AS a tragedy unfolds the West looks the other way. There is something almost obscene about the disregard shown by the international community right now over the fate of Afghanistan and its people, not least because we in great part are responsible for its making.
Monitoring events closely and with many Afghan friends there whose lives face an uncertain future at the mercy of a relentless Taliban advance, I have a near dread of what the latest reports bring from the country.
Just reading some of the most recent it would appear that the share of the country’s 407 districts claimed by the Taliban has increased from 26% in mid-June to 55% on July 21. The UN too speaks of a record high in terms of civilian casualty figures and in this country that’s a high bar indeed when it comes to bloodletting.
Such statistics of course tell us nothing of the real suffering currently being experienced by countless ordinary Afghans. It fails to convey the looting and burning of homes, the torture of civilians and cold-blooded killing of anyone perceived to have been remotely associated with the Afghan government, authorities or army.
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Such statistics also fail to put in context the chilling implications of what is meant by the Taliban’s extremist Islamic ideology that regards women as “kaniz” or commodities making them effectively “qhanimat”, spoils of war.
Writing recently in Foreign Policy magazine, Australian journalist Lynne O’Donnell, a former bureau chief for various news agencies in the country, recounted what Taliban rule meant after they overran Saighan district in the remote central highlands of Bamiyan province.
Eyewitness accounts and testimony from locals told of how the Taliban ransacked homes, stole food and livestock, and imposed a tax of 8000 afghanis, about $100, for every resident of this impoverished district.
Perhaps most disturbingly of all was an order to make lists of all young women and widows and how the Taliban forced some residents to show them wardrobes of clothing to determine the ages of the girls and women who lived there. Women whose menfolk had died fighting against the Taliban were among the first listed for what will be forced marriages and sexual slavery.
This is the stark reality that stands in marked contrast to the rhetoric spouted by the Taliban’s negotiating teams during recent “peace talks” in which the extremists insisted they had changed and would grant women’s rights “according to Islam”.
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Reading such eyewitness accounts, I couldn’t help thinking back to earlier this month when US president Joe Biden became visibly irritated when questioned by reporters about the state of Afghanistan right now since the American decision to pull-out its troops along with others from the US-led coalition.
“I want to talk about happy things,” Biden said as a reporter asked a third question about the winding-down of America’s longest war during a press conference. No doubt Afghans would love to talk about happy things too right now but there is precious little chance of that.
It’s easy to blame Biden (above) of course for what has befallen the country and that’s only right because in the view of many – including myself – his administration has made a colossal mistake in the way they have handled leaving Afghanistan.
Sure, I accept there was never going to be an “ideal” time for the drawdown, but with negotiations with the Taliban inconclusive and nothing concrete in place, Washington has acted irresponsibly for which it will pay dearly if not in quite the same way as the Afghan people themselves.
If the abandonment of Afghanistan verges on the obscene then it’s also ironic that Russia, a nation that once hightailed it out of its own long bloody war there, is beginning to fill the security vacuum left behind by the West’s departure.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is one of that generation that well remembers how much the decade long war badly scarred Russia, when the Taliban’s forbears from the mujahideen forced demoralised Soviet forces out of Afghanistan.
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NONE of that however appears to have deterred Putin and you can bet his renewed interest in Afghanistan has nothing to do with Moscow helping some peaceful resolution within the country.
“I guarantee you the Taliban will take power in Kabul by September,” a Russian diplomatic source is reported to have told the Financial Times recently, on condition of anonymity.
“But they don’t know how to rule – they’re stuck in the 13th century in the way they do things, so it will be a mess,” the source added.
It’s that very mess in which the Kremlin sees an opportunity to help re-establish itself as a security guarantor for a large chunk of the region and if that means talking to the Taliban where the West failed then so be it.
Russia in the past was one of the first countries to publicly engage with the Taliban and is already doing so again as it sees as them as potential allies against more extremist outsider Islamist organisations like the Islamic State (IS) group that Moscow says are building up their presence after the US departure. Not content with just talking, Russia is beefing up its military base in Tajikistan near the Afghan border too.
The idea that Moscow is putting its faith in the Taliban as a bulwark against the threat of IS and al-Qaeda is not only a risky one but most likely bodes ill for those ordinary Afghans caught in the crosshairs of what could become a widening civil war.
And so, as the clock ticks down to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that were carried out by al-Qaeda who were hosted by the Taliban in Afghanistan, events have turned full circle. In short, Afghanistan and its long-suffering people are back to where they were before.
One can choose to agree or disagree with that intervention by the West all those years ago. But I for one am more firmly of the belief now than ever that the US-led coalition will rue the day it turned its back on Afghanistan.
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