Daily Times

Afghanistan awaits another withdrawal. Previously, it was back in the winter of 1989 when Gen. Boris Gromov of the Soviet 40th army crossed the Friendship Bridge on the current Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border.

Simon Saradzhyan, the founding director of the Russia Matters Project at Harvard Kennedy School concludes, “The soviets failed to ensure a sufficiently broad and comprehensive inter-agency process of reviewing potential decisions to use force, factoring in the views of all key stakeholders in general and those to be tasked with implementing the decisions in particular”.

Simoon’s observation needs to be re-imagined in the context of the US exit leaving behind multiple violent stakeholders with an ideological polarisation that is more profound as compared to what the Soviets had left within a scrapyard of infrastructure and warlords.

Today’s Afghanistan is the output of the nineteenth-century feuding between the British, Russian, and Persian empires for dominance in the region. The 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention crafted Afghanistan as a buffer between the USSR in Central Asia and British imperial India.

Afghanistan’s polarized factions are intertwined with its diversity, through ideological, ethnic, linguistic, or tribal waves. External interventions perplexed the swirl as these groups have co-linguists, co-ethnics, or co-religionists in Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Achieving sustainable integration of a polity with clear national goals is a serious challenge.

Afghanistan’s constitution (2004) mentions 14 ethnic groups: Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Baloch, Turkmen, Nuristani, Pamiri, and many others with overlapping linguistics divisions; Dari 78%, Pashto 50%, Uzbek 10%, English 5%, Turkmen 2%, Urdu 2%, Pashayi 1%, Nuristani 1%, Arabic 1%, Balochi 1%.

ISIL has already emerged and taken over control of a large area in the mountains of Kunar province. The outfit deployed large units of local and foreign recruits from the Islamic movements in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the Middle East, and Pakistan. They set up jihad schools for kids, military training camps, and challenged both the Taliban and Kabul simultaneously

Ethnic groups are further sliced into tribes compounding the Afghan gyre. For example, the Pushtuns are divided among the Durrani, Ghilzai, Waziri, Khattak, Afridi, Mohmand, Yusufzai, Shinwari, and numerous smaller tribes. A highly centralised presidential system is in place facing internal power struggle, inefficiency, and corruption charges.

President Joe Biden recalled, “We went there to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that objective”. The President’s statement is almost contradictory to the ground realities of the conflict. The ideology that drove suicidal plane attacks on the twin towers back on September 11, 2000, is resurrecting from the dust of narratives.

The US has to exit. The security and development assistance between 2001 and 2021 to Afghanistan already exceeds $798 billion. The longest war of American history has consumed tens of thousands of civilians and millions have fled the country as refugees. A total of 775,000 troops have been deployed since 2001. More than 2300 servicemen have lost their lives and 20,660 were injured.

On March 10, the US began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan following The U.S.-Taliban “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” in March 2020. The agreement stipulates that the Taliban will not allow Afghan soil to attack the West and enter into negotiations with other ‘Afghan sides’ to forge a peaceful Afghanistan. In return, the U.S. agreed to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. However, the talks excluded the Afghan government.

Another spell of procrastinated violence is about to start with more players on a larger canvas having new communication strategies -The Taliban, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Afghan government, ethnic groups, neighbouring countries, The USA, India, and Russia. Taliban and the Afghan government are further divided into moderates and hardliners.

While drawing the space from the current chaos, another version of the Al-Qaida, ISIL, has already emerged and taken over the control of a large area in the mountains of Kunar province. The ISIL deployed large units of local and foreign recruits from the Islamic movements in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the middle east, and Pakistan. They set up Jihad schools for kids, military training camps, and challenged the Taliban and Afghan government simultaneously.

The Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Mostly Pashtuns, they are organically entrenched in the Afghan societal process, believe in power-oriented legitimacy, and well-aware of the intricate war topology of the country. They control one-fifth of the country and major road networks with an estimated 85000 full-time combatants to deal with a further 48% contested districts. They subscribe to ultraconservative Islam and reject universally accepted human values of democracy, religious co-existence, and female education.

The Taliban considers the Afghan government illegally installed by infidel forces and condemns the electoral process. The Taliban’s idea of an Islamic state is indigenous and focused on Afghanistan. Many hardliners among them are inclining towards ISIL after being convinced of the argument: “if it is obligatory to sacrifice for God’s supremacy on Earth, then why should we limit ourselves to the frontiers of Afghanistan? Why not the whole world?”

The young jihad aspirants cherish the concept of Pan-Islamism (Caliphate), derived from the literature expounding on offensive Jihad available within Afghanistan or supplied by the Islamist groups operative in the neighbouring countries.

To connect with a universal jihadi network active in Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East is more appealing to the indoctrinated and weaponised youth. The age group of 24 and below constitutes 62% of the population pyramid. Most of them in the rural areas are poor, deprived of modern education, and readily available to join locally powerful groups for all practical and ideological reasons.

As the war is winding down, global trade interests also swept in. Afghanistan hosts rich metamorphism in Hindukush mountains ranging from precious stones like Rubies and Emeralds, rare earth elements like uranium, to industrial raw materials like Iron, Copper, Zinc, Coal, and Chromite, together accounted for an estimated wealth exceeding one trillion dollars.

Recently, Afghanistan Investment Facilitation Unit arranged a meeting between Chinese investors and President Ashraf Ghani. The investors pledged to make an investment of 400 million dollars on a coal power plant to have the capacity of generating 300 Megawatts of electricity.

China shares a 76-kilo-meter border with Afghanistan interfacing with the extremity of the Wakhan Corridor. China evolved its policy from being premised on calculated indifference to strategic engagement. It has offered infrastructure and security rehabilitation programs to Kabul alarming both New Delhi and Washington.

Although China’s intentions may be predicated on domestic compulsions due to Uyghur’s unrest in Xinjiang, nevertheless, Afghanistan can benefit in the process in relation to China’s transcontinental connectivity, Belt and Road Initiative, which is indeed a challenge amid devastating security quagmires.

It is imperative to continue tactical and strategic support to the process of democratic evolution in Afghanistan. The strong military institutions will help to broker sustainable peace by carving a minimum consensus framework between the two primary contestants-the government and the Taliban. Secondly, the neighbouring countries should refrain from proxy interventions for their preferred solution to the conflict. Thirdly, strengthening civilian institutions is important to ensure transparent trickle-down of foreign aid and to exploit local industrial and mining potential for socio-economic development. Finally, financial support for the reconstruction of civil and communication projects like the Ring Road project circling the whole of Afghanistan, Education and Health infrastructure.

The war is not over. Peace is not an event in Afghanistan. It is a process that needs resource, strategy, capability, grit, and enlightenment. The role of Afghans is important now. They need to understand that consecutive wars have indiscriminately inflicted poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, drugs and refugees, and environmental degradation on all of them without considering their tribe, language, or ideology. They have been facing generational catastrophes during the last four decades. History has again brought them to a chasm with only two choices; either to bridge it by using the tools of tolerance, peace, and development or to sink into it for another decade. In the latter case, the country will become a more complex hotspot of terrorism again.

The writer is an academic, columnist, and public policy researcher