When the US invaded Afghanistan after al-Qaeda’s September 11 2001 attacks, it was roundly condemned. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops by the 20th anniversary of those attacks has not been endorsed with as much enthusiasm. Is this a case of damned if the US does, damned if it doesn’t?
Interventions in places ranging from Vietnam and Eastern Europe to many parts of South America and the Middle East have always been contentious, regardless of who is involved. But as the Taliban gains more ground in Afghanistan each day, many Afghans are rightly concerned for the future of the country’s fragile democratic institutions and the advances women have made since 2001.
Could Afghanistan turn out like Vietnam, where after the departure of US forces the country was finally able to confront its internal divisions and build a thriving, economically prosperous, united country?
The roots of the current conflict can be traced to the late 1970s, when the Marxist-Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) led a revolution that ended the 1`52-year rule of the Barakzai dynasty. The modernising efforts of the PDPA government were spurned by conservative forces in the rural areas and the warlords, who foresaw the erosion of their power bases.
Almost a year after the revolution the government had to call in the USSR for support, resulting in what has been dubbed as the “Soviet Union’s Vietnam” given its almost decade-long involvement there.
The antiregime fighters, the Mujahideen, enjoyed popular support in the Islamic world since it was seen as a holy war against the communist infidels. They received backing in various forms from the US, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and the UK. This hot conflict was seen as a proxy for the Cold War, and ended around the time of the break-up of the USSR in 1989.
The PDPA-led government managed to hold on to power until 1992, when it collapsed due to internal squabbling, the decline of the economy and Russia’s own economic crisis and inability to support the Kabul government any longer.
The Taliban emerged in the 1990s from the complex network of Mujahideen fighters opposed to the government, brandishing a mixture of strict adherence to Sharia law, especially drawing on the ultra-orthodox Deobandi school, and Pashtun social and cultural tribal norms.
Writing in the London Review of Books, former BBC correspondent Owen Bennett-Jones captured this tortured history well: “Over the last century and a half the intricacies of Pashtun politics have been discussed by politicians and their advisers in the capitals of all the great powers: it’s Washington that’s worrying today, but it used to be Moscow, and before that London.”
Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001 led to girls’ enrolment in primary school fall from 32% to just 6.4%. The current government claims big improvements: 8-million Afghan children enrolled in school, 2.5-million of them girls, and the number of female university students rising 50% since 2008. About a quarter of the members of the Afghan parliament are women. However, school dropout rates for girls are still high.
Recent scenarios sketched by Ben Barry, senior fellow at the International Institute of Security Studies, suggest the Afghan government could hold on to the most populous cities by concentrating its forces there. The other possibility is a peace deal with the Taliban that would probably result in the rolling back of many of the advances made since 2001. The worst-case scenario is a no-deal one in which the Taliban consolidates power in Pashtun-dominated areas and the government’s power bases wither away.
While the US shifts its attention to its power rivalry with China, the best option may be for regional powers such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, India, China and Saudi Arabia to guarantee a peace arrangement that entails a Taliban commitment to preserving some kind of democracy and women’s rights in return for supporting Afghanistan economically.
Such underwriting may be one of the few justifiable forms of intervention.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute.
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