The scenes from Kabul are uncanny; specters from the past which are simultaneously shocking and familiar. The enemy waiting just outside the city prepared to deliver the coup de grace, while what remains of the US mission packs up its barracks and offices, shreds sensitive documents, disables equipment that cannot be moved, and makes its way to Hamid Karzai International Airport, to be evacuated to safety by aircraft of the United States Air Force’s Air Mobility Command.
They must run a gauntlet of Afghan civilians desperate to escape the Taliban. Refugees flood over the jetways to the last Ariana Afghan Airways planes still in operation, run alongside USAF C-17 Globemaster transports, clinging to hatches, landing gear, even control surfaces as they taxi to the runway, and then they fall from hundreds of feet as the aircraft take off, jettisoned like refuse in the windshear. Soon, the Americans will all be gone, leaving behind an ominous silence as the allies that they have abandoned wait apprehensively for the arrival of the Taliban.
“It’s like déjà vu all over again,” the great Yankees catcher Yogi Berra once said. We have been here before; we have all seen it before. For those of us old enough to remember the details of April 1975, it all seems so surreal. We know what comes next; we saw it happen the day after 15 April, when Saigon fell, and the day after 17 April, when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. What boggles the mind is that, after the United States’ imperialist manipulation of and intervention in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, after the refugees, the boat people, the settling of accounts, and the killing fields of the 1970s, it could happen again – and in exactly the same way.
It is like we are standing at the side of the road, watching a fatal car accident in slow motion, unable to do anything to stop it or to help the victims. Two narratives have emerged in the chaos and the triumph of the Taliban, but both obscure a chilling warning about the future of the United States itself.
The first narrative, repeated ad-infinitum in the media, is that that the US-led 2001 invasion and subsequent occupation was a crusade, above all, to rescue Afghan women from Taliban oppression. Gender equality and women’s rights are utterly fundamental, but it is worth asking if imperialism is the best way to secure them, or whether they were ever more than window-dressing for the Bush administration’s rush to war against the Taliban in 2001.
Yet, the plight of Afghan women was a central talking-point to promote the war from the very beginning. Short weeks after the invasion began, President George W. Bush “launched a drive,” the Washington Post reported, to “help build support in countries where there is heavy skepticism of the anti-terrorism coalition.” Appearing with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Crawford, Texas, President Bush called the Taliban “the most repressive, backward group of people we have seen on the face of the Earth in a long period of time, including and particularly how they treat women.”
Western media had reported on the Taliban’s brutal, misogynistic policies for five years. In a 1997 Time magazine article, the veteran foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour detailed Taliban offenses, concluding that, “for Afghanistan’s tyrannized women, there is no escape from an unsparing, medieval way of life.” Many Americans were justifiably horrified by the Taliban’s inflexible version of Islamic law that denied Afghan women basic rights to education and even healthcare. In 1998, Jay Leno held a star-studded event in his Hollywood home to raise $500,000 to end “gender apartheid in Afghanistan.” Before 9/11, however, US officials had never used that horror as a justification for war.
For the most part, Washington was eager to negotiate with the Taliban and collaborate with its efforts to bring Islamic fundamentalist order to a country ravaged by war for more than 15 years. Bill Richardson, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, infamously declared that the Taliban were people he could “work with.” That, indeed, had been US policy all along; following the Taliban assumption of power in 1996, State Department spokesman Glyn Davies announced that the US government could see “nothing objectionable” in the new government. From the US point of view, the Post reported, “the Taliban represents a preferable alternative… to the faction-ridden coalition headed by President Baharunuddin Rabbani” that they had overthrown.
This attitude was in keeping with the narrative originally deployed to justify US aid to the Mujahidin – the main factions in Rabbani’s coalition – following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 in support of its then-secular, Communist government. Facing its own challenges in Latin America and a hostile new Islamic government in Iran, the United States saw a golden opportunity to put its Cold War rivals off balance and pin them down by supplying the anti-Soviet resistance with money and weapons.
The rhetoric of the moment celebrated the radical Islamist Mujahidin as “freedom fighters,” as CBS newsman Dan Rather famously (or infamously) reported on 60 Minutes in 1980, who needed US assistance against the evil Soviet empire. It can be difficult today to fully recall, but the overriding Cold War thinking at the time was that the Soviets were not just America’s main enemy, they were the only enemy, a point that former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski made plain in in op-ed article in the New York Times in 1983. Dissent in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Sandinistas’ overthrow of the US-sponsored Nicaraguan dictatorship, the Afghan war, acid rain, and even the 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II, he said, were all part of a vast, Communist conspiracy.
So, it made sense for President Ronald Reagan to praise the Mujahiddin in the same terms as Rather – as “freedom fighters” – when he entertained a half-dozen of their leaders in the White House in February 1983. Two days later, he asked Congress to pass a $9.2 billion foreign military aid package, including hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of aid for Pakistan earmarked to be covertly transferred across the border to the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan.
In Cold War terms, it was a winning strategy; the Mujahiddin won, and the defeated Red Army retreated back to Mother Russia to spark the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it also created a nest-egg for the foreign Mujahiddin drawn to Afghanistan’s Holy War against Communism, and who would soon coalesce as Al-Qaeda under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. It also bequeathed Afghanistan a bloody civil war between Mujahiddin factions.
The Taliban emerged as the one force that could defeat the factions and unite Afghanistan under its austere, repressive rule. “It was this lawlessness that the Taliban rose up against,” Rather reported with not a shred of self-awareness less than a year before 9/11. “With the Koran in one hand and a rifle in the other, these young, militant students of Islam have largely brought law and order where there had been anarchy.” Rather was willing to concede that “the Taliban shut down girls’ schools, limited a woman’s right to work, and forbade them from appearing in public without a male relative,” while also enthusiastically celebrating the blessings of peace.
It was, to be sure, a complex, and fraught bargain. “My daughters sit in the house and cry to me: we want education,” an Afghan UN official told the New York Times in 1998. “This is a heartbreak, but peace is the first priority for people here. The Taliban must be given credit for accomplishing this.”
The second narrative holds that the United States has betrayed Afghanistan by withdrawing after two decades of war and occupation, leaving Afghans to the brutality of the Taliban. The story goes that the United States was the only guarantor of Afghan freedom, and that the Taliban are a fringe conspiracy of Muslim fanatics who overthrew Afghanistan’s modern, progressive government to impose radical fundamentalist rule when the Americans packed up and left. The Taliban are brutal, and the United States certainly did betray Afghanistan, but the real story is far more complex and, to be blunt, disturbing.
The most shocking thing about the collapse of the Islamic Republic is how quickly it happened. There was no chance that the United States was going to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan after the Trump administration had agreed to withdraw American troops by 1 May 2021, and American troop strength in the country had been drawn-down to 2,500 personnel by the beginning of this year. When President Biden announced that he planned to renege on the agreement, and keep troops in Afghanistan until September, the Taliban began an all-out offensive.
The speed of their campaign was startling. Even South Vietnam held on for two years after the US military withdrawal in 1973. Perhaps imagining that timeline, President Biden continued to insist that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was secure. On July 8, he told reporters that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
But the withdrawal had already become a chaotic flight of US troops, officials, and what Afghans could find a plane to carry them out. By last Saturday, the Taliban controlled the entire country and sat at the outskirts of Kabul. On Sunday, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani slipped out of the country to safety and exile. On that day, 15 August, the Taliban proclaimed the creation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The only conclusion one can draw from the almost immediate collapse of the US-installed government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan like a house of cards, is that very few Afghans rushed to its defense. Given the opportunity to defend their government from a Taliban takeover many, indeed most, Afghans demurred. It is worth wondering: what choice did they have?
In the fantasies of Western liberals, all peoples are presented with an infinite menu of alternatives for how they will govern themselves, and we are confident that, when seizing their right to national self-determination, they will choose some form of free, liberal democracy or, at worst, a constitutional monarchy. We are always dumbfounded when they don’t. But this is a myth; for Afghans, the choice was a stark one between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban. It breaks my heart that Afghans had no other options, but all of them were eliminated by the United States in the 1980s and again in 2001.
To be sure, the vast majority of Afghans probably did not explicitly choose to actively support either the Taliban or the Kabul government; as in most civil wars, most probably kept their heads down, hoping that they would survive this civil war, prepared to go along with whoever won. Yet, not choosing is, itself, a choice. As Hannah Arendt noted, even passively “going along” requires the positive choice that, given two alternatives, doing nothing is the best option.
So, why did so few Afghans, when faced with a possible Taliban victory, positively choose to support the radical fundamentalists, or negatively choose not to support the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan? That they did is evidenced by the way that the 180,000-strong Afghan National Army, equipped with tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, helicopters and aircraft, simply melted away in a little over three months. More damning was the vast and widespread national indifference to the Kabul government; President Ghani won more than 50 percent of the vote in Afghanistan’s 2019 elections, but slightly less than 20 percent of eligible voters turned out at the polls, meaning that he enjoyed a mandate of one-tenth of the Afghan population.
The differences between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban were never really that great, despite what Americans might want to believe. Afghanistan was an Islamic republic whose 2004 Constitution states explicitly that the “sacred religion of Islam is the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.” It provides no guarantees for freedom of conscience and, although it is “committed to create and foster balanced education for women,” there is no mention of equality.
While noting that the ongoing war in Afghanistan had severely compromised human rights, and laying a larger share of the blame on the Taliban, Amnesty International noted in its 2020 report that the Kabul government was hardly a rights champion. It was hobbled by corruption, and “the few women in government faced intimidation, harassment and discrimination.” At the time of the report, the Afghan parliament was discussing “a draft bill on public gatherings, strikes and demonstrations, which if passed would significantly restrict the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.”
The government was largely indifferent to human rights, and routinely declined to enforce what protections there were. “Despite the sexual abuse of children being well-publicized, and the abusive practice of ‘bacha bazi’ (male children being sexually abused by older men) being criminalized in 2018, the authorities made little effort to end impunity and hold perpetrators accountable.”
In the Western colonialist imagination, the United States was supposed to be both a civilizing presence and a guarantor of rights in a backward land, nurturing Afghanistan toward modern democracy. In fact, it aspired to those goals mostly in their absence. There is no mention of human rights or the status of women in the peace agreement that the United States brokered between Kabul and the Taliban. This was no oversight, either; Amnesty noted that the US government threw women and human rights under the bus, and “cemented this position by imposing sanctions, including asset freezes, against the Prosecutor of the [International Criminal Court], who was poised to lead an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity by all parties to the conflict since 2003.”
In practical, day-to-day terms, it must have been very difficult for many Afghans to see much to choose between the brutality, incompetence, and corruption of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and the brutality and fanaticism of the Taliban. What they certainly did recognize, however, was that the Kabul government had been imposed upon them by the American imperium, and had come with a decades-long war that cost some 800,000 Afghan lives.
As bad as they are, the Taliban are Pashto-speaking Muslim Afghans answering only to God (as they understand him), under whose harsh rule Afghanistan enjoyed its only five years of peace and order in the last four decades. The government in Kabul, on the other hand, owed its very existence to the foreign, Christian crusaders who put them in power and it danced to their tune. And this fact was ultimately disqualifying.
For many Afghans, even many Afghan women, the whole concept of women’s rights was doubtless tainted by its associations with the invading empire. The main talking-point of American policy since the 2001 invasion, the dominant theme in the West’s increasingly jingoistic discourse on the Taliban in particular, and Islam in general, equality and the rights of girls and women were inevitably over-coded in Afghanistan as alien values.
The more Americans and westerners pushed for them, the more resistance to gender equality and women’s rights became authentically Afghan virtues. In her 2005 book African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50, the historian Tabitha Kanogo noted that the British colonial administration’s “efforts to medicalize and politicize” the practice of female circumcision in Kenya only made it more common. “The government’s efforts to supervise and legislate a culturally constructed practice created resistance,” and transformed it into a positive act of Kenyan “authenticity.”
The same process was certainly at work in Afghanistan; the imperialist master’s politicization of gender equality and women’s rights made resistance to them an authentic act for Afghans eager to be free of the foreign oppressor. By a kind of dark alchemy, the American mission civilizatrice might have cemented misogyny and sexism as authentic Afghan cultural values for generations to come.
There is a chilling warning for us in the fall of Kabul. The Taliban are not a tiny fanatical cabal, and their assumption of power in Afghanistan is not a mere coup d’état in which they will simply occupy the offices vacated by officials of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. They are a mass popular movement committed to absolute power and a fundamental transformation of their society after 20 years of civil war. Their numbers have grown at least fourfold since the US-led invasion. In 2001, they had an army of less than 50,000 soldiers, two thirds of whom were foreign volunteers; today, according to US government sources, they have a force of 200,000, the vast majority Afghans.
It is clear, however, that the Taliban never commanded the allegiance of a majority or even a plurality of Afghans, yet they seized power and free-rein to govern Afghanistan as a rigid, Islamic theocracy. They did not need the majority, only its acquiescence, and its willingness to “go along” with the zealots. And this poses a critical question for Americans.
Totalitarian power has always been built not on the majority’s eager embrace of the fanatical minority’s program, but its indifference to it. It is predicated on a stark political binary. The people occupying the ideological plateau between the fanatics and their opponents invariably find that they have a choice of two alternatives, but one is so tainted and delegitimized that they find a way to “go along with the fanatics.
The Nazi party won only 33 per cent of the vote in Germany’s last free election in 1933, but the vast swath of German voters between them and their Social Democrat rivals, who won 20 per cent, found that they could reconcile themselves to Nazism after more than a decade of social strife and propaganda had tainted the Social Democrats. They might not have hated Jews, and they might have found the Nazis vulgar and even comical, but they went along with the antisemitism. And then they went along with the suppression of the Social Democrats, and the Nuremburg Laws, and Kristallnacht, and the deportations, and finally the death camps.
The fall of Kabul and the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan this week demonstrates that this dynamic still works. Given a choice between fanaticism and a discredited alternative, the great mass in the middle – independents, undecideds, moderates – can reconcile themselves to “going along” with the fanatics and tacitly consent to their rule.
We have our own small but popular mass movement of religious zealots intent on imposing a regime of religious rule, our own American Taliban. The Christian White Nationalist movement is growing, has tasted power, and is routinely writing legislation to be passed unquestioningly by almost half of the state governments in the United States that are controlled by the Republican Party. It is building profile and legitimacy through social media, disinformation, anti-vaxxing and anti-masking propaganda, and successfully delegitimizing and neutering campaigns of social justice and equality as “un-American” socialism, and Black Lives Matter and Antifa “terrorism.” And opposing them is an unpopular, ineffective national government with a manufactured, but growing, legitimacy problem.
We must ask how long it will be before they have completely surrounded the capital and, when that happens, how many American independents, undecideds, moderates will be able to reconcile themselves to “going along” with the fanatics and tacitly consent to their rule?