Afghanistan: A tragedy in many acts

Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban. The words of W B Yeats -- spoken a century ago -- that the worst are full of passionate intensity, while the best lack all conviction, come to mind. The United States, the greatest power in the world, lacked all conviction in mainstreaming the Taliban, determined to make an exit from a ‘forever war’ that provided no promise of victory. America’s precipitate and hurried withdrawal -- the image of the exit from Bagram airbase in the cover of darkness in early July will be etched indelibly on the flagstones of history -- and the flawed agreements at Doha provided the cue for the final Taliban onslaught. The passionate zealotry of the Taliban, which quickly overwhelmed the forces of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan once the Americans had left, has brought them back, triumphant, to Kabul.

The country has reverted to default, and one recalls the British diplomat Martin Ewans -- from 20 years ago -- that in its most acute form, Afghanistan is a ‘failed’ state, an acutely traditional Islamist society, especially in its villages, and a nation of divided ethnic and tribal loyalties that run extremely deep. Its people -- particularly its women -- immersed in a despair that has little parallel, have become once more the wretched of the earth. For the last 40 years and more, Afghanistan’s trials and tribulations have only multiplied in a macabre, repetitive dance of self-destruction, aided by foreign forces.

The Taliban is a Pakistani creation. Its restoration to power in Kabul signals a victory equally for Pakistan. The speed and sophistication with which the Taliban have moved to secure strongholds through the country point to a great deal of professional and personnel inputs from cross-border minders. Questions are also being raised about the ‘wrong’ approach taken by the US in training the Afghan National Army. Also, a unified national identity is absent in Afghanistan. The more influential narrative, it is said, was created by the Taliban. A by-product of their return is that the terror pipeline that feeds the rest of the region -- in Central and South Asia -- could be back in business.

The Taliban proved during their stint in power in the nineties that they are proponents of radical Islamic overreach. The question before the world is -- have they changed? There is no evidence that they have. Crucially, their survival depends on strategic subservience to Pakistan, which has always regarded Afghanistan as providing it vital ‘strategic depth’ that the generals in Rawalpindi have always sought against India.

The US is now seen in the region as having backtracked “on everything” -- especially by legitimising the Taliban through what former US National Security Advisor H R McMaster calls the “capitulation negotiations” at Doha, in a “reversal of morality and in self-delusion”.

The US withdrawal has also meant that there is an open pathway for China and Russia, whose partnership gets closer and closer in the region, to become key players in Afghan affairs. China, in fact, will now enter Afghanistan as a long-term player, and increasingly, for the rest of Asia, excluding nations like India, Japan and Vietnam, the Asian order will be seen as dominated by Beijing. China will work very carefully with Pakistan as this new phase begins. It displays no signs of discomfort with Afghanistan’s strategic subservience to Pakistan, while the Iranians, the Russians and the Central Asians also have no fundamental quarrel with this state of affairs.

More importantly, the US ‘defeat’ in Afghanistan -- even if it is argued that America remains the supreme military and economic power in the world and defeats of this nature will not eclipse its supremacy -- points to the botched nature of its actions, both in that country and in Iraq over the last two decades, failures that have egged the Chinese on to believe that the West, particularly the US, is in decline. Gloating mouthpieces of the Chinese establishment are already warning Taiwan not to rely on the US for military intervention in the event of a showdown with the PRC.

The pursuit of the dream of establishing inclusive democracy in Afghanistan, as the analyst Francisco Sisci recently said, was bound to fail when a vast majority of its population remains poor, illiterate, in the shadow of the most extreme Islamist practices in the modern world, all in a terrain that is one of the most formidable and difficult on earth. If China now picks up the reins of imperial overstretch in Afghanistan -- for its own ends -- the going will be as treacherous for Beijing as it was for Washington.

The Taliban are fickle clients -- and they will be difficult to manage. The Chinese are gamblers by nature, but the risks in Afghanistan defy even the most daring of that ilk. China would like to build a great wall of steel between radical Islamist influences emanating out of Afghanistan and Chinese Xinjiang, while at the same time have the upper hand in securing access to the country’s precious natural resources, and also pursuing the agenda of ‘Belt and Road’ development, through Afghanistan into Iran and West Asia.

Whether China will be able to influence the Taliban to embrace development-oriented governance in place of medieval methods remains a question. China may be thinking big, and trying to play the long game, but will this be a stepping stone to further ‘greatness’ or decline (as the image of Afghanistan being the ‘graveyard of empires’ suggests)?

India has not been a key influencer in the trajectory of events in Afghanistan --Pakistan has striven hard to exclude it from being one. But India was seen in these last two decades by most Afghans as a champion of what may be called Afghaniyat. It was the recipient of enormous goodwill from the Afghan people for its generous investments and aid for people-oriented development programmes and projects stretching across the 34 provinces of the country, and promotion of the interests and the welfare of Afghan women and children. It is not known whether India has established substantive, future-oriented contacts with the Taliban. For now, it has signalled that it favours an inclusive political dispensation in Kabul, that it will ‘wait and watch’, and that it is examining policy options. The priority is to safely evacuate all Indian nationals from the country. It is hoped that India will offer relief and refuge, if so called upon, to those Afghans -- civil society leaders, journalists and rights activists, as well as women and children -- who seek to escape from the Taliban.

The departure of the ambassador and Indian staff of our embassy in Kabul has been a dramatic development. It illustrates that, presently at least, for India, the equities created over the last 20 years are under threat. Deft and agile diplomacy is the need of the hour.

(The writer is a former Foreign Secretary)