“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”
Edward Said, Orientalism.
I know I am entering into murky waters while I write this post. But I am helpless. So much dust is blowing in the social media open ground that it is becoming difficult to get the real picture. But that will take some time when the dust is settled if it is allowed to settle.
In the meantime, here are a few questions that are bugging me of late since the USA pulled out of Afghanistan and creating a sudden political void. At least, that is what we are told and made to understand by the mainline and overactive social media.
But what is the actual story? Can and do we believe everything that is peddled in the media? All these stories of atrocities, read, seen, forwarded, and reforwarded by the zealous netizens?
It is time to dig deeper.
Have anyone of you ever thought of finding out the meaning of the word TALIBAN? When you do that, you will be surprised, and instantly it would ring a bell. A bell that will wake you up to a different perspective. Different from what social media is trying to make us understand.
But let me come to the point without beating about the bush. What I could find out from my little research is this. The word TALIBAN is a Pashtun word meaning students or seekers.
Is it ringing a bell? What do we understand by student unrest? A disregard towards authority, a dream of changing the world, and the energy to fulfill that dream, despite the personal hardship and loss.
But a more important question is why the students would want to change the world, in this case, Afghan society? What is it that agitated them? Why are they up in arms? From where do they get the sophisticated arms and ammunition? Are they really as brutal as the social media is trying to portray them?
It is not possible to find all the answers to this riddle in this short post. But we can go back to history a little bit and find out how it all started. We can also raise a few questions pertinent to the present circumstances.
Afghanistan is an Islamic country. Its population is predominantly of the Sunni sect - 90%, while 10% is of the Shia sect. The difference and rivalry between Sunnis and Shias go back to 632 AD when the Prophet Mohammad died. Sunnis, who opposed succession based on bloodline, as against Shias, who considers that only those from Prophet Mohammad’s bloodline can be the leader of the Islamic world, dominated the Islamic world. There is a long history of this battle of supremacy, but we will not go into that details. But to simplify the issue, we can take it that the Sunnis are more conservative and puritanical than the Shias.
Many Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian converts to Islam chose to become Shia rather than Sunni in the early centuries of the religion as a protest against the ethnic Arab empires that treated non-Arabs as second-class citizens. Their religions influenced the evolution of Shia Islam as distinct from Sunni Islam in rituals and beliefs.
Afghanistan, as popularly understood, is the world’s largest tribal society, with more than 400 tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and sub-clans. Pashtuns, the most dominant and numerous of the tribes, are spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and some other ethnic populations populate the country's northwestern part.
Afghanistan is an enigma. Since the times of Alexander the Great, the western powers came and tried to subjugate Afghanistan. All failed and had to retreat with a bloodied nose. Even in recent history, the British, the Russians, and now recently the USA could not subjugate Afghanistan like the other countries. Due to geographical reasons, Afghanistan remained a country that had never seen a central unifying government for a prolonged period in the whole of its history.
Let us cut back to the present.
The last King of Afghanistan was Mohammad Zahir Shah. His cousin, Mohammad Daoud Khan, deposed him in 1973 when he was vacationing in Italy. Zahir Shah started modernizing Afghanistan in the 1950s. He introduced free elections, a parliament, civil rights, women’s rights, and universal suffrage.
Yet, Afghanistan is a country predominantly of the Sunni sect and did not like these modernizing efforts. Two undercurrents were flowing parallelly, Islamic fundamentalism, backed by Saudi Arabia, and communism, backed by Soviet Russia. To support Afghan communists against growing religious fundamentalism, Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Leonid Brezhnev was the Soviet premier during that time. Brezhnev's doctrine is a foreign policy that suggested that any threat to the socialist rule of a country is a threat to all socialist countries. Hence, the justification of the Afghan invasion by the Russians. The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
There was, naturally, resistance from the grassroots level against the Soviet occupation. Islamic fundamentalists were also active with the help of Saudi Arabia.
The USA, the arch-rival of Soviet Russia, was not happy with the Soviet intervention. They got an ally in the Islamic fundamentalists who were against Russia-backed socialists. During 1989-1990, the Taliban was formed by the USA to fight against the Soviet occupation. The group’s founding membership consisted of religious students educated in traditional Islamic schools. The militants and mujahideen subsequently joined the group. According to a BBC report, the Taliban were mostly funded by Saudi Arabia after the cold war.
A Washington Post report says that, during the cold war, the USA spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars supplying textbooks to Afghan schools that had violent and militant content.
In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
Evidently, the Taliban is a creation of the USA, Soviet Russia, Saudi Arabia. Pakistan’s ISI played their own game in this arena.
It was and still is a game of supremacy that has turned into a humanitarian disaster. The western powers, the struggle of dominance between Sunni and Shia sects of Islam, religious fundamentalism, and western imperialism all played their parts to bring forth this disaster.
Whatever is happening in Afghanistan and what the Taliban is doing, if it is correct, is not good at all. It is a reign of terror in the name of religion. But is it any different from any other religious fundamental group?
Why I do not concur with the dominant narrative.
So far, I have said nothing new. It is all in the public domain already. So why am I writing this?
My point of dissonance is in two main issues.
First is the western narrative of the story, and the second is our passing the judgment against Afghanistan society.
Let me elaborate.
I have already said earlier that I am against all kinds of religious fundamentalism. Is the status of women any better in Arab countries? Even in the UAE, sharia law is followed. We never seem to be bothered by the way women are routinely treated in Arab and middle-east countries. And let me make it clear again that religious fundamentalism is not confined to Islam only. We have seen fundamentalism and fanaticism in our own country fanned by the dominant Hindu right. In the name of religion, caste, creed, and the community, we have seen men and women are being persecuted in our backyard.
The status of women in our country, contrary to what the educated city dwellers think, is not far better than the most Islamic states we are criticizing. The status of women, along with the minority communities, are like second-class citizens. Any patriarchal society, be it Hinduism, Christianity, or Islam, is harsh, oppressive, and unfair to women.
Agreed, India being a semblance of democracy, may not be as bad as the other non-democratic societies. But that does not justify what discriminations and violence we see around us in our society.
Western media, by amplifying a specific kind of news, is trying to demonize Afghan society. There is a deep disdain for other cultures by most mainline western media. These narratives are repeated, circulated, and re-circulated in social media by us who have no stake in the game, thereby helping the cause of the parties who have a vested interest in maligning Afghan society - the western powers, to save their own face for their failure.
A few decades back, we have seen similar propaganda happening through popular blockbuster films. Films like the Rambo series, first, when the USA was routed in Vietnam, and then in Afghanistan when the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan. But now, with vibrant social media, who without understanding the issues, are prompt in forwarding and reforwarding a specific narrative, who wants blockbuster films.
Afghanistan - a humanitarian disaster
We, as the citizen of the world, need to understand the real picture and decide accordingly. It is easy to endorse the dominant narrative and follow the herd. To stand apart and take an objective judgment without being judgemental takes a lot of courage and levelheadedness.
We should, instead, focus on the humanitarian disaster that is taking place in Afghanistan. Women, children, the aged, and minorities are the first casualties in any war zone. And the same is happening in Afghanistan. Be it the Taliban or any other regime, it is happening in Afghanistan for some time now.
The problem arises when we judge others with our code of ethics and moralities. To understand a culture different than ours, one needs much more than just knowing the language.
Have the Taliban changed?
There is a possibility, maybe a remote one, that the Taliban may have changed their overt fundamentalism over the last 20 years. A case in point is their open press conference after their taking over of Kabul. They are also helping evacuation of foreign nationals safely, which is definitely an improvement over the last time they took power. It clearly shows some maturity on the part of the Taliban, which is a far cry from their previous term. They clearly want international approval and acceptance of their regime.
There is a saying in English that the leopard never changes its spots. The skeptics among us may be thinking in similar lines. It may as well be true for the Taliban. Maybe, the Taliban now is a subdued form of their earlier avatar.
But I would rather root for the Afghans, who have the right to decide their own course of life. And without outside interruptions. But whether they will be allowed to do so is a million-dollar question.