Come from the Shadows. Terry Glavin
too. But whatever we think or believe, to remain indifferent to objective truth is to submit to the “sealing-off of one part of the world from another” that George Orwell noticed all those years ago. It will only make it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs, and harder to know what is really happening, as the years pass.
So, to begin, I want to dispense with the Absurdistan that is set out in those two earlier paragraphs. There’s some history that’s important to get right, straight away, because if it’s left upside down or sideways, nothing about Afghanistan will make any sense. What follows is how Absurdistan comes apart.
THERE IS NOTHING uniquely or hopelessly misogynistic about Afghan society. Afghan women have been no less enslaved than women elsewhere in the so-called Muslim world and, in the purdah tradition of the full-veil burqa, perhaps more noticeably. But by the late 1800s, Afghanistan was among the leading Muslim-majority countries in the cause of women’s emancipation. By the 1920s, unveiled Afghan women were taking up posts as university professors and government ministers. By the 1970s, Afghan women were attending the theatre in Kabul and Kunduz, taking in the plays of Chekhov and Molière and Brecht, and they could look back on two generations of women who were university graduates, skilled-trades workers, judges, doctors, lawyers, teachers and senior government officials. When the Taliban swept into Kabul in 1996, 40 percent of the women there were holding down jobs; a third of the city’s doctors, half of the university students and civil servants and most of the teachers were women. Afghan women have waged a valiant struggle, and their struggle continues. Their fight for equality has nothing to do with anything the West is trying to impose on them or on Afghan men.
The Taliban do not represent religious values that are deeply rooted in Afghan culture. You can inquire into their mumbo jumbo as closely as you want, and you will not find an Islamic antecedent for it in Afghanistan. “Before the Taliban, Islamic extremism had never flourished in Afghanistan,” notes Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist and author who is one of the few authorities on Taliban history. “The Taliban represented nobody but themselves and recognized no Islam except their own.” In the nineteenth century, when the tyrannical amir Abdur Rahman was attempting to stoke jihadist xenophobia among Afghans, he appealed to the country’s Muslim clerical council to condemn a mullah who had been preaching peaceful coexistence with Islam’s Christian “brothers.” The council defied the amir and refused to condemn the mullah. Twice.
It is untrue that Afghanistan is chronically plagued by insurgencies. “Afghanis do not want us in their country. They have been fighting this war or that since the beginning of time,” declared a leaflet titled “Get Out of Afghanistan Now,” distributed at the World Peace Forum at the University of British Columbia in 2006. The sentiment in this “left-wing” leaflet was echoed by Canada’s Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in 2009: “We are not going to ever defeat the insurgency. Afghanistan has probably had—my reading of Afghanistan history—it’s probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind.” But as Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, observes, if a bit too generally: “From 1929 to 1978, the country was completely at peace.”
As for the origins of Afghanistan’s most recent agonies, it is important to know that the United States was already funding Islamist forces in Afghanistan before the Soviet period, during the time of the mildly Moscow-friendly Daoud government. Further, in his 1996 memoir, former Central Intelligence Agency director Robert M. Gates disclosed that the American president who first armed Afghan Islamist groups against the communist regime that overthrew Daoud in 1978 was not Ronald Reagan, but Jimmy Carter, the peace-loving southerner. Carter’s interventions began a full six months before Soviets soldiers poured across the border and a year and a half before Reagan’s election.
The United States was by no means alone in funding anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and uncounted numbers of oil-rich Arab privateers spent billions of dollars funding Afghan mujahideen armies through the 1980s. Still, for all the money they cost and the trouble they caused, the mujahideen never did manage to chase out the Russians. The Soviets’ 1989 pullout was the culmination of a carefully planned, three-year phased withdrawal based on diplomatic, economic and military terms guaranteed by the White House. The withdrawal had little to do with Ronald Reagan’s geostrategic genius, and nothing to do with the Afghans’ legendary ferocity and cunning in warfare.
The U.S.-funded anti-Soviet mujahideen couldn’t even manage to bring down the government the Soviets left behind in Kabul. By the time Soviet soldiers left Afghanistan, more than a million Afghans were dead and a third of the country’s people lived in exile as refugees. The Afghan countryside was a moonscape of bomb craters. The country was littered with several million landmines. Human Rights Watch reckons that by the time of the Russian departure there were more small arms in Afghanistan than in Pakistan and India combined. Still, Mohammad Najibullah’s reformist republic carried on quite competently for another three years after the Russian troops left, fending off assaults and mutinies from unreconstructed Stalinists and from mujahideen militias. Najibullah’s government ended up outlasting the Soviet Union. When his regime collapsed in 1992, it was mainly because it ran out of gas. With Washington’s quiet blessing, Moscow’s proto-capitalist Russian Federation cut off all fuel shipments to Afghanistan and scuppered a UN-brokered transition plan Najibullah was in the middle of implementing, which was to have opened the way for a new multi-party Afghan state.
The long Afghan civil war that followed was mostly a bloody campaign of bombardment and massacre that Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia waged by proxy armies almost wholly upon Kabul and its civilian population. Enflamed by the prospect of a sovereign Muslim democracy emerging in Afghanistan, each Islamist bloc competed with the other to be the first to capture the Afghan capital and sabotage the Peshawar Accord, the successor to Najibullah’s aborted UN-brokered transition plan. The accord contained a two-year roadmap to the new Islamic State of Afghanistan and national elections, which were to be held in 1994. While incoming U.S. president Bill Clinton was famously playing his saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, Kabul was being turned into a human abattoir. The massacres that began in 1992 left three-quarters of Kabul’s two million people dead, missing or wandering the roads as half-mad refugees.
The sociopathology of Talibanism is not attributable to a too-strict interpretation of the Quran. The Taliban arose in the 1990s from lowbrow madrassas in Pakistan where poor hill-country Pashtun boys were indoctrinated into a cargo-cult perversion of a debased form of Deobandism, which originated in India in the nineteenth century. (These same Pakistani madrassas were still churning out roughly 250,000 fanatics every year, ten years after September 11). The Deobandi-inspired doctrine the Taliban adopted was itself a corruption of an eighteenth-century Arab-supremacist Salafism, which asserts that Islam’s glory days were in the ninth-century Arabian deserts, and it has all been downhill ever since.
Apart from the fighters in the Taliban ranks whose illiteracy rendered them incapable of reading the Quran in the first place, literate Taliban commanders would indeed resort to a Quranic lexicon when they issued death-by-stoning verdicts. The Quran was likely the only book they’d ever read. But nowhere does the Quran stipulate death by stoning as the punishment for any crime, and all that mattered in Taliban discipline was what the supreme leader Mullah Omar said. Omar was the Taliban führer-figure, the Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful. Omar’s word was religious law, and for his followers, a proper Muslim was burdened by a religious duty to murder anyone who disobeyed Omar. The only consistency in the purportedly Islamic order Omar imposed on Afghanistan during the Taliban years was the cruelty of his rules and the sadism of the prescribed punishments for breaking them.
Despite their own boasts, the Taliban are not owed any credit for having been anti-Soviet holy warriors. Mullah Omar was once employed by a third-tier anti-Soviet mujahideen groupuscule, and any number of ageing Taliban soldiers-for-hire may once have been retained by the Pakistani ISI and paid with American money to fight the Soviets. But among the mercenary Taliban generals in bin Laden’s circle were cold-eyed men who had been senior Afghan army officers in the Stalinist coup that took over Afghanistan in 1978. Some had served the Soviet-backed Afghan police state at the highest levels of command.
To trust the Taliban