Back to the past

One year ago the Taliban returned to power, seizing Kabul; the U.S. and its allies made a panicked exit from the country. Of all the books written on the subject, four stand out from the crowd. By Tobias Matern

By Tobias Matern

Do we still need them, the multitude of words, the hefty tomes, to help us comprehend the failure of the West in Afghanistan? The story of this botched deployment can be told in an instant. The U.S. was desperate for revenge after the 9/11 attacks. Their allies joined the war, in a mission that wasn’t really about the faraway country on the Hindu Kush.

Berlin wanted to "please" the Americans, as an adviser to the then Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would later candidly admit: "The decision to go to Afghanistan had zero percent to do with Afghanistan and 100 percent to do with the United States. If Osama bin Laden had been holed up on the Fiji Islands, we would’ve gone along with them there too," he said. 

While the decision-makers had scant understanding of this nation on the Hindu Kush, the appeals of those experts with knowledge of the clan structures, of the previous failed interventions by major world powers, who knew that anyone seeking to improve the fortunes of Afghanistan with a western democratic model was doomed to failure – well, they were ignored.

Twenty years later, in August 2021, the humiliated U.S. superpower went home, as did its partners. In Kabul, everything returned to the way it was before: the Taliban had regained power, their Kalashnikovs drawn in the palace of President Ghani, who had long since fled.

One year after this disaster, which American universities estimate cost the lives of 240,000 people and for which the U.S. alone spent around two billion dollars, there’s a whole series of books, some reissued and some newly written, which tackle this subject from a variety of perspectives. Three categories are especially apparent: academic/fact-based papers, observations by reporters and first-person narratives. 

Prognosis: the global threat is ongoing

In the first category we find Pakistani veteran commentator Ahmed Rashid, whose book "Taliban. Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (latest edition in March 2022 published in English by I.B. Tauris) represents the gold standard for anyone seeking to understand the past and present rulers in Kabul.

Cover of Ahmed Rashid's "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (published by Yale University Press)
Ahmed Rashid's classic on the Taliban is the gold standard for understanding the old, new rulers in Kabul, even in the updated new edition: "Rashid’s book is a sober and solid presentation of how the Stone Age Islamists leading the first Kabul regime (1996 - 2001), have for the most part been replaced by a new, young generation of Taliban, 'which is deeply divided in relation to education and the rigour with which religious duties are to be observed'. Believing the Taliban leadership will not be inclined to moderate its views, the specialist predicts further years of major unrest for the country," writes Matern

Back in 1994, Rashid was in Kandahar when the Taliban, a movement largely unknown at the time, set out to take over the entire country from their initial footholds in southern Afghanistan.

Rashid’s book is a sober and solid presentation of how the Stone Age Islamists leading the first Kabul regime (1996 - 2001), have for the most part been replaced by a new, young generation of Taliban, "which is deeply divided in relation to education and the rigour with which religious duties are to be observed".

Believing the Taliban leadership will not be inclined to moderate its views, the specialist predicts further years of major unrest for the country.

Rashid is also convinced that Afghanistan will again be set adrift; he foresees the emergence of a kind of black hole, like the one that already existed before the attacks on the U.S. on 11 September 2001.

The Taliban and their spiritual brothers, the international terror organisation al-Qaida, "will remain a worldwide threat, as long as Muslim governments and the West are not decisive in their fight against extremism and if their efforts to find solutions to the most pressing problems in the region – poverty, economic misery, a lack of school education and unemployment – are only half-hearted if they exist at all".

 

Washington's financial aid against the Red Army

America’s neglect of the region dates back still further to the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The extremism co-financed by Washington in the battle against the Red Army was later directed against the U.S. itself.

Rashid’s book has been sparingly updated: a short preface on current events following the Taliban power takeover, a few text revisions and a chronology refreshed to reflect the latest developments. But this suffices for a good understanding of how the conflict and the power of the Taliban have brought them back to Kabul.

Those daunted by the book’s nearly 500 pages could do worse than read Conrad Schetter and Katja Mielke’s far more compact publication. As well as the analysis of the various groupings within the Taliban movement, their book "Die Taliban. Geschichte, Politik, Ideologie" (The Taliban. History, Politics, Ideology published in German by Verlag C.H. Beck 2022) contains interesting passages on the Islamists’ own update, how they have evolved from barefoot warriors to savvy Twitter users disseminating their propaganda amongst the people in English.

As Schetter and Mielke explain, the Taliban’s evolution was "closely bound up with the availability of the Internet as well as the spread and popularity of social media". This step into the modern age was brought to Afghanistan by the West, and now the Islamists are using it to best advantage. Equally engaging are Schetter and Mielke’s rather brief conclusions concerning the question of whether, with this latest takeover of Kabul, the Taliban have perhaps already reached the zenith of their success? Will the movement now disintegrate due to its "internal differences"? 

If the first year of the regime is anything to go by, it has not yet realised the transition from guerrilla militia to a government that can collect and distribute resources. After the loss of western investments, it is the people who are suffering the most as a result. The U.N. says 90 percent of Afghans live below the poverty line. 

In the second category, reportage, the stand-out book is Wolfgang Bauer’s "Am Ende der Strasse. Afghanistan zwischen Hoffnung und Scheitern" (At the End of the Road. Afghanistan Between Hope and Failure, published by Suhrkamp Verlag 2022). The Zeit reporter has been visiting the country for decades and this is evident from his writing. His journey along National Highway 01, formerly known as the Ring Road reveals a courageous observer who, as he travels around, is not afraid to take risks and report from isolated regions. Sometimes the author’s focus is directed too much at himself, which is unnecessary: "I’m embarking on this journey in a bid to understand why we, not just the West, but the international community, failed to do good," he writes.

What would have been the right war objective in the end?

Was that what it was really about – "to do good"? That was certainly the popular narrative that did the rounds in Berlin – for the development of Afghanistan, for the good of Afghan women and children. So, at most a development aid mission, secured with weapons, to build schools and water wells? When it came to this mission, the politicians were never honest.

To do "good" in a war, did that mean fighting as little as possible, as German soldiers were told by their government as they set out on the long road through the Hindu Kush? Or should it have actually meant fighting harder, with a much more robust political mandate as the Taliban consolidated its influence in Kunduz? Or perhaps to have been honest at an earlier stage and to have conceded that this was a war that couldn’t be won?

Chaotic evacuation scenes at Kabul airport (photo: Associated Press/picture-alliance)
Iconic image of the West's failure: the U.S. was desperate for revenge after the events of 9/11. Their allies joined the war, in a mission that wasn’t really about the faraway country on the Hindu Kush. Berlin wanted to "please" the Americans, as an adviser to the then Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder candidly admits: "The decision to go to Afghanistan had zero percent to do with Afghanistan and 100 percent to do with the United States. If Osama bin Laden had been holed up on the Fiji Islands, we’d have gone there too." While the decision-makers had scant understanding of this nation on the Hindu Kush, the appeals of those experts who knew that anyone seeking to improve the fortunes of Afghanistan with a western democratic model was doomed to failure were ignored

Bauer’s trip takes him into German military operational areas in the north of the country on a number of occasions. And his conclusions are clear: "It wasn’t the military that was to fail in the years to come, although the Bundeswehr could not have been more poorly prepared for Afghanistan, it was the wrong army in all possible respects, and it remained so until its withdrawal," writes Bauer. The West didn’t "fail to achieve its goals in Afghanistan because it failed militarily. The West failed because its concept of development aid failed. It wasn’t bullets that destroyed the vision of a democratic Afghanistan, but money." 

Excelling in the first-person narrative category of books on Afghanistan is Waslat Hasrat-Nazimis "Die Loewinnen von Afghanistan. Der lange Kampf um Selbstbestimmung" (The Lionesses of Afghanistan. The Long Struggle for Self-Determination, published in German by Rowohlt Verlag 2022). She works as a journalist for German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, her family fled Afghanistan and came to Germany when she was a child, affording her a foot in both worlds. The subject of the protracted conflicts on the Hindu Kush was hotly debated within the family, even after they had settled into their new home. And in her youth, Hasrat-Nazimi wanted nothing more than to be spared all the details. "I was irritated by their attempts to explain political events to me and batted them away," she writes. 

Of "lost childhood" and masculinity

It was only later that she began to engage more intensively with the nation of her birth, also visiting as a journalist. It is not cheesy, but very honest, for example when the writer mourns her "four-year-old self", a girl who when she fled Afghanistan, "lost her childhood before it had even properly begun, and had to grow up much too fast". Hasrat-Nazimi describes the patriarchy in a country where the concept of marriage is synonymous with "masculinity" and talks about misguided aid for Afghan women.

Her view of the nation doesn’t glorify, she calls out the injustices, the dominant role of the majority ethnic group and the fundamental errors of the 20-year western mission: that although the West was quick to topple the Taliban, it didn’t immediately integrate the movement into peace negotiations, that the warlords who fought alongside western forces against the Taliban were not divested of their power, but included in the western post-war order, that women were "practically excluded from the first round of talks on the reconstruction of the nation."

Which brings us back to the question: are these books needed? Yes. Written as they are from a variety of standpoints, each one of them can foster a better appreciation of the failure of the West in the Hindu Kush and help us learn lessons for the future.

Tobias Matern

© Suddeutsche Zeitung 2022

Translated from the German by Nina Coon

 

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