Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo
A Taliban fighter stands guard as people walk through the old market in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, May 3, 2022.
“Let’s see how long they will last,” said Mohammad Saleem, a local from Afghanistan’s northern Baghlan province. We were sitting in his car last March, at a Taliban checkpoint. He grabbed a white Taliban flag from his glove box and erected it in front of his windshield, hoping to curry favor with the guards.
Saleem, like many, is no Taliban supporter. Since the insurgents’ return to power and the U.S. withdrawal, however, he tries to see the glass as half full. According to him, at least some positive aspects about the change in government are undeniable. “This area was one of the most dangerous places during the last 20 years. Skirmishes were taking place every day, but now we can pass safely,” he said about Baghlan’s notorious Cheshm-e Sher area, where clashes between Taliban fighters and the Afghan National Army (ANA) took place regularly before the military apparatus fell apart.
Yet Baghlan is still far from being secure. Most streets are littered with Taliban checkpoints, and it’s undeniable that the country’s new leaders rule through fear and intimidation. Violence has definitely decreased, but has not disappeared. At least in two mountainous districts, Andarab and Khost wa Fereng, anti-Taliban militias primarily consisting of former army soldiers are still active, biding their time and hoping to increase pressure on the Taliban once the winter snows melt away. It is still not fully known exactly how many Afghans have joined the so-called National Resistance Front (NRF) led by Ahmad Massoud, son of famous Mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, to combat the Taliban. Other crucial figures appear to be former warlords and military officials tied to the fallen government.
Most of them, like Massoud himself, are in exile, and whether the NRF movement actually meaningfully exists is open to question. During the last few months, many of the movement’s supporters appeared online, spearheading a campaign of fake news and targeted harassment against figures perceived as hostile. Still, its disproportionate presence online relative to on the ground has led critics to label the NRF as an online movement, with little bearing in the real world. Even in Baghlan, some people described them as a “Facebook myth.” “There is no fighting. Everything is fine now in the mentioned areas,” said Homayun Sarwar, a local from Baghlan’s Markazi district.
Others tied to the militias, however, do not share Sarwar’s opinion. “We are forced to fight because the Taliban don’t want true peace,” a former ANA soldier told me. At the moment, he is in hiding, but preparing himself to join the NRF in Baghlan’s mountains soon. Like other observers, he points out that the Taliban control most highways and do not allow news to leave the affected areas. “They are censoring news and intimidating people,” the ex-soldier said.
Much of the world has already forgotten Afghanistan since last summer; interest in the country dwindled with the departure of the final American troops, while other hot spots, like Ukraine, assumed the global limelight. Here, though, life grinds on. To the Taliban and its supporters, the country is finally at peace. To others, it seems that the country is merely reaching yet another phase of a four-decade-long conflict, which, as some observers predicted years ago, would entail the Taliban fighting groups even more extreme than themselves.
It seems that for the Biden administration, the war against the Afghan people is far from being over.
These predictions came true in explosive fashion over the past month. Within a single week during the Islamic month of Ramadan, ISKP, Afghanistan’s “Islamic State” cell, allegedly carried out several suicide bombings in different parts of the country. Dozens were killed, disproportionately members of the Shiite Hazara minority. In the last week of April, another attack in the west of Kabul targeted a Sufi mosque and killed at least 70 people.
Aside from Islamic State killers, in mid-April Pakistani aircraft attacked civilians in the bordering provinces of Kunar and Khost, killing at least 45 people. As if that weren’t enough, a steadily increasing number of witnesses claim the continuing presence of American drones hovering in the Afghan sky. So far, no strikes have been reported. But things in Afghanistan, as the past four decades have demonstrated, can change quickly. Who knows what the future will bring.
Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans are starving, thanks mainly to sanctions and a currency crisis. The country’s foreign currency reserves, worth billions of dollars, are still frozen. These sanctions exacerbate the suffering of millions of citizens—apparently for the sole purpose of undermining Taliban rule. It seems that for the Biden administration, the war against the Afghan people is far from being over. While bombs and rockets were used in the past, economic warfare is the present.
Many Afghans blame both the U.S. and the Taliban for the current situation. The country’s new rulers, for their part, are busy with policies that often betray a poor sense of priorities and an even worse understanding of modern governance and the services modern citizens expect. Instead of providing security and starting a meaningful dialogue with non-Taliban factions, the Taliban’s increasingly prominent hard-liners have steered their government toward micromanaging the public lives of millions of Afghans, particularly women and girls. In late March, it became clear that the Taliban would not keep their most high-profile promise: the reopening of high schools for female students. While one of their spokesmen talked about “technical issues” and missing school uniforms, it became obvious that the group’s leadership, mainly dominated by veteran Taliban from the 1990s, were not interested in any ideological change and wanted to enforce their views.
These zealots owe their position in large part to the American-led war on terror. Though American media portrayed them as an undifferentiated mass of fanatics, the Taliban in fact has factions, and the more practical and pragmatic Taliban leaders who were interested in dialogue were mostly killed during the occupation. The most prominent example is Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, the successor of Taliban founder and supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Mansour was killed by an American drone strike in Pakistan’s Balochistan province in May 2016 (along with an innocent cab driver who did not know his identity). The current leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, stepped in to succeed him. While Akhundzada is steeped in the scholarly traditions of the Pashtun tribal belt in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mansour covered his identity and traveled to many countries around the region for years. That, plus the fact that much of his family lives abroad, including in Western countries, gave him a certain cosmopolitan pragmatism.
While Taliban leaders involved in negotiations with the U.S. in Qatar sent their daughters to secular schools, most of their kinsmen rejected modern education and anything else remotely tied to secular schooling, especially for girls. Interacting with the group, it quickly becomes clear that academic achievements count for little among the Taliban. As Afghan journalist Fazelminallah Qazizai pointed out in a recent article, Akhundzada and many others believe that it was not secular education that led to their victory against foreign forces; instead it was divine blessings granted to students from madrassas (religious schools). Taliban leaders reason that while religious students participated in the Taliban’s “jihad,” secular ones stayed silent or even supported America’s brutal war on terror. “A Karzai will graduate from university, a mujahed will graduate a madrassa,” said Akhundzada, linking secular schools to former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose tenure as president was marred by astounding corruption. Karzai, who studied political science in India, was installed by Washington after the U.S. invasion of the country.
One has to admit that Akhundzada has a point. Post-2001 Afghan governments were not led just by brutal warlords and drug barons, but also by educated, urbanized elites. In terms of governance, their record was little better than that of the Taliban of 2022, despite gargantuan American subsidies. Worse, many of them backed the war on terror and its associated horrors of brutal death squads, drone strikes pummeling the rural countryside, and endless war with Taliban forces they were unable to defeat. The most prominent example is Afghanistan’s ex-president himself, Ashraf Ghani, who fled Kabul in mid-August and triggered a chaotic collapse of the U.S.-backed government. He was educated in the United States and also taught there at Johns Hopkins University. But it is his tenure as president for which he will be remembered, a tenure marked by blood and cowardice.
Moderates fared no better even from the Taliban’s perspective. Already in the 1990s, during the Taliban’s first reign, Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was known as a pragmatic realist. While leading his ministry, he prioritized effectiveness; to this end, he was even willing to work with former Afghan Communists, and criticized his ideologically stubborn Taliban fellows. For his trouble, he and many of his moderate comrades were killed by the American war machine. Their absence prolonged the war, set back any kind of peace process, and led inward-looking hard-liners to the corridors of state power.
It all calls for some introspection on the part of America and international agencies that promoted secularism and gender equality in education. Like everything else about the occupation, the interests of the actual Afghan students were barely noticed in practice compared to the interests of foreign governments, agencies, and military contractors. If Afghanistan is to have good schools available to all, they must be rooted in institutions supported by the Afghan people, not be imposed at gunpoint by distant imperial powers. Unsurprisingly, there is little sign the Taliban are ready or willing to serve the people they rule.
