[Closed] Governing Afghanistan

Outside interests / funding.
Has anyone in the other Afghan thread posted the photo of (was it?) Bush snr hosting the Taliban in the White House?
Edit: maybe I dreamt that one, or it was on a some satirical show.

Was that the Taliban or the Mujahadeen?

Quite right, Reagan / Mujahadeen. Apologies to Bush there.

And why has the Taliban been able to do what they do?

Different interpretation of what basic human rights are.......

And fear.

Why hasn’t anyone – foreign or domestic – been able to unify and govern it like the Taliban?

I think you could argue that the Taliban haven't been able to either. As last time their control in places like the NW of the country wasn't certain. There's been an effort (certainly from the early 70's) for a Pushtu state, the Taliban are the latest iteration. The non-Pushtu bits of Afghanistan still aren't cool with them "running" the place.  Give it a couple of months, I think there's going to be a civil war.

The Taliban have not unified the country. They have ruled it through terror. The majority of the people that live there just want a peaceful life where they are not forced to grow crops they can't eat or told to go and kill people in the next village because they said no to someone. That goes for when warlords ran the place too, and the legit government the US and UK installed.

The Taliban rule by fear, oppression and ruthlessness. They do not unify.

Afghanistan isn’t really a real state - it largely consists of some arbitrary lines drawn on a map by colonialists centuries ago that doesn’t really represent the tribal and ethnic populations - like the Sykes - Picot ‘arrangement’ for Syria/Iraq etc. The Taliban aren’t a unifying force by any means - they have primary displaced the Government apparatus of Kabul and their income derived from a levy on the opium/heroin trade controlled by the tribal warlords. Would be interesting to know how much funding they are getting from ****stan, Saudi and the Gulf States because addressing that might be the only way to create ‘influence’. Meanwhile expect to see a refugee crisis and famine.

Might be easier to split it into several countries............

it largely consists of some arbitrary lines drawn on a map by colonialists centuries ago that doesn’t really represent the tribal and ethnic populations – like the Sykes – Picot ‘arrangement’ for Syria/Iraq etc

Not this rubbish again. Modern Afghanistan is the rump of a 17th century empire ruled from Kandahar. Afghanistan was never colonised. Sykes-Picot was a touch over a century ago, not centuries ago.

Why hasn’t anyone – foreign or domestic – been able to unify and govern it like the Taliban? I mean, there are other countries on Earth with a comparable combination of challenging topography and ethnic-linguistic diversity that have been united and, in other (unfortunate) circumstances, successfully invaded. So why not Afghanistan?

Unity, or at least tolerance of your government, often comes from economic prosperity. But I think you'd only need to look across the Irish sea to find another example where variation in language and belief in the the same god, have failed to result in harmony. Obviously not Afghan levels - but it is on our doorstep.

Would be interesting to know how much funding they are getting from ****stan, Saudi and the Gulf States because addressing that might be the only way to create ‘influence’.

What will be interesting is how China reacts if the Taliban do something it doesn’t like in relation to the Uighrs.

They cannot be unified because all of the various fractions want to be the "king" to rule with pleasure. Non has the upper hand. Talib can fight in the mountain so are the warlords. They were at "peace" because they all benefited from financial gains.

What will be interesting is how China reacts if the Taliban do something it doesn’t like in relation to the Uighrs.

They just have to learn, speak and dance Chinese at the reeducation camp. Unlike their forefathers where they were fighting on level ground, technology has moved on since and they no longer has the upper hand if China really want to deal with them if they dare to intervene in their internal affairs. The only people that will come to the aid will be ... yes, you know who on human rights excuse ... the USA.

I don't think the Taliban seem overburdened with concern about what happens to people outside their immediate boundaries do they? The impression I get from them is overwhelmingly that they'd just like everyone else to **** off and leave them alone.

Back when I had hair I used to visit an Iraqi barber. He was a classics professor who escaped a purge of intellectuals by a young Saddam Hussein hidden under a truck. He used to tell fascinating stories from his days back home.

Like all the world that region has  a rich history of fables and classical stories. He told me that one of the running themes is that they will only be ruled by strongmen and violence, lots of cutting off heads of snakes analogies. There is no history of democracy at all.

Might be easier to split it into several countries

The Taliban believe that all the rules that matter are written in a book from thousands of years ago, and it's exclusively according to that text that the country/world should be governed.

Not really compatible with 21st century living, is it?

Especially when even questioning the logic of this will probably get you stoned to death or beheaded

The impression I get from them is overwhelmingly that they’d just like everyone else to **** off and leave them alone.

So are all the warlords ...

The question is who will have a say in the wealth to be generated from the mineral deposit.

The Talib will have to come down from the mountain to govern but the mineral deposit is near the mountain valley ...

lots of cutting off heads of snakes analogies

If he was my barber I would have gently requested that he change the subject.

binners - there's folk in the US (and I dare say elsewhere) who aren't so different! If not the Bible, then the constitution... Not so big on the beheading and stoning there, but they'll storm their own parliament building with guns in an attempt to enforce their version of reality. In one of the worlds supposedly most developed and democratic nations... I doubt there's anything very special about the Taliban or Afghanistan, create a power vacuum, add guns, religion, poverty alongside wealth and you've got the raw ingredients for it. The particularly special thing about the Taliban is how they treat women, but let's not forget that we've only been allowing all women to vote here for < 100 yrs, and we still shame them for the way they dress - just to far less extreme levels.

So are all the warlords …

The way you've written that makes no sense as a reply to my statement as you've quoted it, so I'll do likewise

duck a la orange.

The particularly special thing about the Taliban is how they treat women, but let’s not forget that we’ve only been allowing all women to vote here for < 100 yrs, and we still shame them for the way they dress – just to far less extreme levels.

You are talking about their property there. No amount of education can change that and change is just tolerance which goes against their belief.

The way you’ve written that makes no sense as a reply to my statement as you’ve quoted it, so I’ll do likewise

duck a la orange.

The warlords will fight for their share of wealth so they will fight like the Talib.

Why hasn’t anyone – foreign or domestic – been able to unify and govern it like the Taliban?

The Taliban havent. There are large parts not under their control at the moment and a major contributor to the original success of the invasion in 2001 was due the various factions opposing the taliban.
As for how they it could have been managed better. There were those arguing that the plan of having a strong central government running everything was flawed and instead it should have been done as a set of loose federal "states".

For the argument of strongmen vs democracy. Democracy is a bit of oddity in history. Whilst we think its the norm it has only really been around for at best two hundred years in the current form (even then with lots of flexibility about what democracy meant). It doesnt seem to be something you can stick in place in 20 years or so but takes time to slowly sink into the cultural beliefs and even then might not stand up to serious stress.

Not this rubbish again.

Boundaries have always been fluid and continue to be so.

Would be interesting to know how much funding they are getting from ****stan, Saudi and the Gulf States because addressing that might be the only way to create ‘influence’

The one question I've not seen being pushed/investigated very closely.

I think it all depends how much they’re interfering in the Pashto areas of ****stan. Certainly previous Afghan governments have come to a sticky end because of this, and if Wikipedia is to be believed difficulties with ****stan ultimately led to the Soviet invasion.

Not this rubbish again. Modern Afghanistan is the rump of a 17th century empire ruled from Kandahar

OK, so a 300 year old construct created by force is just as acceptable? There is no unifying force - multiple ethnic and tribal groups with conflicting interests is hardly a recipe for peaceful harmony.

OK, so a 300 year old construct created by force is just as acceptable? There is no unifying force – multiple ethnic and tribal groups with conflicting interests is hardly a recipe for peaceful harmony.

It's not, but I think the point is that the situation in Afghanistan is not a result of the British Empire ****ing it up, like it is in most of the rest of the region.

I don’t think the Taliban seem overburdened with concern about what happens to people outside their immediate boundaries do they?

If they had had this approach in the 1990s and not hosted Al Qaeda, they'd never have been invaded in 2001.

OK, so a 300 year old construct created by force is just as acceptable? There is no unifying force – multiple ethnic and tribal groups with conflicting interests is hardly a recipe for peaceful harmony.

All states are constructs created by force! Most countries have multiple ethnic and tribal groups with conflicting interests. The Nation State is a 19th century invention. Some of the nations (Italians, Germans...) were invented to fit the state.

It's simplistic to say that Afghanistan is a failed state because it contains multiple populations or because it doesn't contain all of one people. There are plenty of successful states that have different ethnic groups within them and there are plenty of nations that aren't all living in the same state.

It sounds like we need more thinking like "Ethniklashistan"

https://www.theonion.com/northern-irish-serbs-hutus-granted-homeland-in-west-b-1819566085

Governing Afghanistan

It's not our job any more.

Remember we wrote in massive letters 'World Go Home' a few years back?

Well, 'we' meant it.

Until it comes to expecting 'the world' to indulge our every whim, obviously.

Saw this today.

They would like to see decentralised government due to all the different ethnicities...

Seems like a good idea. Good luck to them.

BBC News - Anti-Taliban resistance group says it has thousands of fighters
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58239156

Within a minute of starting that ^^ video it makes a false claim.

It claims that Najibullah's government "almost immediately collapsed" after the Soviet withdrawal. It didn't, unlike the US occupation when Kabul fell even before the Americans had left, it was 3 years after the Soviets left that Kabul fell.

It's a shame because I couldn't be bothered to watch it after that. It looked as if it might be interesting but what's the point if they are going to be sloppy with the facts?

Depends on your definition of almost immediately I suppose - 3 years isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. I'm no expert but I'd say the video is pretty good/interesting.

There are plenty of successful states that have different ethnic groups within them

Yes, most of us on this thread live in one. In fact most people in the world live in one.

Watch the video!

Why hasn’t anyone – foreign or domestic – been able to unify and govern it like the Taliban?

Without trying to state the obvious Afghanistan is an Islamic country and the 'unifiers' tend to be Christian soldiers that carpet bomb them..I think anyone would struggle to get their head round that.
And because the Taliban(for all their obvious faults) are Afghan and Muslim and there are lots of parts still where Sharia law is quick and very effective(as administered by the Taliban and other warrior groups) for most of the community issues the villages have, it's not all stoning's and beheadings, there is normal life in a war zone with no economy to be getting on with too.

Depends on your definition of almost immediately I suppose

Well obviously. But the picture they paint is a distorted one. 3 years is a long time in politics, and we've seen how quickly things can move in Afghanistan.

They could have said "collapsed 3 years later" rather than "collapsed almost immediately" which the viewer is very likely to assume means, well, almost immediately ie within days or perhaps weeks.

I'm not attempting to nitpick I just think that a distorted picture which fits in nicely with the US government narrative, but is misleading, is not particularly useful if trying to make sense of the situation.

When the US first went into Afghanistan it was quite understandably pointed out that it seemed particularly foolhardy considering the appalling price the Soviets had to pay. I clearly remember the response, "the Russians were fighting everyone, we are just fighting the Taliban". This was clearly not the case.

For Najibullah’s government forces to have lasted 3 years against large Islamist forces, which were highly armed, trained, and financed, by the US, suggests that they enjoyed some considerable support and were highly motivated.

Compare that with the immediate collapse, without even any fighting, of the Afghan army, which for the last 20 years has been armed and trained by the US, against a much smaller and poorly armed and trained enemy, and you can understand the US's need to manipulate history.

Edit : I guess I'm trying to make a similar point to espressoal, ie what we in the West regard as the "bad guys" often enjoy far more support than our media would want us to think. The Taliban are not a highly effective fighting force imo, they certainly haven't done much fighting to take control of most of Afghanistan, which suggests that they must have far more support than we are led to believe. Even if it's only because Afghans want peace and stability in their lives and not necessarily strict Sharia law.

1. Presidential systems are nearly always unstable compared to parliamentary systems. The U.S. is really the only successful presidential system. The jury is still out on that question.

2. Most Afghans are probably focused on fairly concrete local issues. The Taliban (like the Viet Cong) lived locally and understood those. They helped get stuff done. The central government and court system were utterly corrupt and more of a problem than a solution.

3. Issues like human rights are probably seen a bit differently. Country people are generally very conservative, so woman's rights probably means not being murdered for wearing the wrong clothes, not abstract ideas of gender identity. In a lot of cases of crime, everyone in a small community has a pretty accurate idea who did the crime, so a summary trial and punishment won't be seen as a violation of universal human rights, just commonsense. If you're a poor farmer, having your livestock stolen is a big deal, possibly leading to starvation. If that's the case, a quick hanging is probably going to be seen as justice well served. A bunch of Americans lecturing about due process and rules of evidence aren't going to get far.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/what-taliban-understood-about-afghanistan/619864/

The united states never understood Afghanistan. American planners thought they knew what the country needed, which was not quite the same as what its people wanted. American policy was guided by fantasies; chief among them was the idea that the Taliban could be eliminated and that an entire culture could be transformed in the process.

In an ideal world, the Taliban wouldn’t exist. But it does exist, and it will exist. Western observers always struggle to understand how groups as ruthless as the Taliban gain legitimacy and popular support. Surely Afghans remember the terror of Taliban rule in the 1990s, when women were whipped if they ventured outside without a burka and adulterers were stoned to death in soccer stadiums. How could those dark days be forgotten?

America saw the Taliban as plainly evil. To deem a group evil is to cast it outside of time and history. But this is a privileged view. Living in a democracy with basic security allows citizens to set their sights higher. They will be disappointed with even a relatively good government precisely because they expect more from it. In failed states and in the midst of civil war, however, the fundamental questions are ones of order and disorder, and how to have more of the former and less of the latter.

The Taliban knew this. After its fall from power in 2001, the group was weak, reeling from devastating air strikes targeting its leaders. But in recent years, it has been gaining ground and establishing deeper roots in local communities. The Taliban was brutal. At the same time, it often provided better governance than the distant and corrupt Afghan central government. Doing a little went a long way.

Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government didn’t fail just because of the Taliban. It was hobbled from the start by America’s blind spots and biases. The United States saw a strong, centralized authority as the answer to Afghanistan’s problems and backed a constitution that invested the president with sweeping powers. That, along with a quirky and confusing electoral system, undermined the development of political parties and the Parliament. A strong state required formal legal institutions—and the United States dutifully supported courts, judges, and other such trappings. Meanwhile, it invited resentment by pushing programs that were meant to reengineer Afghan culture and gender norms.

All of these choices reflected the hubris of Western powers that saw Afghan traditions as an obstacle to be overcome when, it turns out, they were the lifeblood of the country’s political culture. In the end, few Afghans believed in a government that they never felt was theirs or wished to wade through its bureaucratic red tape. They kept turning to informal and community-driven dispute resolution, and local figures they trusted. And this left the door open for the slow return of the Taliban.

The special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction oversaw how the U.S. disbursed reconstruction funds and assessed their effectiveness. Over the past year, two depressing SIGAR assessments were made available to the public.

One—grandiosely if obsoletely titled “What We Need to Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction”—notes that the United States spent about $900 million helping Afghans develop a formal legal system. Unfortunately, Afghans do not seem to have been impressed.

One of the first things militant groups like the Taliban do when they enter new territory is provide “rough and ready” dispute resolution. Often, they outperform the local court system. As Vanda Felbab-Brown, Harold Trinkunas, and I noted in our 2017 book on rebel governance, “Afghans report a great degree of satisfaction with Taliban verdicts, unlike those from the official justice system, where petitioners for justice frequently have to pay considerable bribes.”

This is one major reason why religion—particularly Islam—matters. It provides an organizing framework for rough justice and a justification for its implementation, and is more likely to be perceived as legitimate by local communities. Secular groups and governments simply have a harder time providing this kind of justice. The Afghan government wasn’t necessarily secular, but it had received tens of billions of dollars from governments that certainly were. A Sharia-based, informal dispute system would almost certainly be frowned upon by those Western donors. How likely was it that an Afghan government headed by an Ivy League–educated technocrat could beat the Taliban at its own game?

As the SIGAR report noted archly, “The United States misjudged what would constitute an acceptable justice system from the perspective of many Afghans, which ultimately created an opportunity for the Taliban to exert influence.” Or, as a former USAID official put it, “We dismissed the traditional justice system because we thought it didn’t have any relevance for what we wanted to see in today’s Afghanistan.”

What, then, did the United States want to see in today’s Afghanistan?

When the bush administration helped shape the post-Taliban Afghan government, it was still claiming that it had little interest in nation building. Pilfering from Afghanistan’s past constitutions was easier than proposing something more appropriate for what had become a very different country. The new constitution created a top-heavy system that gave the president “nearly the same powers that Afghan kings exercised,” as Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a prominent Afghanistan scholar, has written.

Strong presidential systems are appealing because they offer the prospect of determined action. But the concentration of power inevitably alienates other stakeholders, particularly on the local and regional levels.

From the beginning, the Afghan Parliament suffered from a legitimacy deficit. Afghanistan used an electoral system known as single nontransferable vote (SNTV), one of the rarest in the world. There are reasons SNTV is sometimes used in local elections but almost never nationally: Among other things, it allocates votes in a way that depresses the development of political parties. If there’s anything Afghanistan needed, it was political parties—and a parliament—that could check the dominance of the president.

The risks of a presidential system are heightened in divided societies, and Afghanistan is divided along ethnic, religious, tribal, linguistic, and ideological lines—in almost every way possible. This raises the stakes of political competition, because what matters most is who ends up at the very top.

Finally, the system works only if the president is competent. The now-exiled president, Ashraf Ghani, managed to be all-powerful in theory but resolutely ****less in practice. Despite having been the chair of the Institute for State Effectiveness, his ineffectiveness—reflected in his mercurial style and penchant for micromanagement—infected the entire political system, and little could be done to reverse the trend as long as he remained in office.

In addition to fashioning new political institutions, America believed that it could transform the culture of a country. Naturally, most American politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and donors thought that the things that worked in advanced democracies would work in fragile would-be democracies. Liberal values were universal. And because they were universal, they would be, if not embraced, at least appreciated.

Somewhere close to $1 billion was spent on promoting gender equality. But such a focus was too often tantamount to social and cultural engineering in a conservative country that was still struggling to establish basic security. USAID’s Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy stated as one of its rather ambitious goals “working with men and boys, women and girls to bring about changes in attitudes, behaviors, roles and responsibilities.” This is a worthy objective, but the American approach was heavy-handed and at times counterproductive.

As the second SIGAR report, titled “Support for Gender Equality: Lessons From the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” concluded, U.S. officials need “a more nuanced understanding of gender roles and relations in the Afghan cultural context” and of “how to support women and girls without provoking backlash that might endanger them or stall progress.”

These efforts were well-intentioned, but they drew on assumptions about the arc of progress, and the belief that the United States would make progress happen even if Afghans themselves were less sanguine.

If the united states had made other choices, would the outcome have been different? I don’t know. Americans believe in certain things. Suspending those beliefs in the name of understanding another society can easily devolve into moral and cultural relativism that many, if not most Americans, would reject. Would a Republican—or, for that matter, a liberal suspicious of religion’s role in public life—have felt comfortable supporting programs in Afghanistan that involved the implementation of a version of Sharia, even if that version wasn’t the Taliban’s?

But the order and sequence in a transition matter. It’s clear now that we got that sequence wrong in Afghanistan, especially considering that women’s rights had long been one of the country’s most divisive issues. As the experts Rina Amiri, Swanee Hunt, and Jennifer Sova warned in 2004, when the Taliban seemed a relic of the past, “While the situation has markedly improved since the Taliban regime, the stage is set for a struggle between traditionalists and modernists; and once again women’s roles and religion are central to the conflict.”

Was it America’s place to change a culture? Did anyone really expect that the U.S. government would be good at it? If there is any change that should come from within, presumably it’s cultural change. But if there’s anything that’s universal—transcending culture and religion—it is the desire to have a say in one’s own government. Instead of telling Afghans how to live, we could have given them the space to make their own decisions about who they wanted to be.

With the Parliament weak, in part because of that bizarre electoral system, all attention was diverted to presidential contests, which were invariably acrimonious. The result was a winner-takes-all system in a country where the winners had long subjugated the losers, or worse. It is little surprise, then, that “every Afghan presidential election has been brokered or mediated by U.S. diplomats,” as Jarrett Blanc, one of those diplomats, put it. This was the democracy that America and its allies tried, for years, to build.

Many of the political institutions that America helped create have now been washed away. It is almost as if they never existed. By insisting on the primacy of culture over politics, the United States thought it could improve both. Might Afghanistan have been doomed regardless? Perhaps. Now we will never know.

Shadi Hamid is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a founding editor of Wisdom of Crowds. He is the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World and Temptations of Power.

Presidential systems are nearly always unstable compared to parliamentary systems.

Big if true - but this old saw (that was never really substantiated, just asserted) withered in the 1990s because there's no credible evidence for it.

Somewhere close to $1 billion was spent on promoting gender equality. But such a focus was too often tantamount to social and cultural engineering in a conservative country that was still struggling to establish basic security.

= "get back in the kitchen, love, we'll get around to your fluffy women's problems once the big boy issues are sorted".

I'm reminded of what MLK said about white liberals telling black Americans not to rock the boat while there were other more important things to do.

Well obviously. But the picture they paint is a distorted one

I think there's a bit of shorthand to get the point he wants to make, rather than a concerted attempt at distortion isn't it. and while the PDPA govt in theory lasted three years, After the Russian left in 1989, there was already a coup attempt in Mar'90. I think the Battle of Jalalabad was a high point for them, but after the siege of Khost they were in power in name only really

Not sure if this has been posted, but worth a read.

https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-ides-of-august

Pretty much standard for any US overseas operation, some folk get incredible rich, the rest suffer.

Now that the taliban have been left an airforce along with armoured hummers, night vision goggles and stock piles of guns and ammunition, rockets etc, how long before they get those birds in the air, I can see them recruiting some more jihadi Johns from the UK with helicopter and pilot licences, some guy with 50 hrs in a cessna trying to get fighter planes up n running.