It’s not easy to write about the difficulties facing Afghanistan right now. I don’t want to leave the impression that I believe we should have stayed there. I don’t think we should be indifferent to what’s going on either, but we have to accept that our options and influence are limited.
It’s just hard to watch.
The latest tragedy is that female middle- and high school students can no longer go to school. Try to imagine if that suddenly happened in America. Paired with this, almost all female municipal workers in Kabul have been fired. Those that remain either have critical expertise that cannot immediately be replaced or work in gender-specific roles, like bathroom attendants. The same pattern is happening throughout the country.
The Taliban believe that they’re being very religious by imposing these rules. That strikes me as ridiculous, but more importantly, it’s not something Afghanistan can afford. There are already food shortages, and they’re creating unemployment. Even if the women’s jobs are handed over to Taliban fighters, that’s a severe dumbing down of government services and it’s a very bad look for attracting foreign aid.
What the Taliban should be focused on is rooting out corruption. They really have a mandate to do two things: create peace and security, and replace a government that was rotten to the core. If they focus on those two things, they’ll have some room and space to govern and the country might begin to recover from decades of war. But they’re still too similar to their 1990’s iteration that imposed a rigid and medieval version of Islam that cannot exist in the modern world without insane levels of coercion and violence.
Afghanistan cannot afford more strife, and it can’t afford the brain drain that is already taking place in response to the Taliban’s takeover. Now they’re going to stop educating women and girls, and remove them from the workforce. That’s obviously going to make the economy less productive.
To be clear, this is wrong from a human rights perspective and in a sense nothing further needs to be added. But women aren’t the only ones who will suffer. It’s going to make a humanitarian crisis worse and Afghanistan will continue to be a miserable place that creates problems for others, and not just those in their immediate vicinity.
I wish we could have prevented this, but in some ways we helped bring it about. There are still things we can pursue that might help on the margins, but mostly we just have to watch. And that’s not a good feeling.
It’s not a good feeling to just watch as the county devolves. In the short term, the result will be tragic. I’m more hopeful for the long term because, as the post-WWI saying went, “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm when they’ve seen gay Pari?” In other words, once people have gotten a taste of liberation, it’s hard to lock them back up. WWII gave birth to the civil rights movement in the United States but the incubation period was rather long for those on the ground.
There’s probably a cohort in Afghanistan trying to take the country back to what they remember from their childhoods.
“The good old days.” In the 1960s, women weren’t allowed out on the street without a male relative escort. They didn’t attend school or have jobs. Even Saudi Arabia, bad as it is, is liberated by comparison. Turning back the clock that far has consequences that will make governing difficult. As the older generation dies off, a younger generation will remember more moderate times as “the good old days” and there’ll be a lot of internal pressure to moderate. I don’t think this could ever have happened from the outside. We could show them a taste of modernity but the people there are the ones who must ultimately choose it.
There are places where Islam peacefully coexists with modernity. In time, that’s what I expect. It’s tragic, however, for those who are young now. I expect that those who can will get out.
There are many places in the world where what is happening is hard to watch… Libya, North Africa, they were all hard to watch places before COVID… waves of boat people making the dangerous crossing… countries closing their shores and borders to prevent them from entering…
The aperture is on Afghanistan right now because of our 20 year misguided presence…
But I bet next year, absent another terrorist attack that originates on its soil, Afghanistan will be in the rear view mirror for most of America…
Sigh. Here’s hoping that the Taliban are forced to reconsider. The women training their male replacements have zero incentive to do a good job. And once they’re gone things will fall apart just that much more.
Pakistan won’t allow Afghanistan to starve – they’re not looking for more refugees to house.
Americans love stories of plucky underdogs overcoming their oppressors, but that’s mostly fantasy. The truth is that oppression works. The plucky underdogs just end up in prison or in exile. Did Tiananmen Square bring down China’s totalitarian government? Nope. Did the Arab Spring transform the Middle East? Nope. How’s Navalny doing in Russia? Not so well? Aung san suu kyi in Myanmar? The Dalai Lama still hiding out in India, is he?
The Taliban are pigs, but reducing Afghanistan to their level will be easy for them – the sty is their home. Women will not rise up, they’ll submit or escape the country. The threats to the Taliban come from Shi’ite Iran, and from the looming influx of Chinese money for their belt and road initiative, and from restive ethnic groups within Afghanistan, not from women seeking liberty.
Well, they also almost certainly killed (by decapitation) a member of the women’s volleyball team. Then they posted a picture of her body/head on social media.
She wont be the last woman athlete they kill, they are searching for them.