Valson Thampu

You don’t have to be an expert on Afghan matters, or the tricky internal dynamics of the Taliban, to know that that unfortunate country will not know peace for a while yet. It will suffice if you know the words of Jesus, ‘He who takes the sword shall fall by it’, provided you know its scope, unbiased, in its historical sweep. I propose here to provide a hint in that direction, if you please.
But, before that, a word about America. Poor America! These are bad days for policemen. All the more so, for global policemen. In comparison, moral policemen, such as roam the by-lanes of India’s Yogiland, fare better; at least for the time being. But even they know that lawlessness, unlike diamonds, can’t last not forever.
The violence of one prevailed over the violence of another. In its wake, the collaborator became the coloniser, as is consonant with the logic of violence. Violence, it was pretended, would lead to ‘nation-building’: a stupidity that still remains attractive to the tyrants and their herds in the world. But there is a problem with violence: its face is gory and scary. So, an ideological mask is needed to hide its face. America turned to Samuel Huntington to craft it. He pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Foreign affairs pundits began to parrot ‘the clash of civilizations’. A global alliance against the Axis of Evil came into being. It ended up in blurring the line of distinction between good and evil. The War on Terror and the war of terror became two sides of the same coin, as was inevitable.
Taliban feels somewhat eerily familiar to me. May be, that is because I heed Jesus’ warning against false prophets, who are bound to come in the wake of true prophets. False prophets? Who are they? Are they not ‘prophets’ whose faith is in violence alone. Surely, the Taliban is not merely a fighting machine. It is also a religious moonshine. Prophets bank on truth; false prophets on violence. Islamic rule in Afghanistan must be established, not through a change of heart, or on the strength of truth, but through the barrels of guns. Mao was blatantly wrong: power does not emerge from the barrel of a gun. Only violence does. More violence; indeed violence within violence.
I should be rabidly hypocritical and historically illiterate to assume that this aberration is exclusively Islamic. No! It pertains to religion as religion. Religions make specious worldly gains via violence. But what they gain thus they lose in their souls. It is regarding such foolishness that Jesus said, ‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?’
America and her allies launched themselves into the ill-conceived and hypocritical nation-building enterprise in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The specious assumption in the core of this fraudulent agenda was that a nation can be built with money power and fire power. The people of Afghanistan did not matter. Yes, there are signs of change, even of progress. But the gulf between those who ruled Afghanistan and the people of that country remained wide, and widening. This played no small role in the fairy-tale-like ease with which the Taliban overran that country. The fact that one preaches or proffers development is no guarantee that one understands it, or even that one cares for it.
America, the self-appointed exporter of democracy to the rest of the world, forgot democracy during its two decades-long occupation of Afghanistan. That country got superficially americanised, but was not rebuilt as a sane and healthy polity. Hence the universal ridicule that the US faces today: ‘spent a trillion dollars, sacrificed nearly 2500 American lives, suffered 20000 casualties, just handover Afghanistan from the Taliban to the Taliban.’ So much for the nation-building that American arms achieved in Afghanistan.
The ascendancy of the Taliban was inevitable. It could have been neither averted nor delayed any further. Now there is only one hope, which is also a terrible worry. There is none to defend the Taliban from the Taliban; no, not even the ISI. History must have the last laugh, after all! The all-important question facing the Taliban is: will it rule Afghanistan by violence, or by legitimate power, which stems from the will of the people. The worrisome fact is this: violence rooted in religion is the most in-eradicable. Do men gather, as Jesus asked, figs from thistles? Or, can a leopard, as Solomon wondered, erase its spots?
The prospects for the people of Afghanistan are grim. The Taliban has already announced that Afghanistan will be an Islamic Emirate. Liberal democracy is incompatible with the Sharia and the Islamic worldview. It’s another matter that, if the Prophet of Islam were alive today, he might have held a different view on the human condition and the political mode to manage it. Religion, sans spirituality, being a backward-looking thing, the sole priority that religious hotheads can entertain in an ambience of endemic violence is the consolidation of the old ways. Afghanistan will go forward by sliding backwards. An ‘inclusive’ government has been formed for the purpose by ‘excluding’ everyone else. The Minister of Education got off the block by discrediting higher education!
This is unsustainable. Maintaining it will activate and perpetuate the need to resort to overwhelming force against one’s own people. The alienation between the Taliban and the less religiously fanatical among the people of Afghanistan will widen in the days ahead. Alienation will intensify suffocation. Desperation will mount. The more desperate the people, the more brutal and suppressive the Taliban government will need to be. The prospect for spiralling violence exists like a brooding volcano.
Tragically, the only bulwark against internecine feuds and widespread anarchy in Afghanistan is its precarious economic plight. A third of Afghans are food-insecure. The country needs to stay in peace, if a humanitarian catastrophe is to be averted. It just cannot afford a spell of internal haemorrhage. But, there’s a problem. The Taliban are a cult of violence. Fighters need to fight; for violence is their mode of self-accentuation. Roles change; but habits die hard. Rivalry among the Taliban constituents is inevitable, unless it is sensible enough to reinvent itself as a constructive force. Otherwise, governance, armed with State power, could come to be misunderstood as the licence to fight the people as ferociously as the Taliban fought and trounced the ‘forces of occupation’. Why else would so many Afghans show such desperation to flee from the country?