Afghanistan: A Graveyard Of Empires

 Yuba Nath Lamsal

It’s been over a year since Taliban reigned in Kabul after withdrawal of the NATO troops. Afghanistan’s elected president fled the country in a helicopter even without giving a hint to his own staffs and advisors. Afghanistan fell in another dark cycle of chaos. All institutions built over two decades collapsed and failed to function. Afghan security forces, which consisted of over 3, 00,000 strong men at least in papers, did not fire even a single shot when a few thousands Taliban fighters swooped on Kabul and took control of all strategic installations including the President Palace. 

It was the second triumph of the Taliban. They had taken control of Afghanistan in 1992 after the fall of Moscow-backed communist government of Mohammad Najibullah. Taliban were evicted from power in 2001 by joint military operation of NATO forces under US command following the September 11 terrorist attacks in America planned and executed by the Al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.  

Graveyard of empires

Afghanistan is often called a graveyard of empires. All external powers that invaded Afghanistan have ultimately bit the dust. British failed, Russians failed and now United States has failed. Big powers were attracted to Afghanistan because of its geopolitical position.  Once Afghanistan served as a buffer between Russian and British powers. The Durand line separated the British and Russian spheres of influences in South and Central Asia.  

In the height of the Cold War, Afghanistan turned into battle field of proxy war between two super powers. The western narrative was that Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and installed Moscow’s puppet regime in 1979, which prompted the United States to support Islamic Mujahedeen groups and mobilised them against Soviets in Afghanistan.  However, the reality is different. Former director of the CIA Robert Gates, in his memoirs, said that CIA had started covert operation in Afghanistan six months earlier than the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

US covert operation in Afghanistan had twin objectives. The first strategy was to provoke Moscow to invade Afghanistan. Should the first strategy failed, the second strategy sought to infiltrate the trained Mujahedeen groups into southern Muslim dominated parts of Soviet Union like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan and destabilize the USSR.  However, the first strategy succeeded as Moscow was rightly seduced to invade Afghanistan on December 24, 1979 and got entangled in Afghanistan that eventually led to the fall and disintegration of Soviet Union. 

In an interview to a French magazine ‘Le Nouvel Observateur’  in January 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, said President Carter ‘signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul’ on July 3, 1979. United States did it to provoke Moscow for intervention in Afghanistan so that it would fall into ‘the Afghan trap’- something like what US faced in Vietnam in 1960s. Apparently, the war in Afghanistan was between Mujahedeen groups and Soviet armies. But, in reality, the war was between the United States and the Soviet Union. 

After USSR withdrew in 1989, Americans prevailed but they too got badly entangled in Afghanistan and had to come out of it with humiliation. 

China is currently trying to engage Taliban but it should be cautious that too much engagement in Afghanistan would be counterproductive. Afghanistan is a lesson that interference and invasion in another sovereign country is fatal, no matter how mighty the invader may be. Invasion in Afghanistan marked the downfall of Soviet Union and now America had to withdraw from Afghanistan after costly engagement of two decades.  US entanglement in Vietnam in 1955 and Iraq’s invasion in Kuwait in 1990 are other examples. Now Russia has invaded Ukraine which is also bound to fail. 

Since Afghanistan became a geopolitical battleground of big powers, Afghan society was highly divided and polarised. Religion was politicised and politics was radicalised for which domestic zealots, regional hawks and international powers are responsible. Politicisation of religion and radicalisation of politics lead to the rise of either rightist authoritarianism or left extremism. If such a trend further grows, it will give birth to terrorism. 

Afghanistan is the case where politicisation of religion and radicalisation of politics fractures society and promotes extremist politics, from which this South Asian country has not come out. The flame of extremism and radicalisation is not limited to Afghanistan alone and its neighbourhood is also feeling its heat. 

Fanatical groups

Taliban, Al Qaeda and other religious fanatical groups are the product of this radicalisation process. Whoever may be behind their creation, the victim has been the entire humanity. When Soviet Union withdrew its troops, hopes were high for the modernisation and democratisation of Afghanistan. Out of the power vacuum in the aftermath of Soviet withdrawal, Taliban came to fill in the power void. By both conviction and action, Taliban proved to be Islamic terrorist group opposed to modernity and democracy. Taliban seeks to impose Islamic Sharia law that denies democracy, human rights, and women rights. Girls are not allowed to go to school and freedom of expression is summarily restricted. Democratic and other institutions are destroyed and total dysfunction reigns in Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan’s unique geography and its ethnic composition needs to be taken into consideration for any political process in this country. But that was not thought of in the Bonn conference in 2001 where powers-sharing agreement was reached on the future governance of Afghanistan. The Pashtun is the dominant ethnic community in Afghanistan and Taliban claims to be Pashtun’s representative. Pashtun ethnic group felt under represented or unrepresented in the post-Taliban government. Thus, Taliban won public sympathy in Pashtun dominated regions and emerged as rulers in present Afghanistan. Afghanistan will not come out of the cycle of violence and instability until Taliban renounces terror tactics and respect human rights and democracy. International community needs to work with civilian forces in order to exert pressure on Taliban to come to peaceful terms.

(The author is former ambassador and former chief editor of this daily. lamsalyubanath@gmail.com)

This was published in The Rising Nepal on October 12, 2022

https://risingnepaldaily.com/news/17045