Promises are tricky. While some may take the sanctity of a promise to heart, others say that promises are made to be broken and it is naïve to believe otherwise. I prefer to err on the side of the former but no matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, one thing is clear: reneging on promises involves costs, be they of a transactional, emotional or — as economists would have us believe — utility kind.
While promises in personal relationships are no less sacred, promises in the international arena take on a completely different context. Nations survive on the idea of potential synergies that can be generated from shared commitments, and even though states may not have recourse to a higher, binding authority, they still rely on other states to make good on their promises. Of course, not every state does and, when that happens, the consequences tend to be of a higher magnitude than personal relationships.
Back in the 1980s, when Afghanistan was under a communist government, the western world promised it would be overthrown. What Afghanistan got, however, was Taliban rule all the way up to 2001, when the west once again promised deliverance. Instead of rescue and relief though, it appears that Afghanistan once again finds itself staring down the barrel of a rejuvenated Taliban juggernaut. So much for promises then.
In the past couple of months, the Afghan Taliban have increased their attacks in urban Afghan areas and have declared a systematic onslaught against President Ghani’s government. Such is the gravity of the situation that on the eve of the first anniversary of his government in Afghanistan, the Taliban dealt a strategic blow to the domestic setup by staging a seizure of the provincial capital of Kunduz.
If reports are to be believed, the Taliban entered the city of Kunduz discreetly in small numbers on the eve of Eid-ul-Azha, and once they had the requisite numbers within the city walls, they staged a vicious blitzkrieg that caught the security providers and administrators in the city by surprise. Resultantly, much of Kunduz was swiftly captured by the Taliban, and the alive and willing were forced to take refuge in Kunduz’s airport, far from the city centre. At the time when these lines were written, the Afghan security forces, in collusion with NATO troops, had regained control of some areas in the city, hoping to end the nightmare scenario that materialised. However, whereas the battle for Kunduz might ebb away in the coming days, the war for supremacy in Afghanistan has just begun.
It appears that the messy succession battles within the Afghan Taliban’s ranks have finally been resolved in favour of Mullah Akhtar Mansour, the new Taliban supremo. After the death of Mullah Omer was made public, Mansour faced intense opposition from various factions within the Taliban organisation. But it seems that the fractious debate has been settled in favour of a re-grouping under one banner. Furthermore, the creeping threat of an Islamic State (IS) presence in Afghanistan might have pushed the Taliban to stick together in testing times and leave aside differences.
Of course, these developments do not bode well for Pakistan. We were on the wrong side of history the last time a similar situation arose in our west, and we paid dearly for our miscalculation then. Right now, whilst we are in the midst of a counter-terrorism campaign that is going to stretch over possibly into the next decade, a consolidation by the Taliban in Afghanistan is bad news. Admittedly, the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban factions have had differences over the selection of targets in the past but it takes an awfully short time for differences to disappear once survival comes under threat. A Taliban takeover in Afghanistan raises the possibility of extended civil war that would only further the sense of instability pervading the region.
Of course, the failure of Ashraf Ghani’s government to claim legitimacy over Afghanistan’s domestic governance is partly to blame. In part, this has been due to the stark divisions that plague the Afghan political setup. Additionally, failure to induce accountability and curb corruption has not given the Afghan citizenry plausible cause to put much confidence behind Ghani. Moreover, after successfully sweet-talking various regional and international players at the beginning of his term, Ghani has let his detractors get the best of him in recent days, and he will now find himself stranded in his search for allies and partners.
But it must seem like a trip down memory lane for the global powers so bent on trying to make Afghanistan conform to modern day statehood norms to see all their efforts go to waste in such a short time. In the 1990s, the Taliban were ostracised from the rest of the world community after taking over in Afghanistan, but instead of the sanctions working against the barbaric regime, the isolation helped strengthen the Taliban by providing them free reign over a territory. That episode ended with the tragedy of 9/11, after which the western world sought to liberate Afghanistan from the clutches of the Taliban, only to see them not only survive but maybe even come out on top in the end.
It has been abundantly clear for quite some time that Afghanistan is not a typical nation-state with neat, predictable attributes. As a matter of fact, it occupies that strange buffer zone between primordial entities and modern day governments that we seem to have confined solely to history books. Afghanistan’s history of colonial rule, the artificial divisions that plague its border with Pakistan and a lack of state infrastructure have never really allowed for contemporary statehood to gel within its territory. Resultantly, we have seen any and all attempts to transform Afghanistan into a ‘successful’ nation-state go to waste. But leaving the question of whether or not Afghanistan remains the exception in a world that sees the state as the sole claimant to violence aside, we must understand that without socio-economic change on the grassroots level and a robust state presence, there is very little hope for Afghanistan to re-invent itself. Until that happens, the world will see itself only burrowing further and further down an inescapable rabbit hole.
The author is a freelance columnist with degrees in political science and international relations