Allies turn against each other. Kabul gets shelled. Julia Roberts hovers around in the background. Check.
"There are only fragmentary accounts of the civil war in Kabul at that time -- and, yes, I meant that pun. Cheryl Benard talks about it in 'Veiled Courage,' Human Rights Watch sketches it out in "Blood-Stained Hands' and Khaled Hosseini gives a vivid and only slightly fictional account of it in 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'. We will never be sure of the real numbers, but here are some important estimates: 50,000 civilians were killed within Kabul, with 12,000 incidences of abduction and rape each year between 1992 and 1996. 500,000 fled as refugees from Kabul. Factional fighting became increasingly ethnicized, as Massoud and Rabbani were associated with Tajiks generally, and Panjshiris specifically over time. Mazari's Hezb-i Wahdat became associated with Hazaras and Shi'ites; Dostum's forces with Uzbeks and northerners. I think Hekmatyar was not associated with Pashtuns generally, but perhaps with the eastern Pashtuns of Jalalabad and the northern Tribal Agencies within the FATA in Pakistan."
Tribal warfare. Blood in the streets. No Tom Hanks. Got that too. Hey, I'm actually starting to understand this stuff.
"Suffice it to say that it was all a very bloody mess at this time -- one that we later brought back into play when we hastily cobbled together a government during the Bonn negotiations in the fall of 2001. I think Steven Coll's 'Ghost Wars' covers some of this, and Johnson and Leslie's 'Afghanistan: the Mirage of Peace' (2004) is also an excellent, very well-informed account."
Now I'm confused again. Did all this bloodshed take place before or after 9-11? And where does the Taliban fit in?
"There's a lot of historical detail here, Jane, but what happened next is easy to describe. In short, after interfering with Afghan politics for many years and causing so many civil wars and blood baths in an effort to stop the Soviet Union that Afghanistan became tired and bleeding and vulnerable to a take-over by the Taliban in 1996, America then decided that Afghanistan no longer had any geopolitical interest for us, and so we tossed aside our most courageous allies in the Cold-War endgame as if they were awkward kids on the playground and we were too cool to play with them anymore. Afghans have often said 'Do not forget us again' and I think that is both a desperate plea and a very dire warning, simultaneously."
Pietro also gave me a whole bunch of insights into the Taliban in Afghanistan today and I thought I'd pass those along to you too -- sort of as a "Taliban for Dummies". Perhaps Robert Gates should seriously consider buying a copy of this book if our Pietro ever has time to sit down and write it (hint hint).
"To get back to your original question about the similarities between the USSR and the US in Afghanistan," Pietro continued, "off the top of my head I can think of several obvious parallels between 2009 in Kabul under American troops and 1986 in Kabul under Soviet troops (and 1970 in Saigon under US troops as well), but it is the differences as much as the parallels that are interesting. In 1986, the USSR was in serious economic trouble because its revived arms race with Reagan was pushing it to devote 50% of its GDP to military spending." Yeah, that's a paralell. The United States is now spending approximately 60% of our GDP on the military too.
"Also the overall Soviet GDP was stagnating -- for various reasons." Our GDP is now stagnating too. "Plus the USSR's opponents in Afghanistan were willing to give their lives to defend their turf, and were being coordinated by Pakistan's ISI, armed by the US, and funded by the Saudis."
Pakistan, the US and the Saudis worked together to arm Afghanistan's various insurgents back in the 1990s . Got it.
"But today, the whatever-you-might-call-them borderland insurgents are carving out a new geopolitical space on the borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the difference is that the current insurgents are doing it with substantially less outside political support than the old Taliban had. And the Pakistani government is now recognizing that its ISI had created a monster -- as the insurgents who used to fight against the USSR (in Afghanistan) and India (in Kashmir) are now attacking the Pakistani state and civil society." Sounds like the same old swamp that the one everyone was slogging through back between 1989 and 1996 -- only different.
"Okay. For simplicity's sake, let's still call the current borderland insurgents 'The Taliban' also (as they call themselves -- or occasionally by other names such as Lashkar-e Taiba). These fighters are composed of different sub-groups, but their political coherence is enough to call them one movement. I am not sure that they have a totalizing ideology such as some Marxist movements have had, but there is enough commonality -- centered around Islam, anti-corruption and a vague anti-Westernness -- for them to hold together."
Taliban. Not Taliban. Main movements. Sub-groups. Got it.
"For example," continued my friend, "banning girls' schools is not really as much about promoting Islam as it is a litmus test -- because it pisses off Westerners so much. So if a village or town agrees to close girls' schools, it is a marker of loyalty; I doubt that any of the leadership think of that as fulfilling a 'true' Islamic value on the ground. Meanwhile, Americans continue to back governments that are opaque, corrupt and illegitimate -- even in the eyes of many Westerners -- so Taliban can just translate our own observations regarding local corruption into Pashto to find nuanced arguments against America's current 'project'."
Corruption. Girls' schools. Pissing westerners off. Check.
"And speaking of projects," said Pietro, "I am now wondering about who the backers of the current Taliban really are and what exactly they hope to achieve. David Harvey, in his 2003 book 'The New Imperialism,' argued that there is no such thing as a 'state' that simply just exists; governments must actively pursue 'projects' in order to convince their subjects to keep committing resources to the cause. Think of Ireland in the 1970s: was there any realistic belief that the UK would let the Four Counties become part of the Irish Republic and leave hundreds of thousands of Protestants unprotected? Or look at Sri Lanka: what did the Tamil Tigers realistically hope to gain? In both cases, warring factions profited from warring -- for decades. Do the Taliban realistically think that the Hazara and other northern/western Afghans would accept their rule again? Not likely; but fighting the Coalition infidels in southern Afghanistan is a noble cause that could go on indefinitely."
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