Afghanistan

Kabul is a city still waiting for its new life to take shape – a lot depends on the will and whims of its new Taliban masters. But it is hunger that could become the worst of Afghanistan’s many crises.

For the poor of the city, the majority, scraping together a few hundred Afghanis, a couple of dollars, to stave off starvation is the biggest challenge.

Millions live in desperate poverty in a country that has received huge sums in foreign aid. The money left over that might help them, around $9bn in central bank reserves, is frozen by the Americans to keep it away from the Taliban.

Jonathan Ariel argues that the American debacle in Afghanistan can be traced back to Washington’s failure, decades ago, to confront Pakistan over its support of the Taliban, which has sometimes been hidden but never wavered.

Laila, a transgender woman in Afghanistan, rubs her eyes to wipe tears away. “I am terrified. It’s like a nightmare. I don’t feel safe even in my room. I’m scared of the Taliban. When I see them I feel they will know who I am and they will come to beat me, kick me or send me to prison.”

After the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, Laila is far from an isolated case. Rehmat, a gay man, said: “Our lives are in danger. We are afraid of having mobile phones. I get afraid when I receive calls from unknown numbers, worried that it might be the Taliban.”

The Taliban have effectively banned girls from secondary education in Afghanistan, by ordering high schools to re-open only for boys.

Girls were not mentioned in Friday’s announcement, which means boys will be back at their desks next week after a one-month hiatus, while their sisters will still be stuck at home.

The Taliban education ministry said secondary school classes for boys in grades seven to 12 would resume on Saturday, the start of the Afghan week. “All male teachers and students should attend their educational institutions,” the statement said. The future of girls and female teachers, stuck at home since the Taliban took control, was not addressed.

The Taliban appear to have shut down the women’s affairs ministry and replaced it with a department that once enforced strict religious doctrines.

On Friday, the sign at the ministry was removed, and a sign for the ministry of virtue and vice put in its place.

Videos on social media showed women employees outside the offices, urging the Taliban to let them return to work.

During the Taliban rule in the 1990s, the ministry forced strict Islamic rules and harsh restrictions on women.

If only our “experts” had listened to his prophetic warnings.

Many Western observers “have ignored the very real accomplishments and popular acceptance of the Taliban government in Afghanistan,” then-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer wrote anonymously in 2002. His previously-analyzed book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, contains sobering analysis, which foresaw the failure of American-led nation-building efforts in Afghanistan 20 years later.

Scheuer had focused on Afghanistan while tracking Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit in the years before and after September 11, 2001. Although since his 2004 retirement from the CIA he has exposed himself as an anti-Israel, conspiracy-mongering crank, his 2002 writings about attempts to liberalize  Afghanistan were highly thought-provoking. Already at the time he had criticized that the “Afghan war, then, is an opportunity for social work of international scope, not an opportunity to destroy al Qaeda.”

An absolute crank but he read Afghanistan right.

When I think about the West’s project to liberate Afghan women, my mind conjures a line from T.S. Eliot: “The last temptation is the greatest treason/to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” In Afghanistan, we engaged in a twenty-year, deliciously self-righteous, tragically ill-designed mission best expressed by flipping that sentence.

We did the wrong thing, perhaps for the right reason. We wanted to develop that country and rescue Afghan women. Their lives were hellish, girls banned from school, women forbidden to leave their homes except in the company of a male guardian, vigilantes beating them with sticks if their burqa was too short. We wanted them to enjoy the pleasures of modernity and live full, happy lives.

Start rubbing the Malala Totem that’ll fix it!

Afghan power always stems from the poppy fields

In his 2015 documentary Bitter Lake, the filmmaker Adam Curtis observes that Afghanistan’s opium poppies grow in a “wonderland of vegetation and power”. Amid the conspiratorial hyperbole that characterises much of his work, it is a striking phrase — but also a perceptive one. The poppy is integral to modern Afghanistan because of its relationship to both vegetation (and the communities it sustains) and the exercise of raw power: two of the main forces which drive Afghan politics.

Understand this imperishable fact and it becomes clear how the country fell so quickly to the Taliban over recent weeks.