TALIBAN ATTACKS IN AFGHANISTAN

Books, we have been told, shouldn’t be judged by their covers. In a similar vein, political speeches need not be assessed by the headlines they generate.

Last Friday, US President Joe Biden was a casualty of a sub-editor’s creative ingenuity. Reporting his much-awaited announcement on Afghanistan, days after US forces had evacuated the Bagram airfield on the outskirts of Kabul in the dead of night, The Times (London) carried the headline: “Afghanistan is not worth more US lives, says Biden.”

To be fair, Biden didn’t quite say that. He pledged that after 2,448 casualties, he wouldn’t send “another generation of Americans” to war in Afghanistan, adding that “We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build…And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”

The Times headline, it would seem, wasn’t totally accurate, but it wasn’t entirely misleading either. As US and NATO forces withdraw ignominiously from Afghanistan two decades after the ‘war on terror’ was proclaimed, it is pertinent to ask: Was America’s security worth so many Afghan lives?

The question is not some warped version of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ epidemic that is sweeping across Anglophone democracies. The awkward reality is that President George W. Bush launched the military assault against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks to save American lives and avenge those who died. It was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida’s targeting of US cities that was the trigger for the intervention in Afghanistan. Afghan lives didn’t enter the calculations then, and they don’t matter now.

American lives are still paramount. Shortly after Biden’s speech last Thursday, NATO members put out a joint statement suggesting that the military intervention had achieved its goal to “prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan as a safe haven to attack us.” The basis of this reassurance was an agreement between the US and Taliban negotiated last year. According to the ‘bipartisan and independent’ Afghanistan Study Group Final Report of February 2021, “The Taliban are not an international terrorist organisation and there is no evidence that they have any intention to attack the US.” The report drew a distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaida and other jihadi groups.

The distinction was, however, contrived: “The Taliban do, however, accept assistance from al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. It remains to be seen how rigorously the Taliban will clamp down on the presence of these organisations and their activities on Afghan territory. From late-2020, the steady rhythm of terror attacks in Kabul and across the country suggests a disinclination or inability on the group’s part to restrain the use of terror, either by its own members or by others.”

In plain language, as has been admitted by the CIA director and the head of Britain’s MI6, there is absolutely no surety that the Taliban will stick to its commitment to limit its jihad to Afghanistan. This may happen in the short term as the Taliban — no doubt with Pakistan’s active assistance — go about trying to establish control over Afghanistan, but the longer-term implications for the security of the region are grim.

This is more so because the forces rooted in Afghan society that doggedly fought the Taliban between 1994 and 2001— mainly the Northern Alliance — have been irreparably weakened by the US’s ham-handed and amateurish attempts to create an Afghan democracy, mainly using money power. Under the circumstances, it is more than likely that those who sing the virtues of jihad in neighbouring countries, including India, will once again use Afghanistan as their launching pad.

In the 20 years, it has spent regrouping, there are crucial lessons the jihadi forces may have imbibed. The first, and by far the most important, is the awareness that the West today lacks the moral resolve and the political skills to recreate the world in its own image. The imperial zeal that sustained it till the culmination of the Cold War has been replaced by national self-loathing and loss of direction. The ability to endure discomfort and even pain has sharply eroded in the ‘snowflake’ generation.

Contrast this with the triumphalism that is now the hallmark of the Afghan Taliban. Having worsted two superpowers in succession, the Taliban have acquired a belief in their own invincibility grounded in unflinching theological certitudes. If it succeeds in overthrowing the regime in Kabul in the coming months, the recreated Emirates will not retreat into its earlier isolation. A more self-confident Taliban will now seek to safeguard its future by forging an axis with two strategic neighbours — China and Pakistan.

I wish that Afghanistan recovers from the Taliban attacks very soon.

-courtesy swapan dasgupta