Voices
When Joe Biden spoke to the American people this week, he combined a stark explanation of what he felt the US’s role in the world was with a disparaging dismissal of the Afghan forces’ refusal to fight for themselves.
“We gave them every tool they could need,” Biden said. “We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. The Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”
So Americans would leave and, much quicker than anticipated, the Taliban would advance and return to power.
“Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralised democracy,” Biden said.
In today’s podcast, Emran Feroz, an Austrian-Afghan journalist, provides context for what has been happening in Afghanistan. It is a podcast that merits being listened to in full.
“They just saw what they wanted to see. They said, hey, we kill terrorists there. We killed terrorists in this province.
Emran Feroz
The US, as Biden says, did not engage in nation-building. Instead, the Americans supported a corrupt government while their actions turned people against them.
The truth about the will to fight is more complicated too, according to Emran Feroz.
“Let’s focus a bit on the Afghan security forces, who apparently didn’t want to fight. This is wrong. Mainly the fighting was done by the Afghan security forces during the last two decades, not by the Americans, especially in the last years. During the era of President Ashraf Ghani who fled on Sunday from Kabul, Afghan soldiers, many of them young men, were turned into cannon fodder. They were just killed by attacks, by the war, by the Taliban and they were just poor, poor men being sent to a bloody war for nothing.
“They didn’t receive the salaries often, they didn’t have basic food, they didn’t have ammunition. In February or March, I visited some of these soldiers on the ground and you could see it that these guys were just poor men fighting a war for a corrupt elite.
“The number of Afghan soldiers being killed by the war was three times – at least three times, I think – higher than the other civilian casualties. So we saw on large scale during the last years, tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers being killed during the war on terror, and getting nothing for it, while the children of political elites in Kabul didn’t participate in anything, while their fathers took over the whole security apparatus after 2001, 2002, fuelled massive corruption and enriched themselves heavily. At the end, you don’t have much morale, you just don’t want to fight for such people.”
There was, too, a failure of intelligence or a failure at least, to give the intelligence the correct weight if it told people things they didn’t want to hear.
“It’s a failure of intelligence and that the intelligence services, especially the CIA, and all these players on the ground, they just wanted to see what they wanted to see. And we saw this so many times in Afghanistan in the last years, when CIA death squads, or American drones, killed people. And they just saw what they wanted to see. They said, hey, we kill terrorists there. We killed terrorists in this province. We killed terrorists in this region, we killed the terrorist leaders, suspected terrorists, suspected militants, potential militants.
“All these phrases, all these words, you read them over and over again. It was like Newspeak, they just framed these people,as they wanted to have them. At the end, they now had total blowback. Because, of course – and some people still don’t want to acknowledge it – but a lot of people joined the Taliban, supported the Taliban in these rural areas, because of many Western war crimes that took place there.
“Maybe you killed a farmer, and you probably killed the farmer and described him as a terrorist. But afterwards, you will probably also see how many of his relatives turned to the Taliban, to start to join them, supporting them and everything. I’m not saying that this happened all the time because I also met a lot of these victims and I know that not every one of them was an active Taliban supporter. But they also didn’t like the government in Kabul. The Taliban commanders they saw in their villages were still something more local, and more indigenous, than American soldiers attacking them or drone pilots bombing them.”
The surprise that many felt at what was happening over the past weeks – and more importantly the intelligence failures which didn’t recognise the prospect or give it the correct weight – stems, he says, from a certain type of viewpoint which sees the West as unable to overcome problems unique to Afghanistan. The reality, he says, is more complex. The reality is that in many areas of the country, the Taliban, as he says, were home.
The nature of Afghanistan over the past 20 years allowed them to be seen as something other than what they are and how many in Afghanistan saw them in the 1990s.
“One of the famous sentences Hamid Karzai once said, and many Afghans are still quoting is – steal the money, but invest it in Afghanistan. So actually, they stole the money – the warlords that surrounded him, they stole the money, they invested some of it into the private empires in their home provinces or wherever and the rest of it is gone. A lot of this aid money is gone, you really have to look for it, and you will not find it. Okay, of course, you can find it but not in Afghanistan. A lot of it is probably in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, which became one of the most corrupt havens for political elites from Afghanistan.”
There were missed opportunities too, many years ago, when the US could have withdrawn without the chaos which President Biden said was inevitable.
There has, of course, been areas of great progress which is now under threat with the return of the Taliban.
“The focus of many media coverage was Kabul regarding these developments, sometimes even very specific areas of the capital. So, of course, you saw many people there who benefited from this whole thing, from the occupation, from the apparatus. At the end, it was still a good development for these people and for parts of society, because parts of the society took over this positive change, and also expanded them in other areas, not in many, but in other areas of the country.
“There was some kind of optimism. There were positive developments. Another positive development, which I really give some credit to Hamid Karzai here is that actually he encouraged freedom of speech, and, you know, press freedom.”
The return of the Taliban will extinguish those freedoms, even if some are clinging to the idea they’ve changed – and there may be some governments who try to insist they see this change to conceal their own failures.
“In the West, I think that many people have the feeling or the desire that change here means that they are now a super democratic force, who support press freedom, and different kinds of opinions, that they totally changed their ideology and are something new. And I think this is not the case. Obviously, the Taliban changed during the last 20 years, everyone is changing within so many years and this is natural development.
“Especially when it comes to being more internationally recognised, more globalised, they don’t want to be isolated like in the 90s. This is for sure. And, of course, when it comes to technological changes, changes within society, you could expect that when they say they’ve changed, they’ve somehow change in these means. But when it comes to the basic ideology, I don’t think that they’ve changed. And I think that many people have this kind of expectation. And for that reason, they might be disappointed very soon.
“As a brutal insurgency group, you can’t say after the second day, ‘Ah okay, they are now the nice guys, they are now super freedom-loving people, progressive feminists’.”
Emran Feroz
“One of the main changes of them is that they are now very good at PR. And they think they know how they should show themselves to the public, to international players to benefit them somehow. And this is not something new. I mean, the first Taliban press conference in Kabul took place yesterday [Wednesday], but their PR campaign started years ago.”
Feroz doesn’t believe in any of the claims even if there will be governments outside the country who desperately want to.
“Yeah, probably they want to believe it, I think some of them will also pretend to believe it, to make deals with the Taliban very soon and recognising them more and more and making them more legitimate.
“As I said, when it comes to the assurance at the moment, I wouldn’t believe much because an insurgency that had the very brutal past they had during their own regime era and also afterwards as a brutal insurgency group, you can’t say after the second day, ‘Ah okay, they are now the nice guys, they are now super freedom-loving people, progressive feminists’, all these things that are used often in the best western analysis.
“We also have to accept one of the realities of Afghanistan is large parts of society are not like that. They have other values, and you can’t force them to change it. I mean, western countries tried to do that. The Soviets tried to do that. It’s not working like that. You just make many people on the ground more radical, and you make them fight against you.”
