Afghanistan – Ghani = AF-stan?

Taliban fighters take control of the Afghan presidential palace after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 15. Pic/AP

When is it ever pleasantly quiet on a battlefield for a war to be considered cold? But that's precisely what the Cold War was - up until the last decade, of last century - between the US, and the (then) USSR. Because things never really reached boiling point, inside those countries.

The wars, on behalf of both the superpowers, were hotly fought on foreign soils/properties. Often engaging locals of those lands - whether Korea, Vietnam…. Or, indeed, Afghanistan.

Which the Soviets invaded in 1979, staying around for a decade, while the US armed/militarised Afghan Mujahideen (Islamist guerillas) in those parts to take on their global rival instead. It's unlikely the US cared so much for the Afghan/Islamic/tribal norms being threatened by a foreign power. Around 1.5 million Afghans died in this Cold War!

Why? For being a place of "strategic" importance. Which is what Afghanistan was for both the British and the Russian empires in the 1800s, up until early 20th Century.

The cover of Ahmed Rashid's book, Taliban

The riches were in Central Asia, where the Russians were. India, too close for comfort, was the jewel of the British crown. The British fought to take Afghanistan under its wing - in order to keep Russians from invading India. This Cold War that played out was then called The Great Game!

What to make of Afghan people in all of this, living for centuries inside arid battlefields and around merciless deaths? "Their story and their character involve immense contradictions. Brave, magnificent, honourable, generous, hospitable, gracious, handsome, Afghan men and women, can also be devious, mean and bloody minded," is how the world's leading Pak-based expert Ahmed Rashid describes them, in his seminal book, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords (2001). Which tallies with dusty, popular images of men brandishing Kalashnikovs from Datsun two-door pickup trucks; and the genteel Kabuliwala from Tagore's short story from the late 1800s.

Or, of course, the fun, current Afghan Diaspora you meet - charming you with a common love for the singer Arijit Singh, whose songs played prominently in Kabul's cafés - over what's generally a shared Eastern fondness for all things Bollywood.

In fact when you read about Afghanistan from centuries further back in Rashid's book is when Bollywood names come alive even more. Starting from 1300s, when Taimur (on whom Saif Ali Khan named his son), the descendant of Genghis Khan, who captured Hairat (in Afghanistan). Taimur's son was Shah Rukh. He moved the capital of the Timurid Empire to Hairat in 1405.

In 1500, Taimur's descendant Babur was driven out of home in Ferghana valley in Uzbekistan. He went on to conquer Kabul in 1504, and then Delhi, to establish the Mughal dynasty.

What does any of this medieval history have to do with medieval minded men called Taliban, a second generation of (Pashtun) Mujahideens, chiefly educated/indoctrinated in Pakistan, who took over Afghanistan in the mid 1990s? Nothing. Except, when you consider a place that has suffered more for where it is - rather than what's in it!
As the Soviets left in 1989, rivalling warlords from multiple tribes/sects fought over commanding portions across 34 provinces. This instability proved detrimental for Pakistan in 1993, under Benazir Bhutto - looking to use Afghanistan for the shortest land-trade route to Central Asia.

A one-eyed Jack, Mohammed Omar - who people still don't accurately know what he looked like, or when he was born; he died in 2013, that people learnt about in 2015 - was emerging as a Pashtun Robin Hood figure, for his justice system. The young Taliban (meaning ‘students' in Pashto) that grouped under him could be Pakistan's dependable proxies.

As Rashid recounts, "In just a couple of weeks, this unknown force had captured the second largest city in Afghanistan (Kandahar), with loss of just a dozen men... By December 1994, some 12,000 Afghan and Pakistani students had joined the Taliban."

If you're old enough to have read accounts of what followed, they were essentially ‘Ripley's Believe It Or Not' columns in international (including Indian) press - smashing of TV sets, public stoning/beheading, banning of music, sports, decreeing all men to grow a beard...

Even if in horror, the world looked away mid '90s onwards. Until September 11, 2001, when Taliban was used as shoulder for an attack on the US, by the multinational group Al Qaeda. Post Cold War, for the first time, things got fatally hot in the West.

The US drove out Taliban. Public health and women's education, I'm told, improved considerably. That war got over in 20 years. Whatever the conclusion, America left the building. And the Taliban returned on August 15, 2021, just as swiftly as they had first popped up in the '90s.

What was their original goal? An ancient religious state, inspired more by tribal codes. And while Taliban Pashtuns don't like Hazaras, or as Sunni Muslims, can't stand Shias, or as Deobandis can't get along with Salafists (the IS), what religionists of a fanatical type are united on is their common hate for women - thrown out of schools, wiped out of streets, stripped of human rights.

That's the first war, aimed against half of humanity, to look out for in 2021 - when technology allows public shaming of Taliban, if they err - in a way that it was not possible in the '90s. Certain rights look globally non-negotiable two decades hence. If the world's at it, think they'll care. As must the brave, living within.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14

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