If the West provides aid in Afghanistan, it stabilizes the Taliban’s rule. If it does not, the state and society collapse, triggering new streams of refugees. Who could also reach Europe.
The images of how thousands of Afghans rushed to the airport after August 15th 2021 hoping to get a seat on an evacuation flight, remain in agonizing memory. Desperate, they believed remaining in Afghanistan was as good as to a death sentence. The last U.S. soldiers left the country after twenty years in the dark of night. That is already history.
Does Afghanistan still concern us today? Yes it does. Anyone who sends soldiers to another country assumes responsibility for it. The soldiers had filled a vacuum, and that vacuum returned after their withdrawal. Afghanistan also concerns us because the tremors that are shaking the country can be felt even here in Europe – whether because of transnational terrorism or because of the refugees who have been leaving their war-torn homeland for decades. There are more than 4,8 million Afghans living abroad.
Wars usually ends after a few years or after a decade. That was the case in Vietnam, the Balkans and Rwanda. But Afghanistan has been ravaged by war and violence for half a century now. It is the burning glass for many crises of our time. It shows how external interference turns a country into a pawn and fails to pacify it, how bad governance slides into a failed state, how terror emerges and spreads, how war and violence turn people into refugees.
Much of this also applies to the Middle East, to the conflict region that stretches from the Persian Gulf along the southern Mediterranean coast to the Atlantic. The UN Security Council has passed more resolutions on Palestine than on any other topic. Wars have also characterized the Middle East for decades; oil has played a role in some of them. Jihadist terror has its roots in the Arab world. Today, people are revolting against unjust orders, states are imploding, and external actors are interfering. In the Middle East, these conflicts are spread over a wide arc of crises that, if Iran is included, is three and a half times the size of the European Union. However, all these conflicts are also found in Afghanistan, which closes this Middle Eastern arc in the east.
Afghanistan’s history is a succession of wars and violence. Time and again, foreign powers have wanted to annex the country. However, no power has ever succeeded in establishing a permanent foothold against the Afghans’ will for freedom. History would probably have been different if the people living in Afghanistan had formed a nation, and it would probably also have been different if these people had agreed on a state that they not only wanted to defend externally, but also filled internally with functioning institutions.
Few other countries prove as difficult to govern as the country in the Hindu Kush. And few countries are as diverse and heterogeneous as Afghanistan. This is as true of its nature as it is of its people, who have never permanently come together in the common project of forming a nation. The Afghans were always united only in the fight against the invaders. In contrast, all attempts to modernize the country according to foreign models have failed.
Only the Afghans themselves can create a nation in which everyone feels at home. However, after the fall of the Taliban and the elimination of Al Qaeda, the hope had been to help the Afghans build a functioning state from 2001 onward. This failed because the governments in Kabul were highly corrupt and incompetent, and they underestimated the clout the Taliban had gained as an insurgency.
Connected to the Taliban’s values
The battle for Afghanistan was lost in the rural areas. The large amounts of aid hardly reached beyond Kabul and a few other cities. In rural areas, people perceived the post-Taliban era primarily in terms of fighter jets, attack helicopters and drones flying over their land and villages to hunt down the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And so they turned again to the Taliban, and in order to survive, they resumed cultivation of opium poppies. The Taliban had already taken control of large parts of Afghanistan in 2005 partly because the rural population sympathized with them more than with the central government in Kabul and because they felt more attached to the values of the Taliban than to the values of the urban population.
However, if the Taliban had ruled continuously from 2001 to 2021, many improvements in the lives of (urban) Afghans would not have occurred. The Brahimi Plan and NATO’s ISAF mission had brought progress that made a new, better life possible after decades of war. Girls could once again attend schools, women were allowed to work, and the media enjoyed a certain amount of never seen before freedom. The expansion of the health care system lowered infant mortality and extended life expectancy. International aid money created a service sector that offered opportunities for work, especially for the skilled and educated. These achievements are threatened with the collapse of the central state and the return of the Taliban.
The importance of the Durand Line
Afghanistan is difficult to govern. There are two reasons for this: the legacy of history, to which the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States have contributed, and the cultural persistence of conservative tribal society, which is firmly entrenched in rural areas. Together, they form a web that distinguishes Afghanistan from all countries and explains why the country cannot rest.
While the British Empire won its Great Game with Russia and successfully shielded India with Afghanistan as a buffer zone, it is the Afghans who are paying the price today, both for the Durand Line drawn in 1893 and for the no-man’s land created in 1901 that persists as the Pakistani Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
British colonial official Sir Mortimer Durand drew an arbitrary boundary across Pashtun settlement territory in 1893 with the intention of creating a stable buffer to the Tsarist Russia. This Durand Line still defines Afghanistan’s borders to the east and south. To this day, however, no Afghan government has recognized it; until the 1970s, on the contrary, nationalist Afghans had even made territorial claims deep into Pakistan, all the way to the Indus River. The Pakistani leadership has always responded by blocking the transport routes that connect landlocked Afghanistan with the port of Karachi.
A second decision by the British Empire was also disastrous. The buffer zone of Afghanistan was not enough for the British, so colonial officials placed another no-man’s land in front of it in 1901. In the seven tribal areas of the strip, political agents, i.e. higher officials, ruled as they saw fit. They had wide-ranging punitive powers and could punish entire tribes. Pakistan maintained this no-man’s land status, now called tribal areas under federal administration (FATA), and continued the repressive administrative system with dispatched administrators. Tribesmen continued to have no political rights, they could not appeal to Pakistani courts, and until 1996, tribal elders alone appointed their representatives to the Islamabad parliament.
Effectively lawless tribal areas
The tribal areas remain underdeveloped to this day, the literacy rate is low, and the tribes are considered backward and narrow-minded. It is to Pakistan’s advantage that they live on both sides of a border that exists only on the map. The Pakistani army repeatedly used the de facto lawless tribal areas to exert influence from them in Afghanistan, most recently after 2001 to support the Taliban. Protected by the Pashtun tribes and the high mountains, the “Afghan Arabs”, Al-Qaeda and other jihadists also settled here after fleeing Afghanistan in October 2001. The great terrorist attacks of Madrid, London and Bali were planned here. Unchanged, this British legacy from 1901 is a menacing terror nest under the eyes of the Pakistani state.
The Soviet legacy builds on this British legacy. The Soviet Union wanted to make up for what tsarist Russia had failed to do in the 19th century: annex Afghanistan on its way to the warm seas. However, it failed just as Russia had failed before. The Soviets sent in their army and began to cover Afghanistan with their Soviet-Communist modernity, but did not get beyond a few cities. The occupier met with fierce resistance, especially in rural areas steeped in a conservative code of values. Faith warriors, the Mujahideen, organized a resistance to which the occupiers responded with violence the likes of which the country had not seen since Genghis Khan. The Islamic world showed solidarity with Afghanistan; for the first time, a militant Islamic international organisation emerged. Jihadist Salafism, merely a phenomenon of the Arab world, now had a transnationally operating organization based in Afghanistan: Al-Qaeda.
But Al-Qaddafi wasn’t the only reaction to the Soviet interference. At that time Afghanistan was still a semi-functioning state, but it imploded when the Soviet army left the country. In the lawless space, a new movement formed – as if from nowhere – with its roots in the Pashtun village of southern Afghanistan : the Taliban. With its Islamic courts, it filled a legal vacuum, which favored its rapid triumph. The Soviet Union failed because it underestimated the tribes’ desire for freedom. They rejected everything the Soviet Union stood for: foreign domination, the communist central state that interfered in their lives, and the changes it sought to impose, such as the liberation of women from patriarchal society.
The legacy of the Soviet Union
The Soviets left behind a failed state that even the Taliban failed to stabilize after them, and a transnational terror that targeted the West. That was the starting point when the United States launched its war on terror. Their first mistake was to neglect for too long the British legacy in Afghanistan: that Pashtuns on both sides of the border stick together. This allowed insurgents like the Taliban to retreat and operate out of safe areas in Pakistan. The second U.S. mistake was to rely, as the Soviets did, on cities and the central state. In doing so, they underestimated the power of rural areas as well as the contrast between urban and rural areas. While an urban elite had introduced an alien modernity, the traditional tribal society in the countryside resisted all changes.
The United States and its partners had mistakenly believed that a central state could be used to control a country that had only ever bowed to central power for brief periods. And they overlooked the fact that the corruption machine they had set in motion with the artificial central state they were alimenting would turn the people even more against them. Furthermore, the United States failed because it did not consistently continue Operation Enduring Freedom, but instead turned its main focus to Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein after only a few months.
A democracy accepts differences of opinion; a democratic process endures them. Traditional Afghan society, however, wants to settle internal conflicts, not settle them in a democratically constituted state. The only task a state has is to act as a mediator and judge in conflicts when it is called upon to do so.
The Pashtun code of values
After the fall of the Taliban and the elimination of al-Qaeda, the goal was to build a state, ideally a strong central state that would enforce law and order. This attempt failed because it ignored the fact that Pashtun tribes, in particular, have always perceived strong states as oppressors, against which they have rebelled throughout history. Traditionally, they regulate their internal relations in an order that seems to us like an orderly anarchy. In it, the Pashtun code of values, Pashtunwali, sets the rules for individual behavior. At best, Islamic Sharia law still has legitimacy as a source of order. What developed states strive for as rational administration, however, these societies reject as a presumption of tyranny.
The state that was built in Afghanistan after 2001 was not strong, but weak. It did not extend beyond the capital Kabul, and it could not impose its will on the rural tribes. This became another problem as the weak state relied on local warlords who used violence and were hated by the population. This hatred was transferred to those who sought to consolidate the state from the outside, meaning foreign powers. Moreover, in the rural areas, the dislike of the modern, decadent city is deeply rooted. Now, however, the Taliban also face the challenge of reconciling Afghans – and among them, in particular, the rural Pashtuns – with the state, because without a functioning state, there will be no stability in Afghanistan.
Can the Pashtun Taliban establish such stable rule? International donors must subsidize the country, which can be done in return for fighting drug cultivation and jihadist terrorist groups. The Taliban must make concessions to cultural modernity in order to keep technocrats in the country and also gain the trust of international donors. Finally, the Taliban, which are recruited almost exclusively from Pashtuns, must guarantee autonomy and security to the other major ethnic groups in their settlement areas, as well as grant them a share in the state – that of the Taliban.
Who is providing aid ?
Even before the Taliban returned the country was on the precipice. Before winter began in 2021, 23 million Afghans were in need of food aid; more than half did not have enough income to feed themselves. The worst drought in four decades is ruining agriculture. Without foreign aid, the state faces collapse, accelerated by the exodus of skilled workers. The Afghan residual state also can no longer provide sufficient services as foreign donors, who until now have contributed three-quarters of the state budget, drop out. And neighboring countries stop supplying electricity because Afghanistan can no longer pay the bills.
The economy is in free fall. But who is ready to help? China and Russia are keeping a low profile. In the Arab world, the Taliban have no friends except Qatar. Their relations with Turkey, which sees itself as the protector of the Turkic peoples and thus of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks, are not good ; their leader Rashid Dostum therefore found refuge in Turkey. Iran is the protecting power of the Shiites, but the Shiite Hazara also play no role in the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.
What’s remaining ? The West. It has put its financial aid on hold, and the United States has frozen the Afghan currency reserves it manages. The European Union attaches five conditions to future aid to the Taliban emirate: the orderly departure of all foreigners and Afghans who want to leave the country; respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; free access for humanitarian operations; the prevention of terrorist activities in Afghanistan; and the formation of a government that includes all ethnic groups.
The West faces a dilemma in Afghanistan: If it provides aid that keeps the country from collapsing, it stabilizes the rule of the Taliban, who would also interpret this aid as recognition of their rule. If it does not, the state and society will collapse, triggering new streams of refugees that could also reach Europe and creating a lawless space for terrorist groups.
The solution must be to learn from the mistakes made by the United States, which were to not attach conditions to its withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 2020. Every single financial aid must therefore be linked to concrete conditions, such as practical steps in the schooling of girls or the freedom of women to work, before further aid is disbursed. With unconditional aid, the West would only stabilize and recognize a state that is diametrically opposed to its values.
Such a quid pro quo, in which the Taliban reciprocate for aid, could create a stable framework for an intra-Islamic dialogue that would bring the Taliban to their senses. The success of such a dialogue would also be in the interest of the West. After all, the Taliban will remain the most important Afghan actor for the foreseeable future.
References
https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/afghanistan-pakistan-relations-and-the-durand-line/
https://globalsecurityreview.com/inequality-dangerous-rural-urban-divide-afghanistan/
https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Policybrief12.pdf
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/16/afghanistan-history-taliban-collapse-504977
By The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
