The United States’ rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan and the dramatic fashion in which the set up it left behind capitulated to the Taliban was arguably the most important development of the past year. But as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine draws all global headlines at present, that watershed moment which marked the end of a two-decade intervention seems to belong to another age.
“The overarching lesson of the Afghanistan intervention should be that before we begin to construct any policy, launch any war or risk lives, we need to be sure of what we are doing, why we are doing it and if the people to be ‘protected’ truly want it to happen. Especially if we live and bring our children up in the relative peace and affluence of the West,” writes contemporary historian and human rights professor Dr Brian Brivati in the introduction for the book ‘Losing Afghanistan’. “Especially if we have never seen war. With conflict now at Europe’s doorstep, his words take a different meaning.
The Express Tribune reached out to Dr Brivati to speak about the new book he has edited and especially discuss the changes the fall of Kabul portended. Some of those are unfolding before our very eyes.
ET: The book ‘Losing Afghanistan’, which you have edited, is a collaborative project, being a collection of essays and testimonies. How did this project come about?
BB: Obviously, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 came as a shock – much more of a shock in the West than in the region. The bulk of my work has been in Iraq and other places in the Middle East. Because of my background as a professor of human rights and as someone who has worked in the realm of Western security, I happen to have a good network across these fields. As such, I had been talking to a number of people who had been involved in Afghanistan for a long period of time.
The publisher of the book was also very keen on bringing out something on the subject [of the fall of Afghanistan] very quickly. You see sometimes, particularly in the realm of teaching, the first book that appears on a particular subject has an influence on the shape and the way in which that subject is debated and thought about.
As the Taliban takeover unfolded, I was very concerned with the way in which the intervention in Afghanistan collapsed. What struck me straight away was that if we were going to debate and discuss the lessons of what had happened in Afghanistan, it was very important that we did not resort to our sort of ‘specialist ghettos’.
I knew that would be debate on human rights and girls’ rights [under the Taliban]. When famine came and when the [Afghan] state collapsed, as it was expected it would when the Taliban took over, that would be another debate and a very important one at that. But those should be the first debate we had – instead, it should be our responsibility to protect the people of Afghanistan.
Secondly, there was inevitably going to be a debate in the West on intervention, the responsibility to protect, the war on terror and where we go from here in terms of our own national security, along with debate on the whole project of trying to improve security and stability, and rule of law across the world. I thought it was very important that all those debates were contained in one volume.
I tried to get as broad a group of people as I could possibly find to contribute short essays that could be published quickly. That is how the book came about.
ET: Speaking of the term ‘specialist ghettos’ you have mentioned, one thing that seems to have become apparent is how most of the world only knew a ‘mediatised’ version of Afghanistan. Starting with the Afghanistan Papers, there was a big dent in the global narrative around Western intervention in the country. Some of the stories that have come out since the fall of Kabul – about the suffering of the Afghan people under intervention and the composition of the current breed of Taliban – have also challenged the narratives that were prevalent over the past two decades.
BB: I think you are absolutely right in the picture you are painting of Afghanistan over the past 20 years. The Afghanistan Papers brought home the scale of the failure of governance or – to use a phrase Mr Biden says we are not allowed to use – nation-building.
If you read the first seven chapters of this book, the first section of this book is called ‘People’. It is either written by Afghans, or by people who work and live in Afghanistan and have done so for years, or by the members of the Afghan diaspora.
A few things are brought up by these Afghan voices. Outside the cities of Afghanistan, the extent to which the aid did not flow, the reconstruction did not take place, and so much was wasted in corruption, you have to face the question: “How was it that the Taliban came back?” To an extent you can say they came back because the West scuffled their mission and ran away in August after Donald Trump did his deal in Doha.
But the fact is the Taliban had never gone away completely. They controlled large sections of the countryside. They continued to deliver to an extent in those places. So it did not come from nowhere and then suddenly they took over Kabul.
Secondly, when the Taliban were positioned to start taking over the cities of Afghanistan, why did those cities fall so quickly and often without a fight? Why did the Afghan National Army and security forces melt away? Why did the state and intelligence structures not hold?
What comes through very clearly, particularly in the opening chapters of the book, is the extent of the corruption in the governance. The management system of the Afghanistan by the West had created what was essentially a straw house. It just needed a relatively sustained blow and the house collapsed.
I did not understand the extent of that failure before doing this book. I did not understand the extent to which this was a hollowed out shell of a country. Those first seven chapters, I think, taken together, bring that home overwhelmingly. What these chapters also bring home is that the Afghans, although they were badly off under Western intervention, are I believe much worse off now. That Taliban rule is as corrupt but perhaps even more inefficient. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Afghan people were better off under the Taliban – they are worse off – but lets not pretend that they were well off under the West or Western-influenced government.
ET: Pakistan’s stance on Afghanistan, especially following the fall of Kabul, has been to call for engagement with the Taliban. That right now there is a humanitarian crisis in the country. There seems to be, especially among the West, a reluctance to do that. An argument could be made that any concessions made now to alleviate the humanitarian crisis will be hard to roll back. What are your thoughts on that and how does the book explore this aspect?
BB: I do not think the West is united in this. The Norwegians had flown the Taliban in private jets to Oslo for talks and in the name of humanitarianism they are engaging with them. There is not one view of this question in the book and I should say overall. This is a collection of views from writers who have got different opinions.
I would say that from the human rights perspective, there is a very strong resistance to dealing with the Taliban. Take the issue of the $8-9 billion the United States has frozen. How do we know that that money is actually going to reach the people who need it? The fact is we do not really.
We have all this experience from Iraq about how much can be stolen. We see in Lebanon, at the moment, a country that is essentially being closed to the outside world; there is not electricity in Lebanon at the moment and the banks have collapsed. The $15 billion spent on trying to rebuild Lebanon’s national grid has just gone. Theft on this scale is not without precedent.
So my personal reluctance on the humanitarian grounds is practical. If we concede to recognition in exchange for guarantees that aid gets through to the people who need it, will that actually take place or will we be essentially throwing billions more dollars down a hole?
Gordon Brown has been backing an initiative where aid goes directly to the Afghan people and misses out the state. But that can only be very emergency relief. The only way you are going to reconstruct a functioning Afghan economy is by engaging with the government.
And that is not going to be by the West. That is going to be by the Chinese. The main client for the Taliban is no longer the West. The main client for lithium and other rare earth minerals are the Chinese. The economy of Afghanistan, if it is going to recover, is going to recover in the short term by Chinese extractive mineral policy, which they will pursue down the road with a vengeance now.
The human rights writers in the book say do not deal with the Taliban because there is no guarantee and that we need to find other ways.
Other writers in the book, who have direct experience from serving in Afghanistan in the intelligence community, are very unusual. Their almost universal view is that the West was utterly ignorant of what they were doing and what they were getting into. Compared to the Russians, the Chinese or you guys in Pakistan, the West was clueless. There were structural problems with the way in which the Western military operated and technical problems with the way in which Western intelligence operated.
There were failures that were insurmountable and this withdrawal was inevitable. Not because of military defeat – the Taliban could be militarily defeated, relatively speaking, easily. Politically and culturally, it was a defeat and a failure to learn from the Russians’ lessons in their 10-year struggle in Afghanistan.
The realist position, which is not my position, would be “this is the government of Afghanistan now so we have to deal with it and live with it.” In my view, this realist position will triumph. I believe very quickly there will be comprehensive recognition by many states of the Taliban. There will be fig leaf paid to women’s rights and broader human rights, and to due process.
Post-Covid, I think there is an immense opportunity for the Taliban to get recognition and to set up a criminal enterprise on a significant scale. You can argue that the Afghan government set up under the Western powers was a criminal enterprise on a significant scale as well. But at least there were some ministries, some parts of government that were at least attempting to uphold the rule of law and there were some areas of life – women and girls’ rights for instance – which did see progress.
We will have a broadly recognised Taliban government, which will run a criminal enterprise, for a period of time. But it will collapse because this new generation of Taliban do not seem any more technically competent in running a state than the old ones.
ET: One thing that has been mentioned about the current iteration of the Taliban is that they are nowhere near the monolithic entity that they sometimes seem to be portrayed as. It could be argued that the Taliban never were, but moreso now with the membership of youth from various villages. The current iteration of Taliban is also, according to some reports, multi-ethnic as opposed to the past. Religion too seems now to be weaker glue as the Taliban ranks range from one-time medical students in the cities to farmers. Do you think the world thinks Taliban have a stronger hold on the country than they actually do? If humanitarian crisis persists, could we see a repeat of civil war and anarchy?
BB: A number of Afghan warlords, as they have done throughout history, have switched sides to join the winning side. That coalition is completely contingent on the ability of Taliban to first get the US and its allies out and then to get control of resources. What happens next will be determined by the extent to which the Taliban share those spoils evenly.
The only difference I can see between this current generation of the Taliban, many of whom have been living in Doha for a number of years, and the previous generation is they may have more of an understanding that they have got to allow a broader sharing of the spoils if they want to keep those warlords on board.
The Uzbeks are broadly still supportive of the old regime. There are some Uzbek groups that have joined the Taliban, but most are reserving their position. Remember most of the Afghan National Army was made up of Uzbeks. Where are they and where are their weapons? The potential there of a civil war is very real.
Western aid in response to the humanitarian crisis will come in. The Chinese will invest now heavily. There is going to be a pot of money. The prevention of civil war is based on the distribution of that and the access to corruption that the Taliban allow.
Now that is not a sustainable model for governance. This is a regime that has got within it a time-bomb ticking for its own collapse. One of the contributors to the book, a former minister of interior for Afghanistan, suggests the Taliban have probably five years before its government collapses into anarchy and civil war. It could be they have longer if more money is thrown in to the overall pool. There would be more money to distribute among the various clients of the regime.
Pakistan obviously has a role and responsibility, but I do not think anyone in Pakistan should be celebrating the return of the Taliban on their doorstep. I think it is a fundamental threat to the national security of Pakistan, India and the region. If history repeats itself, the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and other various franchises will be back. I do not know if there is a difference between the current set up in Afghanistan and previous one in allowing the country to become a base of operations for such groups, but these are the things to watch for: the extent to which the Taliban spread the resources across the groups temporarily aligned with them and the extent to which they allow groups like Al Qaeda to rebuild and regroup on Afghan soil. That could be their undoing.
I do not see a renewed Western intervention but I do see them living under the constant threat of drone attacks and figures in the Taliban regime become targets if they do not move against groups like Al Qaeda. Also for Pakistan, the West will not come in if such groups attack Pakistani targets. I think the most threatened country by instability in Afghanistan now must be Pakistan. The threshold of sustained Western involvement now is so much higher that the likelihood of assistance is very low, unless there is threat that affects the West directly.
The Taliban regime will have a tough role. They have got to balance internal interests, control any terrorists living in their midst, manage external relationships while feeding and rewarding new recruits from cities and villages. That governance vacuum is huge and is compounded by a security vacuum and humanitarian vacuum.
ET: In your previous book on Arif Naqvi, you made the case that he was a target of a grand geopolitical game. There is a perception that Western reluctance, American reluctance in particular, to engage with the Taliban regime may be partially motivated by trying to deny China an entry into Afghanistan. There is also the sense that just as how the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan marked the beginning of the end of the USSR, the US withdrawal from the country has signalled that Washington may no longer be willing to step in militarily in defence of other nations.
BB: What we are seeing is a world divided into silos. Within those silos, the great power that dominates that space basically controls sovereignty. The riskiest places to be in the world are where these silos rub up against each other. What we have seen with the capitulation of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan is the movement of a silo barrier and the absorption of Afghanistan within the Chinese silo. Pakistan now sits uneasily at the edge of that Chinese silo. With the Belt and Road Initiative and the billions that have gone in, it too is increasingly being sucked in to the Chinese silo.
The question now is whether the United States would come to Pakistan’s aid as a contested space and whether India would support the US in doing that in order to prevent China. The problem also is whether within Pakistan the Chinese-leaning elite will win out over the US-leaning elite or whether they will continue to play both against the middle. I think we are moving out of a world in which you can play both against the middle and into a world where you have to choose a side. The time may be coming where Pakistan has to choose sides.
In Ukraine and Georgia you see the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia are both in a contested space between Russian sphere of influence and the European Union. What Vladimir Putin wants, in my opinion, is not the complete absorption of Ukraine. He does not want Ukraine to be able to exercise its sovereignty in terms of membership of Nato or the EU. If Ukraine did not pursue membership of Nato and EU, Putin in my opinion would not invade.