SWANA Region Radio are joined by Afghan scholar Aiman Saed to reflect on the anniversary and the consequences of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. It is now one year since the US’s hurried and chaotic withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country. Neither the US withdrawal nor Taliban rule have brought security or peace to that nation, which has suffered continuous war and civil strife for nearly fifty years, much of it instigated by US covert and overt interventions ever since the Soviet occupation of the nation in the late 1970s. Far from bringing peace and order, those US interventions ended up spawning Al Qaeda and, eventually, ISIS and other radical militant organizations, as well as strengthening the Taliban that the post 9/11 in 2001 invasion was supposed to have defeated. And, despite the withdrawal of its troops, US interventions continue via drone strikes, from “over the horizon”, in Joe Biden’s phrase.
Meanwhile, in large part due to the US’s withholding of Afghan funds deposited in American banks, the Afghan economy is in collapse, some 95% of the population suffers from hunger and malnutrition, and the Taliban has reimposed a draconian regime that denies women the fundamental right to education, to travel, to work, or even to move around outside the home without male accompaniment. Female-headed households are the most likely to suffer from extreme poverty and hunger, but all households are affected by the impact of women’s inability to earn or even to go out. It is clear that optimistic predictions of a “Taliban 2.0” that would be more liberal in its social policies have proven fatally misguided.
Only a year after the US withdrawal, American media have largely forgotten Afghanistan, as in the years before they had rarely covered the war and, in particular, its impact on ordinary Afghans. Coverage of Afghanistan seem merited only when the US conducts a spectacular drone strike, such as the recent assassination of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. Today, however, SWANA Region Radio speaks with Afghan scholar and refugee Aiman Saed about the ongoing crisis in her country, about the impact of US policy on Afghanistan, life under the Taliban, and about her own experience of the chaotic scenes at Kabul Airport this time last year as Afghans sought to flee in the wake of the Taliban takeover of the country and its capital.
Aiman Said is a scholar of Political Science, with an MA in International Relations from the University of Peshawar in Pakistan. She is a women’s rights activist and speaker and has also worked as a social worker in the areas of child protection and healthy discipline, gender sensitization, and community development. Currently she is enrolled in a PhD programming International Relations here in the United States.
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