Afghanistan’s darkest hour!

• A nation of 40 million is at the mercy of Islamist zealots
• Dreams of million souls crumbled
• America’s credibility lost for generations to come

Taliban fighters take control of Afghan presidential palace after the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 15, 2021. (AP/Zabi Karimi)

However, Afghanistan has lost. The world at large has lost. Civilization has lost to a medieval theocracy

Chinese state media is having a field day, relishing the American humiliation

America’s debacle is a victory for China by default- at least until the Taliban hold to its guarantees not to get involved in Xinjian

Joe Biden was a mythic hero for some quarters at home and abroad since he defeated his predecessor Donald Trump and began reversing some of Mr Trump’s controversial policies.

 Last week, however, President Biden managed to dismantle -within a matter of 10 days - America’s two-decades-long effort at nation-building in Afghanistan and surrendered the Central Asian country to the clutches of Taliban, the very group George W. Bush sent troops to oust twenty years ago.  Sacrifices in life and limb of many thousands of American and allies forces, Afghan national army and democratic activists are now in vain. American taxpayers’ money to the tune of $ 2.6 trillion that had been poured into the stabilization and rebuilding of Afghanistan has gone down the drain. Worst still, the dreams of many millions of Afghans, its youth, the educated and the sizeable middle class have been callously crushed. A nation of 40 million people has plunged into an uncertain future at the mercy of indoctrinated zealots. 

The road to the Kabul airport had been impassable. Desperate Afghans clinging to the taxiing military aircraft - Several fell to death from the air - would sink into the collective memory as iconic imagery of depth of hopelessness, mayhem and chaos that summed up the end of America’s two decades of military involvement in Afghanistan.Civilian air traffic has been suspended effectively trapping the civilians in Afghanistan. Afghan Special forces, battle-hardened US-trained commandos, who conducted the lion share of  anti- Taliban operations have been left high and dry by the feckless political leadership and their American mentors. President Ashraf  Ghani, a divisive leader whose partisan machinations were at the root of the collapse of the government left the country, unannounced. Taliban are now in full control in Kabul, the last bastion of the Afghan government, and a peaceful transfer of power, a euphemism for surrender is currently underway. 

President Biden has defended his decision to pull out American forces from Afghanistan, a monumental folly that set in motion the whole catastrophe.  The Buck stops there with him, he said, taking responsibility,   then went on to blame his predecessor for tying his hands with an ill-planned deal with Taliban, and  Afghan political leaders and army for not standing up for Taliban. 

In 2018,  the Trump administration reached an agreement with the Taliban to pull out all American forces by May 1 , this year--  though many would wonder whether impulsive Mr. Trump would have stick to the deal when all evidence and warning from serving and retired military top brass pointed that it would come to this. 

Comparisons with Saigon in 1975, the humiliating US departure have been invoked.  Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State has brushed aside the comparison. This is “ manifestly not Saigon” he quipped. He might be right at least in one count. Vietcong were first and foremost Vietnamese nationalists- if at all with a dose of Marxist ideology. Over the next four decades since the US pullout, Vietnam has risen from the ashes of  Agent Orange to an economic tiger by day and night. An average  Vietnamese 14 years old now outperform their American peers in Mathematics and Science in international comparative exams.  Whereas Taliban is an Islamist revivalist group adhering to Deobandi fundamentalism, closely aligned with global Salafi Jihad. In their previous reign during 1995-2001, the Taliban enforced  Sharia in its literal interpretation. Girls were prohibited from going to schools, women were shut from public spheres and forced to retreat into all-encompassing Islamic garment Burka. Amputations and public executions were commonplace and Afghanistan became the sanctuary for Salafi Jihadists across the world.

Now a popular fallacy is making rounds that a reformed Taliban, a more civilized force that had learnt from their past mistakes would play nice. However, when the brute reality dawns sometime later this one could be as disastrous as a previous miscalculation that the Afghan National Army was capable of holding back the Taliban on their own. In a news conference on Tuesday, the Taliban offered a general amnesty for all its enemies and women rights and media freedom. Under the confines of Islamic Law, they said, which would leave many questions as to exactly how it looks like. The debate over the compatibility of Islam in its literal Quranic interpretation with fundamental freedoms has not ended favourably.

Meanwhile, protestors in the Eastern city of Jalalabad have been shot. Regional commanders in Taliban- controlled Herat have turned away female students from schools, its fighters have taken captive of 12-year-old girls and sold for marriage and Afghan special forces that surrendered had been summarily executed. Radios have stopped playing music and advertising murals in Kabul have been painted over. 

40 million Afghans are staring into an uncertain future,  even the most generous accommodations by the Taliban would still fall short of freedoms that many Afghans, especially its educated and the middle class used during the decade. 

The debacle of Afghanistan offer a few compelling lessons, which were not necessarily limited to Afghanistan.
One is the crippling dysfunction in the Muslim world, where political, tribal, feudal and religious faultiness have consistently resented democratization and nation-building. America’s previous near failure in Iraq at the hand of the Islamic State was narrowly averted by the US-backed Kurdish forces and Iranian backed Shia militias, after the Iraqi national army, similar to their Afghan counterparts deserted their posts in enmass. 

Probably the culturally blind misconceptions of the nation-building process might have deepened fault lines. America put the cart before the horse when it opted for electoral democracy before institutions of a cohesive state took root. That effectively both enlarged the myriad of domestic rivalries and undermined the state. Whereas in places where the American intervention was successful, though the context is not necessarily the same, such asin Taiwan or South Korea, electoral democracy emerged from cohesive states which had their formative years under the control of omnipotent but modernist autocrats. 

The other lesson may be as to how unreliable an ally that the United States can be?
 After IS was defeated in Iraq, America abandoned its Kurdish allies, leaving them at the mercy of the Turks. Interestingly, it was a similar betrayal in the 1990s after the pullout of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, that led Pakistan to create Taliban out of the Madrasas in Peshawar. 

However, the latest is the most gruesome and will have far-reaching international implications for American power. 
This should not have happened this way. A 2500 stabilization force that America maintained during the last leg of pull out managed to keep the Taliban at bay. It cost a fraction of the operational cost of an America’s aircraft carrier - which generally has a crew of 5,000.

Countries such as India, which count on the US,  if its rivalry with China come to a war, would now have second thoughts about the reliability of Washington.

If America’s global credibility is a casualty, the greatest victim still is the Afghan people who pinned their hopes on America. No amount of mass relocation can alleviate the grave injustice that had befallen the Afghan nation. 

The winner is the global Salafi Jihad. The narrative of righteous forces of Islam defeating the unbelivers would re-energize Salafi Jihadists worldwide. Despite the assurance and rational calculations of the Taliban not to harbour transnational Jihadists, many below the surface machinations could happen. Taliban already have other Islamist militant groups as wide-ranging as Al Queda to Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan fighting alongside. The collapse of the Taliban in 2001 resulted in the diffusion of Salafi Jihad. It would not be long before they reconverge.

The other winner, and the most sinister of all, is Pakistan and its Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which at a  few hundred million $ cost had unravelled America’s two decades of work, and consolidated Islamabad’s strategic depth by proxy.  

Chinese state media is having a field day, relishing the American humiliation. There are indications that Beijing would recognize the Taliban government. America’s debacle is a victory for China by default- at least until the Taliban hold to its guarantees not to get involved 
in Xinjian.

However, Afghanistan has lost. The world at large has lost. Civilization has lost to a medieval theocracy.
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