselves as relatively radical Islamists, strictly adhering to religious dogmas, without adjustments for the current times. As a result, the Taliban gained the fame of an extremely archaic and backwards movement in the West. Admittedly, deservedly so. People were particularly outraged by the opposition to women's education and refusing to let women work in the public sector.
Since Osama bin Laden, the main perpetrator of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was hiding in Afghanistan at the time, and that was also the main core of radical Islam in Western public opinion, the Taliban were declared the main culprits and the first US attack was made. Already in October of the same year, without much resistance, and with the mandate of the UN Security Council (unlike the invasion of Iraq less than two years later), the US and its allied troops entered Afghanistan. Before the US troops occupied Kabul, the Taliban dispersed with as much haste as the Ghanaian regime on August 15 this year.
The Taliban leadership took refuge in Pakistan, which is seen as the arm that both leads and largely funds the movement. To be honest, there are differences of opinion on Pakistan's influence on the Taliban, and it is argued that it is nevertheless a relatively autonomous organization that may also take Pakistan's interests into account, but cannot be considered a puppet of it.
In line with the global political paradigm at the beginning of the millennium (the ultimate and inevitable victory of liberal democracy in the world's political evolution), the destruction of Taliban structures began efforts by the West, especially the United States, to modernize, Westernize, nation-build Afghanistan. Resources for this purpose were not spared. In total, the US 20-year mission in Afghanistan has cost up to 2 trillion or 2,000 billion US dollars (almost 200 annual budgets of Latvia). That's 100 billion or 10 Latvian budgets per year. Although most of this money was spent directly on maintaining, supplying and providing for the military contingent, huge sums were spent on the development of Afghanistan's public administration, infrastructure and social environment.
One would think that such a huge, almost incomprehensible help to the Afghan people would make them look at the Americans like gods, benefactors, whose hand they would be honored to shake. It was also probably seen like that by the American political class, which so generously financed this distant Asian country. It was probably convinced that the Afghans were looking at the star-striped flag with great reverence and gratitude. But as soon as U.S. troops withdrew, or rather, even before they did, the American-backed government, with all its 300,000 large, American-trained, American-armed Afghan government troops, gave up to the Taliban with almost no resistance.
The 20-year investment turned out to be completely pointless. Absolutely futile. How could this have happened? Where did the US political class and its consulting experts go wrong? This will be discussed in the next article.
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