A year ago this week, Joe Biden appeared before cameras and pledged that America was “going to continue to provide funding and equipment” to Afghanistan and ensure that the Afghan government retained “the capacity to maintain their air force”. “US support for the people of Afghanistan will endure,” Biden went on: “We will continue to provide civilian and humanitarian assistance, including speaking out for the rights of women and girls.”
Weeks later, Kabul fell. And a few days after that, Amrullah Saleh, the legitimate vice-president of Afghanistan, told me that Americans had stabbed the Afghan government and people. Mobilising a resistance campaign against the Taliban from the mountains of Panjshir, Saleh spat at the contemptible lies of the American president. Far from supporting the Afghan air force, the Americans had gone to extraordinary lengths to debilitate it in the days before they cut and ran from Afghanistan.
Since Kabul’s fall last year, Afghanistan has descended into what can only be described as hell. After two decades of relative freedoms and opportunity, half the country’s population has been forced into the veil, and out of workplaces, schools, and universities. Journalists have been tortured. Houses have been raided, and those suspected of harbouring sympathies for the legitimate government of Afghanistan executed. Biden has not made a squeak about any of it.
Habituated to dispensing high-minded lectures on values and besotted with Ukraine— “a relatively civilised, relatively European country”, as one missionary American reporter right out of a Graham Greene novel phrased it—what the West has facilitated in Afghanistan is more than a reign of terror. It is the enslavement of an entire population.
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Pakistan’s ‘colonialism’
When the Taliban first ruled Afghanistan, it was from Panjshir that the late Ahmad Shah Massoud commanded the fight against their brutality before al-Qaeda sent its suicide bombers to murder him. Today, Panjshir is once again the last hope of Afghanistan. It is not only a bastion of armed opposition to the Taliban, but also a haven for Afghans fleeing the Taliban’s horrors. A vicious campaign has been renewed over the past month to pulverise it.
Last year, the Taliban were suffering heavy losses when Pakistan dispatched the chief of its spy-ops agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to oversee their operations. As Amrullah Saleh put it to me then, Afghanistan was not fighting the Taliban alone. It was fighting for its survival against a nuclear-armed State of 250 million people.
The Taliban, lest we forget, was created by Pakistan in the 1990s out of the detritus of the anti-Soviet uprising. It armed, trained, equipped and financed them, and then unleashed them on Afghanistan. As Saleh reminded me, Pakistan’s enduring support for the Taliban and other terror outfits is an outgrowth of its paranoid obsession with India; and this, in turn, is an outgrowth of the identity crisis that has haunted it since the moment of its birth.
Lacking a historical basis for its creation, Pakistan has sought to endow its existence with meaning by casting itself in the role of Islam’s defender. In practice—from the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh to its defence of China’s persecution of the Uyghurs to its sustained assaults against Afghanistan—there is hardly another State that has done more to perpetuate the persecution of the followers of Islam than Pakistan. Saleh had a message for young Westerners who prate glibly about “decolonisation”: If they want to see a living example of colonialism, they should study what Pakistan is doing to Afghanistan.
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Price is right for Biden
Those who defend Biden’s decision to betray and quit Afghanistan abruptly radiate a profound contempt for the progress achieved by its people in the past two decades. When the Americans dislodged the Taliban, Afghanistan had been reduced to a primitive place. In 20 years, out of virtually nothing, Afghans built a civil society, democratic institutions, and structures of government. Apologists of the American president who maintain that the Afghans failed conveniently ignore the baseline from which they began.
The most obstinate impediment to Afghanistan’s progress, Saleh told me, was Pakistan—a State that pretended to be a US ally while abetting its enemies. As the chief of Afghanistan’s intelligence, Saleh regularly supplied information to Washington detailing Pakistan’s active role in the slaughter of American troops and Afghan civilians. But American bureaucracy was willing to subsidise the slaughter of American soldiers in order to uphold the fiction that Pakistan was an ally.
The Americans have moved their attention from South Asia to Eastern Europe—from building a nation to saving civilisation—and the consequences of their new adventure are dire for Afghans: Compared to a year ago, the price of wheat has shot up by 47 per cent, edible oil by 37 per cent, and diesel by 93 per cent. Afghans are selling their organs to feed their families. Biden’s only significant action concerning Afghanistan has been to seize Afghanistan’s cash reserves and gift it to the survivors of the 9/11 attacks. Having callously puffed his ageing chest at a starving nation to which not a solitary 9/11 hijacker can be traced, Biden will this week pay a grovelling visit to Saudi Arabia: Home to 15 of the 19 9/11 attackers. How can any Indian refuse to sign up to the high values that animate the Americans?
Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India. He tweets @kapskom. Views are personal.
(Edited by Neera Majumdar)