Now that they are in control of all of Afghanistan, that too without the anticipated accompaniment of a bloodbath, the Taliban should be facing the same predicament that the US did in their midst for 20 years before exiting with the all-American national honour and military assertiveness destroyed as after Vietnam in the previous century.
Today, decades later, Vietnam is a modern nation with a modern Government, both of which the US embraced as friend and ally long ago, and against the common Chinese adversary since. The message is also for and on Afghanistan. Much as the US is leading much of the rest of the world, barring China and possibly Pakistan, in condemning the Taliban rulers in Kabul, no one can be sure about their ‘day after’ – at times inseparably together.
For the interim, there is the need for the world to watch the Taliban through a new pair of glasses with the militant group’s unforgettable and radical religious past ingrained in their minds and brains.
Whither women
There is no denying all those TV visuals and Social Media posts on hundreds, if not thousands of locals, mobbing the Kabul Airport for a way out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But most of the other visuals on Taliban atrocities, mostly centred on women, seem to be from the past. At least, there is this feeling that you have seen many of these visuals earlier – though not in the Social Media, which was not there at the time.
Yet, there is no denying the status of women in a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. They themselves have declared that women have nothing to fear from them – only if they lived a life by the Shariat. Ask the refined scholar from the community’s midst, he would tell you the Shariat way of life for women is not always as dictated by backward thinking individuals and groups living in their own past.
In Taliban’s Afghanistan, such refinement of ideas does not work. For them, it’s ideology as dictated by their leadership, for whom feeding and fuelling such bankrupt ideas that should have had no place in any civilisation at any point of time. So, what if they too are living in the 21th Century, wearing clothes of the 21st Century and holding on to the war weapons, also of the 21st Century?
Iranian precedent
The world should take the Taliban also at face-value even as it discounts it on another side. Double-timing its own thinking and acting part is not going to be easy for the world at large, not especially when they are all living in a Tower of Babel of their own creation. They all followed Afghanistan only through the eyes of the US that was present on the ground for critical 20 years – and the US, as it turns out now, did not see the existing and emerging realities, leave alone it having the vision to assess it and stomach it.
Even while comparing the 21st Century Taliban with the 20th Century predecessor, the world would do well also to take a look at neighbouring Iran from the days of the infamous exit of Shah Reza Pehlavi 1978-79. The ‘Iranian Revolution’, as it was and as it is known even now, took the world by storm. Apart from deserting their good friend the Shah and causing eye-brows to raise in other regional capitals where despotic rulers saw the US as their Lord Protector, the Americans also had to go through the humiliation of the infamous ‘Embassy hostage crisis’.
The hostage crisis lasted for 444 days, proclaiming the mighty America’s helplessness bordering on military impotency, too, that may days and hours. It cost incumbent US President Jimmy Carter his possible re-election. With Osama bin-Laden in Afghanistan, then US President George Bush ensured a second term for him, even without eliminating or capturing him.
The American voter mind-set too had changed, revealing how they had come to accept the reality surrounding the myth of American invincibility, post-9/11. If anything, the US in fact picked Osama only under the later-day Obama regime. Barring the strategic community the world over, and possibly the families of 9/11 victims, no one really took any great notice of the credible American performance. In focussing near-exclusively on Osama in Afghanistan post-9/11, the US lost complete sight of Taliban, who predated Al-Qaeda in that country.
Because the US did not talk about the Taliban until after their military withdrew post-haste earlier this year, the global strategic community too did not see what was not visible. Less said about global Governments, especially those outside of the immediate region the worse for them. India was possibly the only regional nation abutting Afghanistan in a way that kept mentioning about the impending crisis, though there is no indication if New Delhi too, visualised the emerging scenario as it actually emerged not long after.
Other regional nations like China, and Pakistan even more, were/are seen as part of the problem, not the ‘solution’, or whatever it was to be. Today, the question is what if the Afghan Taliban turns out to be like the mullahs who began ruling post-Shah Iran from their mosques first, but have since given that nation a modern administration when viewed in the regional context, even if not from a western view.
UNHRC and no farther…
And if the Taliban had learnt from their own follies and those of Iran’s mullahs in the early years of the Revolution, then they may not be issuing ‘fatwas’ against non-residents like celebrated litterateur Salman Rushdie.
In a way, it’s the Iranian mullahs who made Rushdie more famous than he already was, and actually might have been otherwise. Maybe, even as they gather in the UNSC and other conclaves across the world, global nations should also look at an evolved Iranian kind of Afghanistan. It could be an Afghanistan, where the Taliban rulers declare a clear-cut, non-interfering kind of foreign and security policy viz neighbours on the one hand and nonIslamic faiths and its followers on the other.
But inside Afghanistan, the Taliban may harass, humiliate and brutally punish their women and even resort to periodic beheading of errant citizens and foreigners, including, but in the name of a domestic, Shariah law of their own, but without interfering in the ‘internal affairs’ of other nations, friendly or otherwise. In the case of such foreigners, they could well be charged with spying, which no nation allows or admits, or cultural heresy. Who knows, after a time they may even introduce democratic elections as in Iran.
For human rights violations then, you can take Taliban’s Kabul to the UNHRC, but not even possibly to the International Criminal Court. At least, there is no report of any mass-killing of ‘dissident troops’, politicians or citizens after President Ashraf Ghani deserted the post and vanished into thin air – as could only be expected to do under the circumstances.
Reassuring South Asia
For now, the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan have begun well in their open and loud messaging to their South Asian friends in the now defunct SAARC. Whether or not they send out similar messages to other regions and Governments the world over remains to be seen. It may come in stages or not at all – depending possibly on how the world actually reacts to their taking over the political administration without war and violence.
In the case of larger neighbour India, who has cause to worry about, the Taliban has declared that the Kashmir issue is an internal matter for New Delhi alone to worry about – or is a bilateral affair involving Pakistan, too. It is a clear indication that they are not going to send out their men to fight Pakistani ISI’s proxy war along India’s border, terrorist attacks included. The Taliban has also said that Indiafunded and executed development projects (in all 34 districts) in Afghanistan would continue.
They are meant for the people, and the Taliban is not going to interfere with whatever is good for their people. Or, that is their explanation now, and there is no need to suspect them, as yet. New Delhi could hope that the same applies to the tri-nation Chabahar Port in Iran, which also serves the interests of Afghanistan’s people. Likewise, in the case of Sri Lanka, they have reaffirmed that they did not have any links with the LTTE.
It doesn’t matter anymore, yes, but then, how much of the Taliban’s re-emergence in Afghanistan is going to re-energise religious fundamentalists in other South Asian nations, including Sri Lanka – but more so in fellow-Islamic nations, starting with neighbouring Pakistan, and including Bangladesh and Maldives, too.
Caliphate or not?
All of it could imply that the Taliban, more than emerging as a ‘caliphate’ in the place of the defeated ISIS, may want to create a modern state on the lines of Saudi Arabia. It is another matter that the Saudis under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are seeking to ‘modernise’ itself from its Wahhabi ways, at least nearer home – and like many other fellow Gulf-Arab nations. If the Taliban is taken on its word, it could well turn out that even the ‘qualified’ recognition of sorts that China is flagging at Kabul may become irrelevant.
China’s modified stand that recognition for Taliban had to wait for the composition of their Government needs to be read in context, but then Beijing has also indicated that it’ ready for ‘friendly relations’ with the new Kaubl. China knows Talibanised Afghanistan will be keen on development if only to prove their genuineness, and Kabul’s mutual suspicion with the West won’t go away overnight.
The Taliban knows China is eyeing the rare minerals in Afghanistan’s underbelly and wants to make a mockery of the US-led West post-takeover, and more so after the recent noises that the latter made in and over South China Sea and Taiwan. It’s more so in the case of Pakistan, which feels shakier than usual suddenly, and at the same time wants the Taliban to turn their attention to India, instead. The moot question is if Colombo would follow suit if and when Beijing recognises the Taliban.
After a waiting game, and following Afghan envoy Ashraf Haidari calling on Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and Foreign Minister G.L. Peiris – a rare event after Taliban’s takeover – Colombo has come up with a nuanced reaction of hope that ‘Taliban will keep its promises’. In a way, Afghanistan under Taliban may – or, may not – want to grow and develop as Vietnam and Iran have done in their time.
It has vast mineral wealth, especially of rare earth. It may be that China may thus want the Taliban more than they are in Afghanistan already in the name of development funding and work than the other way round. It is for the rest of the world to decide if the Taliban would need a P-5 shoulder of the China kind, or not… If nothing else, there is no harm in the world approaching Taliban on the trust-but-verify mode.
De-mobilising Taliban fighters
It is here that India and its American partners, and estranged Russian friends could come together, or act independent of each other or one another. They need to ensure that the Taliban leadership understands the need to either disarm and demobilise their unconventional fighters, many of whom may still be trigger-happy and bring down the reputation that the new Government wants to create for itself. Alternatively, India and others can help the Taliban to integrate their cadres into the regular Afghanistan army.
The same applies to Taliban civilian and political commissars, who need to be admitted into the existing Afghan civil service, or whatever remains. More importantly, the leadership has to draw the hierarchy between the existing services and their own men within, clearly. Else, like under similar circumstances elsewhere, their own cadres could take their own laws into hands, executing a civilian official or an army soldier, for ‘not falling in line’.
Such a course, if left unchecked, would lead to anarchy, which the Taliban seems intending on not bringing back with them. For years to come, analysts and historians would be writing tomes, recalling that the superiority mind-set of the US never allowed its politico-military strategists to think of the ‘day after’, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, interspersed with Iran, Philippines and Iraq.
So much so, they will dig deeper into Afghanistan’s ravines to tell us where and how the Taliban had hidden in hundreds and thousands through two long decades, fending off the American bunker-buster bombs targeting Osama and Al-Qaeda but did not at the time…. They would also want to write how the Taliban handled its own ‘day after’ with their taking over political power in changed circumstances.
In this what kind of role, if any, the US talking Pakistan into freeing Taliban’s President-elect from the previous decade, Abdul Ghani Badarar, in 2018, and flying him in directly to Doha, where he signed the American troop-withdrawal agreement with Washington, all played their parts.
For now, the US has straightaway shot down Ashraf Ghani’s belated wisdom, if any, to ‘return’ to Afghanistan. It is yet to react to Ghani era Vice-President Amrullah Saleh’s claims that he is in charge.
This is bound to make the Taliban more unsure of the global mood and disposition than already. Maybe, even while taking Talibanruled Afghanistan to UNHRC as planned, the US and its allies should keep their diplomatic options open – translating as how the new rulers behave and how accommodative are they viz other Afghan groups, before hardening their political stand.
Economic sanctions won’t work anymore after what all the US and allies had done to that nation over the years. Given what the US had done to Afghanistan over the past 20 years – and what it just could not do – the world should also realise that there are no ‘military options’ left any more, to neutralise the Taliban in that country. The choice is thus that of the US, the rest of the West and their allies as much as that of the Taliban in Kabul!
