I first arrived in Afghanistan on March 21, 2000. I was immediately whisked into the office of the Taliban Deputy Minister for Culture, who warmly welcomed my mission to collaborate on the documentation and protection of cultural heritage. In the following seven months I occasionally worked with him and other Taliban authorities, mostly at the provincial and district level, as I surveyed Afghan monuments and archaeological sites and undertook some small-scale protection and restoration works. I lived in Kabul and moved freely, without needing any protection, through the city and the country, except in the Northeastern areas held by the opposition.

I found the Taliban personable and hospitable as only Afghans can be, but I also noticed they were often uncultivated and inept, and intensely disliked by my Afghan colleagues. I once co-hosted a political gathering of Taliban (for the opening of the National Museum in August 2000) and then noticed that usually calm Taliban contacts suddenly agitated for jihad and national cultural resistance (the museum was closed again after three days): to me an antipathetic group identity and project. Moreover the Taliban were clearly incapable of governing the country – in four years since they had gained power they had not restored any buildings, and only paved 20 km of road – and most Afghans I met ardently longed they would disappear.

The Taliban had hoped that once they captured Kabul (in Sept 1996) they would automatically be recognized as the new government. The refusal of the international community – barring the three countries of Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia – to recognize them bewildered them and they tried hard to gain acceptance. The decrees to protect the country’s pre-Islamic cultural heritage that had triggered my presence were such a measure, as was their prohibition of poppy cultivation, which they entirely stopped in 2000. In one year, opium production dropped to almost nothing in the areas they controlled. It created great tensions between rural communities already afflicted by drought, whose last livelihood was now taken away from them, and the Taliban authorities.

But the international community did not respond to these overtures, and by early 2001 the Taliban decided to steer a confrontational course. Their first symbolic gesture was to blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the biggest in the world, on March 11. Then exactly six months later September 2001 happened. The Taliban were accused of complicity in the attack on the World Trade Center and soon after the US bombed them out of power.

Creating a new Afghan state

It is worthwhile to recall that when US President Bush pointed the finger at Osama Ben Laden and Afghanistan, only a day after 9/11, the Taliban requested evidence before extraditing their guest, whom they were not particularly close with or fond of. The US refused to provide evidence, and threatened with an aerial bombardment instead, closing diplomatic channels. Just prior to 9/11 I had started working for the United Nations Mission to Afghanistan and was witnessing a trial for proselytization against the members of a Christian NGO in Kabul. I had been impressed by the Taliban legal proceedings, surprisingly fair and disciplined. Was it so absurd for the government to request evidence before extradition?

I was evacuated out of Kabul together with the handful of foreigners who lived there the day after 9/11, and redeployed to the Pakistani tribal areas, in Peshawar and later Quetta. From there I witnessed the rapid crumbling of Taliban rule; all people I spoke to welcomed it. The fact that the USA had flown to their rescue after more than a decade of abandonment gave the Afghans confidence and hope. After the fall of the Taliban Afghans expected to build a Western-supported state in which all Afghans, those in the country and the refugees, could find their place – except war criminals. After twenty-two years of continuous war the consensus was that the country had to be reconstructed by its population, including previous Taliban sympathizers. A survey I conducted in October and November 2001 among Afghans in Pakistan and those I could reach in Afghanistan pointed out that the preference was for a transitory period of technocratic rule by the UN. This was not what the UN wanted to hear, and that part of the survey results was ignored.

Instead, an Afghan government was formed without previous announcement in a meeting in Bonn, in December 2001, crafted almost entirely by Western diplomatic envoys. Besides a few names of Northern Alliance leaders, which had led Kabul through the worst bout of civil war (1992-96) and had provided the ‘boots on the ground’ for the US attack, the list of names for the new transitional government came mostly from the Western-based Afghan diaspora. Many names were unknown to the inhabitants of Afghanistan.

I was not important enough to go to Bonn, and was the only foreigner for the UN political mission in Kabul those first weeks. I had arrived on the first UN-authorized flight in Kabul, somewhere near November 20, with a suitcase full of dollars (Afghanistan had a cash economy and I was supposed to set up the office for the pending UN return to Kabul)¹.

When the Bonn conference started I had to deflect the anger of Rabbani, the ex-President who had reoccupied the broken sofas of the presidential palace after the Taliban withdrawal and considered himself the head of state. He sent messengers to me (phone lines did not work) to complain that he had not been informed about the real purpose of the Bonn meeting; he also warned me he refused to recognize the new government headed by Karzai and would not leave the palace. It took Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy responsible for Bonn, to smooth-talk him out of resisting what Rabbani saw as a coup. Brahimi ensured him he would have a honourable place in the future Afghanistan, and Rabbani would run for president in the first electoral process.

Because of my previous work in the cultural sector and current post of ‘civil affairs officer’ I was close to many of the young educated Afghans who came out of the woodwork after the fall of the Taliban. They accepted the list of the UN-decided government, although they were worried about the participation of ex-warlords. Altogether it was seen as a sufficient first step, but there had been little consultation among Afghans to decide on the new government. The Taliban had not been invited, although normally, after a conflict, the victor should reach out to the adversary to make peace; this is international practice but also an Afghan custom.

The Taliban had disbanded during the US attack, and some of the authorities I had known discretely contacted me to ask if the UN would be OK with their return to private, not public life. When the Taliban leadership surrendered to Karzai on condition that they could return to civilian life and enjoy an amnesty, Karzai immediately agreed and made a public statement to that effect. But Rumsfeld, the belligerent US Secretary of Defense, forced him to retract his agreement. In the emerging doctrine of the Global War on Terror the Taliban and Al Qaeda were the same and they had to be punished to avenge the attack on New York. It should be noted that no Taliban involvement in 9/11 preparations was ever proven. At that point some of the senior Taliban leaders settled in Pakistan; it would take years for them to restart operations in Afghanistan.

The first electoral process

This desire for US vengeance also upturned the first electoral process. The small UN team in charge of the political transition had been working very hard to make this nationwide consultation, based on a traditional political mechanism, a success. Throughout Afghanistan district populations freely elected civilian representatives who came together to agree on the new structures of government, who should lead it and who should fill the key posts. Besides Karzai, King Zahir Shah (who had been deposed in a 1973 coup and spent nearly three decades in Rome) and Rabbani were the main presidential candidates.

I witnessed many of the district and regional elections in the Taliban heartland (around Kandahar) and was awed by the democratic spirit I encountered. My UN colleagues in other parts of the country reported the same. Despite their military presence (there was a security vacuum in Afghanistan at this point) very few warlords were elected in this process. Although the UN hardly had a budget for the exercise, people in all districts of Afghanistan participated enthusiastically, paying for their own travel and board. As preliminary elections in Kandahar ended I was called back to Kabul to become the floor manager of the planned ten-day national conference in the Polytechnic University compound in June 2002. As we prepared for the first session the mood among the 1500 delegates from all corners of the country was incredibly optimistic. Now there would be peace and the country would be rebuilt from scratch.

That evening Jean Arnault, who had recently started as political director of the UN mission under Brahimi, invited me and my UN colleagues who had been responsible for overseeing the regional elections to dinner. He asked us who we believed would win the elections. A tour de table revealed that we thought King Zahir Shah would be the delegates’ favourite, with Karzai as a Prime Minister and head of government. That seemed to surprise him. He left hastily to confer.

The next day much happened. First the opening was delayed by one day. Then the US Special Representative Khalilzad and a few detested warlords of the Northern Alliance were allowed onto the compound, against the regulations, and they assembled groups of delegates to convince them they had to support Karzai. Then King Zahir Shah suddenly appeared on television with Brahimi on one side and Khalilzad on the other to read a declaration in which he stated he did not wish to become head of state; simultaneously Rabbani dropped his candidacy. But the worst development for the popular delegates was the announcement that a hundred additional seats were to be given to ‘important personalities’, many of them the warlords that the US relied on to continue chasing Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and who had not been elected by the population.

When my colleagues and I asked for the reason of this sudden reversal, we were told in hushed ‘intelligence’ overtones that there had been credible threats to the Polytechnic compound by snubbed warlords, and we had to give them a seat for the sake of peace. For us UN workers, who had repeatedly vouchsafed for the neutrality of the proceedings in front of assembled district and regional delegates, this was deeply disappointing, even embarrassing. I remember a panicking young woman from Uruzgan, who had agreed to expose herself by working for us because she believed in the country’s democratic future, telling me that ‘by you giving power to these people I will not be safe when I return, and the troubles and violence are going to start again’. And indeed, they did. 10 June 2002 was the day that the democratic hopes and engagement of the Afghan people were betrayed. The UN lost its prestige among Afghans on that day. From there it was all downhill.

It was clear to us at the UN that our organization had succumbed to US pressure. They wanted their warlord friends who could hunt Al Qaeda for them to be in charge of the country, not a democratic government. It just had to look democratic. The will of the Afghan people, which I had experienced as so remarkably united to rebuild their country, was disregarded. Coming elections would be riddled by corruption, intimidation and abstention.

For those that have 26 minutes to spare, I have documented this first electoral process in a movie called ‘Emergency Loya Jirga in Kandahar’, available online.

A state dependent on international patronage

The Afghan state that emerged over the following two decades was based on patronage, with the USA and the international community as prime patron. Patronage networks were mostly ethnical or regional, and linked to traditional structures of authority and business networks. The Taliban characterization of the Afghan government as a puppet regime was not that far off the mark, considering that the Afghan government could not do anything against the wishes of the USA. Karzai tried towards the end of his second mandate to limit the freedom of US troops to search Afghan houses, but was thwarted by the US administration. But the Taliban are wrong when they insinuate that the Afghan population did not support the new state. Despite its corruption – its major flaw in the eyes of the population – and the impossibility for independent civil society or other groups not connected to the patronage networks to gain any representation in government, people supported the idea of a liberal republican Afghan state, with all the institutional and legal trappings suggested (or imposed) by international consultants. Most of my friends and acquaintances were doing quite well, in business, academia, the arts, the media, legal practice, NGOs etc– usually quite far from the Afghan state.

Still, it was surprising to see how easily that state crumbled as the Taliban advanced through the country: even faster than the Taliban collapse under US Coalition bombing and their allied ‘boots on the ground’. One can only conclude that a government without popular legitimacy, even when most of the population agrees with its principles (rather than with the principles of Taliban rule), has no staying power at all.

Although most Afghans don’t seem to support the idea of the Taliban state, they readily concede that the Taliban are much better at governance: the provision of justice, law and order, social peace, public finances, even citizen’s participation. Afghanistan might finally become peaceful, because the Taliban know how to deal with armed opposition and crime: decisively.

The West does not see the opportunity that Taliban rule provides the Afghan people and the region. When watching the news or reading public opinion on social media, we are stuck in our support to the rather small part of the Afghan population that actively colluded with the Afghan state against the Taliban, and which probably needed that state’s protection: women’s rights activists, Western-trained intellectuals and Western freedoms-loving youth. Our betrayal of these people (insofar we identify with our governments’ Afghanistan policies) should make us pause for reflection, not shout at the Taliban.

Our role as Western citizens

As Western citizens, we should indeed reflect on the failures of our government’s policies. For example, on the military wastage. Western countries lost thousands of soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars and euros on ineffective military campaigns. People point the finger at Pakistan for providing support to the Taliban, but the accusation is meaningless when compared to the full technological, surveillance and strike capacity of the elite troops of Western armies which supported the Afghan security forces, not to speak of equal amounts of Western taxpayer money that went to private military contractors. Obama’s ‘surge’ with a total of more than 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, accompanied by serious civilian resources, only strengthened Taliban resistance. We may conclude that these public funds are ill-spent and Western citizens should ask for a review of our military spending, which absorbed about 80% of the trillions of dollars and euros spent in Afghanistan. If all the armies of NATO could not win the war against Taliban fighters on sandals and motorbikes, there may be something fundamentally wrong with our ‘Defense’ policies. We could also ask who is responsible for these funding decisions.

We citizens should also ask about the state-building policies which have now turned out to be a complete joke in Afghanistan, but which are still applied in other countries such as Somalia, Libya and other ‘failed states’ where the international community intervenes (the list is long). If sovereignty is only conferred through international patronage, and popular participation is limited to a rubber stamp exercise in faulty electoral processes every four years a state enjoys no popular support and will not survive even a minor onslaught. So why continue to spend such large amounts on ‘constitutional processes’ where the constitution is copy-pasted by foreign consultants, let alone on the institutional structures that derive from this Western rules-based society? We should accept that populations self-govern and are capable of deciding on their own political structures. They do not need international organizations and Western consultants to create them in their place.

Whether Western citizens can still ask such accounts from their rulers will show how strong our democracy is. For the time being, we should be a bit more modest and outspoken in our opinions, and maybe look and listen to what’s happening in Afghanistan instead of judging.

Please also read the following blogs and opinions: Sarah Chayes, who became closely acquainted with a Kandahari point of view (The Ides of August)

¹: The day of my arrival I was surprised to encounter a Russian military camp just around the corner of my office in Chahrahi Sherpur. The cables I had been copied on, and the international media, had not mentioned this. I walked into the crowd mulling around the human perimeter of nervous Russian soldiers that guarded the camp. I was surprised to hear the Afghans laughing ‘Mama is back’ – that’s how Afghans jokingly referred to the Soviet Union, who provided everything to them – instead of being anxious or angry at the Russian return. I managed to get past a surprised guard, and found the camp commander. He was an Afghan war veteran with a white cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and he didn’t appreciate my speaking Russian at all. He told me in fluent English that this was a medical camp with a humanitarian purpose. The next day it had moved to another location, and three days later the camp had disappeared from Afghanistan. Needless to say, I had seen no Afghan patients. I wondered what else then sheer bravado had motivated the Russians to return so quickly. When I asked my boss he smiled and told me to drop the matter. I have never heard any reference to it.