Wed 15 September UPDATED ON 20 SEPTEMBER
Today I tried to send money by Western Union to a friend in Afghanistan. At their office on Louise square, Brussels, I was told that the Afghan government had banned transfers to the country. The director came to confirm that it had been a decision of the Taliban; the employee shook his head sadly in commiseration with the Afghans. Later I managed to transfer the amount on the company’s online platform. It was just not possible in dollars anymore, only in the local currency. That makes sense, because there are not so many dollars left in Afghanistan, and they are needed to buy things from abroad – such as food. Edit 10 November: my donation arrived in the Afghan bank but my friend had to come every day to stand in line, and each time he was told the money was there but they had no cash to pay him out. After three weeks I recalled the money and then sought out an Afghan money trader in Belgium that could send the money to my friend through the hawala system. Transfer costs are a bit lower than with Western Union and my friend could pick up the money from Kabul’s money market the same day.
The EU High Representative, Josep Borrell, said in a press statement this afternoon that a serious lessons learnt exercise was needed within the EU to reflect on the results of twenty years of statebuilding efforts. He also stated the EU should engage the new Taliban government (underlining it is not the same as recognizing them), overriding some member states who rather not even talk to the Taliban. He congratulated Europe on increasing the humanitarian aid available to Afghans to 200 million Euros. The Taliban government, in turn, yesterday thanked the world for the 1.2 billion USD pledged in Geneva to aid Afghanistan. But no European aid will be delivered through the Afghan government. The Ministries of Education, Health, Rural Development and others will have insufficient funds to confront the looming crisis.
Humanitarian operation undermining the Afghan state
This does not only apply to the political appointees from the new caretaker government, but also to the entire civil service . Despite its many deficiencies, the state apparatus has continuously developed and expanded its capacity, buoyed by a young generation of more educated Afghans, over the past two decades. According to the UN and other international observers, who agreed that the Ghani government was hopelessly and increasingly corrupt, the only Afghan state institution which performed well in 2019 and 2020 was the Internal Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission, which helped build a more inclusive, streamlined and rules-based Afghan administration.
The main complaint of the Afghan population about their administration was corruption. The Taliban, during their years of shadow governance, have convinced the Afghans that they’re much cleaner. But it will be difficult for them to fight corruption if they cannot pay salaries. The Taliban may hope to receive payroll support from well-willing countries in the region: Pakistan, as during their first stint in power, and Gulf states. Maybe also from China and Turkey.
The large humanitarian operation which the international community is preparing will mostly go through the UN. The Taliban will have to give the UN assurances of safety, operational freedom and diplomatic immunity. There will be hard haggling about the right to employ Afghan women, which is likely to dominate headlines in the West. The UN will vastly increase its mission in Afghanistan and the aid will reach the beneficiaries through a well-oiled NGO sector which will also inflate. The UN will probably set up large IDP camps to facilitate aid distribution, as it has done during humanitarian operations elsewhere. These camps usually evolve into slums when they are on the outskirts of cities.
The Taliban will remain uncomfortable with the intrusive Western operation and point at the enormous overheads and the inefficiency of the aid operation, claiming that the Afghan state could have done the job much better. There will be continuous frictions as the UN insists on following its own standards of human rights while the Taliban impose their laws of segregation. As soon as the humanitarian crisis is over, hopefully in the spring of 2022, the Taliban will insist the UN drastically scales back the humanitarian operation, while the UN will attempt to transform it into developmental work. But it cannot stay if the host government rejects it. However, the Taliban will want the UN to maintain a small humanitarian and diplomatic presence, hoping that they will convince the international body to gradually accept it and absorb the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan into the community of nations.
The UN and the humanitarian sector sometimes exaggerate the risks of a crisis. They point at the ethical grounds for preventing rather than responding to a catastrophe, but there is also an obvious professional interest in maintaining high levels of funding. However this crisis seems real. From all sides we hear that the drought has severely impacted food production, especially on rain-fed lands. Together with the cash shortage – which makes it difficult to buy food abroad – the winter is going to be a tough one in Afghanistan.
Perhaps the new government will convince neighbouring countries to deliver food aid and even support government delivery systems. But such news is hard to find. It seems nothing positive can be found online about the Taliban government. It is downright difficult to even find what they are saying, in their own words, on their own channels. These seem to have been taken down around the 21st of August, likely the work of hackers: I have not encountered any investigation of the matter. Currently one needs to follow a chain of links into the shadows of the web to hear the Taliban in their own voice. They are making an effort by communicating in English. It’s worthwhile listening.
Engaging the Taliban
This morning I was interviewed by students for their online magazine. Many questions were about a policy paper I had published entitled ‘Engaging the Taliban’ where I argue that a window of opportunity exists for a positive engagement between the West and the new Afghan government (I’m glad Borrell picked up this idea ;-)). Afghan civil society, infused with the freedoms and practices of sociocultural life during the past decades, can try to engage the Taliban at the local level. The government needs the participation of experts, and engaging local civil society actors can strengthen social cohesion. With some modest external funding, civil society, together with the remaining state structures, could work on development projects.
Maybe this is a bit idealistic. The Taliban have announced that civil society organisations would remain closed. They see them as the main vehicle to import Western ideology into Afghan society. And some students objected that I was caving in to unreasonable demands, sitting in my academic ivory tower, playing the power games of privileged white men while ignoring the women protesting in the streets of Afghan cities. How could I even suggest the West should support the impossible adaptation of progressive forces to medieval practices?
But what’s the point of sitting far away and condemning a government, whose arguments one does not even hear, while a disaster is unfolding? Of course it’s more productive to engage them. The Taliban captured the government after a long and hard struggle. They were up against the USA, NATO and the entire Western world, which waged an all-out war with drones, airstrikes and special forces, killing an estimated 80,000 Taliban fighters and many civilians (UPDATE 20Sep21: according to data from the Cost of War project, more than 50,000 Taliban and other opposition fighters died between 2001 and 2021. In 2018, 39 countries – each of them from the West, except Mongolia – had troops in Afghanistan. From a military perspective this victory deserves at least some respect. After such a hard-won victory, the Taliban will not relinquish power easily.
They convinced much of the Afghan population (also in the urban centres) that they govern better, especially in terms of providing justice (see for example the research by Adam Baczko). The feeling of injustice, not religious ideology nor poverty, is the major driver of conflict in every theatre of conflict I’ve visited. By focusing on justice, Taliban do actually bring peace. Taliban-controlled areas, of which there have been quite a few over the past fifteen years, have generally been more peaceful than government-ruled areas. And this is not through repression, which never brings peace, but by better local governance.
A Panjshiri friend of mine, an uneducated guy with a simple life, an ex-communist with no sympathy for religion, told me today that the situation in Kabul has become better. Security is good, he said. The Taliban had started becoming more predictable. His children were going to school and he could get around town freely. The main concern, he told me like all others, is the lack of work and money. All the stories of Taliban atrocities circulating on internet are true –executions, floggings, beaten-up journalists – but when a victim goes to complain about them with the new administration, they seem to have better chances to be received properly, than with the previous government. Local Taliban governance has been their main selling point with the local population in rural and conservative areas; now they have to adapt it to urban areas. After the initial chaos of takeover, with the attendant security vacuum, their law and order regime is starting to function.
Legitimacy of the new Afghan government
From the perspective of political theory, it can be argued that the Taliban takeover of the Afghan government is legitimate. It is based on mass support accompanied by a frank military victory. The previous government and its army, whose legitimacy may have been constitutionally based but popularly not widely respected, just collapsed and fled. There has been less bloodshed than many expected. There are assassinations but there is no purge of Afghan society. The main argument for considering the Taliban government illegitimate, not according to supposedly universal human values but in classical political theory, would be if it is subordinate to Pakistan.
It is true that the caretaker government, of which most members seem to have close ties with Pakistan, suggests that this might be a puppet government. The announcement of the government was probably the worst news non-Taliban Afghans received in the first two weeks of September. Several of my cautiously hopeful Afghan friends were deeply dispirited when they read the list of pro-Pakistan Pashtun mullahs and mawlawis who received most of the positions in the new government. But nobody rejoices at the news that some more nationalistic Taliban groups are splitting from the movement. This might mean more war, the last thing Afghans want. Better be governed by mullahs than face a new civil war, most of them seem to think. The Taliban apparently seek to pacify communities by building on this prevalent attitude. If they thus manage to compose with the population at the local level, the composition of the government, which is a caretaker one after all, may be less delegitimizing.
The Taliban movement has been good at keeping its cohesion over the past decades. One can imagine how many efforts have been deployed to split the movement, mostly into ‘hardliners’ (to be eliminated as terrorists) vs ‘pragmatists’ (whom the West can speak to and include in a political settlement). These efforts by Western opponents of the Taliban are ongoing. The movement only takes big decisions after intense internal deliberations, seeking consensus. This also happened with the decision to form the caretaker government. The Taliban must certainly have been concerned about the internal cohesion of the movement and the loyalty of its leaders. They did not expect to govern so soon and were caught unprepared. They have also been worried by a new Islamic resistance movement, inspired by the Islamic State, emerging in opposition to them. They may also need to prove to the rest of the world they can stop terrorism in Afghanistan. The conservative choice they made may reflect not (only) submission to Pakistani interests, but a security reflex: first establish tight security through loyal Taliban members, and in a second, future phase they may establish a more civilian and inclusive administration (inshallah).
Support the population
I am not a Taliban sympathizer. My friends have lost dear ones in the past weeks through the fighting and are stunned and immensely depressed by the sudden falling apart of the country they helped build over the past twenty years, often selflessly. From my first days in Afghanistan, I have been a fan and supporter of Afghan culture, so I feel darkness when confronted by destroyed musical instruments and the prohibition of any cultural events except the few allowed by the Taliban. The sudden lack of liberties and perspectives faced by a new generation of urbanized open-minded youth, a dynamic population with many talents (including the children of my friends) is devastating.
But… after two decades of many ill-guided policies, we in the West, the so-called ‘international community’, should be very careful not to aggravate their plight. At least we should endeavour to support the establishment of social peace, which includes the new Taliban rulers since they are now part of the landscape. We may not be able to understand why so many Afghans prefer the establishment of law, order, and a predictable and functioning justice, over the fight for their rights such as a right not to wear the niqab (in fact the former may be a condition for the latter). We do not understand because we do not live in their country and we reflexively compare the Taliban to the Nazis or other extremists we have seen in movies. We should not seek to impede the Taliban establishment of governance. We should certainly not arm their opponents, because by offering weapons and political support we are creating rather than supporting opponents, and fanning the flames of another, perhaps long round of conflict.
It seems we are first letting a humanitarian crisis unfold, and then will respond to it with a humanitarian operation. This may make us feel good so we can forget the pain of the defeat of the Western liberal state-building project. Maybe after that we will be faced by a new global crisis and start forgetting about Afghanistan. It is a scenario that seems familiar and which offers little hope. Instead, as Borrell suggested, we should embark on a serious soul-searching about the reasons, methods and results of the major Western intervention in Afghanistan, and meanwhile not abandon the very Afghan people we claim to defend, whether they have landed in our countries as asylum seekers, are stuck in third countries like Turkey awaiting relocation, or – the vast majority – are still in Afghanistan. To support them there’s only one way forward: engage the Taliban.