Return of the Taliban: The Silver Lining for Strategic Peace -By Saliu Momodu

It is no longer news that the balance of power in Afghanistan has once again flipped hands after exactly 20 whole years of a political experiment by the Americans. The 2001 invasion of the country that brought in American boots and afterwards American democracy had always proven abortive from the very first day. From motivations of sheer revenge that followed the terrorists attacks in New York and other places, to the pursuit of outright imperialist endeavors, the US’s Afghanistan misadventure quickly morphed into the unexpected- a blow-up of seething clash of ideologies, a “clash of civilizations” to borrow the contested description of the American political Scientist Samuel P. Huntington.

It is one thing to fight your enemy- real or imagined, but it is altogether a different thing to effect a regime change and further seek to have your adversaries reborn in your own image after your likeness. This is one major error of the invading power that would reduced an understandable campaign, at least as viewed from the window of “might is right”, into a dumb one, a counterproductive one.

In Afghanistan, the invaders had no business occupying the country with the excuse of schooling an entire people, culture and civilization about feminism, equality, freedom, education, democracy, liberalism etc. No country in the world has got such rights, even worse driving same through the barrel of the gun and predator drones. Long gone is the colonial era where chains and munitions where the final seal of authority with which to determine the fate of a supposed savage people. But now after two decades of devastation, 2 to 3 trillion US dollars, thousands of lives lost and many more displaced, we may just be seeing the start of the right thing to do with dialogue, diplomacy, politics and economy.

Every country like the United States reserves the right to self-defense, and even, the right to invade an enemy territory if that is the plausible option of the best benefit and least harm. But to seek to recast the people in a supposedly superior mould of civilization was always going to fall apart at least when attempted on a rugged people tailored by war in an uncanny terrain as Afghanistan.

At the centre of this unfolding drama really are the Talibans –a supposed rag-tag group of religious zealots who will not agree to perish their ambition and determination to have their country governed by their own understanding of Islamic precepts and laws. Their first bout at political power through the latter half of the 90s after their own ouster of the Afghan Mujahideen(s) was widely reported as characterized by brutality, suppression, repression and rights violation. Women and others reckoned as minorities were especially documented as victims of that brief Taliban episode.

The straw however that broke the camel’s back for the Taliban was their affiliation with Al-Qaeda characters linked with the September 2001 violent attacks in the US. But while right and wrong may be easy to epistemologically categorize, the politics of the modern world is hardly ever black and white. This it seems will forever be the case as power and interests reincarnate in different clime, time and characters turning avowed adversaries into sudden bed fellows with the opposite occurrence equally commonplace. How ironic that only yesterday, Afghanistan was a darling of America to the point that many Hollywood blockbusters like Rambo III would eulogies the Mujahideen whom the Soviets on their own parts would call terrorists at the time.

The sort of situation that prevailed in Afghanistan years before the US eventually brought her enormous fire power to bear in 2001 left the regime at the mercy of any agent, foreign or domestic, that could conjure any semblance of relevance as a rallying point for national mobilization. This was the condition of Afghanistan pre 9/11 that lent it to be an easy platform and a free conduit for AlQaeda. But at the same time, the US upon invading the country was striking a people who as it seems at the time had nothing to lose except their identity, their culture and their history. A history shaped already by decades of excruciating war and deprivation. Little wonder the American war in the country quickly ran into futility being that the only thing that was worth the fighting power of the Coalition was the protection of the very same democracy they had forced down the throat of the people with the barrel of a gun and predators drones. As the saying goes, you can force a horse to the banks of a river but you cannot coerce it to drink water.

With the ongoing spectacle of the ignoble withdrawal of American and other NATO forces from Afghanistan, one would think that the road to a diplomatic and political solution to the Afghan question is finally being paved. But that will be a naive estimation it seems, especially if the posturing of Amrullah Saleh, the immediate past Vice President of Afghanistan is anything to go by. Unlike the ousted President Ashraf Ghani his fleeing boss, Mr. Saleh and perhaps others too seems to be posturing to oppose the Taliban in some form of a military-styled confrontation.

Any student of history or at least an observer of recent developments in Afghanistan must be at a loss right now as to what Mr. Saleh and his supporters seek to achieve that the Americans and her allies could not in the last 20 years. Any further interrogation therefore would show, I suppose, that the enemies of that country who wish to keep it perpetually under turmoil and bloodshed may just have found another way to resurrect full scale hostilities in the form of a bloody civil war in the hopes that the balance of power would again tilt against the Taliban as happened in 2001. The sheer number of people officially bid to be ferried away from that country and the aloof manner the government dissolved out of the scene should worry and alert us lest another horrendous decade, this time a proxy war be unleashed. Syria is an example easily comes to mind.

But to my mind, all peace lovers and genuine friends of Afghanistan and her people must discourage any attempt at instigating a civil strife in the country. Instead, diplomatic and political corridors should quickly be opened and all those that still command any leverage over the Taliban like Pakistan, Qatar, China, Russia and indeed the US be encouraged to sincerely constitute themselves for such peaceful objectives.

Evidently, the Taliban of this 2021 is significantly different from those of the 90s. Their recent unequivocal proclamation for a general amnesty devoid of victimization is unprecedented judging by the fiery imagery of the group we have come to know. I think these sorts of overtures should be immediately fashioned into a bond by which the international community initiates and prosecutes negotiations with the new Sheriffs in town. Moreover, the world has become more interconnected and too interdependent to such unbearable extend for any government to dare attempt to stay isolated at her own peril. With clips of their fighters posing and smiling for selfies as they sling their AK47 rifles across their shoulders, it appears evident that the Taliban would have realized how unnecessarily they had set themselves up for the condemnation and apathy that contributed to their down fall in 2001.

It should be clear therefore that the proper and progressive interpretation of religious laws be henceforth accorded premium place so that history be not needlessly repeated again to the detriment of all. Laws pertaining to women, entertainment, education, family esectra must now be interpreted within the ambient and spirit of Islam rather than through the blinkered window of cultural preferences and perceptions.

So as against the continued employment of a brutal conflict, economic and developmental incentives must now be the new bargaining chips with the Taliban and all other players in Afghanistan. A resort to unrest and more bloodshed in the form of a scripted civil war likely orchestrated and sustained from abroad would not rid Afghanistan of the Taliban. On the contrary, an already war-torn country with a population desperate to find their feet in a fast advancing world would descend deeper into the abyss. In the same spirit, Muslim scholarship and institutions with balanced interpretation of Islamic Laws and Jurisprudence must be co-opted as partners in the international facilitation for an inclusive and progressive application of beneficial governance for the Afghan people. All law-abiding men, women, citizens and aliens to Afghanistan must be accorded their rights to live in peace, prosperity and dignity under humane legislations.

The Taliban authorities must realize that anything short would quickly result in widespread discontent which will compromise their power and authority as well as breach whatever stability they seek to realize in their country. The lesson should be clear by now that rallying men and machine guns to overrun a country and put it under your sway is yet a cakewalk in comparison to running a government that harnesses the idiosyncrasies of the people for political stability and socioeconomic development. The American on their own part must have by now learnt that not always can democracy be shoved down people’s throats with bombs and assault rifles.

After all said and done about this war-troubled country and her people, there is a silver lining about this resurgence of the Taliban that public commentary is yet to so far acknowledge or appreciate. I think this is most disingenuous to put it mildly. The 9/11 attacks and the so-called war on terror that it birthed may have wrecked appreciable incapacity on the ease of terrorist attacks on US soil and American interests, but it nonetheless mushroomed extremist ideologies across the Muslim world and other places. The infamy of the Guantanamo Bay, countless renditions and disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings among other human rights violations and injustices came to characterize a war supposedly initiated to enact justice.
Indiscriminate predator drone strikes and an obvious agenda to Westernize and liberalize a conservative country all fed well into those initial extremists ideologies that 20 years ago fueled the killings of those innocent thousands across three US cities and across many other Muslim none lands in the intervening period.

That the West hates Muslims or at least that it seeks to undermine their religion of Islam was a central theme with extremist propaganda. Such was the narrative that the Afghanistan debacle came to freely circulate in the minds and circles of those that were already so receptive or legitimately aggrieved. Innocent, young, poor and impressionable Muslims who ordinarily were hitherto apolitical were taken in the wings of these sorts of propaganda only to become both villains and victims of third party surreptitious politics. To make matters worse, the 2011 events in Egypt that saw to the American and Western support for the ouster of a democratic elected government of Mohammad Morsi was another chink in the armor of the Western campaign against extremists and terrorists tendencies in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world.

Needless to say that much of the so-called Arab spring was truncated in key Arab countries by the American secrete hand that wielded the might of Arab regimes against innocent citizens who were only asking to be free from Western-backed suffocating dictatorships. In the midst of all these is the unconditional American support for Israeli apartheid, dehumanization, killings and land theft that they continue to perpetuated against the Palestinian people in the most gruesome of ways.

Now with the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the stage is again set for a new opportunity for both the East and the West to sincerely find common grounds. The opportunity has again come for all parties to demonstrate that the misadventures of the past 20 years were really a matter of misunderstanding, overreach and unintended mistakes. The opportunity has again come for the Taliban to show that what they really seek is an Islamic government that derives from the humane, flourishing and just provisions of the Sharia instead of a brutish and vindictive hold on power for a control and repression of the people. The fledging government of Afghanistan or however it eventually pans out must never allow their soil to be a safe haven for radical, extremist and terrorist entities that seek to harm, hurt or kill innocent people in or outside the country under the guise of Jihad.

The Taliban, by embracing an inclusive, progressive and just approach to governance would not only be assuaging the atrocities and agonies of the many years of war, destruction and deprivation in their country, they would also be helping to starve the oxygen off any extremists or fanatical group in the Muslim world and beyond who are quick to draw false equivalence and dubious inspiration from Afghanistan as a darling example of an Islamic State which they seek to replicate or one on whose behalf they exact violent revenge.

I am confident that a proper international approach to this foreseeable return of the Taliban would not only silent the political motivations for global terrorism, it would also defeat the recruiting narratives and ideological underpinnings that has fueled the deadly endeavor for the past two decades.

This to me is the silver lining amidst the current hullabaloo making the rounds in the media. But the choice moving forward, at least in the immediate and medium terms, is actually up to the Americans and Talibans: the former who can choose whether or not to maintain an arrogant, overbearing and seditious posture against Afghanistan, and the later who can decide whether or not to tow a path of vindictiveness, constriction and stagnation.

On my part, I wish the people of Afghanistan a peaceful country, compassionate leadership and progressive government that is faithful to the ideals of their cherished heritage and that which resonates with the dreams and aspirations of her beautiful people.

By Saliu Momodu
saliumomoh123@gmail.com