Five years on from the Taliban’s return, and life for Afghan women like Manizha has become a kind of hell. Banned from schools, universities and even parks, they need a “male guardian” to travel more than 70 kilometers from home. And now, the mother of three fears for her children’s future too. Taught that unbelievers should be killed, and that women’s rights are mere Western propaganda, young Afghans are being groomed to become the extremists of tomorrow — with worrying implications for their country and the world.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has become infamous for its restrictions on female education, locking over two million girls from the classroom. But that still leaves millions of boys, and millions more girls under 14, in the regime’s pedagogical clutches. Certainly, it’s clear that the Taliban itself understands its power here. As far back as 2022, a 78-page leaked document outlined a raft of changes to what was dismissively called the “modern curriculum”. Instead, the document argued, schooling should be transformed in line with the Taliban’s radical interpretation of Islamic law, suggesting, among other things, that natural disasters should be explained both scientifically — and in terms of “Allah’s will and power”.

If that’s the theory, the practice is equally grim. “They asked schools not to teach some parts of certain books to the students,” explains one anonymous educator. “They’ve also removed subjects such as civic education, life skills and a subject about loving the homeland.” In its place, the teacher adds, schools now hold classes on the Quran, with textbooks reviewed by UnHerd exhorting battle against “invaders” and “apostates”. Other subjects, including English and biology, are no longer covered for lack of teachers, unsurprising when the Taliban has banned thousands of female staff.

Not that the curriculum is the only thing to change. Boys, after all, are now expected to wear a beard — or at least try to — while girls as young as six now attend class in the burka. That, in turn, reflects the spread of out-and-out madrasas, the religious schools common across the Islamic world. According to research by the Hamrah Network, a cohort of Afghan organizations, there were 23,000 such schools in Afghanistan last year, up from just 5,000 in 2023, with some 3.65 million Afghans now enrolled in madrasas or Islamic seminaries.

The Taliban has achieved this growth by operating what the Hamrah Network calls a “franchise model” — whereby private madrasas are nationalized in return for government salaries and a formal certification. With the Afghan economy in a state of near collapse, it’s little wonder that everything from broadcast facilities to guest houses have taken up the offer. One notable example is the Abdul Hai Habibi High School in the east of the country. Once among the most progressive institutions in Afghanistan, it became a madrasa in 2022, displacing 6,000 students and 130 teachers.

If anything, meanwhile, Afghanistan’s burgeoning madrasa system is even more extreme than regular schools. Framed around the hardline Deobandi movement — a revivalist form of Islam founded in India — it brings extremism to the heart of every classroom. Manizha has witnessed this firsthand, and not only in her son: her young daughter has been taught about marrying a jihadi fighter. “What place does jihad have in the 21st century?” the girl’s mother asks. “Why does a 10-year-old need to know about participating in the war or killing people? How do you expect a kid to have a bright future if all they are being taught is killing and bloodshed?”

They’re all good questions — with a depressingly plausible answer. Experts speculate that reshaping young minds is the very reason the Taliban are consolidating their control over Afghan schools. In this, the militants have history, shadowing other Islamist insurgencies in recruiting almost exclusively from religious institutions. More than that, the emirate continues to maintain a militant insurgent group, complete with suicide bombers on call, with the madrasas ensuring a steady stream of brainwashed recruits.

If this obviously has domestic implications — Dr Timor Sharan, co-founder of the Hamrah Network, suggests it deepens the subordination of women and girls across Afghan society — this matters beyond the country’s borders too. After all, the Taliban continues to support terror groups across the region. That includes the remnants of al-Qaeda, which has been blamed for a number of recent atrocities in India and Pakistan, as well as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which wages war on Islamabad from bases inside Afghanistan. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a Uyghur group battling China, also enjoys training grounds in the emirate.

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Yet whatever the geopolitical implications here, it’s hard not to return to the plight of Afghanistan’s children, with parents suggesting that the steady drumbeat of extremist content is affecting the younger generation’s mental health. “The way the teachers behave with the students, my children now dislike going to school,” Manizha says. “Especially my older son, who has experienced schooling in better days.” Other evidence supports this claim: the student dropout rate, even among boys, is rising, perhaps also a symptom of the rise in corporal punishment since 2021.

Of course, it’d be wrong to suggest that the Taliban invented these schools wholesale. Afghanistan was a deeply conservative country long before they returned. All the same, locals suggest one key difference, in that regressive ideas are now lauded by the state.

“The funny thing is I grew up in a community where we already experienced having that one family member, an uncle who was a little too conservative, who would get mad if women in the family went out or they wore clothes he considered inappropriate,” explains Pashtana Durrani, founder of Learn Afghanistan, which runs underground classes for girls banned from school. “We know that type in all South Asian communities”.

But now, Durrani suggests, these attitudes are “celebrated” in public — even as they’re seeping into formerly liberal, urban areas too. Given the already-shocking rates of gender violence in Afghanistan, this could have disastrous consequences, as whole new cohorts of boys grow up thinking that women are there to submit.

There are, to be sure, glimmers of hope, and Durrani’s Learn Afghanistan project is one. Operating covertly, it follows the pre-2021 curriculum, educating some 400 students in everything from history and geography to robotics, AI and even feminist literature. At one point, Durrani’s team held discreet lessons in person, but Taliban crackdowns forced them to go almost entirely online. It’s a move that poses problems all its own, obliging Learn Afghanistan to invest in new laptops, and the solar-powered batteries to run them during power cuts.

That’s better than nothing — but hardly enough to stem the extremist tide. Indeed, though Manizha says her family tried to complain about her children’s curriculum, they were dismissed out of hand. “We can’t raise our voice because we know the outcome could hurt the kids and also the family members within the community,” she says, adding that she works to counter the Taliban’s educational extremism once her children return home every evening.

That might explain Manizha’s remarkable optimism in light of everything that’s happened. “We are Muslim,” she says, “and we will be Muslim with or without the Taliban, and are capable of teaching our kids about Islam. Everything comes to an end eventually. People won’t always tolerate this form of extremism.” Perhaps — but, for the moment, the Taliban and their madrasas remain.

Whenever I see the word “Taliban” I always think of The Tempest. Caliban sings those lines after Stephano gets him drunk and persuades him that exchanging Prospero for another master amounts to liberation. The rhyme may be accidental, but rhymes are rarely innocent once they lodge themselves in the mind. Cognitive psychologists Matthew McGlone and Jessica Tofighbakhsh have identified a “rhyme-as-reason” effect: formulations that rhyme are processed more fluently and can consequently acquire a spurious sense of truth or fitness. Sound, in other words, can tempt the mind into looking for a connection in meaning. The resemblance between the words “Caliban” and “Taliban” proves nothing logically. But it suggests a track where the echo may lead.

Shakespeare’s Caliban — savage, slave, poet and dispossessed islander — offers an unsettling way of thinking about the movement that returned to Kabul five years ago, 20 years after America invaded Afghanistan in response to 9/11. At first sight, rhyme apart, the two names belong in radically different registers. The Taliban — literally translated as “students” — emerged around Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, in 1994 from predominantly Pashtun religious students and former mujahideen, many formed in the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan’s Afghan refugee belt. Led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, they exploited popular disgust with the predatory warlords who had divided Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, promising order, Islamic justice and disarmament. With substantial Pakistani assistance they captured Kandahar, swept northwards and took Kabul in 1996, establishing the Islamic Emirate that would shelter Osama bin Laden until its overthrow after 9/11.

Caliban, by contrast, is Shakespeare’s fish-smelling monster who claims the island as his inheritance and succumbs to alcohol in a manner later generations could readily associate with dispossessed peoples in America and Australia. He carries utterly different baggage — indeed, he has been made to carry almost every political burden imaginable. The dramatist Trevor Griffiths, surveying stage interpretations from William Charles Macready’s 1838 revival to the postcolonial productions of the Seventies, finds him successively represented as an “underdeveloped native”, revolutionary republican, Darwinian missing link, black slave and oppressed aboriginal. The retreat of the British Empire transformed the relationship again: Prospero increasingly became the colonizer and Caliban the colonized. Yet Shakespeare scholar Meredith Anne Skura, warning against doctrinaire versions of this reading, insists that the play is too slippery to be reduced to a tract about colonialism. Its very slipperiness is its strength.

Shakespeare does not allow Caliban to remain just a monster. He is certainly capable of monstrosity: his attempted rape of Miranda, with the intention of peopling the island with his own kind, cannot be wished away. Yet while the supposedly civilized characters routinely describe him in terms that diminish his humanity, Caliban himself possesses the most intimate knowledge of the island — its springs, berries, pignuts and hidden resources. A 20th-century Stratford program put the matter bluntly: the island belongs to Caliban “both by inheritance and by right”, because it is he who knows its terrain.

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His political claim is equally uncompromising: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me.” By 1904 the radical journalist W. T. Stead could hear in those lines “the whole case of the aboriginal against aggressive civilization”, comparing Prospero’s blandishments to those used by Cecil Rhodes’s chartered company in southern Africa. Over the centuries, the analogy has kept on changing because Caliban himself will not settle comfortably into either category, savage or victim.

Nor does his language. Prospero and Miranda teach him words, expecting linguistic instruction to be part of civilization. Caliban discovers that language can also be an instrument of resistance: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” Yet the same creature who curses Prospero as a tyrant hears music where his supposed superiors hear nothing: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” The “savage” is aesthetically receptive to his world in a way that complicates the cultivated ducal exile’s account of him.

Actors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries repeatedly discovered this complexity. One critic insisted that however debased Caliban might be, he possessed “human feelings” and could win an audience’s sympathy. A 1974 production visually divided him between monster and noble savage, while his cry of “freedom” carried more passion than anything else in the performance. Derek Jarman’s wonderfully mannered 1979 film foregrounds this ambiguity through Jack Birkett’s compelling, grotesquely vulnerable Caliban. The repertoire of performances shows how much political meaning can gather around Caliban without being settled. 

The rhyme linking “Caliban” and “Taliban” may offer only an acoustic bridge, but the ambiguity is salient. In 2001 the Taliban were expelled from Kabul with astonishing speed. Mullah Omar fled Kandahar on a motorbike. Osama bin Laden escaped into the mountains of Tora Bora. Into the space they left arrived Prospero’s government, and with it came international recognition, constitutions, elections, NGOs, consultants, development targets and, behind them all, overwhelming American military power.

Then there was Ariel. Shakespeare’s sprite is invisible, airborne and astonishingly mobile; when Prospero wishes, he becomes visible to no one but his master. The American version consisted of satellites, drones, special forces, biometric databases and the communications systems through which an immensely sophisticated external power believed it could see and control Afghanistan. Twenty years before Kabul fell, Western forces possessed virtually every technological advantage imaginable.

What they did not possess was Caliban’s intimate knowledge. The Taliban survived in villages, valleys, madrassas, clan networks and cross-border sanctuaries. They understood relationships that could not easily be entered onto spreadsheets: which district commander had quarreled with which governor, which family grievance might be mobilized, which local notable could be frightened, bought or reconciled, when to fight and when simply to wait. They could be brutally coercive, but they were also indigenous to the political ecology in which they operated.

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The contrast with America’s Prospero, Ashraf Ghani, was painful. Ghani was among Afghanistan’s most intellectually accomplished citizens: anthropologist, former World Bank official, author of a book on rebuilding failed states. When I met him briefly at a conference in New York, he struck me as one of the most quick-thinking and brilliantly articulate people I had ever encountered. For myself, and many others, he represented the dream that Afghanistan might be reconstructed through expertise, institutions and international capital. Yet the republic over which he presided depended upon foreign money, foreign military power and administrative structures whose authority weakened drastically beyond Kabul.

When the Americans finally left, Ariel vanished with them. Or, to be more precise, Ariel ceased to serve Prospero. Some of his magic changed masters. The Taliban now carry American rifles, fly American helicopters and use Western smartphones.  

Yet another Shakespearean echo resonates here. Prospero’s power is inseparable from his books. Cast out of Milan, he remembers Gonzalo furnishing him from his library with volumes “that I prize above my dukedom”. Caliban has learnt the same lesson from below. Plotting Prospero’s murder, he tells Stephano that the first thing to do is seize the books: “for without them / He’s but a sot, as I am.” Then comes the blunt instruction: “Burn but his books! He had brave utensils — so he calls them — which, when he has a house, he’ll deck withal.” Caliban sees that the “brave utensils” are only the outward trappings of power; the real instrument of Prospero’s rule is the knowledge contained in his books. Destroy its source and the magic collapses.

Afghanistan has produced an ironic reversal. The Taliban have seized much of Prospero’s utensils without burning them: rifles, helicopters, smartphones, ministries, uniforms, even some administrative habits. But they have not accepted the assumptions that were supposed to come bundled with the machinery. Prospero’s library is not ornamental: it is the source of the magic that allows an exiled duke to command the island. For the Taliban, ultimate sovereignty belongs to the Qur’an and to the Sharia drawn from it. The discarded utensils of the American imperium may be useful, even indispensable. But the Taliban remain subordinate to a holy Book whose authority the occupiers never displaced.

Washington assumed that modernization would inexorably produce Westernization: that roads, schools, internet connections and elections would carry liberal values. Instead, the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. Caliban has learned to operate Prospero’s machinery while declining Prospero’s metaphysics.

The image should not be pushed too far. The Qur’an is not a magic manual, and Sharia is not reducible to a single book. The Taliban’s jurisprudence also draws on hadith, Hanafi law, Deobandi scholarship, clerical authority and Afghan custom. But as a Shakespearean echo, the contrast matters. Prospero knows that books make rule possible; the Taliban know that technologies can be borrowed without surrendering the textual authority by which rule is justified.

After the American withdrawal five years ago, the Afghan security forces, expensively trained and equipped, dissolved with extraordinary speed. Provincial capitals fell almost without resistance. Ghani fled Kabul for exile in Dubai. Twenty years after being driven into the wilderness, the supposedly defeated barbarian returned to Prospero’s island.

Yet the moral of The Tempest cannot simply be that Caliban was right all along. The play is more conflicted, and Afghanistan more tragic. The Taliban’s claim to indigenous legitimacy does not absolve them of what they have done with victory. Since 2021, they have progressively excluded Afghan women and girls from secondary and university education. They have sought to erase women from large areas of public life, restricted their employment and curtailed their freedom of movement. Meanwhile, Hazaras and other minorities remain exposed to discrimination and violence. Caliban, once restored to his island, may himself become Prospero.

Nor has restoration resulted in prosperity. A recent Afghanistan Analysts Network report describes an economy that contracted calamitously after the Islamic Emirate returned, followed by a recovery so fragile that GDP per head continues to fall. Behind those figures lie families exhausting one survival mechanism after another: savings disappear, possessions are sold, boys leave school, sons are dispatched on dangerous journeys to Iran. Women and children undertake poorly paid work at home or on the streets; the Taliban restrictions on women’s education and employment have denied them escape routes they might otherwise have used.

The result is a grim inversion of development. Families survive today by consuming tomorrow: schooling, assets and earning capacity are sacrificed to the immediate necessity of food and shelter. Yet the report reveals something that is easily missed from Kabul, Washington or London. Afghans do not simply wait upon the state. The social contract of reciprocal help — relatives lending money, neighbors supporting neighbors, families taking responsibility for one another — still operates, though poverty is placing it under severe strain.

Another recent AAN account catches this side of Afghanistan almost microscopically. A 40-year-old Kabul office worker with a slipped disc cannot afford the operation his surgeon recommends. He moves through several worlds simultaneously. He consults modern doctors and has MRI scans; visits hakims who bleed him and prescribe herbal powders; travels to a shrine in Paktia where a mullah ties a tawiz, an amulet containing sacred writing, to his arm; and finally returns to surgery when the pain becomes intolerable.

The story could be treated as an illustration of medical backwardness, but it is more revealing than that. It shows a society whose institutions overlap rather than replace one another: MRI scanner and shrine, surgeon and hakim, religious belief and modern medicine. Most strikingly, when the operation finally becomes unavoidable, formal provision does not rescue him. A friend unexpectedly repays a debt of 200,000 afghanis, enabling him to meet the hospital costs. After surgery he cannot afford physiotherapy, so another friend abroad sends him exercises to perform at home. Afghanistan is full of noises: some of them cacophonous, some of them sweet. This is what Caliban’s knowledge of the island may mean in less romantic language: knowing not merely mountains and pathways but the dense networks through which people actually survive.

Meanwhile the Emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, governs in Kandahar from something like Prospero’s cell: rarely seen, surrounded by clerical advisers, issuing commands whose authority rests ultimately on sacred texts rather than social or political consent. His Afghanistan is a landlocked “island”. His staff may not be magical, but has the weight of religious legitimacy. The symbolism is not invented by outsiders. At Kandahar’s Khirka Sharif, lines of Qur’anic calligraphy run through the decoration around the shrine that houses the Prophet’s cloak. In April 1996, Mullah Omar carried that cloak onto the roof of the main mosque before thousands of ulema and fighters. The assembled scholars acclaimed him Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful. Sacred text, sacred relic and political sovereignty were made to reinforce one another. A few months later, the Taliban captured Kabul.

Yet while decrees issued from Kandahar have religious authority, they are far from absolute. In reality they encounter the messy density of Afghan society. Families improvise around them; religious practice intersects with custom; money circulates through networks of debt and obligation; people move between official and unofficial institutions according to necessity. The Afghan state may prohibit, prescribe and punish, but it does not exercise a totalitarian type of control. That is another lesson the West was slow to learn: power in Afghanistan has rarely been identical with government. The state may issue decrees, but villages, families, ulema, businessmen, elders and local authorities determine the extent to which they become reality.

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Those networks now extend far beyond Afghanistan. For some young men, the escape route leads westwards through a clandestine economy that has become increasingly sophisticated. An Afghanistan Analysts Network investigation found young Afghans traveling through Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and onwards towards Italy, France, Germany, Ireland — and Britain. Journeys are arranged through professionalized smuggling networks using GPS, encrypted messaging, TikTok advertising and hawala, the informal money-transfer system built around personal knowledge and trust, that functions here as a kind of escrow account. A passage from Turkey to Italy can cost €6,000 to €8,000; some networks have graduated from facilitation to extortion, kidnapping and violence.

For British readers accustomed to encountering Afghans at the other end of this journey — in debates over small boats and “illegal migration” — the connection is worth making. Europe’s harder borders have not abolished the traffic. In parts of the Balkans they have helped turn what was once a loose diasporic network of guides and fixers into a profitable criminal industry. The young man crossing the Channel may be the final visible link in a chain beginning with the economic and political constriction of Taliban Afghanistan.

And this takes us back to the Bard. The deep ambiguities in The Tempest lie not in deciding whether Prospero or Caliban are good or bad guys. They involve the much more difficult questions about who possesses the right to rule the island, who possesses the knowledge required to rule it, and what happens when supposedly superior outsiders mistake magical or technological mastery for political legitimacy.

Skura’s caution is helpful. She argues that the colonial interpretation can itself become reductive when every difference between Shakespeare’s island and colonial history is treated as irrelevant and every contradiction as further evidence of domination. Caliban lacks many of the stereotypical attributes Europeans assigned to New World peoples, and Shakespeare repeatedly complicates any straightforward identification. Skura’s larger point is that the personal and political cannot finally be separated. Prospero comes to the island as the victim of Antonio’s usurpation, but responds by becoming master over Caliban: the exile who has lost his dukedom recreates hierarchy in miniature. Caliban becomes a screen onto which Prospero projects the appetite and disorder he disowns; mastering him allows Prospero to rehearse the recovery of authority.

The Afghan story reflects a similar pattern of replication. To explain why the Taliban defeated the republic is not to endorse their theocracy. Their rootedness may confer a kind of authenticity without conferring virtue. Conversely, the ideals proclaimed by the international intervention — education, women’s rights, constitutional government — do not become worthless because the political structure erected to protect them proved catastrophically fragile. Nor should “indigenous” be confused with humane. The restored Caliban may now be the ruler, but his regime has deliberately deprived half the island’s population of opportunities that might make their lives less desperate.

The rhyme, then, can still trigger meaningful perspectives. Shakespeare refuses the comforting choice between enlightened Prospero and the uncouth monster. The native claimant may indeed be brutal, lustful and dangerous; he may also know his island better than the civilizer who has taken possession of it. The civilizer may bring books, knowledge and extraordinary powers; he may also mistake possession for legitimacy. And books themselves can serve more than one sovereignty.

At the end of The Tempest, Prospero says something Western policy rarely admitted in Afghanistan. Looking at the creature he has repeatedly called slave, monster and devil, he declares: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Even that line refuses a simple interpretation. Does Prospero mean that Caliban belongs to him — the last assertion of colonial possession? Or is he recognizing something of himself in the figure he has spent the play defining as Other? Skura points out that critics have argued both ways: the acknowledgment can be dismissed as another act of appropriation, yet its poetry reaches beyond Prospero’s behavior and momentarily destabilizes the distinction between civilization and darkness.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Afghanistan leaves us with much the same discomfort. The Taliban are not simply medieval intruders who somehow captured a modern state. They arose from Afghan history, from war, religion and social structures — but also from the violence, alliances and unintended consequences of outside intervention. And the Afghanistan they now rule is not simply “Taliban Afghanistan”. Beneath the Emir’s decrees lies a deeper and denser reality: women sewing for pennies, boys abandoning school for work, migrants sending money home, relatives lending to relatives, doctors scanning spines, hakims mixing mountain herbs and mullahs tying amulets beside ancient shrines. Some of its young men are also moving through Balkan forests, climbing fences or waiting for boats across the Channel. It is battered, improvisatory and profoundly local — yet connected to us in ways British politics notices only when those connections wash up on a Kentish beach.

Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban. Ban, ban, Taliban.

The rhyme itself proves nothing. But perhaps that is why it lingers. It connects two figures whom powerful outsiders prefer to define as barbarous, and asks the disturbing question Shakespeare leaves hanging over his enchanted island: whose island was it in the first place — and what does its owner do with it once he gets it back?

Almost exactly five years earlier, on 15 August 2021, the Taliban seized this airport. Chaos ensued. The Americans carried out an 18-day operation in which more than 123,000 people were airlifted to safety — the largest non-combatant evacuation in U.S. military history. On 30 August, at 11:59pm local time, the final US military plane departed Kabul, one minute before President Joe Biden’s deadline for withdrawal.

The airlift marked the end of the American-Afghan state that was born in 2001, when the US, aiming to hunt down Osama bin Laden and overthrow his Taliban allies, invaded the country and installed a Western-style government. For 20 years, this US-backed state persisted, but its unraveling took mere weeks. Everything Washington had built in the country, notably a national army, proved to be a mirage that vanished in the face of a resurgent Taliban. The regime now celebrates 31 August as the day of liberation from US occupation. Each year, parades weave through Kabul’s central squares. Celebratory gunfire sounds across the city.

Today, the capital is a mix of urban squalor and state repression. Armed Talibs patrol the streets while beggar children work the traffic, tapping insistently at windows and thrusting out supplicant hands. On Chicken Street in the city center, homeless girls play beneath brightly colored shopfronts selling trinkets and carpets to a small but growing trickle of tourists. “Things are much safer now the Taliban are in control, and there is no war,” says a local who doesn’t wish to be named. “But we have lost a lot of freedoms. That is the bargain we now live under.”

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He’s right. The streets are calm. Taliban are polite – friendly even. But I am aware that this is a state beholden only to itself. People can, and are, regularly disappeared into its prisons and torture chambers without warning or due process.

Still, to understand the Taliban, you must understand where they come from. Kabul may be Afghanistan’s capital, but Kandahar, a city in the country’s south, is the Islamic Emirate’s spiritual and political center. Here its Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and his circle of advisers rule, largely hidden from public view. I make my way there down the  300-mile Kabul-Kandahar highway, which cuts through vast stretches of arid plateau and dust-blown steppe. I pass goat-hair tents belonging to Afghanistan’s semi-nomadic Kuchi people and flocks of threadbare sheep. Mud-brick villages whizz past, their flat roofs and earth-colored walls almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

As I approach the city’s outskirts, three small girls swing incense burners, sending coils of smoke billowing skyward. The ritual is said to keep away evil spirits. In the city center, the heat is intense. Taliban flags fly everywhere. Men swathed in black keffiyehs emerge through clouds of dust kicked up by their motorbikes. Women are begging in full burqas. The poverty of Kandahar, to say nothing of the theocratic intensity, makes Kabul look like San Francisco. I am told that photography is banned.

My first stop is the Ministry of Information and Culture, where I’m seeking permission to report in Kandahar. It’s roasting hot in the carpeted waiting room. In the corner, two men are carving up a huge melon. I am offered a glass jar of pear drops – the Taliban’s love of 1950s British sweets is one of the more surprising discoveries of my trip – and told that I’m in luck. A senior local official, Inamullah Samangani, has decided to grant me a spontaneous interview.

After a few minutes, I am summoned to an air-conditioned office next door. Four Talibs, one of whom is cradling an M16 rifle, are sitting barefoot on sofas. Cold melon and water are served to everyone. Samangani is an ethnic Tajik from the country’s north. He has a smooth, youthful face with a manicured mustache and tufty beard. He beams at me.

I ask him how he feels as the fifth anniversary approaches. “All our people are happy,” he replies. “This is what we wanted. After 20 years of war, this anniversary is very meaningful for us.”

What the Taliban want, he tells me, is peace and prosperity for the nation. “Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. Afghanistan needs a great deal of rebuilding and construction, and we are working on this.”

What are the biggest challenges facing this new Islamic Emirate? “The situation is not normal because of the war and because of Western policies towards Afghanistan. The military war has ended, but an economic war continues. We want peace not only for Afghanistan but for our neighboring countries, the region and the world.”

I ask what he attributes the Taliban’s success to. “Our belief in Allah,” he replies without hesitation. “And our belief from the first day that we were on the right path. After September 11, when America and its allies occupied Afghanistan, we knew that freedom was our first and last choice. After 20 years, we achieved it.”

The interview ends; it’s clear that Samangani is more concerned with painting the Islamic Emirate as a reasonable partner with whom the international community can do business than getting into the realities of life here — and in this, he is like politicians everywhere. I make my way out of the office, passing a small room where a Talib is sitting on the floor, clipping his toenails.

Outside, armed men saunter in groups. Printed on a billboard overlooking a roundabout is a message from the Supreme Leader. “When you return from Hajj, don’t be wasteful by spending money on dinners and celebrations,” it warns.

The following morning, I set off from my guest house to meet Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman for the Taliban government since 25 October 2021. He became a Taliban spokesman, and a senior government official, in January 2007, during the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan government. Even as he claimed responsibility on behalf of the Taliban for attacks on coalition forces, he remained faceless and pseudonymous. But on 17 August 2021, two days after Kabul fell, he revealed himself publicly. Now he is the regime’s international face.

For security reasons, I am not initially told Mujahid’s location. Instead, I am instructed to wait for a call. As I sit in a nearby cafe, my eyes scan the room until they settle on a pair of decorative screens. One depicts two camels, the other a peacock, the faces of all three creatures covered with stickers. I’m confused until I realize why: the defacing accords with the hadith-based injunction against complete representations of dhawāt al-arwāḥ (“beings possessing souls”). If you obscure the head, you render the figure incomplete and therefore permissible. I saw nothing like this in Kabul.

The call comes; the venue is a gated residence just across the road. I walk into a spacious garden, where a flunky is watering a comparatively lush lawn. Inside, I am shown into a large room and asked to wait.

After a few minutes, Mujahid enters and sits down. He is immaculate in a white shalwar kameez with dark blue waistcoat and brown, patterned turban. Five years on, he tells me, the Taliban’s victory has brought what Afghans wanted most. “No war, no fighting, and a unified government in place.”

But victory has also forced the Taliban to govern, not just fight. Its foot soldiers and clerics, formed in the madrassas and mountains, must also now serve as policemen, civil servants and diplomats. They must manage budgets and rebuild infrastructure. For this they need international recognition, and aid money from international organizations and Western countries — above all, the US. “We definitely want good relations with the USA,” Mujahid tells me. “We have tried, but they have to try as well.”

Recognition has not been forthcoming. I ask Mujahid about the first government press conference he gave in 2021, when he promised that women would be able to work and study within the bounds of Islamic law. Girls have since been excluded from secondary schools and women from universities.

“I said that everything would be according to Sharia,” he replies, maintaining a serious demeanor and a quiet, even tone of voice throughout. “I still say that. Human rights, education — everything.”

Women still work in hospitals, schools, banks and government, he says, before adding that the exclusion of girls from secondary education, now approaching its fifth year, is “only a slight disruption in the education system”. The Emirate is working to find a way for women to study “with the necessary segregation, transport and safeguards”.

The matter of women’s rights is a serious problem for the government — even among its supporters.  Mainstream Islamic law does not ban the education of women; even hardline theocracies such as Saudi Arabia have eased the restrictions on women in recent years. Afghans are furious. In Kabul, on my second day in the country, I met a man out walking with his three daughters. “We have seen a lot of improvements in different sectors and in the rebuilding of our country,” he told me. “But there are big limitations for girls. They should be able to go to school. This is a big ambition of every Afghan. We hope the government will listen to the voice of our citizens.”

But the Taliban will not budge. I suspect Mujahid will be giving the same answers to the same questions five years from now.

I ask him about another contentious issue. In Kandahar, fiber-optic internet has been cut off to private homes. Mujahid insists this is not an internet ban, but a means of ensuring internet use stays within Sharia guidelines. “With mobile internet we can [control it] to a degree,” he explains, “but with fiber-optic Wi-Fi it is harder.”

Every Talib I meet echoes what Samangani told me: they defeated the most powerful and technologically advanced army in history because of “Allah” and their faith. But the more time I spend in Afghanistan, especially in Kandahar, the clearer it is to me that the Taliban are not to be regarded simply as quasi-medieval fanatics. To Westerners, they might seem like barbarians — particularly in their treatment of women — but they do not reject technology or modernity. Except where they cannot control them, they have absorbed both.

As a result, I’m witnessing a kind of Taliban “March of Progress”. Talibs still patrol the streets with long hair, matted beards, black turbans and the imprint of the village. But what’s also emerging is a discernibly post-American Talib. At the many checkpoints between Kabul and Kandahar, these men now stand guard in matching uniforms, patches identifying them as Afghan National Police. Some wear black balaclavas like Western special forces. They cradle their weapons with conspicuous discipline: fingers straight along the receiver rather than curled around the trigger. They carry M16s and Kalashnikovs, the most famous weapons of the two superpowers defeated in Afghanistan.

One morning, I awake to the sound of a helicopter flying low overhead. “Taliban air force,” explains a friend — who proceeds to tell me a story. When the Taliban swept to power five years ago, the US-trained Afghan pilots were told to fly the helicopters to the safety of Tajikistan. One of them, already in the air, called his father to ask what he should do. The father hurried to the Taliban in their village and laid out his son’s dilemma. “He’s a son of Afghanistan,” they said. “He must come back. He will be safe.” The father relayed the message; his son switched off his transponder, turned the helicopter around mid-air, and flew home. The Taliban kept their word. Now he works as an instructor, teaching Taliban pilots to fly the helicopters the Americans left behind.

The Taliban have embraced many of the technologies and institutions of the Western order they defeated, all the while rejecting its overarching values. They carry American rifles and use Western smartphones, yet remain unyieldingly beholden to Sharia. To them there is no contradiction. Washington assumed that modernization meant, inexorably, Westernization. But the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. And in so doing they exposed the category error on which America’s war was based.

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The US-led coalition claimed to be in the state-building business, but in truth it extended a narrow Western template of statehood to Afghanistan. The West offered Afghans the liberal franchise, confident they would accept it. Why wouldn’t they? This was 2001. Liberal democracy had won the Cold War, helped bring peace to Yugoslavia and presided over a decade of extraordinary capitalist prosperity. Washington went in, convinced that economic development, education, connectivity and institutions would bring democracy in their wake — and turn Kabul into Copenhagen.

I think about this during my visit to the Khirka Sharif: a compound of buildings smothered in stars and polygons, plants and flowers. Lines of Qur’anic calligraphy thread through the patterns. Turquoise, blue and green mingle with ochre, gold and pink. Kandahar’s streets are sludge and concrete, but here, smooth white stone encircles an explosion of geometry, brilliant in the summer sun.

According to local tradition, Khirka Sharif houses the cloak bestowed upon the Prophet Muhammad during his ascension to heaven (the Mi’raj). The cloak played an important role in the early mythology of the Taliban — literally “students” in Pashto — which emerged in Kandahar in the mid-1990s. On 4 April 1996, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, took the cloak out of its cloth-covered box and carried it onto the roof of Kandahar’s main mosque. There, he held it aloft before thousands of religious scholars, fighters and supporters. The crowd erupted: men threw their turbans into the air in the hope that they might touch the sacred garment, while some reportedly fainted. The assembled ulema (Islamic scholars) acclaimed Omar Amir al-Mu’minin — “Commander of the Faithful” — and pledged allegiance to him. By associating himself publicly with both the Prophet and Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of the Afghan state who had brought the cloak to Kandahar, Omar sanctified his leadership and transformed a sacred relic into a source of political authority.

A few months later, on 27 September, Taliban forces captured Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It lasted until 2001, when the Americans arrived with historically unprecedented military power and the apparatus of state-building: NGOs and aid agencies, elections and constitutions, Excel spreadsheets, risk assessments and results frameworks. These were the iconography of a different faith, one that rooted its legitimacy in the post-World War II liberal order.

The Taliban’s victory laid bare the error and the arrogance of that project. Modernization and Westernization are not the same thing. A fiber-optic cable is neither autocratic nor liberal. A regime can want modern roads and Western investment while oppressing women and killing homosexuals. After two weeks of reporting in Afghanistan, observing how that what is left of the American occupation has been almost completely appropriated by the Taliban; the attempt to force regime change through military means was always doomed. Today, the West pays lip service to this lesson — but the instinct, judging by Donald Trump’s attempts to topple the Islamist regime in Tehran, remains.

Just before I leave the city, I stop for lunch. I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet, eating meat and rice, when a Talib in his early twenties comes in and sits down next to me, fascinated by the presence of foreigners. We talk. He joined the Taliban at 12 and fought the Americans and British for years. He likes my Western sunglasses and, ignoring the prohibition on photography, eagerly poses for pictures wearing a pair borrowed from my photographer. Photos and transatlantic fashion clearly delight him. What, I ask him, are his hopes for the future of Afghanistan?

“Taliban,” he says without hesitation, and smiles beatifically.

I journey back, and just under 100 miles south of Kabul, I pass through the city of Ghazni, its entrance dominated by three light-blue domes. Its open-air military museum displays rows of burned-out Soviet tanks, monuments to the Afghan mujahideen’s victory in the 1979–1989 Soviet–Afghan War. A thousand years earlier, Ghazni was the imperial capital of Mahmud of Ghazni, later celebrated as the “idol-breaker” (but-shikan) after his destruction of the Hindu temple at Somnath. When Mullah Omar destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, he invoked Mahmud, casting himself as a modern-day but-shikan.

The occupying Westerners lacked this sense of history. Shortly after the disastrous 2021 withdrawal, I asked a British soldier who had served in Afghanistan how, after twenty years of war, we had understood the country so poorly. “The thing is,” he told me, “we served one-year tours and left. We weren’t there for twenty years but twenty lots of one.” Western soldiers, diplomats and officials rotated through the war, but the Taliban lived it year after year. And their sense of time and place stretched back centuries — to the cloak of the Prophet and the legend of Mahmud. There was only ever going to be one winner.

On December 1, 2022, the Taliban issued a decree closing down the two local stations run by the BBC’s rivals: Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to a Taliban spokesman, they were being silenced for their “non-compliance with journalistic principles and one-sided broadcasts”. Remarkably, though, the militants are happy to indulge their British counterpart, which broadcasts from Afghanistan in Dari and Pashto, while also hosting local variants of the BBC news website.

But while the Corporation clearly enjoys its unusual role, is editorial independence really maintained? For as UnHerd has discovered, BBC funds frequently end up Taliban coffers, channeled via organisations led by extremists at the very heart of government. More worrying still, these relationships seemingly shape the Corporations coverage in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that just two weeks before the Corporation’s rivals were banned, its South Asia bureau chief, Jacky Martens, met with Sirajuddin Haqqani: the Taliban’s deputy leader and Afghanistan’s interior minister. The notorious jihadi, proscribed on both sides of the Atlantic for terrorism, clearly enjoyed his encounter with Martens. According to a statement from Haqqani’s ministry, the BBC was “an important media outlet at the international level” and could rely on the Taliban’s “cooperation”. While others had been hostile when reporting the country’s “internal” issues, the BBC was “impartial”.

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How, then, to explain such enthusiasm?

One answer is likely financial. The BBC refuses to disclose exactly how much it pays the Taliban, but the Corporation sends considerable sums to Radio and Television of Afghanistan (RTA), the group’s propaganda network. As a BBC spokesperson confirmed, these figures cover items including the use of transmitters, power and maintenance: but also “security”. BBC Afghan service sources say this last service is provided by Taliban fighters, led by Haqqani from his office in Kabul.

As for BBC Media Action, the Corporation’s charitable wing, we have obtained a copy of a “memorandum of understanding” between the organisation and RTA covering health education projects worth $1.9 million. The organisation has also confirmed that Media Action has paid both “fees” demanded by the Taliban and income tax on staff salaries — money that feeds the Taliban’s exchequer. Until early February, when President Trump and Elon Musk effectively shut down USAID, the agency was one of BBC Media Action’s biggest sources of income, financing its scheme to train Afghan journalists.

And if that chimes with other foreign organizations in Afghanistan — which pay levies as high as 60% of a project’s total budget to secure the Taliban’s blessing — the BBC’s situation is complicated further by who, exactly, its money goes to.

Aside from his avowed extremism, Haqqani is also the former head of the so-called Haqqani Network, a group responsible for kidnapping American citizens and conducting deadly suicide bombings. Since Haqqani remains on Britain’s sanctions list, it is a criminal offense under UK law to have any financial dealings with him. Qari Mohammad Yousef Ahmadi, head of RTA, is on the sanctions list too, not least for writing articles glorifying attacks on Western troops.

When asked about these links, the BBC said the Corporation is sure its dealings with Ahmadi and Haqqani don’t breach UK law, citing FCDO guidance that suggest that “a public body in which a designated person holds a leadership position is not automatically subject to sanctions”. 

For its part, BBC Media Action also insisted it wasn’t in breach of sanctions, stating that “we have no reason to believe that any benefit has been provided to any person or entity who or which has been sanctioned” and that the FCDO was “fully sighted” on all Media Action’s work. 

But a London-based sanctions expert we spoke to was less convinced. The risk sanctions had been breached would be considerable if it could be shown that Haqqani or Ahmadi exercised a “high degree of control” over the bodies that deal with the BBC or its charity — and derived direct benefit from their funding.

To listen in, you might think that the BBC has paid a high price for the privilege of remaining in Afghanistan. For one thing, it no longer broadcasts programs showcasing Western music, nor the once-popular songs of local pop stars. Condemned by the Taliban as un-Islamic, they used to be mainstays of the BBC’s Afghan schedule. Asked about this, the BBC said it had recently used part of a track by an Afghan female singer to accompany a news story, and that it sometimes broadcast “traditional” Afghan music. 

Anti-Taliban stories found elsewhere on the BBC are also absent from the Afghan service — and sometimes aren’t broadcast at all. One example was a powerful TV report on the collapse of female education under the Islamists. Covering Afghanistan’s last female schools, it showed students wearing burkas and reciting the Quran. These places were starkly contrasted with shots of the now-empty schools that thrived before 2021, when girls were taught a full secular curriculum. 

In the end, though, the BBC decided not to run the film. Staff who worked on it were told by their editors that it was “too sensitive” to broadcast. 

Such compromises predictably frustrate the Corporation’s female staff. One BBC Afghan service journalist, speaking anonymously, says it was “incredibly difficult” to persuade editors to cover women’s rights and freedom of speech. She continues: “People call and beg us to play more music on air, but we don’t — because if we do, our operations inside Afghanistan could be shut down.” Women themselves are being purged too. There used to be several female presenters on the BBC station broadcasting in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. Now only one remains. On its sister Pashto station, women presenters are totally absent. 

The same journalist adds that Taliban complaints have sometimes led to internal investigations of BBC staff — as Ali Hamedani, the co-author of this article, learnt first-hand. 

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An experienced BBC journalist, Hamedani is gay and had often reported on anti-LGBT discrimination in Afghanistan. In October 2022, the month before Martens met Haqqani, Hamedani covered the killing of a local gay student. Forces answerable to Haqqani detained Hamed Sabour at a Kabul checkpoint, before torturing and shooting him dead. His killers then made a video of Sabour’s execution and sent it to his family.

Before broadcasting his story, Hamedani interviewed Sabouri’s relatives and friends. Yet after the Taliban submitted a complaint, he was forced to undergo an internal disciplinary investigation that lasted almost a year, requiring him to prove his story was accurate — including providing a photograph of the murder victim’s body. He was only cleared 11 months after his initial report.

Yet, it seems that not everyone at the BBC was up to speed, for when we asked last week why Hamedani had been investigated, its spokesperson said his report “contained an image of a living man who wasn’t Hamed Sabouri. It therefore did not comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines.” This is simply false: Hamedani’s report, though made for TV and radio, clearly contained no images of the victim. The incorrect photo appeared in The Guardian, which later acknowledged its mistake, and on a BBC Instagram feed — for which Hamedani had no responsibility. 

Despite all this, the BBC has defended its work in Afghanistan. The Corporation says it’s proud to be “the only international news media organization still broadcasting” in the country. Media Action defends its actions too, stating it “plays a critical role supporting local journalists to provide life-saving information on matters including health, nutrition and food security”. It’s also “proud of our work with local radio stations to support some of the last remaining women journalists working in radio in the country”. 

Yet perhaps the most telling statement comes from the Taliban itself. “The BBC is a credible source of news for Afghanistan,” says its official government spokesperson. “[The Corporation] collaborates constructively with the Islamic Emirate.” With praise like that, it’s hard to see how the Corporation can truly wave the flag for journalistic impartiality.

While a recent US military review concluded that Logari’s plot was not preventable, the findings were less a vindication of America’s chaotic withdrawal than a reminder of how the US–Afghan relationship had broken down. As US forces withdrew, many Afghan government officials told me that they had warned their US counterparts about the threat of Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS–KP), the Afghan branch of Isis. But it appears the US had stopped listening to their warnings; and in doing so, it helped to create the very conditions that led to the Abbey Gate attack.

One of the men who had warned them was Ahmad Zia Seraj, the General Director of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Once a revered spy chief targeted by the Taliban for assassination, Seraj, now a refugee waiting for his residency papers and teaching at King’s College London, cut a very different figure when we met in a London hotel at the end of last year.

Long before the US withdrawal, Seraj had been telling the American top brass about the threat of IS–KP, and is still doing so. “We had detainees from 15 different nationalities in our NDS detention facilities,” he told me. In fact, Seraj had personally interrogated Logari. He knew him as Hamed, a “bright, intelligent young man who spoke several languages fluently”. Seraj described how he brought religious scholars and even Logari’s father to his cell in an attempt to dissuade Logari from becoming a suicide bomber. But it was no use: “Once a person wants to become a suicide bomber, there’s nothing that can stop him.” Logari didn’t want freedom; he wanted paradise.

Seraj told me that he had shared everything the NDS had with the CIA, who would then brief Nato’s commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, and other US officials. “Frankly speaking we were on the same page.” In fact, he warned anyone who would listen — whether the US, Pakistan, or Central Asian states — about the security threats. So why was he ignored?

During the postmortem of the chaotic US withdrawal, Biden blamed Trump and the US military intelligence apparatus which didn’t anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover. He also blamed the Afghan government and the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight. It seemed to play on tropes and criticisms made by journalists and Afghans for decades that Afghanistan was run by corrupt politicians and warlords.

Trump had dealt Biden a bad hand when he came to office in January 2021. The Afghan–American relationship had been damaged ever since the Doha Accords were signed between the Americans and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement stipulated that the US would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021; the Taliban, in turn, promised to cut ties with al-Qaeda and sit down for peace talks with the Kabul government. Yet the democratically elected Afghan government wasn’t part of the discussions. 

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The deal had been engineered by Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, an experienced figure who served under various US presidents, including Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, but whose rough and tumble diplomacy was not liked in Kabul. The US envoy had reached out to the Taliban without consulting the Afghan government. As Abdullah Khanjani, the government’s Deputy Minister for Peace, told me: “One of the key strategic problems with the whole structure of the peace process was that the Americans did not integrate the Afghan state and Afghan voices into it.”

By contrast, the negotiations empowered and legitimised the Taliban. According to Khanjani, with the Doha Accords, “a strategic propaganda opportunity was given to the Taliban, as an insurgent group. [US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo sat there to endorse the deal with the legitimacy of being ex-CIA. And this was a shock to everyone. It was a game changer for the Taliban. And this also normalised the Taliban and [changed] the international system of power relations.” A green light was given for other countries to follow suit.

The Doha Accords also set the stage for the Abbey Gate attack. The terms of the deal included a prisoner swap, with the Taliban receiving 5,000 prisoners in exchange for 1,000 captives. The Afghan government was incensed by the condition: the US seemed to be treating Afghanistan as if it was not a sovereign nation but a plaything of empire. One day after the accords were signed, President Ashraf Ghani told reporters that “the government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free[ing] 5,000 Taliban prisoners”, adding that 400 of those prisoners were “a threat to the world”. Seraj told me that many of those prisoners were involved in high-profile attacks including those on the German embassy in 2017, the Intercontinental Hotel in January 2018 and the G4S compound in November 2018. Some of those released, according to a senior government official, were not Taliban fighters but belonged to IS–KP and were related to the Taliban through familial and tribal links. Their release would mean that many would return to the insurgency. 

Neither the preliminary intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha nor the prisoner swap that followed resulted in a reduction in violence. Instead, they gnawed away at the state, creating the conditions for the chaos to come. According to Shuja Jamal, international relations director at the Afghan government’s National Security Council, more than 21,000 Afghan army soldiers were killed, injured, taken prisoner or deserted between March and October 2020. Attacks on journalists and politicians increased as well.

But perhaps more importantly, the prisoner swap demoralised the NDS — the very agency that the US needed to share vital local information. The officers who had interrogated the prisoners could now be identified and targeted by the Taliban and IS–KP. As Seraj explained, many of the NDS officers no longer wanted to risk carrying out interrogations and debriefings if the prisoners would be released.

“You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it,” Seraj added. He had always wanted to model the NDS on the CIA and focus purely on intelligence-gathering, but this soon proved impossible. Instead, Ghani tasked him with strengthening citizen militias that could resist the coming Taliban onslaught. But accepting the task, which he felt should be the military’s remit, made the NDS cumbersome. They were now working with local mayors and tribal and security chiefs on sourcing weapons instead of being the eyes and ears of the republic. And as government forces neared collapse, more problems piled up on Seraj’s desk. Instead of focusing on the enemy, the NDS were forced to investigate corruption allegations against these militias. “80% of our work fell to investigating those charges, while the enemy was at the gates.”

The US withdrawal also meant reducing the air support given to Afghan forces. “Our forces,” said Seraj, “had become so addicted to air support, that without it, it was very difficult for them to fight.” It meant that the Afghan army could not stop the Taliban advance, resulting in the swift collapse of the republic. The Taliban made the situation even more difficult by deliberately targeting Afghan pilots and many were unwilling to fly. Due to a domestic skill shortage the Afghan government tried to source foreign contractors who could service their aircraft, but with little success. In December 2020, National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib flew to Azerbaijan to buy drones which Baku had used to devastating effect against the Armenians in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War weeks earlier, but to no avail. Kabul also reached out to Turkey and the US, wanting to set up a special operations team that could deploy Predator and Reaper drones, but the US was reluctant to accede to their requests. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan was working to undermine the Afghan government. Although the US and Pakistan were allies, Islamabad had always viewed the US presence in Afghanistan as a threat to its nuclear arsenal, which it needed to counter its hostile neighbour, India. As a result, it could not support the US-backed government in Kabul and instead provided sanctuary to the Taliban. Seraj had confronted his Pakistani counterparts on the issue many times, but they would often deny or deflect the issue. 

The Trump administration aggravated the situation in other ways. After the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, the situation in Afghanistan became more volatile. Tehran wanted revenge and allowed the Taliban to open up an office in Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. “There was a strong commitment from the Iranians to help the Taliban,” Seraj said. “It’s not that the Taliban are very friendly to them, it was just to see the US leave, and Taliban were used as a tool to expedite that process.”

When Biden came to office in January 2021 he pledged to “lead not merely by example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security.” However, as Alexander Ward shows in his new book, The Internationalists, Biden had always been consistent about getting out of the nation-building business. After a review, he pressed ahead with Trump’s withdrawal policy, albeit with a slight delay. American troops would now leave by the end of August 2021.

Biden made the hand that Trump had dealt him even worse, at least from the perspective of his Afghan partners. The fact that they kept on Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, was a sign to Mohib that they would get more of the same. “He would be their fall guy,” Mohib told me. Moreover, as if to rub salt in the Afghans’ wounds, a scathing letter from the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was leaked. It urged Ghani to return to the negotiating table, humiliating and alienating the Kabul government further. It showed the world how the US treated their “partners” and destroyed any goodwill left between Washington and Kabul. Afghan government delegations visited both Moscow and Tehran, apparently exploring other political options.

In February 2021, Seraj invited regional intelligence chiefs to a secret conference and urged them to support his government, warning that many of the extremist groups that plagued them, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had close ties with the Taliban. The response was muted. “Those were the days when the popularity of the government was so low in Afghanistan,” Seraj recalled, “the neighbours didn’t take us seriously because they knew the government was dying.”

Four months later, Biden gave the order to withdraw. It was to be done as fast as possible: Washington wanted to reduce the risk to its own troops, but in its eagerness to leave, created the conditions for suicide bombers to flourish and move undetected. The US assessed that the Afghan army would hold out long enough to come to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But they didn’t take into account Pakistan’s role. 

Intense clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan army immediately broke out in Wardak and other areas. In June 2021, the Taliban took more territory and there was fighting in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Speaking two years later, Fazli Rafi, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, told me that the government assessed that these attacks had a professional command and control structure. “The Taliban knew guerrilla warfare, but this time the Taliban were attacking in 24 different provinces with three different districts in each. That was over 100 battle fronts. We assessed that the Taliban could only attack five provinces. This was the work of a professional army – and Pakistan was implicated.” 

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On 22 June, Seraj’s overwhelming fear was realised. Sher Khan Bandar, the main crossing point on the border with Tajikistan, fell to the Taliban. The dam had been breached. The Afghan government could no longer control its own borders. It was now a case of salvaging whatever one could from the flood. 

Even at the height of the crisis, the president tried to sidestep ministers he felt were close to the Americans. Ghani had become very suspicious of ministers and political leaders. According to insiders, he felt that many Afghan leaders had private back channels with the US and the Taliban and were pursuing their own agendas. But marginalising the ministers only led to more chaos. When they ordered the commanders to do something, the latter responded by saying that the president had told them otherwise.

On 2 July, US troops withdrew from Bagram air base, the key entry point for American hardware and personnel for 20 years. Only a few troops stayed behind to protect the US embassy. By the end of that month, the southern cities of Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were scenes of intense fighting. In the first week of August, the Taliban assassinated Dawa Khan Menapal, President Ghani’s public relations chief. Reports of Taliban fighters settling old tribal scores on the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan heightened the fear. 

By the time the president fled Kabul on 15 August, all the major cities had fallen. It was on that day that the Taliban opened the gates of Pul-i-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Taliban militants, as well as hardened criminals, emerged into the sunlight to taste freedom. And among the throng was Logari. 

Seraj was shocked by the president’s departure. Moments earlier, Ghani had called him personally saying that “we should not allow thieves and people to create chaos, we should use whatever force we still have to control the situation”. At the time, Seraj was in Kabul scrambling to secure the release of the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, as well as trying to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif — the largest city in northern Afghanistan. When the Taliban entered Kabul, he made his way to the presidential palace with his side arm at the ready, intending to protect the Commander-in-Chief of the republic until the end. He expected a call from the president to join other ministers and officials at the palace and then wait for him to take a final decision on the right course of action. Ghani’s departure stunned him. He returned to the office and sat on his desk, numb. “I was speechless for 20 minutes.”

One by one, his WhatsApp groups also fell silent, as ministers and senior civil servants started to leave them. He received messages from his colleagues asking for instructions. But what could he tell them? Should he ask them to fight the Taliban? “The elected government that we’re fighting for has collapsed,” Seraj said. “So what was our legitimacy to stay on?” He continued to receive panicked messages from his colleagues asking for orders, but he had none to give, except that they should lie low and find safety as best they possibly can. The republic was no more and they were now on their own. A US State Department contact got Seraj out of the country, and he joined his wife who was already in London. 

As August passed and Seraj began to piece his life together, the chaos of Biden’s withdrawal became apparent. Today, there are already many reports that al-Qaeda are rebuilding, unimpeded. The UN security council recently noted that eight new camps had been established in 2024 alone. An organisation that appeared to be on life support, looking for a reason to exist, appears to be suddenly revived: in a piece published this month, al-Qaeda’s new leader, Sayf al-Adl, called for attacks on Western and Zionist targets. 

In such a world, it’s hard not to be reminded of Seraj’s earlier warning: “You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it.”

But though Talichad won the insurgency, could he still lose the peace? Young Taliban fighters, whose daily life has been transformed by victory, have been interviewed for a new report — and it turns out many don’t like it. Put to work in Kabul’s bureaucracy, they find office work dull and restrictive, and they miss the excitement, fellowship and lofty moral purpose they felt as insurgents. Not only do they loathe office work every bit as much as the West’s much-discussed “quiet quitters”, but peacetime urban life appears to be making them soft and, well, less Taliban-ish.

This, in turn, raises some questions for the online masculinist Right in the West: the men who made a totem of Talichad. For the Taliban’s predicament now offers a counterfactual to a doctrine from these circles, that’s now leaking into the mainstream: that every facet of modern male malaise is the fault of women, and especially of feminism.

This idea circulates, in condensed form, via the term “longhouse”. This originates with the now-notorious internet anon Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), author of the influential 2018 Bronze Age Mindset. Ironically, the term accepts wholesale a set of revisionist claims made by feminist archaeologists, such as Heide Göttner-Abendroth, who argue the very earliest societies lived in collective “longhouse” dwellings — and were matriarchal.

For Göttner-Abendroth and her fellow feminists, these longhouse-dwelling matriarchies were characterised by egalitarianism and sharing of resources and caring obligations, traits they viewed as positive and worthy of revival. From the perspective of Bronze Age Pervert and his online followers, though, such societies are beneath contempt, dragging the natural excellence of some into the feminised morass of the many.

And, contra the feminists, such matriarchy isn’t something we should revive — because it’s already here. For BAP, the modern world is already one huge metaphorical “longhouse”. In it, we are told, Western men have grown contemptibly soft, relinquishing a life of confident vitality in favour of a weak and resentful mass culture of collectivism. BAPists assert that under this suffocating order, masculine excellence is resentfully nipped in the bud at every turn by a stifling, safety-obsessed egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator, whose enforcers act like burrowing termites to hollow out everything good about our civilisation, leaving behind only crumbling ruins to be picked over by whiny, feeble, and increasingly asexual moral pygmies.

And this is all women’s fault. When the “longhouse” meme completed its transition to familiar jargon recently, in an explainer on the term published by First Things, the author ‘Lomez’ linked it explicitly with the growing prevalence of women in public life. In BAP’s view, “feminism and the liberation of women” is “both the proximate and the ultimate cause” of this nightmarish world, which Bronze Age Mindset characterises luridly as presided over by “some kind of half-human half-cockroach creature resplendent with horrid eggs like a big Amazon centipede…this seeks to re-absorb you”.

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As the “longhouse” concept has percolated out of group chats and Discord servers, so too has this correlation grown more accepted, between emotivism, safetyism, suffocating egalitarianism — and the rising prevalence of women in public life. Essays now come thick and fast: political scientist Richard Hanania tackled the relation between female-typical social patterns and changing norms of political debate and conflict, and the journalist Heather Mac Donald argued that the feminisation of American academia is now “almost complete”. She suggests that this has been accompanied by a transition away from norms of truth-seeking and open debate, toward a culture characterised by emotional volatility, anxiety and a fixation on vulnerability.

Conservative campaigner Christopher Rufo developed Mac Donald’s arguments to suggest that a public culture that over-emphasises “trait empathisation”, which is to say a more female-typical style of relating, has negative downstream consequences including normalising psychological disequilibrium, and leaving young people permanently infantilised. A consensus is emerging on the Right, then, that the feminisation of public life is causing (or at least linked to) a great many things the Right views as disagreeable. As these arguments bleed into mainstream discourse, though, few have the forthrightness of your average internet anon. The anti-woke activist James Lindsay may say “woke is a woman”, for example, but he’s lighter on what that implies in policy terms. Mac Donald and Rufo are likewise at pains to make clear that they aren’t saying female-typical traits and preferences are bad or in need of elimination.

Meanwhile, the anons mutter that surely the solution to a problem that started with the feminisation of public life is, well, defeminising it again — or just walking away to start something new. BAP advocates exiting the “longhouse” for life as a “Bronze Age pirate”; it’s not wholly clear what this means, but the overall impression is of all-male groups, perhaps mercenaries, or something not dissimilar to bands of Taliban insurgents. In any case, it’s clear enough that many cheered on the Taliban for evicting women from schools and workplaces, in no small part for achieving what they only fantasise about: a public square purged of women.

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But, speculating wildly, imagine the Talichad celebrators got their way and booted women out of public life. Would that result in a return of manliness? The first-person accounts of Taliban fighters now working in Kabul’s bureaucracy suggests: possibly not. For it appears that no matter how manly your mujahideen, when you transpose them to a high-tech metropolis and put them to work in Excel spreadsheets, they’ll begin to drift toward the social and psychological conditions deplored by BAPists in the West.

Bronze Age Mindset chafes against a sense of life lived in captivity, where all space is already “owned” and freedom of action always already circumscribed. And we find an echo of that same sense of constraint in the grumbles of Huzaifa, 24, about his post-victory loss of freedom: “The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.”

City life seems to drive alienation and moral degeneracy, too: several fighters lament how atomised everyone is there, and deplore the sight of their comrades succumbing to temptation: drug use, hot girls, material possessions. And cubicle-drone life is so boring and repetitive that many spend their days slacking on social media instead: “Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter,” admits Abdul Nafi. Social media addiction thus completes the transition of these young men, from “Talichads” admired by alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in the West into alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in Kabul.

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And in this case, it’s indisputably not women’s fault. As is well-documented, to mainstream lamentations and 4chan glee, there are no Afghan women in these workplaces. For the Taliban, then, the exchange of masculine camaraderie and freedom for alienation, constraint and moral degradation has not involved the female HR managers, DEI administrators and the like whom the masculinist Right generally blame for their woes. And this suggests that at least some of the “longhouse” phenomena now being reflexively blamed on women may be less a malign byproduct of literal workplace feminisation than a consequence of working an office job in a high-tech, 21st-century urban environment.

The notorious anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski made a version of this point in his manifesto, arguing that modern men and women are “oversocialised” into neurosis, powerlessness and anxiety as a byproduct of the distorting effect industrial society has on human nature. Today, “Uncle Ted” is himself a popular underground literary influence, and source of internet memes. But he was arrested before the mass spread of the internet, and to my knowledge has not commented on its contribution to the conditions he deplored. Yet perhaps the bitterest irony of all is that the internet acts as an accelerant on all the phenomena Kaczynski described. Thus, as the Taliban have taken to the internet — whether to promote recognition of their regime or just ease the boredom of cubicle life — they’ve been drawn, by degrees, into the most captivating “longhouse” of all.

The struggle sessions, cancel culture and purity spirals routinely blamed by the Hananias of this world on political feminisation happen among anonymous Right-wing body-builders too. And this is because, as I’ve argued before, social media itself forces even the most committedly masculinist groups into female-typical social patterns: covert aggression, public scolding, punishment via ostracism and so on. When your principal means of interaction incentivises endless talking, even as it forecloses physical confrontation, how is anyone meant to navigate disagreements except via stereotypically feminine social patterns such as “calling out”, backbiting, emotional drama or cancelling wrongdoers?

Things are rarely monocausal, and social and material feedback loops are complex. I don’t doubt that the presence of more women in the workplace makes some contribution to the tone of public life. Indeed, I’ve made that case myself, though needless to say I don’t think this is an argument for Taliban-style purges. But I suspect that for those very online males currently fantasising about making everything less longhouse-y, and wishing they could do so by just getting women to shut up, actually succeeding would make less difference than they imagined.

For probably the only way the online masculinist Right could exit the “longhouse” entirely would be by passing the Taliban in the opposite direction, and exiting the modern world. And, especially, exiting the internet. And it seems not even the Taliban is willing to do that.

Even within the iconoclastic organisation, there are some for whom this forced backward march does not make sense. It’s one thing to be highly pious and ultra-conservative. It’s quite another to blast out eccentric, made-up rules with no foundation in mainstream Islamic doctrine or Afghan history and custom. Today, it’s all too easy to imagine a bunch of bearded old men sitting around in Kandahar dreaming up the next ridiculous way to annoy girls and women: girls above the age of 12 turned away on the first day of school; female university students ordered by guards not to wear scarves that are too cheerful in colour; female news anchors told they must cover their entire faces except for the eyes. So much for the hopes that this time around, the Taliban would be different.

The conclusion from all this seems obvious: after seeming to have learned from the failure of their previous time in power, the Taliban are now back to oppression as usual. Yet a more granular look reveals a peculiar vacillation in the Taliban’s edicts on women.

Under the current regime, an order is announced — then, right away, it is partially taken back or softened. Attempts are made to enforce it, but these are also erratic and uneven. Flurries of contradictory explanations and announcements follow. We’re told that girls in Grade 6 and above will not return to school. Wrong — they will, just not yet. We’re told this is because additional female teachers need to be recruited. Wrong again — it’s because a more concealing Islamic school uniform needs to be designed and manufactured. As for adult women, we’re told they must wear a hijab, but then that a headscarf is sufficient. Actually, no it isn’t: they must wear the burqa and be covered up completely. Well, no, it doesn’t have to be an actual burqa, a hijab is fine after all. But wait, they must also cover their necks and faces except for the eyes. But that’s just a recommendation, not a requirement. But it will be enforced.

What is going on here? Are the Taliban collectively maniacal, changing their minds as their mood shifts? It’s unlikely — you don’t fight and win a 20-year insurgency by being indecisive. Rather, these sequences of contradictory statements reflect their internal divisions on how to govern, and where they want the country to go. A tug of war is taking place and the cracks are starting to show.

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Already there have been a number of eruptions. In a recent speech, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, a high-ranking Talib, went so far as to accuse those calling for the exclusion of girls from middle and high-school education of disrespecting shariah. Because how could girls and women claim their Prophet-given rights if they can’t get enough education to learn what those are? More astonishing still are the credible reports of shouting matches between the Supreme Leader in Kandahar, Haibatullah Akhunzada, and his own bodyguards, in which the latter accused him of wasting the sacrifices made by their comrades and turning the country into an impoverished backwater shunned by all.

These rumblings in the ranks are partly down to the fact that today’s Taliban is more like a multi-party system. In one corner we have the Doha Group, which consists of those Taliban who were involved in the peace negotiations. For years they lived in Qatar, which, while unimpeachably Islamic, is not neurotic on the subject of women. Education is universal and excellent. There are high-profile women in corporate and political life. Both men and women wear traditional dress that includes a head covering, but women are not expected to conceal their faces or to stay at home. Public life is very family-oriented, with malls and parks populated by happy, relaxed parents and their children enjoying their leisure time together. All of this was not lost on the Afghans. Indeed, many of them left their families there when they returned to Afghanistan to join the government.

Then there is the Haqqani Group, which was based in Pakistan. While the country is conservative, it is also home to strong, publicly engaged women: politicians including heads of state, entrepreneurs, cultural icons, scientists. Their Taliban guests took note. There are also regional Taliban power centres which, due to the decentralised nature of an effective insurgency, are accustomed to exercising considerable autonomy. The Taliban is not a hierarchical organisation, nor does Akhunzada have the theological position or weight of, say, Ayatollah Khomeini. So to have him issue consequential pronouncements on his own, without consultation, rankles.

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There may also be ideological and theological reasons why some of the factions are distinctly more forward-leaning about women’s rights. A significant part of this more progressive interpretation of Islam seems to be rooted in their vision for the country, and its most likely path from abject poverty to modest prosperity. That path has as its absolute requirement the acceptance of the international community. Nothing good will happen unless the government is recognised, sanctions are eased, frozen assets are returned, and investment occurs.

There is a bit of healthy defiance in this vision. The insurgency was driven by the narrative that the country was bent under the yoke of foreign occupation and the corrupt elite it had introduced. But whatever its contradictions, the impulse is present and may prove impossible for the Kandahar Grandfathers to suppress.

In August and September of last year, as the Taliban took control of Kabul, videos and photos surfaced on social media showing young Taliban soldiers encountering modernity. These were amusing vignettes, the classic stereotype of hillbillies in the big city for the first time. One group had entered the abandoned Presidential Palace, gone exploring, and found the gym. Tentatively at first, they investigated the bizarre contraptions, testing to see if they were weapons, then quickly discovering their functions and filming each other laughing as they tried them out. Others went to the zoo and stared in dumbstruck fascination as they came face-to-face, for the first time, with the residents of an aquarium. Kalashnikovs slung across their torsos, one group traversed the lake in Bandiamir on swan-shaped pedal boats. The videos were faintly comical, but they were also enlightening. These were young people out in the world for the first time, and they were curious, open to new things, open to joy. These young Talibs don’t want to live in Jurassic Park. They want to be part of the larger world. And that world includes women.

This isn’t the only change worthy of note. The last time around, repressive edicts by the leadership were met with disdain by the outside world and sad despair by the Afghan public. What we see this time is quite different. Now, men are part of the protest against the backward slide of women’s rights. In reaction to the forced veiling of female news anchors, for instance, male colleagues made a high visibility statement by also reading the news with their faces covered.

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Is there anything we can do to support these dissenters? Well, if the past 20 years have taught us anything, it’s that our efforts at overt social engineering are not likely to meet with much success. These kinds of changes, of foundational social norms and gender relations, must happen from within. And what are the prospects of that? On the downside, this is a deeply patriarchal society, in which everyone submits to the dominion of the alpha male. Such habits are hard, but are certainly not impossible to break.

On the other hand, we mustn’t forget that, demographically, this is an extremely young society, where the power de facto rests with the young soldiers, the young farmers and the small group of remaining young educated doctors, managers and technocrats. Also, there is no credible opposition. No one really believes that any of the has-beens can muster a plausible fighting force and take back the country, and everyone has had enough of war. There is Isis, but if the government became reasonable, they would have ample outside help against that threat.

There is little we can do, except follow the mantra of “do no harm”. Keep the sanctions in place enough to keep the hardliners in a stall and on the brink of failure, but not so much as to starve the population. Let the protest and the messages come from within, so there is no argument that once again the West is imposing its alien decadent values. Above all, keep the prospect of connection with the outside world alive.

Though most foreign embassies in Kabul have been shut down since the Taliban takeover, a significant Western presence remains. Various UN agencies, representatives of NGOs and of donor countries maintain offices, send delegations or conduct regular visits. Talking points always include the latest eccentric moves by Kandahar on the issue of women. This must be incredibly tiresome and exasperating for the emissaries involved, but it’s important. The younger Taliban hear this, see this and realise where the obstacles to progress lie. They now know that the world remains ready to welcome them, and that they have a choice between shaping their own future, or letting their Grandfathers shut them away in a dark corner.

This use of far-Right tropes — in particular, the Chad vs Wojak dichotomy — is telling of the two groups’ mutual mourning over modern ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘decline of the West’. But this alliance also throws a spoke in the wheel for the conventional narrative surrounding Islam and the Right.

After all, in both fringe and mainstream conservative discourses, Islam is loathed as a prime culprit driving societal decline. Whether it takes the form of European white nationalist groups such as Generation Identity blaming Muslim immigration for the ‘great replacement’ or Right-wing newspaper columnists deeming it a ‘threat to our liberal values’, hostility towards Islam seems to be a defining feature on the modern Right. No less ambiguous is Islamists’ own hostility towards the Right as the vanguard of the Western culture that they oppose; for both parties, a convergence with one another would seem paradoxical.

Islamism and the Left, on the other hand, appear to make far more intuitive allies. Most recently, it has been suggested that some Islamists may be actively co-opting ‘wokeness’ and camouflaging their agenda in the language of diversity and inclusion. But well outside the sphere of extremism, the so-called Islamo-Leftist alliance is a well-established source of analysis. A number of mainstream trends reveal the extent of a relationship between Islam and the Left, from the crossover of Muslim and Leftist causes among student activists to the fact that Western Muslims statistically tend to vote for Left-wing parties.

Yet this alliance is not without its own tensions: the modern Left has an uneasy relationship with traditional religion, and struggles to incorporate moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies, and the submission to a Divine order that is integral to Islam. In other words, while the modern Left seeks to break down ‘grand narratives’, Islam is a grand narrative, and one imbued with a profound metaphysical potency at that.

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This is not to overlook the fact that there have been numerous attempts to systematically converge Islamic and Leftist political philosophy. Most prominently in the 20^th century, movements such as the Islamic socialism of the Iranian Revolution or the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party sought to achieve their political aims through means which were, or at least strived to be, theologically sincere. It is also notable that this kind of Leftism, which was closer to orthodox Marxism, was more sympathetic to grand narratives than its contemporary forms where postmodern currents prevail (leaving aside the overtly anti-religious sentiments of Marx himself, that is).

Today, attempts by Western Leftists to form alliances with Muslims often overlook religious narratives: unsurprisingly, Islamic theological and intellectual traditions do not take centre stage in secular activism. Though modern Leftists — committed to showing solidarity with minority groups — may represent the identities of Muslims, they struggle to represent the values of Muslims. Incorporating their traditional beliefs would involve revising their own secular (and ironically, modern Western) biases, which, despite efforts to ‘decolonise the mind’, they are often reluctant to do.

In effect, the modern Left’s concern with religion boils down to identity politics; an impetus, perhaps, for practising Muslims to gravitate to the other side of the ideological spectrum. But religion is also relegated to identity politics on the modern Right, where the term ‘culturally Christian’ is commonplace. Self-styled ‘anti-woke’ commentators may invoke Christianity in their paeans for a return to tradition, but this often gives precedence to the cultural and aesthetic residues of the religion over its metaphysical and moral precepts. As far as ideology is concerned, more faith is placed in the axioms of the European Enlightenment — individual liberty, free speech and, ironically, secularism — than those of traditional Christianity, now reduced to little more than a signifier of Western heritage.

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It follows that the Right’s contempt towards Islam does not come so much from a theological defence of Christianity, but a cultural one. Likewise, the Left’s representation of Muslims, owing to its own secular biases, also ends up reducing Islam to a cultural entity. In effect, theological and metaphysical considerations have been rendered obsolete on both the Left and the Right when it comes to religion.

This points, among other things, to a major shift within the Right: traditionally, it was the Right that served to uphold religious principles, including moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies and, in a way, submission to a Divine order. But fixated as it now is on individual liberty, free speech and secularism, the modern Right overlooks this. And in relocating its origins to the European Enlightenment, it forgets that the conservative tradition was itself born out of a hesitation towards the Enlightenment.

Roger Scruton — one of the last philosophers to defend conservatism as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, rather than a full embrace of it — saw it necessary for politics to have a metaphysical dimension. Following Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Matthew Arnold, he remained true to the origins of British conservatism as a reaction against the excesses of liberalism and secularism. This conservatism was, he wrote, “a defence of tradition against calls for popular religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress”.

With this in mind, the notion of an alliance between Islam and the Right begins to make sense. Islam poses many of the same challenges to Enlightenment liberalism as the English conservative tradition once did, with both traditions recognising the social and spiritual dangers of modern materialism. Islam, in a sense, fulfils Scruton’s definition of ‘metaphysical conservatism’ as a defence of sacred things against desecration. But today, the modern Right is more concerned with defending free speech against ‘wokeness’, individual liberties against collectivism, and freedom against censorship than sacred things against desecration.

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What does this tell us about the alleged alliance between Islam and the far-Right? Since the mainstream Right has become indifferent towards traditional values, their ideological debris has drifted downstream to be claimed by fringe subcultures. But these fragments, severed from their original contexts, have been misappropriated to suit hateful ideologies that are just as unmoored from religious virtues. Defences of gender roles, the family and community, for example, are often articulated through crude biological reductionism rather than spiritual concerns. Whether it’s the blood and soil paganism of Neo-Nazis or the New Atheism of hardline rationalists, much of today’s far-Right is just as materialistic and hostile towards traditional religion.

The fact that many look for or encounter traditional ideas in these extremist subcultures is telling of the fact that these ideas are severely underrepresented in political discourse. This was once a role fulfilled by the Right. Yet modern conservatism’s embrace of liberalism and secularism, despite originating as a counterweight to these Enlightenment ideolo­gies, excludes those wishing to defend the sacred. Without representation of such concerns, ‘dissidents’ will continue to drift to extremes — even if it means promoting a group as nefarious as the Taliban.

Whether we like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Taliban now preside over a country devastated by decades of conflict: its new government cannot rely on the structures in place, which have been crippled by the abrupt departure of so many educated and trained managers and professionals.

Public safety, always hazardous in the tumultuous days after a major transition, needs intense policing and patrolling. Isis remains a huge threat, while the new regime’s young Taliban foot soldiers — born in remote villages, raised on nothing but combat and now amazed to find themselves in the shining metropolis of Kabul — have to be closely monitored.

Meanwhile, the disruption to trade is causing massive inflation and price increases for basic goods. A long drought has led to a poor harvest. Covid is still rampant. Winter is coming and the poor — 72% of the population, according to the UN — will look to the Government to provide them with firewood and food.

But good news: Afghanistan has money! The country has $9 billion in financial assets, of which $7 billion are in US banks and $2 billion are deposited in Europe. This is because Afghan banks traditionally keep the bulk of their funds in foreign financial institutions, drawing on them monthly for ongoing liquidity. Then there is the aid money already set aside for Afghanistan. The World Bank administers a Trust Fund for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which was supposed to pay $800 million this year, while the IMF has around $400 million designated for Afghanistan.

There’s just one problem: on the orders of the US government, all this cash has been frozen.

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And that’s not all. So much money has been ferried out of the country in recent years by corrupt officials that there is now a cash shortage. People can only withdraw a small portion of their savings. The country can’t print new bills to replace what was stolen, because the country’s currency is printed by a European company that also falls under US sanctions. It’s economic strangulation.

America likes to give names to its overseas efforts. The Afghan venture was called Operation Enduring Freedom until 2015, and Freedom’s Sentinel thereafter. What shall we call this new phase? Operation Enduring Anger, perhaps. That, after all, is what US military officers, and many in the policy community, are: very angry. It’s a blow for a superpower to have to acknowledge that it could not gain mastery over 90,000 unshaved, minimally equipped fighters, and wasted $2 trillion dollars in the process. It’s embarrassing.

But we should save our empathy for the Afghan people. Their country has been in unrelenting continuous war for more than 40 years. With 70% of its population under the age of 25, most people alive in Afghanistan have never experienced peace. We may not like their new government. But their last leaders were awful in a different way: more educated, yes, and savvier — but they used those attributes to pad their bank accounts in the UAE.

The Taliban government prior to that made women wear burqas and beat men if their beard was too short and executed adulterers in the sports stadium. Before that was a civil war and before that a proxy superpower conflict between the Soviet Union and the US. If the Taliban refrain from their previous behaviour – which so far they have largely been careful to do – and if they honour their promises to reopen girls schools, clamp down on terrorism and not persecute their former enemies, they could turn out to be Best in Show.

Granted, the return of the Taliban is not the solution the US had hoped for: to create a beautiful, free and democratic Afghanistan that would be rich on the basis of its mineral wealth. Yet that project stalled. The Taliban reappeared, won recruits, took territory, inch by inch, year by year. Until 2021, when, at long last, the US faced the facts. They pulled out their military and their diplomats and their contractors, closed the embassy and departed, taking with them nearly 200,000 local staff and supporters and accidental stowaways in a sloppy and casualty-riddled evacuation.

For punctuation, they launched one last faulty drone strike that killed three completely uninvolved non-combatant adults and seven children. The US Inspector General investigated the “incident” and described it as an “honest mistake”. The Costs of War Project estimates a total of 71,000 civilian casualties from direct military action during our little interlude. That’s a lot of mistakes.

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But now that we’re out, and winter has arrived, Afghanistan is braced for things to get worse. Last week, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, told the BBC’s John Simpson that the situation “is as bad as you possibly can imagine: 95% of the people don’t have enough food, and now we’re looking at 23m people marching towards starvation. The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It is going to be hell on Earth.”

For his part, Simpson, a veteran reporter who has reported from 120 countries and 30 war zones, broke down on BBC Radio 4’s Today program as he described the plight of an Afghan mother-of-seven facing famine. “I came across a woman whose name is Fatima and she’s a widow. She’s got seven kids – five girls and two boys – and they’re grindingly poor already,” he said. “She used to make money by weeding the area for a local farmer. He can’t pay her now because he’s not able to grow the crop that he was growing. She’s got no money – she’s having to beg for fuel to make a fire and beg for flour which used to be delivered under the old government before the Taliban came in.”

Widows. Little girls. Hell on earth. Afghanistan is clearly in trouble. But let’s step back for just one moment. This woman used to work for a farmer, who used to farm, but now she doesn’t because he can’t — and it’s not because the Taliban “ascended” to power. It’s because we are sitting on their country’s money and won’t let go. It’s because we, in our determination to starve the Taliban, are starving this widow and her seven children. And 40 million others like them. Operation Mind-blowing Hypocrisy.

Now we think we have the solution: sure, we just left, but now we’re going right back in. To prevent the looming humanitarian crisis. That we made.

So money can now go into Afghanistan — as long as it is administered and dispensed by international organisations, companies and agencies. That means international staff with their Western salaries and entourage of drivers and guards and fixers and translators. That means rented houses and offices surrounded by hired security, and fleets of armoured cars and international conferences that add up to an overhead that consumes 60% or more of the total funds.

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And this will never end, because humanitarian aid does not relate to economic development. Afghanistan, in effect, is being positioned as a permanent welfare state. Perhaps, then, this is not about hungry Afghan children after all. Perhaps this about us — our contractors and the huge aid and development machinery that thrived in the country and now sees a way back in.

But we have to let go. We left. That was our decision. Now let’s leave them in peace. Give them their money. It’s all very well to tell them we won’t trade with them, and their government won’t be recognised, if they violate international law and prevailing international standards of human and women’s rights. And yes, it is regrettable that there are no women in their cabinet. But the same is true in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Yemen. No one is freezing their assets, and they are all comfortably seated in the UN.

For Afghanistan to prosper, we need to stop telling them what to do and how to do it. They are not on our continent or in our cultural sphere. They have not gone through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Revolutions, or any of the other transformative steps that made the modern West. But they shouldn’t be punished for that. As we did, they too must find their path. And, in the meantime, we shouldn’t put boulders in their way.

It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.

This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies  by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.

Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims. 

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It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war. 

Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence. 

The Americans, distinctly unimpressed at the failure of the British officers, were forced to help Iraqi forces retake the city in 2008’s Charge of the Knights operation, a humiliation for Britain. “This damaged the reputation of British forces with the US and the Iraqis and inflicted major dents in British military self-confidence,” Barry notes. Akam is less stoic, describing it as ”an acute and lasting humiliation to the British Army”, which “will linger and follow the troops halfway around the world to Afghanistan”.

Indeed, to exorcise this ghost Britain’s political and military leaders recklessly volunteered for a campaign in a Helmand landscape of walled farms and thick vegetation which the Soviets had struggled to pacify, even while the Army struggled with Iraq. In Afghanistan, they believed, the Army would regain its reputation, leaving the difficulties of Iraq behind.

They were wrong. Thinly spread out in isolated rural compounds, or “platoon houses”, British troops were besieged by waves of Taliban fighters, and only avoided being overrun through devastating use of air power, which in turn alienated the civilians whose homes it destroyed. Along with a desperate need to avoid casualties, the reliance on short-ranged patrols, magnets for Taliban ambushes and bogged down by IEDs, meant that the Army could never retain tactical dominance in the countryside, let alone gain the strategic initiative.

As in Basra, force protection became the dominant goal and so initiative passed to the local enemy. Attempts to upend the balance of power, through bold but misconceived operations like Operation Panther’s Claw or through grandiose hearts-and-minds schemes like the transporting of a gigantic turbine through Taliban territory to the dam where it would remain unused for years, all failed. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the rich tribute of blood and treasure Britain poured into the dust was entirely in vain.

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The Tories can save Blue Labour

By Aris Roussinos

Where does the blame lie? Barry lambasts Labour politicians such as Clare Short, whose intransigent refusal to provide the British troops who found themselves suddenly governing Basra, a city of 1.5 million people, with even basic DFID support due to her opposition to the war, did much to incite local anger in the first vital weeks and months of occupation. He takes aim at Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor forced through defence cuts that reduced the Army’s helicopter fleet, and then lied about it as Prime Minister when soldiers died in Helmand as a direct result. 

But he reserves his greatest ire for the architect of Britain’s entry into these needless wars: Tony Blair. Yet as Barry makes clear, military chiefs also failed to impress upon politicians the need to reassess their strategy in light of their failing mission. The plain-speaking and sober appreciation of hard facts for which the Army is renowned were here tragically absent.

For Akam, much of the blame can be laid at the Army itself. He draws an ethnographic portrait of an institution struggling to make sense of a changing world, whose cherished regimental ethos, the wellspring of individual pride and striving for excellence, also reduces it to “an awkwardly organised collection of warring tribes, inadequately co-ordinated and often fighting each other”. Fearful of future cuts, Generals volunteer the Army for the underestimated Helmand mission even as Iraq is failing: “It’s use them or lose them,” Akam quotes General Sir Richard Dannett on the ill-fated decision. Generals tell politicians what they want to hear, instead of the difficult truths that would blight promotion: “the British Army’s determination to ‘crack on’ got the army into a terrible mess.” 

For Akam, the absence of accountability for such failure is corrosive to the Army’s capability. Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels — while generals are rewarded for strategic failure with titles and sinecures. Unlike in Israel, where the failure of the 2006 Lebanon War led to a purge of failed senior officers, “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. The result, for Akam, is institutional rot: “that hypocrisy had trickled down into the institution below them and was souring it.” 

Moreover, Akam asserts, defence think tanks such as RUSI “can seem more like comfy clubs funded partly by arms manufacturers — friendly forces, in the forces’ jargon — than rigorous external overseers”, inhibiting them from guiding the Army through painful reform. 

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How bin Laden won

By Aris Roussinos

The American presence looms large over both books like a Victorian father, whose approval is yearned for, yet who emanates instead only cold disappointment. The tragic irony, as both Akam and Barry note, was that both the Basra and Helmand campaigns were entered into entirely to win Blair cachet in American eyes, yet the result of the Army’s disappointing performance was only American disdain. As Akam notes of his soldier informants on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “many appreciate that the real reason they are here is to maintain British military standing in American eyes”. 

Yet even during the invasion itself, before the humiliating retreat, the winnowing capacity of the British state had already lowered the Army’s reputation in American eyes. Basra, just over the border from Kuwait, was chosen as Britain’s target, in Akam’s telling, because the Army’s recent adoption of just-in-time logistics had left it with insufficient spare parts to travel any further. Lack of armoured vehicles, of body armour, helicopters, even ammunition left the Army scrounging what it could from unimpressed Americans and almost entirely equipping itself through emergency Treasury funds. 

Citing long-ago Malaya and more-recent Northern Ireland (as if that were an unqualified military success) in its favour, the Army deflected its sense of insecurity at its vastly reduced capacity compared to the US with an arrogant and ultimately mistaken belief that population-centric counterinsurgency was its unequalled métier. American officers quoted by Barry rolled their eyes at “‘more British tripe’” as events proved otherwise.

But even the Americans, whose resources were limitless in comparison, ultimately lost both wars. As Barry observes: “The US government’s decision to invade Iraq must stand as the worst military decision of the 21st century. It was a military strategic folly on a level equal to that of Napoleon’s 1812 attack on Russia and Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.” The failure, then, was ultimately a political one, of British politicians blindly following their American patrons into unwinnable wars: the Army’s essential sin was only one of trying to do the best of a bad job, a not ignoble character flaw. 

It is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era. 

Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt: with the Government’s new focus on naval capacity and the much-vaunted Pacific Tilt forming the basis of Britain’s defence vision, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radikin, is allegedly poised to oversee a dramatic cut in the Army’s already-dangerously pared-down numbers, cutting infantry ranks by more than one third of its current numbers. 

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America's forgotten Powell Doctrine

By Edward Luttwak

The “Best Little Army in the World” may be getting littler, but it is not for the better. As the defence analyst Francis Tusa warns, the result of its decades-long and self-inflicted procurement woes is that it is now more or less “combat incapable against high-end threats”. Two decades of fighting poorly-equipped insurgents has distracted the Army from its primary mission of defending the country against a competent and well-equipped adversary like Russia or China.

Perhaps this is less a disaster than it may at first seem. The danger is not so much the Army’s incapacity as our politicians’ inability to match their ambitions to its resources, or the moral courage of its generals to gently dissuade them. For all that we mock Germany its military weakness, it is not abundantly clear that Britain has gained much for the decade or so of warfare that the Germans managed to avoid. After Blair’s promiscuous use of the Army to assuage his lust for glory, perhaps a period of enforced abstinence might do the institution some good, if it is to re-equip itself for the graver, and unchosen challenges of the coming century. 

The Army’s focus on the new Ranger battalions, tasked with training and directing local partner forces, in place of line infantry hints at a world of conflict where the business of fighting is increasingly left to expendable proxies. Yet a shrunken, more tightly-focussed Army also presents a challenge for a denuded British state, which has increasingly come to rely on soldiers to make up for its own lost capacity.

Its willingness to take on tasks outside its core role may fend off cutbacks, for a time, but is not necessarily in its own or the state’s best interests; it distracts from its urgent task of modernisation and reorganisation, and gives British governments cover to further winnow away state capacity, confident that soldiers will always be there to pick up the slack. 

As the Chilcot Report on Iraq observed, “a ‘can do’ attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK armed forces, a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances — but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Perhaps the Army’s capacity to win the next war, like the British state’s to weather the next crisis, would be better served by generals finding the courage, when necessary, to tell politicians that some things simply can’t, or shouldn’t be done.

But with the Taliban now in control of Afghanistan — and signs of resistance dwindling — is he still convinced the West was right to invade?

He joined Freddie Sayers in our London studio to discuss his new book, The Will to See. An edited transcript is below.

The worldview you espouse and are famous for, what we might call liberal interventionism, seems more out of fashion than at any point in the past 30 years. Do you feel you now write in a spirit of defiance?
I never was concerned with being out of fashion or not out of fashion. I have my line, my conviction. It never moved since the beginning of my career. And I’m still the same. I believe that democracy deserves to be shared. I believe that there is no place in the world that is unfit for democracy. I believe in human rights. I believe in universality of values. And it is not because of the illiberal trend, or because of Mr Putin and Mr Erdogan being on the move, that I’m going to change my opinion.

But after all the disasters of the past 20 or 30 years, do you really think we should still be trying to export democracy around the world?
I never said that democracy has to be exported. What I say is that, where you have some democrats, if you have some democrats in a place or in another, we have the moral duty and sometimes the political duty to help, to encourage, to embrace, to reinforce, not to export. You have to have first the existence of a strong political force.

So in Afghanistan, for example?
There is a growing movement of women in particular, wishing equality, wishing to unveil their face, refusing the law of Taliban… The number grows from year to year. We had the moral duty of supporting them and when we denied it we betrayed this moral duty, and that it is a huge moral fault and political mistake.

So should we still be there?
In Afghanistan a few weeks ago, how many soldiers there were — two or three thousand? No more. They were not in war operations. They were in their barracks at the end of the day, but their symbolic presence, the fact that they were there, was like a shelter permitting the women to unveil, permitting the little girls to go to school, permitting your colleagues, journalists in Afghanistan, to do their job. My prescription was that America, and the UK and France have troops all over the world — in Korea, in Germany, in Europe. So what was the cost of leaving 2,500 or 3,000 troops on the non combat-mission? To leave them there just to show that we care, that we have a policy, that we are not withdrawing behind the walls of our fortress, that we don’t give space and abandon the field to Turks, Russians and Chinese.

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The truth about Afghan women

By Cheryl Bernard

You write about the massacre of Christians of Nigeria. Do you think it’s reasonable for Christians in Western countries to care more about because of a solidarity of faith?
They should care about massacres in general. They should care about people embracing their values, our values. Why do the Christians in the West support so much the Christians of the Middle East, and of Mosul. I pleaded for that a lot! But nothing for the Christians of Nigeria. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because there is a blackout in the press. Maybe because Africa is considered as being remote.

Many people who, like you, are proud defenders of Western liberalism, feel that we would be better defended by moving on from the universalist delusions of the past decades — i.e. that every country will eventually look like our countries, and that we have no business being in faraway lands. What do you say to those people?
It’s a mistake. I believe it from the bottom of my heart. I know this way of thinking; it’s a big mistake. It’s a big mistake because the game is worldwide. And the people whom I confront in Mogadishu, in Nigeria, the Muslim Brotherhood, extremist Islamists — they have their equivalents in London and in Paris. What happens when their equivalents in Paris see that we let them act? That we leave them free to act in Nigeria or Mogadishu? They are emboldened, they are happy. They feel encouraged and every victory which they make in Nigeria or in Syria is an encouragement to fight more in London or in Paris. We cannot strengthen our model of liberal society at home, if we give the feeling that we quit the field and abandon the field in the rest of the world.

Realistically, though, there simply isn’t the political will in Western countries for these kind of ongoing foreign campaigns. If you’re a true democrat, surely what the majority of the citizens of those countries want is the point?
The majority is not the point. Majority is the point for a prime minister, for a president. But for a whistleblower, for an intellectual, the question is to say what one feels to be the truth. And if you are alone, to say it even louder. And you have to go against the majority. If the majority does not want to hear, you have to try your best to help them to see.

So your solution to populism, after all that has happened in the past few years, is still to try to “educate” the people out of their mistakes? It doesn’t seem to work very well.
It depends. In the fifties in France, for example, we had a populist movement. It was very strong, but they were defeated by the return to power of General de Gaulle. Then it was a high way for a long time. Now it’s a low, and the populists did gain some ground. This is the old story. It goes back and forth. We are in a moment where these sort of ideas which I defend are on low tide. I’m not discouraged by that. I don’t believe that it means that I’m wrong. I continue and I do hope that I will see a reversal of the tide.

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How we failed Afghanistan

By Caroline Fourest

But surely there must be lessons to learn from the past 30 years. Look at China — part of the reason China was brought in to the global market was the idea that they would liberalise and become more democratic. But it didn’t work.
On China, what I said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, was that we had a duty to protect and defend the dissidents. For example, I was expelled from China in 1998, or 99, because I went there for in a movie festival and I dared to defend and to speak in favour of dissidents. And I think that we did not do that enough. So: defend the dissidents, not accept like stupid morons or beggars the Belt and Road which they are building now. Not accept their compact with Turkey and Russia in Africa to expel the West from this part of the world. I don’t believe that we have to exclude China, I believe that we have to intelligently confront them, not leave the ground; to have a real, proper diplomacy, not to be like, again, stupid morons swallowing all the propaganda of the Chinese when they say that they are creating prosperity and so on. We democrats should not be on the defence.

So you must be very unhappy with the isolationism of President Biden — seems it wasn’t only President Trump then?
I never said that it was only Donald Trump. I wrote a book before this one a few years ago, saying that the isolationism as a trend in America started with Barack Obama, and started on 29 August 2013, when Barack Obama decided not to respect his own red line in Syria… I even said that it was older than that, even years before. And Biden today embodies that… I am disappointed by the way in which he validated the choice of Trump. Trump dreamt the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden did it. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a joint operation — conceived by Trump; executed by Biden.

But again – the reason that leaders of both Republicans and Democrats have pulled out of Afghanistan is that majorities of voters in both of their parties wanted it. So in a way, isn’t the withdrawal by President Biden from Afghanistan a success story for liberal democracy?
No, because liberal democracy is not only the rule of numbers; liberal democracy is also the rule of law. And even if the numbers disagree with the law, both are still valid — liberal democracy is a mix, an an encounter between number, law, institutions, a sort of civilisation and of practices… It is also a big trend in public opinion, which is an egoist trend, which is a trend, leading an increasing number of people to believe that their interest is a selfish interest reduced to the little home of their narcissism. And this is not a liberal democracy. This is something else, a new pattern of society, which you have, by the way, in some countries of Europe, like Hungary, for example. And which has not to be blessed. An intellectual is not here just to bless all that is happening in what is happening. Things have to be blessed, and things that have to be confronted. Liberal democracy is not amor fati — love of destiny — no!

Are you worried about that we are importing some illiberal trends within our Western Democracies?
Yes we are, we are, of course. The woke culture, the cancel culture, attacks on freedom of speech. I know it comes from the Left, but it does not deserve, in my eyes, more indulgence because it comes from the Left than if it came from the Right. For me, the new political dividing line crosses the Left and the Right. We have to adapt our mind, our behaviour, our way of acting, to these new dividing lines, and cancel culture, attacks to freedom of speech is really a huge problem on which we have to be very careful.

How does the pandemic feature in this? Lockdowns were a policy that came out of China and spread very rapidly around the Western world. Were you troubled by the curtailment of liberty and due process?
Of course, it reduced some liberties and it accelerated a process which was already going on, which consists in tracing all of us, collecting data on us and so on and so on. So I may understand that it was necessary for a while, but number one, it has to be just a while. Number two, citizens should be asking for guarantees that when it is over, these liberty measures will be destroyed. Number three, as for myself, I believe this isa terrible time. This is why I escaped to Syria, Iraq, Mogadishu and the Ukraine  during this time because for me, it was, I am impossible to lock down — I cannot be locked. And number four, this has not been a good period for the care of the others, has not been a good period for brotherhood, has not been a good period for internet journalism.

It’s thrown up its own miniature revolution, hasn’t it? We now see on the streets of Berlin, London and Paris regular protests against vaccine passports and steps towards mandatory vaccines. Do you think it’s important not to demonise those people?
I don’t like to demonise anyone. I am a man of words. I try to convince, I try to plead. Ideas are a battle, like an arm wrestling… These anti-vax people they are conspiracy theorists.

Some…
A lot of them. They have a stupid conception of health… So they have to be confronted.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Lévy

They might feel like they’re your people. They are missing and trying to defend the liberal world order that you’re talking about. They want their freedoms. They want due process. They want to make their own decisions.
No, no, no. Because I listen to them. I listen — I am ready of course to hear, I try to hear everything. They are not — they pretend to be in favour of liberal freedom. But when you ask them what they want, a majority of them or big lot of them what they want, what is the ideal regime for them? It is not a liberal one.

In France, Éric Zemmour is doing very well. How worried are you and how do you propose that people of your political persuasion confront his popularity?
You have to try to show that Zemmour is not a new way of being far-Right — he is pumping the votes of Marine le Pen and incorporating them to him, but it’s the same. I would like to say that he is falsely sophisticated and fond of history, I don’t think he is so much. It seems to me useful to say that his conception of France is a tiny, retracted conception of France — little France. Like in UK when you had the debate about Brexit, they wanted the UK great again, the result is that they made England more and more little.

It doesn’t so far feel like Brexit has turned out quite as badly as you feared though, does it? In 2016, you came to London and delivered a play imploring people not to vote for Brexit. We’ve just done a deal with Australia and the US which, although it upset Mr Macron, does not exactly imply a “little England” mentality. Were your fears about Brexit overblown?
I don’t feel that way, but I hope that they are unfounded. I love this country. As I often say, I would not be born without the sacrifice of British young boys on D-Day so I hope I was wrong. But alas, let’s wait to see what happens in in Ulster, in Northern Ireland. Let’s wait. Let’s wait to see what happens in Scotland. I arrived in London on a day when the newspapers were full of the shortage of fuel for the cars, of the shortage of people to work.

What about Boris Johnson. Do you view him as a liberal who just does some things you don’t like, or some kind of dangerous populist?
I think that nobody knows who is Boris Johnson, including himself. He doesn’t know himself if he’s still a liberal, or a really dangerous populist. From outside, it seems to me that it depends on the day. It depends on the hour. It depends on the mood. He’s a strange guy. I’m sure that if I had met him 20 years ago when he was journalist in Brussels, he would have seemed like a jolly and a sympathetic guy. Today, he seems more like Viktor Orbán. A populist — not authoritarian, but more of a populist than his buddy Macron, for example.

BHL, thank you.

We did the wrong thing, perhaps for the right reason. We wanted to develop that country and rescue Afghan women. Their lives were hellish, girls banned from school, women forbidden to leave their homes except in the company of a male guardian, vigilantes beating them with sticks if their burqa was too short. We wanted them to enjoy the pleasures of modernity and live full, happy lives.

Along with the rest of that failed nation-building venture, we got this part wrong too. And now, instead of recalibrating, we are full speed ahead compounding the harm.

Our mantra now is: “We can’t abandon the Afghan women.” And what we mean by that is visas and evacuations. But obviously, we can’t fly out all Afghan women. As for the others, we’re handing them off to confront a medieval regime all on their own, having skimmed away anyone who is educated, affluent, articulate, connected and savvy. We’re leaving them in poverty and on the brink of famine, after whisking away those who staffed the food programmes and the clinics. The US embassy is shuttered. That, folks, is what abandonment looks like.

The sad secret underlying our Great Afghan Liberation Project is this: when we set out to rescue Afghan women, we had no idea of who, how or why. We worked with those we could readily find and interact with, the urban and urbane, the ones who figured us out and gratified our need for photogenic success. We never got to the ones in the slums and the villages.

Even now, we seem unaware that there is no such entity as “Afghan women”. Yet the circumstances of their lives, their mindsets and the forces to which they are subject, make them as distinct from each other as different species.

So I propose: A Field Guide To Afghan Women.

Let us start with the group that no one ever starts with: the ordinary, average, downtrodden, ignored and unloved women who make up the great majority of their country’s female population. They are Afghanistan’s nightingales, peering out shyly from behind the mud walls of their compounds, shapeless silhouettes in drab clothing, accustomed to being ignored and secluded. And possessed, I believe, of a uniquely beautiful voice, if circumstance would ever allow.

Type One: The Invisible Real Women of Afghanistan

The largest segment of Afghan women are the urban poor, the rural population and the internally displaced living in camps. Their lives have barely changed over the past two centuries — never mind the past twenty years. The Communists tried, launching the only true effort to reform an entrenched system of deeply patriarchal, tribal, feudal oppression. The stakeholders of that system resisted, and in our zeal to beat the Soviets on this proxy battleground, we made sure they prevailed.

The lives of these women are sad and difficult. Their birth is regretted, their mothers scorned or even punished for having failed to produce a son. Their childhood consists of training for servitude, starting with their brothers, who are encouraged to order them about. Too soon, it is time for marriage, often to a relative or to a much older man the family wishes to please. Love is not present to soften the lot of these women, and given the segregated lives that reduce contact between husband and wife to a crude minimum, it has little chance to develop over time. A woman’s standing does not improve until she has adult sons; that gains her the right to lord it over her daughters-in-law, who instead of female solidarity, can expect one more tyrant.

What did America’s two trillion-dollar investment buy for this group of Afghan women, in terms of an improved standard of living? Spoiler alert: not much.

According to UNICEF, half of all deaths of Afghan women between the ages of 15 and 49 were attributable to untreated complications of pregnancy and childbirth — statistics straight out of the Middle Ages. In 2017, Doctors Without Borders declared Afghanistan “one of the most dangerous places on earth to have a baby.” This is the result of 15-plus years of Western projects and funding.

What about everyone’s pet project, education? No public speech about Afghanistan failed to tout this as the great triumph: “3.5 million girls back in school, four-fifths of primary school girls enrolled in class.” Wonderful. Applause. The only problem? It’s not true.

Human Rights Watch in 2017 reported that: “Sixteen years after the US-led military intervention that ousted the Taliban government, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not go to school.”

These are the things we failed to do. Here is what we did instead:

1. We created and coddled a tiny, entitled urban elite of professional feminists who were great on the Western lecture circuit but were disconnected from — and I venture to say, uninterested in — the actual lives of Afghan women, and who rarely used their privileges to benefit their poorer sisters.
2. We loved to build girls’ schools. It was fashionable, and we ignored early signs that the mantra “build it and they will come” wasn’t true for Afghanistan. There weren’t enough teachers, and the unending violence made it unsafe to undertake anything but a very short journey. It surely would have been better to build clinics instead, and trained traveling nurses and midwives, and focused on nutrition projects and water projects and basic public education on hygiene and first aid.
3. Then came 2021 and suddenly the Taliban were in Kabul, and we reacted with hysteria. A Plan B would have been judicious, a ready visa process in the event of imminent danger to educated people or high-profile activists. Instead, we preemptively grabbed as many male and female professionals as we could possibly shove onto airplanes — all the people with useful talents: doctors and nurses, journalists, women with artisanal skills, teachers, IT experts. Anyone who could have kept civil society, economic relations, social services and moderate values alive was hustled onto a plane and flown as far away as possible. Not an evacuation, more like a reverse cultural revolution that erased in the space of days what we had nourished over two decades.

How did we go so far off the rails? We had a goal: liberation and empowerment. And we had a theory. We had to educate Afghan women, make them economically independent and get them involved in politics.

I first glimpsed the missing piece of that formula in 2002. I was in my office at the RAND Corporation with a pile of reports and statistics about Afghanistan. What jumped out at me was a problem no one seemed to be seriously considering: the basic physical condition of the average Afghan woman.

Almost everywhere in the world, women slightly outnumber men and have a longer life expectancy. This is particularly the case in countries at war, because while the entire population suffers, the fighting is primarily done by men. But in Afghanistan, there was a clear overhang of males.

The reasons were no mystery. Good food and medical care were given first to boys and men. This made girls far more prone to illness and malnourishment, which led to stunted growth and immature bodies. Couple this with child marriage, and you have 12 and 13-year-old girls being impregnated, losing the baby, being berated for their failure and made to try again. Girls and women were dying disproportionately, of neglect, rough treatment, deprivation, withholding of care and physical abuse.

I also remember when I first began to question my deeply hostile attitude towards the Taliban. It was 2018. Russia had hosted a meeting about the peace process, and the Taliban had issued a “Moscow Declaration” explaining their platform. One section addressed the issue of women. As expected, I found the usual prevarication: women would have “all the rights guaranteed to them in Islam”, whatever that would mean in the interpretation of Taliban men.

But then came this:

“Women are faced with a lot of disasters. The so-called women rights activists stayed in Afghanistan for 17 years; in this period billions of dollars came to Afghanistan, but still Afghanistan is at the top of the countries where many women die during delivery due to lack of health facilities. Afghanistan is still among the top countries of the world where the average life expectancy rate of women is only 45. It is among the top countries of the world where there are more than one million widows. Due to corruption, the expenses brought and spent under the title of women rights have gone to the pockets of those who raise slogans of women rights…”

This was surprisingly empathetic. Nor could I disagree. Afghan feminists and their international supporters had not seemed to care about the bulk of the country’s women, had made no real attempt to address their most pressing “disasters”: lack of food, lack of health care and basic physical safety.

Personally, I had long since lost respect for the self-promoting feminists of Kabul, who knew exactly which Western buttons to push but deployed that skill almost exclusively for their own benefit. They loved attending conferences abroad, were expert at obtaining lucrative contracts to “train” each other in such skills as public speaking, leadership and “advocacy,” and enjoyed being celebrated for their “courage” in foreign news media. You wouldn’t find them in the provinces, trying to uplift rural women. And when leadership and their much-vaunted courage were urgently required, they decamped for the West. Like their country’s national army, they were a colossal disappointment.

Afghan Woman Type Two: The Living Success story

Afghan girls playing soccer. An Afghan woman street artist. An Afghan girls’ robotics team.

What else but extreme condescension explains the delighted surprise with which we received such stories? Why is it so amazing that Afghan girls can learn how to play a musical instrument or kick a ball? Why shouldn’t they be like any other girl in any other country, if given the chance? Given the dire situation of the average Afghan girl, were these really the activities that deserved our attention?

The American University of Afghanistan has an annual budget of 28 million dollars, with which it educates 1700 students, almost all on full scholarships, around half of them girls. The campus is beautiful, the infrastructure state of the art. Surely these students comprehended their great good fortune and were determined to give back to their countrymen and women.

But when the moment of truth arrived, they performed as spokespersons only for themselves. They wanted to be flown to the US — and who can blame them? These are the spoiled children of our bad parenting, the products of an education that taught entitlement over idealism. In the past, groups of them used to be brought to Washington DC and trotted out at gala fundraisers in five-star hotels. At the end of the evening, they’d be brought back on stage to press for additional donations.

To support some programme for the underserved, literacy tutoring for village girls, perhaps? No, they were prompted to ask for money for new sports jerseys, and everyone applauded and got out their check books. Wonderful! Afghan girls shooting hoops.

The adult members of the Living Success Story typically hail from affluent families or clans. Many have dual nationality or family overseas. They are well-travelled and have passports and visas. Most of them were well away even before the airlift.

Afghan Woman Type Three: The Bold Activist

But, you say, some educated women obviously stayed; we can see pictures of them demonstrating and joining in marches.

Let’s take a closer look. The activists’ debut took place in front of the Presidential Palace, eight women holding up signs demanding their rights, followed by slightly larger groups on subsequent days representing the same message before various public buildings. The photos show them angrily yelling and raising determined fists.

Will their demands be met? Am I confident that the Taliban intend to create an atmosphere of respect and safety for women? Not at all.

But let’s not fool ourselves. For most of that country’s women, an Islamic system would represent a step up, because the worst problems they confront come not from religion but from tribal traditions. Islam does not allow forced marriage and does not require women to cover anything more than what modesty demands; it does not ban them from public spaces, and it energetically prohibits Afghan customs such as settling disputes by giving a girl to the enemy clan as a slave.

The real worry is that the Taliban, not exactly a group of sophisticated theologians, will interpret their religion in the same eccentric way as last time. Last time they forbade the keeping of songbirds, which I promise you is a rule found nowhere in the Quran. Any outside help now can best come from other, more advanced Muslim societies and their religious scholars, and from educated women across the Islamic world who have dealt with, and surmounted, comparable challenges. Even last time around, though, they seemed to have some scraps of pity for women. It was a well-known embarrassment during the years of the Western-backed government that a Taliban court in one of the areas under their control would affirm a widow’s ownership of her land, while a government court was likely to accept a bribe from her greedy neighbour.

Afghan Woman Type Four: Madrassa Teacher’s Pet

The Taliban, goaded, had a response to “our” women’s demonstrations. They bused in hundreds of Taliban-supporting, slogan-shouting women in the most extreme form of all-black full-cover dress — the kind that Iranian feminist poets used to say made women look like crows — to march through the streets of Kabul and other cities in support of strict Islamic rule.

These women didn’t suddenly materialise out of the ether. They were educated in madrassas right under our noses, and in significant numbers, during the supposed years of enlightenment and freedom during the secular era we were so proud of. Yet we had no idea they were there.

This pitting of one set of women against another is a very unfortunate development, and it’s entirely our fault. “We don’t need women who left Afghanistan telling us what to do,” their banners read. A fair point.

I’m truly not sure where we go from here. Our twenty-year liberation experiment failed, to the tune of dizzying amounts of dollars. We invested in exotic frivolities and threw money at those who needed it least, and who have since proved all too ready to bite the hand that wrote the cheques. And so — as heartless as it sounds — it is probably best if we resist the “last temptation” and stay well away. And hope that one fine day, in her own time, in her own ecosystem, the nightingale will sing.

I have had several chances to visit Iraq since ISIS took hold in 2014. My first three trips involved having to bypass ISIS-controlled Mosul to reach the land where the Yazidi genocide was committed. I was there to meet survivors, as well as the admirable female fighters taking on the Islamic State, for my movie Sisters in Arms.

On my most recent visit, we were accompanied by a fleet of helicopters and were able to land in the former capital of the caliphate — the now-liberated Mosul. Standing in front of the ruins of the al-Nori Mosque, President Macron delivered a message of hope. This was the very place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had launched his murderous caliphate, only to blow it up in the face of defeat — a desperate attempt to hide behind a veneer of strength. Obscurantists destroy while democrats rebuild.

But unfortunately, the democrats sometimes leave a foundation so weak that they collapse in a few days. This is the disastrous spectacle that the world has witnessed in Afghanistan – hardly the outcome we might have hoped for twenty years after 9/11.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Lévy

The visuals are horrific: Taliban soldiers strutting around in GI uniforms, driving abandoned humvees, terrorising Afghan civilians, especially women, and ultimately crushing the final bulwark of freedom — the resistance in the Panjshir valley. Tragically, this was all accomplished with the help of weapons and equipment left behind by the United States.

Carefully coached by Qatar — the best PR firm for political Islam in the world — the Taliban claims to have evolved. It promises an “inclusive” government, but this includes only the old guard members of the Taliban and the worst incarnations of Salafism.

Afghanistan is now fated to become a sanctuary for jihadists — especially for a revitalised al-Qaeda. One Afghan chieftain who led Bin Laden’s “black guard” has already returned to the country in triumph, while Ayman al-Zawahiri, the brains behind 9/11, will likely now be protected by the Emirate of the Taliban.

Several failures explain this disastrous state of affairs. The most obvious was the failure to cut off the Taliban from the drug trafficking that funded them, as well as the failure to isolate them from their sponsors, the Pakistani Secret Service.

But the most important failing was not a military one. It was psychological: it was to fail to realise that you can only beat terrorism by attacking its ideological roots — religious fundamentalism. France and Europe realised this a long time ago — only to be labelled “Islamophobes” by parts of the American media whenever they dared to robustly defend secular values.

Some in the United States seem to believe that religious fundamentalists can embrace democracy overnight. They view Islamism through the prism of their own world, believing that everyone aims for the same thing — social justice. That blend of naivety and cynicism has even led some to suggest that the Taliban have changed. After all, that is what they promised, hand on heart, during the negotiations in Doha. Surely they were telling the truth?

A similar naivety has been displayed towards the Muslim Brotherhood, often presented as “democrats”, or even “largely secular”, in the American press. Even Hezbollah and Hamas have been described as “anti-imperialists”.

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Afghanistan always defeats the West

By William Dalrymple

Yet anyone who has closely studied Islamist movements knows that their acceptance of democracy is always tactical, viewed as a means to advancing theocracy and Islamic law. Any commitments given to the West are worthless; for the Taliban, Sharia law is the supreme goal.

Of all the extremist movements I have studied, from the ultra-religious Right to neo-Nazism, none has shown such talent at strategic subterfuge as Islamists. They know better than anyone how to instrumentalise democracy to promote anti-democratic views — or how to be victims of “islamophobia” while radicalising the muslim youth of Europe, convincing them that they would be happier in the shadow of a caliphate, rather than in secular democracies.

Of course, the American intervention in Iraq has not completely failed. Life for ordinary Iraqis in the Kurdish north is no longer the procession of massacres and executions that it was under Saddam Hussein.

But while they are freed from daily terror, Iraqi communities continue to eye each other with suspicion and bitterness. Some Sunnis continue to perceive ISIS as a form of protection against a government under the influence of Iran, which now arms Shia militias in the country’s many disputed areas.

The country continues to smoulder and the “Lebanonisation” of Iraq — its disintegration — remains a possibility, with the tiniest spark capable of enflaming the Sunni community once again to support a revived jihadist movement. Just like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS is waiting patiently on the sideline for the Americans to depart. Such an outcome would prove to be the final failure of American policy in the Middle East.

So is the era of Western “interference” dead?

Here, a distinction can and should be made between a neoconservative vision of values being inflicted by force and our duty to care about what is happening in the rest of the world. It is, after all, possible to support democracy without wishing to impose it from above by military means. Indeed, during President Macron’s visit to Iraq late last month, he specifically made this distinction and called for a new approach which he called “neither interference, nor indifference”.

It is unacceptable to undermine a country which poses no immediate threat to the rest of the world, nor has genocidal plans for its own people. But it is “indifference” to allow tyrants to thrive — first in their own countries, then globally.

For as more democratic — and “indifferent” — countries retreat, the more influence they abandon to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. These states have their own methods of interference, which have nothing to do with democracy or the desire to install democratic regimes. Quite the contrary; they are ruled by tyrants and dictators who see no problem with manipulating other countries with social media trolls and authoritarian state media outlets such as RT.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now that Afghanistan has been abandoned, the honourable course for Europe and the United States is not just to become a place of safety for those fleeing dangerous regimes. Rather, they must also support and protect democracy in the Middle East where it still survives; to champion the autonomy of countries or regions which act as refuges or alternative systems of government; to create “safe spaces”, if you will, for the ideals of democracy and equality.

It should be our great honour, and our duty, to support the miracle which is Iraqi Kurdistan, defended valiantly by the Peshmerga, and which has provided a refuge to millions of international displaced peoples from the region. This is now a rare island of relative peace and stability in the war-stricken area.

Likewise we must support the miracle of Rojava, the Kurdish northeast region of Syria, which upholds courageously progressive, secular, egalitarian and environmental values — those which the West claims to defend as its own.

This is an opportunity to remind ourselves that the Kurds are on the frontline, defending our common values. They must no longer be abandoned to Turkish bombardments, which recently targeted a hospital in Sinjar without any reaction from NATO, Europe or the United States.

Similarly, it should also have been our duty to protect the Panjshir region of Afghanistan and its National Resistance Front. This mountainous area was the last region to resist the Taliban, acting as a haven for those fleeing their rule. Panjshir was reported to have fallen to the Taliban last week but guerrilla resistance is likely to continue — as it remains in the streets of Kabul, where brave women and men are demonstrating against the Taliban and the interference of Pakistan.

Across the country, pockets of democracy to survive, as symbols of resistance to tyranny and optimism for a better future. Democracy grows from such places — from the bottom, not the top.

In our own interest — in the interest of freeing Afghanistan — we must not let these seeds of hope perish.

My mother could be fierce and she punished me frequently, but even then I knew that her threat was bluster. She might smack me, but she wasn’t going to take off any digits.

Empty threats are used as leverage to entice certain behaviour. But what if the threats are real? For the girls living under Taliban control in Afghanistan, threats are not theatre: they are promises. Even for transgressions as small as painting their fingernails, they face real consequences.

Saturday marks 20 years since the fall of the World Trade Center, a day that brought unimaginable devastation, heartbreak and loss to America. But if there was one glimmer of hope that came from that tragic moment, it was for the women and girls of Afghanistan. After 9/11, and the conflict that followed, a level of freedom unknown to previous generations came to their country.

I remember watching the planes crash on television. I was at work in the Netherlands at the time, and sat, horrified, with my colleagues. As we watched, we wondered how the world’s superpower would respond to such an evil attack on the American homeland. They certainly had the power, resources and reason to go and obliterate their newfound enemy. Sitting there, we could never have guessed that this tragedy would end up bringing more rights and freedoms to women in Afghanistan.

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How 9/11 created the surveillance state

By Jacob Siegel

The United States could have gone into Afghanistan, taken its revenge and left. President Biden’s continual defence over the past weeks has been that he was following the original plan. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11^th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.”

But this is not where the legacy of 9/11 ends. It was not all necessary revenge and retaliation. Instead, we offered to help rebuild and provide hope to those who had not had it before. Together with our Afghan allies, we built a more inclusive society for women and girls, in the belief that precisely this kind of modernisation would reduce the danger of a Taliban restoration.

As Adam Tooze explains in his brilliant Substack, from 2003 to 2018, the number of women enrolled in university rose from 7,200 to 49,000. Female life expectancy increased by almost 10 years from 2001-2019. “Whereas in 2000,” Tooze explains, “Afghan men lived longer than women, now Afghanistan has the normal pattern of women outliving their menfolk.” Rates of literacy among females more than doubled between 2000-2018.

A generation of girls was raised without knowing life under Taliban control. And they soared. In 2017, an all-girls robotics team was founded, known as the Afghan Dreamers, who went on to win the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the Robotex festival in Estonia. In 2008, Afghanistan saw its first female mayor, Azra Jafari, in the town of Nili. And she was just the first of many females to hold political positions, including Salima Mazari, Zarifa Ghanfari, and Fawzia Koofi. Women made up 40% of the most recent class of graduates from the American University of Afghanistan. They have their own all-female orchestra. Female entrepreneurs invested $77 million over 18 years, resulting in 77,000 jobs. Their rights were promoted by the 2004 Afghanistan Constitution in Article 44, stating that “the state shall devise and implement effective programs to create and foster balanced education for women”.

Their successes were awe-inspiring. They were also a source of pride for Americans. They were, in part, America’s girls — girls raised to know a certain level of freedom, with their rights secure and protected, thanks to the U.S.-led intervention prompted by 9/11.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme produced the Arab Human Development Report, aimed at providing a path for growth and opportunity in the Arab world. The report concluded that three factors contribute to the constraints of human development in the Arab world: “freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge”. Individuals needed to be educated beyond religious ideology, their human rights respected and women’s rights expanded. And for the last 20 years, the United States has supported women and these goals through the US Agency for International Development and State Department-funded programmes, as well as encouraging women’s participation in government and the private sector.

But now women’s rights are being ripped away. Biden’s betrayal reverberates sharply across the country. He offered a false dichotomy to the American people: either pull all troops out or go back to fighting an “endless war”. Pulling out the remaining US troops initiated the swift collapse of the Afghan government, will result in Afghanistan returning to a terrorist safe haven and removed the shield protecting women’s rights in the country. Surely this is not the legacy that Americans want to leave behind on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11?

The effects of Taliban control are already being felt by women. The Taliban have announced that women must cover their faces to attend university and genders must segregate, both in class and while entering and exiting the building. They are banned from sports, considered by the Taliban’s cultural commission as “neither appropriate nor necessary” for women. Women can no longer hold ministerial positions. There are no women included in the new administration. Some are being told not to go to work, allegedly a temporary change while the Taliban draw up new “women related procedures”. They face real violence if they disobey. Those speaking out against the Taliban are being deemed “agents of America” and accused of “not being true Muslims”. They are being erased from the public square. And the Taliban haven’t been in control for a full month yet.

What will happen to America’s Afghan girls? The ones born and raised since 2001. The girls inspired by the allure of freedom, liberalism, and chasing their own dreams. Those who have, until now, not known the crushing burdens and barriers of life under the Taliban. What will become of the defiant girls, who speak up for their rights? The ones who question the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban?

Many will suffer severe punishments. Violence will be unleashed against them in a magnitude that those in the West do not comprehend. Body parts will be chopped off. Sexual harassment, rapes, honour violence and murders will become the norm.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

But, unlike before, this time is different. The women of Afghanistan will fight back. They’ve already begun. Protests are erupting across the country. Women of all ages are standing firm against the Taliban. In Kabul, women attempted to march to the presidential palace, “demanding the right to work and to be included in government”. They were attacked for it, with videos and photos revealing the bloody violence they faced at the hands of the Taliban. At a subsequent protest in Kabul, one woman stated: “We don’t care if they beat us or even shoot us. We want to defend our rights. We will continue our protests even if we get killed.”

At another protest in Herat, calling for girls’ education, one of the organisers, Basira Taheri, explained: “The women of this land are informed and educated. We are not afraid, we are united.” Pashtana Durrani, the Executive Director of Learn Afghanistan, a bulwark for Afghan women’s rights, said; “We are going to make sure [girls] get to go to school, they get to go to work. If not on the terms that we want in public, we’re going to make it happen anyways.”

As the saying, often attributed to Thomas Carlyle, goes: “Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.” The Taliban cannot undo the last 20 years. These women and girls are refusing to submit to a new Dark Age. That glimmer of hope, sparked after 9/11, has not been extinguished. Even with the Taliban in control, America’s girls aren’t going to give up.

And now the world is watching. Before 9/11, the atrocities committed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan received very little coverage in the West. Now, everyone knows names like Malala and Bibi Aisha. And we will come to know more names, like Basira Taheri’s, as we cheer them on. Two decades on, these women may be the most enduring achievement of the American intervention that followed 9/11.

They are defiant. And, as a former defiant girl, I can say with conviction that they can’t beat or cut that defiance out of you.

Meanwhile, the members of an al Qaeda cell were plotting.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were believed by many at the time to have awakened America from the post-historical fantasies of the 1990s. “We have been called out of our trivial concerns,” declared an editorial from September 19, 2001 in The Weekly Standard, the influential neoconservative publication known as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One”. This was a prominent attitude and not confined to the Right. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, in an interview published the day before, declared “the end of the age of irony” and predicted that “things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear”.

Twenty years later, the Taliban’s predictable takeover of Afghanistan is the final crushing defeat of America’s post-9/11 calling as the armed evangelist of global democracy. Instead of spreading the gifts of liberty to the Middle East, the crusading policy of the past two decades collapsed the guardrails of liberal democracy at home, undermined its appeal abroad and wasted America’s strategic power while enriching its ruling class.

Over those same years, the infrastructure of the War on Terror achieved a revolutionary transformation of the global order; albeit one altogether different from the liberalising mission it heralded. From the start, US intelligence agencies argued that the Internet comprised the key terrain of 21^st-century warfare and only by controlling it could they prevent another “intelligence failure” like the one blamed for the al Qaeda attacks in 2001. The unprecedented rise of Google, Facebook and Amazon, as hegemons of the new digital order in which “real life” is what takes place online, is in part the story of the American security establishment outsourcing its surveillance project to private information monopolies. In the process, the emerging digital economy amassed the greatest concentration of wealth in human history, while helping to systematically dismantle the American middle class and with it those institutions like the free press that made liberal democracy possible.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The Weekly Standard editorial from September 19th continues in the next line: “We have resigned our parts in the casual comedy of everyday existence. We live for the first time since World War II, with a horizon once again.” You couldn’t look at the carnage in downtown New York and the Potomac without seeing that the US had enemies who were both determined and savage. Salafist-jihadism is a millenarian cult, an authentic expression of Islamic fundamentalism and an ultra-modern totalitarian ideology. Formulating an effective response to networked and state-aligned terrorism that matched the severity of the threat without overstating its significance was not an easy task — which is why so many people got it wrong.

But the answer given by people with the President’s ear, to elevate the terrorist attack to mythological significance as the event that restored a lost horizon, set the mould for a naive triumphalism that led directly to Iraq and twenty years of delusion and defeat in Afghanistan.

Not everyone held such views, of course. There was some dissent even within the D.C. Beltway. But the Standard’s Republican version of Wilsonian Neoconservatism, which shared with the Democrats’ liberal interventionism almost everything but its cultural and stylistic tics, was the purest expression of a prevailing attitude in the American political and media classes. In a nation that had grown too comfortable and complacent, global jihadism offered a civilisational challenge. Our Islamist enemy would call forth a new “national greatness” in the American character, wrote the New York Times’ David Brooks.

The authors of this vision were nearly all baby boomers. Their call to forge a new generation’s greatness in battle against “Islamofascism” was a self-conscious attempt to recreate the heroic national destiny they had grown up venerating in the shadow of the Second World War. It was an understandable response to the strength and nobility of their fathers’ generation, but a fatal blueprint for American foreign policy.

This new call to arms was not purely a response to 9/11. One important source text was written in the summer of 1996 while Bill Clinton was in office. Together, the Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol and fellow influential neoconservative Robert Kagan co-authored an essay in which they developed ideas that would inform George W. Bush’s vision for the world, especially the “freedom agenda” put forth in his second inaugural address. The article lamented the “tepid consensus” that had taken hold after Ronald Reagan left office among conservatives who accepted a diminished role for America in global affairs.

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

Against what they called “the pinched nationalism” of Patrick Buchanan’s “America First” foreign policy, the authors presented a true “conservatism of the heart”. Under this maudlin title, they enumerated their aims: “To emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in American foreign policy.”

Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it at the time — certainly I was too caught up in my own anger and patriotic furore, which involved enlisting in the military in 2002 — but some 20 years later, the overwrought boyishness of these programmes for the making of “great men” makes for painful reading. In the pages of The New Republic, the emotionally precocious Peter Beinart championed a politics of “muscular liberalism”. Beinart’s twee recreation of historical mission was captured in his 2006 book arguing for why “Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”

So what did we get for all this talk of revived greatness and reborn heroism? We got Bush, the boyish president whose reputation for mangling the English language could never account for his genuine knack for grandiloquent oratory. We got Rumsfeld and Cheney, who were not quite the Strangelovian villains of lore, mostly because they were less cinematic in their foibles and more grubby and desperate. We got a new techno-Calvinist social dispensation and a permanent state of exception that blurs the line between terrorism and disease. We got generations of military generals who have been, with few exceptions, glorified hangers for uniforms overweighted with cheapened medals.

American soldiers who fought with honour know all too well that the heroism of our peers was a private affair, shared between comrades. There was nothing larger in it. No national greatness or unifying purpose. Any contact we had with real heroism only widened the gulf between us and our fellow citizens.

All in all, this quest has been a tragic disappointment. Rather than enlarging the stature of Americans, the effort to manufacture greatness had a miniaturising effect. Everything it touched became not only less heroic but less human. We wanted greatness, but we got simulations.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

Meanwhile, in the same years that the measure of man was being stunted, another type of anti-heroism — this time in a technological form — was coming to rule over the planet. Even before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the budding War on Terror had already begun to metastasise into a permanent bureaucracy. Word of the “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) programme was leaked to the New York Times, which reported on the initiative in 2002 while it was still in development.

Headed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), TIA intended to create a universal data mining system in which every kind of information ever collected on a person would be collated in one database. US authorities could then query and analyse the data — which, properly interpreted, would contain a composite portrait of every individual alive — with algorithms designed to detect patterns identified with criminals and terrorists. For its logo the group chose the eye of providence, that always reassuring image from the one-dollar bill of an eyeball floating at the apex of a pyramid.

Once word got out about TIA, a backlash ensued led by both legislators and civil liberties groups and the programme was shut down. But what we now know — thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 — is that TIA didn’t end when the Government shut it down; it just took on new names as it spread far outside its origins at DARPA. Within the US government, TIA was a direct forerunner to the National Security Agency’s secret efforts known as PRISM to collect bulk data and spy on Americans’ communications. Just this past April, it was revealed that the US postal office was running a secret programme to monitor Americans’ social media activity for signs of “extremism” that would then be passed on to other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. As a specific office TIA is gone, but the principle that unconstitutional spying on Americans’ private behaviour is only limited by the possibility of getting caught lives on.

The true heirs to the Government’s efforts at total information control are companies like Google and Facebook whose businesses are based on luring people in with free services in order to extract their user data. In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes how the “state of exception” created by the Government use of special extra-legal prerogatives in the aftermath of 9/11 “favored Google’s growth and the successful elaboration of its surveillance-based logic of accumulation”. In other words, why would US intelligence agencies run their own collection programmes and have to worry about political scandals and Congressional oversight when they can just allow private companies to cast a legal surveillance net over the entire globe and then tap into the servers on the backend, like they did with PRISM.

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Washington was gripped by fear

By Justin Webb

In 2000, the year the tech bubble burst, there was a burgeoning effort in the US government, led by the Federal Trade Commission, to regulate the Internet and protect users’ privacy. Zuboff details how that came to an abrupt end after 9/11 as, “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism”.

Exactly 20 years after the survey that found “Optimism Reigns, Technology Plays Key Role,” Pew conducted another survey in 2019. Too much has happened to reduce its findings to any one cause, but its headline gives one indication of the direction that change took in the post 9/11 era: “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts: Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system.”

The soaring rhetoric employed by the architects of post-9/11 US policy promised to restore a classical grandeur to American democracy that had supposedly been lost in the “end of history” Nineties. Instead, they undermined its foundations and launched the United States into the anti-heroic era of human-bots, social automation and authoritarian technocracy.

Despite some bright moments, like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the rescue of the Yazidis from Mount Sinjar in 2014, the overall story hews more towards farce and tragedy. In the grief and rage following the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US collectively took leave of its senses and embarked on a generational project of warfare that entailed creating two overseas protectorates, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that inexplicable and indefensible project is over, stillborn and incomplete, as America retreats ignominiously from its obligations, reneging on its lofty promises. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, none of the instigators or cheerleaders for this disaster has suffered any career or reputational loss for their hubris or misjudgment, and almost no one has ever expressed regret.

It began with much more bravado in the early 20th century; wars were waged on two fronts with a casual arrogance that many seem to have forgotten. On 29 May, 2003, a few months after the US invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times declared on The Charlie Rose Show: “suck on this…We could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”

Meanwhile David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter of George W. Bush, co-authored a belligerently pro-war book with the hyperbolic title An End to Evil in 2004. Before the invasion, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article titled “The Great Terror” for The New Yorker, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in genocide against the Kurds, offering a compelling humanitarian rationale for the invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s overthrow.

Goldberg wasn’t alone at that august magazine, with storied foreign correspondent George Packer also being an invasion supporter. William Kristol, arguably the most prominent turn-of-the-century neoconservative, contributed The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission in early 2003, and predicted a two-month rather than eight-year conflict. At the highest levels of the American government, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred with their advisors that the best way to win the “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was to invade and conquer a secular nation-state, Iraq. Leading national security lights such as Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer encouraged Bush and Cheney and then attempted to execute their imperialist vision.

Somehow, all this seemed reasonable to 72% of Americans in 2003. America was the land of promise and possibilities. At the turn of the millennium, the US budget surplus was $230 billion. America was 30% of the world economy, and Russia and China were both considered geopolitical allies. The protracted dispute over the 2000 presidential election actually convinced many that the democratic system in the United States of America was robust even under stress. America at the turn of the century was in the afterglow of Cold War victory, a hyperpower in a world where it was the singular imperial colossus.

But the world has turned sideways in a single generation. By 2020, the US had a $3-trillion-dollar budget deficit, and our share of the global economy had decreased to 25%, in large part due to the rise of China. Nearly 7,000 Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than double the number killed on 9/11. In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, and on 6 January this year the US Capitol was stormed by an enraged mob. To the broader world, the American colossus was looking a lot more like an American basket case.

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British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

The results of American hubris have been mixed at best for Iraq and Afghanistan. A conservative estimate is that more than 200,000 Iraqis and 250,000 Afghans have died since 2001 as a result of the invasions. Iraq’s democracy is shaky, having undergone an existential fright with the rise of ISIS in the mid-2010s. Afghanistan is now under Taliban rule, just as it was in 2001. America came to liberate, but in the wake of imperial conquest, the natives suffered through corruption, factionalism and civil war. Due to our all-volunteer army and reflexive recourse to deficit spending, most Americans did not experience the wars in a visceral or indirect manner. All the while, viscera were being splattered across the streets of Baghdad and Kabul as young men blew themselves up, inspired by a religious fanaticism in turn aggravated by American occupation.

Notably, while the consequences for the Iraqis and Afghans have been tragic, our social, intellectual and political elite have suffered no professional repercussions for their incompetence. On 2 November, 2001 Friedman asked us to “give war a chance”. Twenty years later, he continues to opine for The New York Times, pulling down a salary of $350,000 per year at a time when journalism as a profession is collapsing.

Goldberg, whose New Yorker piece burnished the humanitarian need for the overthrow of Hussein, was appointed editor of The Atlantic in 2016. Packer wrote a book, Assassin’s Gate, where he chronicles his disillusionment with the war. This was sufficient to maintain a sinecure at The New Yorker until 2018, when he moved to The Atlantic to work under his former colleague Goldberg. Frum has had a more chequered career, but that had little to do with his position on the War on Terror, and everything to do with his scepticism of the Republican stance on healthcare reform in 2010, illustrating the true red-lines in American politics.

Frum is now more often speaking to a centre-left rather than a centre-right audience (though still identifying as a conservative), but he is still comfortably ensconced in the American establishment. Similarly, Kristol has converted into a “Never Trump” “Biden Republican,” and is a member of good standing of the “Resistance”. His publication, The Bulwark, receives funding from centre-left foundations. Even George W. Bush, who was once a hate-figure for the Left, is now being rehabilitated. The man who unleashed two disastrous wars and whose decisions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands is now celebrated for his paintings of immigrants.

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What the Mongols did for us

By Razib Khan

Bush’s one-time viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has also taken up painting and become a ski instructor in his leisured semi-retirement. Meanwhile, his hawkish lieutenant Dick Cheney is now well regarded for his support of gay marriage, while Cheney’s daughter, Liz, is garnering respect and accolades from Democrats for her anti-Trump views following the 2020 election. Condeleezza Rice, also an anti-Trump Republican, returned to academia, but has also become a pop culture phenomenon, and has now been tapped to make guest appearances on The View.

The soft-glow Cheney rehabilitation is emblematic of the primacy of domestic political concerns in today’s American cultural landscape. Just a decade ago, he was being pilloried for his frank defence of torture. Today his anti-Trump stance gets more weight when determining whether he’s one of the “good ones” or “bad ones”. Despite how much foreign policy dominated American politics in the early 2000’s, the rest of the world has faded from view over the past decade. The 2016 and 2020 Democrat presidential candidates were both supporters of the Iraq invasion and hailed from the party’s more hawkish wing, Hillary Clinton being a major proponent of American intervention in Libya.

Under Trump, many conventional narratives surrounding national security and foreign policy flipped. Liberals and the intelligentsia came to love the CIA and FBI, and cast a sceptical eye on foreign powers like Russia. Kristol, the architect of the neoconservative intellectual project in the 2000s, has now become an icon of the anti-Trump faction, even lauded by mainstream liberals. Establishment intellectuals even now see Bush as a bulwark of American democracy, a contrast to Trump’s strongman tendencies.

It turns out that 9/11 didn’t change everything. Despite a decade of international adventurism in the 2000s that extended at lower wattage into the 2010s, the US remained a nation apart, focused on its own concerns. The pundits and politicians whose blunders in the early 2000s had grave consequences for nations far away suffered few ill consequences for their disastrous prognostications, short-sighted decisions and uninformed arguments.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

Bush is now allowed to be the pro-immigrant painter ex-president, not the executive who authorised extraordinary rendition and whose decisions pulverised two nations for a generation. Kristol’s legacy may not be as organiser of Bush’s imperial braintrust, but as the rebel against the Trump regime. Friedman remains one of the best-paid journalists in the country, while Goldberg is now editor of one of the nation’s most venerable magazines. Frum and Cheney have not changed their fundamental politics, but are now embraced by the liberal establishment thanks to their strident anti-Trump position.

Never mind that Cheney’s objection to Trumpism is rooted in the latter’s deviation from the disastrous foreign policy of the 2000s. The period in the middle of that decade when foreign policy loomed large as a polarising issue in partisan politics was the exception and not the rule, and the collateral damage abroad of American adventurism is out of sight and out of mind. The current President supported the Iraq War, while Kristol is now a Biden-defender against even the gentlest conservative criticisms.

Twenty years down the line, the American elite is somewhat chagrined to be reminded of the arrogance and ignorance they showed in the wake of 9/11. But they are the same elite that they always were, because their sinecures are ultimately yoked to the whims of domestic politics, not the horrors that American enthusiasms unleashed abroad. Once obtained, a position in the pundit and political elite is rarely subject to the vicissitudes of meritocracy. America is ruled by a soft and complacent aristocracy of error in 2021, just as it was in 2001 on the eve of the 9/11 terror attack. In that sense, it was a day that changed nothing.

The most infamous incident of the war was the retreat from Kabul, which began on the 6th January 1842. An entire army — 18,500 men — left the British cantonment, only to be annihilated by scantly-equipped tribesmen. In the myth of the war, only one British citizen, the surgeon Dr Brydon, made it through to Jalalabad six days later.

Brydon’s desperate escape on a collapsing nag became one of the era’s most famous images, in Lady Butler’s oil Remnants of an Army. Likewise, William Barnes Wollen’s celebrated painting of the Last Stand of the 44th Foot — a group of ragged but doggedly determined soldiers on the hilltop of Gandamak standing encircled behind a thin line of bayonets, as the Pashtun tribesmen close in — drummed home the terrible truth of the war. The world’s premier military nation had been brought low, it’s armies massacred or enslaved.

Defeat cast a long shadow. Perhaps it was that image of a desperate Brydon, half-alive outside the gates of Jalalabad, that deterred British policy-makers from further adventures.

Writing just before Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War 30 years later, George Lawrence, a veteran of the first conflict wrote, “a new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country . . . Although military disasters may be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be as politically useless . . . The disaster of the Retreat from Kabul should stand forever as a warning to the Statesmen of the future not to repeat the policies that bore such bitter fruit in 1839–42.”

Lawrence’s warning was still echoing when Harold Macmillan told his successor Alec Douglas-Home “as long as you don’t invade Afghanistan you’ll be absolutely fine.” Sadly, by the time John Major was handing over 10 Downing Street to Tony Blair, Afghanistan was a distant memory. In 2001, soon after the catastrophe of 9/11 Blair signed up with Bush to invade Afghanistan yet again. What followed was a textbook case of Aldous Huxley’s adage that the only thing you learn from history is that no one learns from history.

Britain’s Fourth Afghan War was to an extraordinary, near-absurd extent, a replay of the first. The parallels between the two invasions were not just anecdotal, they were substantive. The same group rivalries and the same battles were fought out in the same places 170 years later under the guise of new banners, new beliefs and new political orchestrators. The same cities were occupied by troops speaking the same languages, and they were attacked again from the same high passes. In both cases, the invaders thought they could walk in, perform regime change, and be out in a couple of years. Ultimately, in both cases they were unable to prevent themselves being pulled into a much wider, bloodier conflict.

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The media enabled Afghanistan's collapse

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The First Afghan War was waged on the basis of doctored intelligence about a virtually non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was exaggerated and manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically-driven hawks to create a scare — in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion. As John MacNeill, the Russophobe British ambassador wrote from Tehran: “we should declare that he who is not with us is against us… We must secure Afghanistan.” Thus was brought about an avoidable war with all its astonishing resonances with our situation today.

Take the puppet ruler — Shah Shuja ul-Mulk — the British tried to install in 1839. He was from the same Popalzai sub-tribe as Hamid Karzai. His bitterest opponents? The Ghilzais, who today are the mainstay of the Taliban’s forces. Taliban leader Mullah Omar was the chief of the Hotaki Ghilzai, just like Mohammad Shah Khan, the warrior who supervised the destruction of the British army in 1841. These parallels were largely invisible to Westerners, but frequently pointed out by the Taliban: “Everyone knows how Karzai was brought to Kabul and how he was seated on the defenceless throne of Shah Shuja” they announced in a press release soon after he came to power.

We in the West may have forgotten the details of this history that did so much to mould the Afghans’ hatred of foreign rule, but Afghans never did. In particular Shah Shuja remains a symbol of quisling treachery in Afghanistan: in 2001, the Taliban asked their young men, ‘Do you want to be remembered as a son of Shah Shuja or as a son of Dost Mohammad?’ As he rose to power, Mullah Omar deliberately modelled himself on the deposed Emir, Dost Mohammad, and like him removed the Holy Cloak of the Prophet Mohammad from its shrine in Kandahar and wrapped himself in it, declaring himself like his model Amir al-Muminin, the Leader of the Faithful, a deliberate and direct re-enactment of the events of First Afghan War, whose resonance was immediately understood by all Afghans.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Lévy

Hamid Karzai was particularly sensitive to these parallels. When I first published my book the First Anglo-Afghan War, Return of a King, in 2012, he called me to Kabul. Karzai quizzed me on the details over several dinners at his palace about the lessons this history can teach us. His view was that the US were doing to him what the British had done to Shah Shuja 170 years ago: “The lies Lord Auckland told Dost Mohammad Khan, that we don’t want to interfere with your country, that’s exactly what they tell us today, the Americans and all the others,” he told me. “Our so-called current allies behave to us just as the British did to Shah Shuja. They have squandered the opportunity given to them by the Afghan people. They tried to do exactly as they did in the 19th century.”

Karzai made it clear that he thought Shah Shuja didn’t stress his independence enough, and said he was never going to allow himself to be remembered as anyone’s puppet. After reading Return of a King, he substantially altered his policies to make sure he never repeated his forbear Shah Shuja’s mistakes. Hilary Clinton blamed his reading of my book for a chilling of relations between Kabul and the White House during the Obama years — according to a leaked email published in the New York Times after Wikileaks.

Ashraf Ghani, Karzai’s successor, was a noted academic anthropologist and economist. He’d stood on the TED stage in Berkeley, California and co-authored a well-received book on fixing “failed states”. Sadly he learned nothing from the lessons of history. Karzai was a skilful diplomat and an operator; Ghani was rude, lofty, impatient and arrogant. He pushed away tribal leaders with his lack of charm and politeness. He would tell clan elders who had trekked across Afghanistan to see him that they had “ten minutes” and he would take off his shoes, put his feet up on a stool and point them at petitioners — an act of huge rudeness in Indian and Afghan society. As we have seen, in the end, few were willing to die to keep Ghani in power.

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The man who lost Afghanistan

By Will Lloyd

For the Afghans, the First Afghan War changed their state forever: on his return in 1842, Emir Dost Mohammad inherited the reforms made by the British and these helped him consolidate an Afghanistan that was much more clearly defined than it was before the war. Indeed Shuja and most of his contemporaries never used the word “Afghanistan” — for him, there was a Kingdom of Kabul which was the last surviving fragment of the Durrani Empire and which lay on the edge of a geographical space he described as Khurasan. Yet within a generation the phrase Afghanistan existed widely on maps both in and outside the country and the people within that space were beginning to describe themselves as Afghans. The return of Shah Shuja and the failed colonial expedition which was mounted to reinstate him finally destroyed the power of the Sadozai dynasty and ended the last memories of the Durrani Empire that they had founded. In this way the war did much to define the modern boundaries of the Afghan state, and consolidated once and for all the idea of a country called Afghanistan.

If the First Afghan War helped consolidate the Afghan State, the question now is whether our current failed Western intervention will contribute to its demise. Afghanistan has changed beyond all recognition in the last twenty years. The cities have grown, people travel much more widely, thousands of women have been educated. Television, the internet and an ebullient media have opened many minds. It is impossible in such circumstances to predict the fate of the divided state of Afghanistan under renewed Taliban rule, even as the resistance begins to organise itself in the Panjshir Valley under the leadership of my old friend Amrullah Saleh, formerly the head of the NSD. But what the Afghan historian Mirza ‘Ata wrote after 1842 remains equally true today: ‘It is certainly no easy thing to invade or govern the Kingdom of Khurasan.’

For the truth is that in the last millennia there had been only very brief moments of strong central control when the different Afghan tribes have acknowledged the authority of a single ruler, and still briefer moments of anything approaching a unified political system. Afghanistan has always been less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted.

The tribes’ traditions have always been egalitarian and independent, and they have only ever submitted to authority on their own terms. Financial rewards might bring about cooperation, but rarely ensured loyalty: the individual Afghan soldier owed his allegiance first to the local chieftain who raised and paid him, not to the shahs or Kings or Presidents in faraway Kabul. Yet even the tribal leaders had frequently been unable to guarantee obedience, for tribal authority was itself so elusive and diffuse. As the saying went: Behind every hillock there sits an emperor — pusht-e har teppe, yek padishah neshast (or alternatively: Every man is a khan — har saray khan deh). In such a world, the state never had a monopoly on power, but was just one among a number of competing claimants on allegiance. “An Afghan Amir sleeps upon an ant heap,” went the proverb.

The first British historian of Afghanistan, Mountstuart Elphinstone, grasped this as he watched Shah Shuja’s rule disintegrate around him. “The internal government of the tribes answers its ends so well”, he wrote, “that the utmost disorders of the royal government never derange its operations, nor disturb the lives of its people.” No wonder that Afghans proudly thought of their mountains as Yaghistan — the Land of Rebellion.

This is now the problem facing the Taliban. As the Taliban transforms its military command into a government for Afghanistan, alliances and tribal configurations that kept two rival Taliban factions together in recent years are already being tested. Factional divisions began to emerge between the Quetta Shura and militant commanders farther east on the ground after the death of Mullah Omar in 2013. The result was a far-reaching realignment among Taliban factions — particularly between hard-line groups like the Haqqani network that wanted to escalate fighting and more moderate Taliban leaders who sought accommodation with Kabul and Islamabad.

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Can the Taliban bring peace?

By Aris Roussinos

It is too early to see if, and how, the different Taliban commanders from East and West Afghanistan, the Quetta shura and the Taliban political wing manage in Doha manage to settle their differences and succeed in control Afghanistan’s naturally centrifugal polity — certainly the recent campaign appears to have had far more disciplined and coherent coordination than any of us expected. Only time will tell if the movement remains united or splinters into regional Taliban fiefdoms.

What is the longer-term strategic picture now? Few will now trust American or NATO promises and we have handed a major propaganda victory to our enemies everywhere. India has lost a leading regional ally and Pakistan’s ISI believe they have won a major victory — Imran Khan went as far as saying that the Taliban victory meant the freeing of the Afghans from the “shackles of slavery”. Meanwhile China has announced it will do business with the Taliban regime, and reopen the Mes Aynak copper mine which lies beneath a major Buddhist Silk Road archaeological site. The direction the winds are blowing in is clear.

Britain’s Fourth Afghan War has ended, like the First, in ignominy and defeat. There is no Lady Butler or William Barnes Wollen around today to paint the explosions outside Kabul airport, or the desperate crush around American C-130 transport planes inside its perimeter. A Butler or a Wollen is not needed — images of both have already travelled halfway around the world on social media. The words of the First Afghan War’s first historian, Rev. G.R. Glieg, are as hauntingly apt in 2021 as they were in 1843: “Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.”

That was some time ago. More recently, the last time the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, in 1996, they found a previous president, Mohammed Najibullah, at the UN compound in Kabul. He, too, had been a puppet leader, supported by the Soviets. The Taliban seized him and tortured him and his brother to death, castrating him at some point. Their naked bodies were dragged through the street and hanged outside the presidential palace, as a warning to the populace. As a considered insult, funeral prayers for Najibullah were forbidden in Kabul.

On August 16^th this year, the American president Joe Biden gave a televised speech justifying his decision to withdraw his troops. Much of it was devoted to complaining about the conduct of the Afghans — the ones who had been left high and dry. “Afghanistan’s leaders gave up and fled the country,” he claimed. It would have been true with the addition of the word “some” — Hamid Karzai, for instance, stayed where he was, in Kabul. And if the president, Ashraf Ghani, took the opportunity to seek safety in the UAE, it may have been the memory of Najibullah’s grisly fate that encouraged him to flee. Or the fate of Shah Shujah. Biden, on the other hand, appeared entirely ignorant of how things go and have gone in Afghanistan. Ignorance is the general condition of many anti-imperialists in the West, and Afghanistan has paid heavily for it.

I am a novelist by profession. About twenty-five years ago, I found myself inexplicably possessed by a subject. I couldn’t understand it. I had very little interest in historical novels. I had never been to Afghanistan. But there was no alternative: I felt under a compulsion to write a novel about the First Afghan War.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Levy

The British invaded Afghanistan in 1839, replacing the Emir, Dost Mohammed (who fled) with Shah Shujah. Two years later, forces loyal to Dost Mohammed routed the British, killing almost all of them on their retreat. Dost Mohammed regained his throne and kept it.

Nobody, in the late 1990s, could understand why I was writing this. I could only shrug. I could see that something important was happening in Afghanistan while I was writing, but I submitted to the compulsion rather than investigate parallels. Very strangely indeed, at one point I had the unarguable conviction that my hero, in 1839, should look up into the sky and see jet planes flying westward. It made no sense, and it had to be done.

The novel was finished, and the bound proof was delivered. It was September 10^th, 2001. The next day I switched the television on, and understood what The Mulberry Empire had wanted to say.

At this time, I’d also been writing a weekly column for the Independent, and though I seemed like an unserious person to the editors, they occasionally let me write something about Afghanistan if there was nothing else going on. These are curious to read now.

I wrote that, when the Taliban destroyed the 6^th century statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan in March 2001, it was a harbinger of much worse acts of destruction. After the war started, mindful of Dost Mohammed’s tactics in the 1830s, it was absolutely clear to me that the Taliban had usefully melted into the mountains to regroup patiently. In an interview in March 2002, I complained with comic exaggeration that rather than an imperialist project, the West in Afghanistan was “going there for three months, sending sandwiches and then leaving again, which is a recipe for disaster”. Quite soon after, I wrote that in the end of our Afghan adventure, “when it comes to the point, we can evacuate in shame and dishonour”. And so it has proved.

All this was perfectly obvious to a fairly lazy novelist sitting in South London. Why the sequence of events has proved so astonishing to every Western commentator and politician is an interesting question, and unlike many things said to be an interesting question, this one has a fairly easy answer. They don’t know anything.

This is not much of an exaggeration, as Biden’s amazement at Ghani running for safety instantly shows. What has primarily driven all political decisions in the absence of understanding is something universally agreed upon. Imperialism was a very bad thing. No-one must ever be able to describe us, now, as imperialists. We must “start a conversation about Empire” — since this demand came fifty years after Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica was a bestseller, this did not quite mean what it seemed to.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There was plenty of very interesting work being done on empire, but not much of it seemed to enter into the “conversation” — neither Srinath Raghavan’s exceptional study of India’s transition from empire through the experience of World War II, nor Amartya Sen’s lucid understanding of how Empire both shaped and went on restricting India.

Instead, a soothing bromide like Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland was much preferred by the lumpenintelligentsia, however ill-informed or misleading. Sanghera’s approach to his subject was summed up by his account of the “brutal truth” that the Koh-i-Noor diamond ended up in the Crown Jewels after being seized from Ranjit Singh. He fails to mention that Ranjit Singh’s family had owned it for all of 36 years, having seized it from Shah Shujah as the price of hospitality. Still, the evils of imperialism emerge consolingly from the half story Sanghera tells.

What lies behind Biden’s decision is a horror of what people might think of us. This is never going to lead to a stable position. People might think that an unstable and wicked foreign state needs to be dealt with. People might also think that putting things right by moving in and running is wicked imperialism. The end result is that the West decides to move in; after a while, they get bored and nervous of bien pensant opinion; their President declares that twenty years’ presence is a “forever war” and the only solution is to run away, and anyway, look how expensive it’s been. We tried to get them to do stuff our way for, like, forever, and my God they just wouldn’t. Their fault, obviously.

Since there is clearly no appetite for an open-ended imperial commitment, with a viceroy in the Bala Hissar, the only realistic option would have been never to have engaged in the first place.

“Hang in there, sisters,” a groovy Greek commentator advised the women of Kabul last week, and that seems to be about the limit of our interest. The old imperialists, appalling as they were to our eyes, at least took the trouble to find out about these cultures and talk to them. Sathnam Sanghera sneers at the limit of engagements of the imperialists who were to be found “dining on curry and arak, chewing betel and smoking hookahs, forsaking beef, donning dhotis and growing moustaches.”

I doubt Sanghera’s knowledge of Pushto and Dari is as confident as Alexander Burnes’s, however, or his Sanskrit up to that of William Jones. I suspect, on a lighter level, that those imperialists who dined on curry were a bit better informed than the commentator in the Washington Post who, from an impeccably bien pensant position, informed his readers this week that Indian food is “the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based on one spice”.

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The man who lost Afghanistan

By Will Lloyd

We are never, now, going to be able to have an honest conversation about Empire. It would now be quite impossible to say on paper, for instance, that Fiji tried to join the British Empire in 1852 and was turned down flat. Or to talk about the establishment of the medical school in Agra in the 1850s. Or to suggest, as I did, that the heroic ability to fight off imperial annexation, whether in the 1830s or the 2000s, may carry something of a cost.

The current confused state of affairs is that we are perfectly certain that wrong is being done elsewhere, and something must be done, and, also, it would be terribly wrong to do anything but run away in order to put that wrong right, or at any rate excuse ourselves from being called names.

I dare say that the Taliban are going to settle in for an extended period of rule after a certain amount of initial bloodshed, just like Dost Mohammed on his glorious return. There was always considerable tension between them — parochial, tribal, Afghanistan-focussed — and the sophisticated internationalists of al-Qaeda they found themselves hosting. They might not want to go down that path again, and the West will stick to mouthing platitudes and leaving the men, women and children of Afghanistan in the situation they find themselves in.

What’s the alternative? Learn something about the long history and culture of those men, women and children? Talk to them in their own languages? That’s never going to catch on.

But it’s coming true with Biden.

And historians will never stop wondering what could have induced the 46th president of the United States to commit such a grievous error.

Is it the naïveté of a politician lacking any sense of history or tragedy, the one who took the Taliban at their word when they assured us of their peaceful intentions in Doha in February 2020?

Is it the cynicism of a president already looking ahead to his re-election and pandering to those in swing-states who are said to be fed up with “endless wars”?

Is it an effect of a swing of the pendulum between the four major poles of American diplomacy laid out by Walter Russell Mead: Wilsonianism and its democratic messianism; Jeffersonianism and its hard and fast isolationism; Jacksonianism and its reflex to give tit for tat, but only when US interests appear directly targeted; and Hamiltonianism and the formulation, so dear to France’s Montesquieu, that America’s only truly vital interests were those of peaceful commerce?

Or is this a new pole altogether? One pioneered by Barack Obama in August 2013, when he declined to enforce the red line that he had said would be irretrievably crossed if the Syrian leader resorted to the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens? The one at work when, without warning or any shred of moral or strategic interest, Donald Trump abandoned his country’s Kurdish allies, first in Iraq when he allowed the pro-Iranian militias to invade Kirkuk, then in Syria when he allowed Erdogan’s murderous proxies to enter Rojava? The one brought to its culmination in the present Afghan rout, this abject display of open desertion being broadcast live to the world and punctuated, as I write, by scenes of panic and chaos at Kabul airport that could easily be mistaken for those in Saigon in 1975?

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Is it, in other words, the consolidation of a trend that I first sensed almost twenty years ago, when writing American Vertigo and later developed in The Empire and the Five Kings? Gone the great power, which has jettisoned its dreams of exceptionalism, its ambition to be a shining city upon a hill! Broken, the gracious Virgilian thread that made the invention of America a new Aeneid whose mission was no longer to rebuild Troy in Rome or Rome on a grand scale in Europe, but to reinvent Europe with improvements! Onward toward a new pre-Columbian order in which the old empire, in retreat, no longer counts and makes way for the latter-day reincarnations of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Persia, Great Russia, Imperial China, and, as here, the new Ummah made possible by a radical misreading of the Koran!

It is too early to know for certain.

And each of these explanations is at least partially true.

But the time has come for a review of accounts.

And that review shows that what the most pessimistic of us feared must be booked not just as a loss but as an abomination in three parts:

1. The wolves are through the gate

They are hunting down the supporters of republican government and institutions, as well as my journalist friends from Tolo News.

They are sending women back to their fabric prisons after many thousands of them had tasted dignity and become accustomed to gender equality and the freedom to show their faces.

Sharia is the law of the land.

Lists of suspects, banned and “wanted” people are being posted at the entrances to neighbourhoods, sounding an ominous clarion call.

Islamic tribunals will soon be operating at full speed, with their absurd crimes and atrocious punishments.

And the scenes of stoning that have been filmed over the past few months in remote villages will be reenacted live in Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, sites of high civilisation where the descendants of horsemen and poets had begun to embrace the democratic dream.

A people are in agony.

The triumph of a strain of barbarism that, twenty years ago, the great democracies and their Afghan allies easily defeated and whose legions of rabble on motorbikes are no more formidable today than they were back then.

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The narcissistic fall of France

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And of naïveté, when the American administration, speaking through national security adviser Jake Sullivan, adds credulity to dishonour by accepting the Taliban’s word that it is ready to “protect” civilians seeking to be evacuated from the country while offering dubious evidence of good intentions.

Worse than a crime, this is a mistake.

And, worse than a mistake, it is a stain.

A stain on the term of Joe Biden, whose first dramatic error this is.

But also, in a greater sense, this stain dishonours the modern conscience. It will take a long time for that conscience to forget this failure, this shame.

2. And what of the United States?

Already devalued by the sacrifice of the Kurds on the altar of appeasement, first toward Iran (the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq) and then toward Turkey (the Kurds in Syria), the word of the United States is suddenly worth nothing.

Imagine you are a Ukrainian in Donbass battling, in the trenches of Luhansk or Donetsk, pro-Russian separatists and mercenaries in the pay of the Kremlin.

An Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh who has learned that the resentment of those pining for a return of the Ottoman Empire and denying the genocide of their ancestors knows no bounds or limitations.

Or a Taiwanese, South Korean or even a Japanese sensing the nearby presence of the iron jaw of Chinese totalitarianism just waiting to bite.

To say nothing of the Balts, the Poles, the Czechs — of Europeans, in other words — who had been living, like the generation of the founders of Europe, in the belief that venerable old treaties protected them and ensured their security.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

What do they all think of this self-inflicted Saigon? This geopolitical suicide? How can they avoid ruminating on the betrayal and massacre of Carthage’s Punic allies, as recounted by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô, when confronted with this spectacle, this disarray in a diplomatic system that has made the inexplicable choice, just weeks before the anniversary of September 11, of returning Afghanistan to the terrorists on a silver platter and allowing them to build a nest for the vipers of the new Al-Qaeda and their ilk? When confronted, yes, with the direct, deliberate and slow-motion abandonment of a people who, like the Kurds, were our rampart against radical Islam and protected the world from terrorism? Under the circumstances, how is it possible not to conclude that if Putin, Erdogan or Xi got it in his head to fill part of the void created by the American retreat there would be no one to oppose him?

Dizzying.

An Afghan Anschluss.

Munich on all fronts.

And even if one must be wary of comparing the incomparable, this is truly terrible.

3. But then, there is Panjshir

There remains, living in his homeland of Panjshir, one young man, Ahmad Massoud, son of the legendary Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who, in his day, embodied the struggle against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and who was assassinated two days before September 11.

A few days ago, just a few hours after the fall of Kabul, the young Ahmad Massoud was able to elude the hired killers sent to track him down.

Knowing that if they captured him, he might suffer the same fate as his illustrious father, he did exactly what his father had done, a little less than twenty-five years ago, after the first fall of Kabul, when he managed to get hold of one of the last old helicopters that the Taliban had not yet taken over and took refuge in his bastion in Panjshir, above the Shomali Plain, to organise the Afghan resistance.

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He wrote to me from his native village on Monday (16 August), several hours after rejoining his commanders.

“We find ourselves,” he wrote, “in the situation of Europe in 1940.”

The debacle is complete, he continued.

The spirit of collaboration is all around us.

Subjugation is closing in with sound and fury.

As Kabul groans, as the villages of the north and south are put in chains, vengeance is unfurling over our wounded land.

But despite reversal and even catastrophe, all is not lost, he told me.

With my Mujahideen, I intend to resume the struggle.

I call on all free women and men in the world, friends of Afghanistan old and young, to join us in spirit.

I call on all free fighters from all over the country, whatever their origin or ethnicity, to come to our valleys.

Already, he continued, groups of brave citizens are moving to the front with their creed, their bravery, and their antique rifles and grenade launchers.

I welcome them!

They will be — we will be — the living faces of the Resistance, and, soon enough, of the counteroffensive.

Free Afghanistan has lost Kabul, but it has not lost the war.

Massoud’s words were the words of the Spanish republicans in 1936.

Of Czech president Beneš in 1939 and of Alija Izetbegović, in 1992, at the height of the siege of Sarajevo, when he gave me a dramatic message to pass on to French president François Mitterrand.

Almost word for word, they are the words of General de Gaulle’s radio address to his defeated countrymen in June 1940, broadcast from London, in which he urged them not to submit but to continue to fight.

Except that the Afghans were betrayed, the young Massoud pointed out. Betrayed but not defeated. And they were not defeated because their leadership, their generals, did not even take them into battle.

* * *

I know this young man, just as I knew his father.

I have done numerous video interviews in the mountains of Panjshir, where, for a year, Massoud has been quietly preparing for the worst and stockpiling arms, equipment and supplies, as his father had done.

I trust him.

I believe him when he says he inherited from his father the taste for freedom and the instinct of fighting to defend it.

I believe him when he insists that he has no choice and that the fight is now ineluctably his, body and soul.

I believe that when he issues a call for all free Afghans who love their country and reject servitude, whether living in Afghanistan or abroad, to join him, he is not only sincere but credible.

At my initiative, France’s President Macron received him at the Elysée Palace on April 5, 2021.

I was present at that meeting, where the best of France appeared to have a rendezvous with an heir to the noblest anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist struggles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

And I am convinced that, in the new Great Game that lies ahead, it is this young man whom France, Britain and the rest of Europe will have to support.

In this area of the world, he is the embodiment of the future and of hope.

It is more dispiriting, from a British perspective, to realise that our own elites are, if anything, even worse. Observing the efforts of backbench Conservative MPs to summon up interest in a crusade to defend the Kabul government’s writ on a country where its own regional governors and security forces are either surrendering en masse to the Taliban or actively defecting to their side is concerning enough. When we see our defence minister doing the same, we should be worried.

As I begin writing this article, Kabul’s sphere of influence barely extends to the city limits; whether it will extend that far by the time I’ve finished is doubtful. President Ghani has fled the country; the Taliban are inside the presidential palace. There is no Afghan state left to defend. There is no Afghan army to support. And even if there were, given the British Army’s total inability to pacify one single Afghan province, Helmand, with the constant support of American air power that will no longer exist by the end of this month, it is far beyond our capacity even to dream of doing so. It is no good saying something must be done, after twenty failed years of trying everything. The Afghan war is over, and we lost.

Equally, the meaningless noises being emitted by Labour’s leadership that somehow the UK can gather key stakeholders around a table and hammer out a solution that is distinct from Taliban victory are simply gibberish of the highest order. The Taliban is already doing so, negotiating the surrender of the Kabul government’s military and administrative functionaries through the mediation of tribal elders and religious clerics, and are doing so far more effectively than Lisa Nandy will ever be capable of.

Indeed, the central fact of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan over the past two weeks, under-emphasised though it may be by the solipsistic tone of Western discourse, is precisely how little fighting has been involved. The Taliban has taken over provinces one after the other with barely a shot being fired. When even long-time anti-Taliban leaders like the veteran warlord Ismail Khan, who once ruled the western region of Herat like a medieval king, are meekly submitting to their rule, or even being deployed to Kabul to negotiate the Government’s surrender on the Taliban’s behalf, the ability of even such diplomatic titans as Starmer’s front bench to change the outcome of the war must be firmly ruled out.

If anything, the nature of the Taliban takeover offers glimpses of how they may approach their second period of rule. Their emphasis on seizing power, in these final stages, through negotiation rather than open conflict, accords well with traditional Afghan, particularly Pashtun, systems of dispute settlement.

In fact, the nature of the transfer of power elicits many parallels with the newish social-scientific sub-discipline of rebel governance studies, which aims to unsettle the Hobbesian norms dominant in International Relations theory which hold that only states can provide stable governance, and that non-state actors necessarily leave anarchy and violence in their wake.

This is not so: a burgeoning crop of academic literature focusing on rebel governance in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East highlights how, in fact, non-state actors across the world win popular support or at least acquiescence through a variety of methods, including the provision of services such as justice and dispute resolution, medical services, sharing of power through local government and appeals to traditional or other forms of moral authority not open to either the central state or external intervening powers.

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As it happens, I’m currently engaged in PhD research looking at rebel governance in Northeast Syria manifest by the Kurdish-led, radical Left-wing Democratic Union Party. The initial Taliban effort, despite their coming from entirely the opposite ideological pole, strongly suggests the utility of this approach in divining what Taliban 2.0 rule may look like for Afghanistan. Firstly, as already noted, the Taliban’s recourse to mediation through pillars of traditional moral and political authority like the clergy and tribal leaders in seizing power supports observations social scientists have derived from fieldwork in Afghanistan.

The counterinsurgency, or COIN doctrine, that so enamoured American generals and their British military hangers-on in the early and mid-2000s, held that external intervening powers could “lend” legitimacy to the embattled central state through infrastructural and other projects, which led, in Afghanistan’s case, to ambitious and ultimately fruitless showpiece schemes like the British Army’s escorting of equipment for a hydroelectric dam across Taliban-held Helmand.

Yet fieldwork in Afghanistan especially shows the precise opposite: the dependency on external powers taints the central government it is intended to support in the eyes of traditional rural populations, who are generally unsupportive of foreign occupations. COIN doctrine is based on a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of political legitimacy: local actors, embedded within and drawn from the ranks of local populations, will almost always be able to outcompete both the central state and even the most well-meaning and idealistic of colonial administrators in the battle for hearts and minds.

Already, the Taliban have issued numerous proclamations assuring the administrative functionaries of what we must now call the former government of amnesty: captured soldiers are being released, surrendered regional governors escorted back to Kabul, and bank workers, street cleaners, school teachers and traffic police told to resume their work — with some exceptions. Female bank tellers have, apparently, been ordered home in Herat, and replaced with their male relatives; female school teachers told they are only allowed to continue working if they don the chador, and their female pupils the hijab. Taliban governance in its second iteration is likely to be as restrictive for women as it was in its first.

This does not necessarily dampen the group’s legitimacy across the country; indeed, in the conservative rural provinces it may well enhance it. Yet in any case, the United States did not enter Afghanistan to advance the rights of women: if that was the West’s overriding concern, it would not have helped topple the previous communist regime, for whom gender equality was a major cause.

The cause of advancing gender equality in Kabul or Herat or Mazar-i-Sharif is a noble one, yet if the downstream consequence of enabling women’s rights in the cities is CIA-backed death squads murdering teenage boys in their village homes at night, the moral calculus is less clear. Biden, like Trump before him, has made the conclusion that the costs are not worth the benefits. Whether, once Taliban rule is secured, both international and local pressure can salvage some of the gains made for Afghan women is an open question  There is, at this point, no other alternative policy in any case. We shall see.

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This is not to underplay the brutality the Taliban are capable of. Working in Herat in 2014, I met and interviewed harmless Afghan peasants who had their fingers amputated for the crime of voting in the country’s democratic elections, part of the Taliban campaign to dissuade ordinary Afghans, through fear, of engaging with the rival central government. Already we have seen Taliban fighters summarily execute members of government-backed militias they accuse of atrocities against captured Taliban, and they have announced that there will be no mercy for either the country’s erstwhile president Ghani or the Uzbek warlord Marshal Dostum, both of whom, in any case, seem to have already fled the country.

Yet as the rebel governance literature shows, most violence occurs when control of a country is contested between two forces of more or less equal reach: once firm dominance is established by either party, local legitimacy tends to be achieved by amnesties in exchange for submitting to the victor’s authority, a process which we see occur in civil war after civil war. In any case, it must be noted that the measured application of brutality as often affords local legitimacy as it erodes it. The Taliban began, after all, as a local protest movement against the sexual abuse of young boys by warlord militia commanders, who they then hanged from tank barrels to local acclaim.

But the Taliban doesn’t just seek local legitimacy: for their rule to thrive they also need international legitimacy, and though it is very early days, much of their recent output seems designed to secure it. They have already reassured both China and Russia that they have no desire to export disorder beyond their borders, and are likely to be rewarded with recognition, and even investment, once they take Kabul.

For the Taliban to secure recognition from the European Union, which is keen to either continue or resume the deportation of Afghan asylum seekers from within its borders, it will be necessary to avoid the ethnic and sectarian persecutions that marred their previous term of rule. Already, we have seen the Taliban assure Shia worshippers that they will be allowed to worship openly under Taliban protection, and have appointed an ethnic Hazara governor for the Shia ethnic Hazara Bamiyan region, where they have taken control, so far, without firing a shot.

Their seizure of power first focussed on the the Dari and Uzbek-speaking strongholds of the Northern Alliance that had long resisted their rule, with the result that they now control more of the country than they did on 9/11. Minorities with long histories of resistance against and persecution by the Taliban will naturally fear what will come next: yet if the price of international recognition from external powers is delegation of local governance to ethnic minority leaders — as we are already seeing — and the avoidance of senseless killing for the sake of it, then there is every chance that this is what will result.

The present-day Taliban has already shown itself as a sophisticated and competent diplomatic actor on both the world and local stage: it is far from certain that they are so wedded to killing that they will forego the lavish reconstruction money certain to head their way if they can avoid it.

As for recognition by the United States, it will surely come in time: the Taliban were welcome diplomatic interlocutors before 9/11, and their campaign against their mutual enemy the Islamic State, which will now be pursued with all the American weaponry they have captured from the collapsing Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, will eventually make them a useful, if distant de facto partner.

It is strange to see an American foreign policy establishment which urges American engagement or even support for Syrian jihadist factions ideologically indistinct from the Taliban so distraught at the outcome in Afghanistan. If a qualified outreach can be made to even former al-Qaeda factions in Syria, including ones led by veterans of the Afghan jihad deployed by the al-Qaeda leader himself, on the basis that they promise not to attack the West, then it is difficult to see why the same logic cannot be applied further from the West’s shores.

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Whether or not the Taliban will continue to provide a haven for the al-Qaeda leadership is another question: but America’s notional ally Pakistan already does, with little censure. In any case, as in northwestern Syria, the United States retains the capability to assassinate senior al-Qaeda figures through carefully targeted drone strikes with minimal collateral damage, and with far less costs involved than in the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

So, at this stage, it looks like we are observing the dying days, even hours, of the American phase of the Afghan War. We must hope that the end of Afghanistan’s more than forty years of civil conflict are also drawing to a close. Afghanistan will still need Western support for reconstruction, the financial lures of which ought to be used to salvage what can be salvaged of the genuine advances for human rights made over the past two decades across the government-controlled portions of the country.

Whether the Taliban leadership, in Doha or in Pakistan, can maintain effective enough control of their fighters on the ground, buoyed by victory, to prevent a repeat of the urban fighting that destroyed Kabul in the 1990s is now the most pressing question; whether the assurances of amnesty and cooperation the Taliban leadership are giving its defeated opponents can be trusted, or whether they will revert to totalitarian excess, is the next.

Yet if the initial signs of Taliban political outreach to its conquered enemy are sustained over time, then the results might be similar to the 2001 offer they made to hand over Bin Laden for trial and engage in power-sharing negotiations, which the Americans rebuffed. Perhaps some Western leader, somewhere, will learn something from all this: from the evidence so far, that remains doubtful. But either way, whatever happens in Afghanistan now is up to Afghans to decide.

The speed of developments has been dizzying, and is forcing neighbouring countries and international organisations to plan on the hoof. Many have opted to close their embassies and consulates, and evacuate their staff. The UN is pulling out most of its internationals — the UNDP, for example, is down to a handful in the country. Multiple border crossings — with Tajikistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, and (on Wednesday) with Pakistan — have fallen to Taliban control, blocking customs revenue which is practically the only source of government income except for international aid.

The Taliban, a highly decentralised franchise-style operation, but with an excellent social media team, have been broadcasting videos of Talibs repairing roads in Kandahar, treating captured government soldiers well, and ogling vast mounds of captured American-sourced rifles and ammunition. The most poignant videos are of young Talibs enjoying swings and slides in children’s playgrounds, perhaps savouring for the first time the childhoods they never had.

But nobody is fooled: this week a gruesome video surfaced showing Taliban militants executing surrendering Afghan government soldiers. The veracity of this content was denied by the Taliban but confirmed by CNN. It’s clear that the advance of the Taliban is a complete disaster for the young, educated, progressive generation, who are used to the internet, and music, and mixing between the sexes — to normal life, in other words. And it’s doubly worse for the women, who, under Taliban rule, would be unable to, among other things, leave the house without a male relative .

Many of this generation are making increasingly desperate attempts to flee the country. The US has made belated efforts to accelerate the relevant visa programme and get them out of the country, but it is bittersweet for many Afghans: they feel utterly betrayed by the United States and its allies. Meanwhile the Taliban leadership, based in Qatar, have been touring the neighbouring countries, meeting with government officials, acting like a government in waiting.

But what has happened is government weakness, rather than Taliban strength. Many of the districts that have recently ‘fallen’ were remote districts, difficult to supply, and only possible to maintain with western air support. In June, the Defence Ministry decided to retrench from many of these areas in order to concentrate on strategic defendable areas (a retrenchment the Americans had been encouraging the Afghan government to make for over a year). Now, the government still controls the cities, and has an air force, which the US has stated they will continue to support (with spares, contractors, and repair facilities in other countries). The US will also continue channelling massive amounts of financial aid into the Afghan government. After the USSR pulled out of the nation in 1989, the Afghan government managed to survive with Soviet funding — until 1992, when that funding dried up. And it will probably survive now, at least in the medium term.

The deluge of videos and reports ricocheting around social media shows that the Taliban is a fractured movement. Local aid workers and contractors report that they are being taxed by the “Taliban” to continue their projects in an area, and then the next day being taxed by other “Taliban”. Some government prisoners are allowed to go home, others are executed where they stand. In some areas locals are left alone, in others they are being whipped for minor infringements. At a local level, many Talibs are fighting for individual, rather than “national” reasons.

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At a higher level, there appears to be an internal argument within the Taliban between the political and military strands of the movement. The political leadership, conscious that Afghanistan will need international aid on an ongoing basis, seem to be pursuing negotiations in order to become a legitimate government recognised by the global community. The military side, flush with their recent advances, are convinced they can take over Afghanistan by force, much like they did in the 1990s.

It’s also not clear to what extent different factions within the Taliban are working together, or will work together if they get closer to government. A range of groups with very different interests united against American occupation — now that it’s over, they’re likely to fall on each other. This is especially true when you consider that the Taliban political leadership just announced that they will ban opium production and trafficking if they get into power — many factions, like the Mansur drug networks, depend on the trade.

The most likely scenario, then, is a stalemate, with the government controlling the cities and most of the ring road, and eventually regaining control of their border posts, which the Taliban don’t appear to know how to operate anyway. Any negotiations between the Taliban political leadership and the government are unlikely to be successful. There are just too many sticking points, like women’s rights; neither the Taliban nor the government can concede enough while maintaining the support — from the military wing of the Taliban and the Kabul progressives, respectively.

But it’s not just Afghan politics that’ll shape the aftermath of America’s withdrawal. Geopolitics abhors a vacuum. All eyes are on China, a nation with huge interests in Afghanistan — centred around minerals, counter terrorism, and connectivity via its Belt and Road Initiative. Like every other surrounding power, it has hedged: its offer of development funds to rebuild infrastructure has been made to both the Taliban and the Kabul government. In return the Taliban leadership have declared the Uighurs an “internal affair” for China — an astonishing about-face for a movement that hosted Uighur separatists in the 1990s and 2000s. Given some factions are distinctly pro-Uighur, this declaration may well make it even more difficult for the Taliban to hold together.

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Until recently, China outsourced a lot of its Afghanistan policy to its ally Pakistan, but this might be about to change. Pakistan’s actions in supporting the military wing of the Taliban are seriously increasing the chance of a civil war. Completely missing from most media — as they breathlessly chart the advance of the Taliban —are multiple credible reports of Pakistanis fighting against Afghan government forces. Meanwhile, Talibs wounded or killed in Afghanistan are being taken back to Pakistan for treatment or burial — something even admitted by the Pakistani Interior Minister in late June. But Pakistan’s government has realised (not for the first time) that it doesn’t control its proxies in Afghanistan. It will likely come under increasing pressure from China to do just that. Bizarrely, the US did little to reduce Pakistani influence over the years, preferring instead to fund the Afghan government, at the same time as funding the Pakistani government, who were funding the Taliban, who were fighting the Afghan government and NATO. No wonder Afghans are disgusted with the US.

Pakistan’s ideal scenario is a negotiated settlement leading to a friendly Taliban government in Kabul — a deeply worrying prospect to Pakistan’s old nemesis India, which has a long-standing and deep relationship with the Afghan government. India has reached out to the Taliban leadership, unsuccessfully, and is now actively considering training Afghan troops, as well as other means of supporting the government military effort. Afghanistan to India is, of course, a way to challenge Pakistan’s regional foreign policy.

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Afghanistan is, then, an arena in which conflicts between multiple nations are playing out. There’s also jostling between China and Russia. The latter doesn’t share a border with Afghanistan but its proxy, Tajikistan, does. A couple of weeks ago, over 1000 Afghan soldiers fled to the neighbouring nation, raising concerns that the conflict would spill over. Memories of Tajikistan’s own civil war, in the 1990s, are still raw. Russian troops in Tajikistan are considering deploying to the border to help seal it, with the very highest levels of the two militaries in discussion. In the last decade, China has been steadily usurping Russia’s traditional influence in the Central Asian states; it’s not clear how a Russia military deployment so close to China would be viewed in Beijing.

Plenty of other countries have skin in the game, too. For instance, Iran’s traditional proxies in Afghanistan — the Shia Hazara — have among the most to lose to a Taliban takeover, because the Sunni Taliban view the Shia as basically non-Muslims. It is inconceivable that Iran would leave them hanging — particularly after many Hazara recently fought in Iranian-organised brigades in the Syrian conflict. They’ll support and further arm the Hazaras as the conflict progresses, pouring yet more weaponry into a country where the price of a Kalashnikov is already among the cheapest in the world.

In the midst of all this, there’s a distinct lack of global power-broking. The one organisation that could provide a framework for regional political discussions, the UN, is largely absent, not being the fastest moving bureaucracy. And so, everyone is stuck: assessing the situation, hedging their bets, and waiting. Meanwhile, the Afghan government is clinging on for dear life. It’s likely to survive, but there’s a distinct possibility it will collapse and Afghanistan will fragment, with some areas going to various parts of the Taliban franchise, some areas going to local warlords, and at best a rump Kabul government remaining. At this point, the nation would be a free-for-all, with outside powers diving in to protect their interests and support their proxies in the hope that they can gain ascendancy — or just survive. And this chaos would be the worst of all possible outcomes, for everyone, but above all, for the Afghans.

The US has promised to remove all its forces from Afghanistan by 11 September this year, and there is something astonishing about the world’s hyperpower agreeing to a date that will become doubly resonant not of American victory but of American failure. Were America leaving Afghanistan after 20 years of spent blood but with a thriving, stable Afghan society, then it is possible that the whole exercise could still have been marked up as a success. Instead, the opposite is true.

After two decades of insurgency, open warfare and betrayal, the US and her allies are leaving an Afghanistan that could be overwhelmed by the Taliban at any moment. Only yesterday, just hours before Boris Johnson announced the end of Britain’s military mission in Afghanistan, Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the UK Defence Staff, revealed that the Taliban now holds “nearly 50% of the rural districts”.

Suhail Shaheen, the Islamist group’s spokesman, this week warned that all foreign troops must obey the withdrawal deadline — a demand that the Biden administration has so far displayed every indication of following. Yet it would be wrong to think Biden is solely to blame. As wildly different administrations have come and gone in the past two decades, a vacillating commitment to the Afghan operation has remained a constant.

Perhaps it is inevitable that when a conflict goes on for so long, people, including politicians, eventually switch off. But even without that, I suspect that many would have tired of the Afghanistan war long before this grim season finale. For the truth is that if there is no point in fighting wars you’re going to lose, there is even less point in fighting wars you’re going to lose slowly.

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In hindsight the outlines of the Afghanistan disaster were clear from an early stage of the conflict. The US and her allies went in to ensure that Al-Qaeda and its affiliate groups would never again be able to have a country they could call home and from which they could plan attacks on the West. The allied bombing campaigns and ground operations wound up the first stages of that operation successfully and in good time.

And then, within the first year, the mission creep began. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban merged into an understandable blur in the eyes of the allies. The borders of Afghanistan and her neighbours were more porous than our generals expected, and as the conflict became entrenched within the country, it also seeped out. All the while, America and her allies failed to create anything that resembled civil society.

It was famously, if erroneously, claimed in 1883 by Sir John Seeley that Britain acquired her empire in “a fit of absence of mind”. America today has spent her time as the world’s leading superpower attempting not to be accused of the same. But while the US has often been criticised by her enemies for “empire-building”, the country’s problems on the world stage have largely been caused by her unwillingness to do any such thing.

If you are going to invade a country like Afghanistan and attempt to transform its society in the space of a few years — or in this case decades — then your military, diplomatic service and political class all must contain people who wish to engage in that activity; people who are fascinated with the local culture, are willing to learn the language and are eager to live among its people and to show leadership if needs be. To put it simply, if you are going to acquire an empire then you need empire-builders.

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For better or worse, this is not an American instinct. Its military does not want to remain in control of large countries thousands of miles away from home. Its diplomats have no special vision for how these societies might realistically look. And its political class professes its desire to get out as swiftly as possible even as they become more embroiled in conflict. Whether it is Barack Obama, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, all wanted to get out of the mess they had inherited. Yet all professed commitment while dreaming of abandonment. And now we see the results.

Will anything be learned in all of this? Possibly. The undoubtedly hubristic moment that America engaged in under George W. Bush after 9/11 is unlikely to return. There is now no appetite for foreign adventures on either the political Right or Left. The late John McCain could always be relied upon to call for American intervention in any country he saw, but since his death no one has stepped forward to pick up his mantle.

After all, they have witnessed countless interventionists talk with certainty about what societies would look like if America showed its might and the muscle, before watching them get it wrong again and again. I know, because I was one of them. I had hopes for Afghanistan, as I once had hopes for Iraq. But nobody could watch these interventions  and come away believing in America’s half-hearted imperial ambitions. That isn’t to say that the UK would have been any better if it had attempted such missions alone. Simply that America has repeatedly demonstrated herself to be eminently capable of starting fights while being profoundly disinterested in actually winning them.

Syria was the moment I decided to get off the train, having become immune to claims of foresight, special intelligence or “operational ease”. By then — late in the day, it may well be said — I believed that America had neither the will, knowledge nor desire to see through the operations that it started. It had the resources and the technology, certainly. But without the personnel to make a success of it, that’s meaningless. The country had fallen for the pottery barn rule of intervention (“You break it, you own it”), despite having no wish to own the countries it intervened in and forgetting that in warfare it is perfectly permissible to go in, break a lot of things and then leave.

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That is what America should have done in Afghanistan: gone in, carried out some punitive strikes, made an example of her enemies and then left. Would it have still had to return to the country from time to time? Most certainly. Would it have been able to do everything it wanted to do from 20,000 feet? Almost certainly not. But it would have beaten two decades of American soldiers having to give up their lives for stretches of road which their colleagues — and eventually their government — would shortly abandon.

So perhaps it is inevitable that the stories emerging from Afghanistan are greeted quietly. They stir quite a cocktail of feelings: inevitability, boredom, disappointment, shame.

The statues’ demolition certainly lived up to the depiction of the Taliban in international media: they were a group of religious fundamentalists who beat women, banned music and measured the lengths of men’s beards to make sure they tallied with the religiously mandated length. This was the government of the day: coherent and imposing its will on the people of Afghanistan, whether they liked it or not.

But who are the Taliban now? Surely this is an important question, particularly if you are trying to work out what to do about Afghanistan; that country for which there were such high hopes after the supposed defeat of the Taliban in 2001, but which is currently disintegrating before our eyes. Yet those responsible for Afghanistan’s future don’t seem to be asking these questions. Which is, of course, one of the reasons that Afghanistan is collapsing. Nobody bothered to find out what the place was like.

Now, after nearly 20 years of hunting terrorists (Al Qaeda), conducting a counterinsurgency (against the Taliban), fighting a drugs war and developing the country, all foreign troops — including 2,500 Americans — are due to leave Afghanistan by the start of May.

This follows the signing of a peace accord between the US and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement, which astonishingly was negotiated without the participation of the Afghan government, had few stipulations. The US would reduce its troop numbers and would release several thousand prisoners. The Taliban, meanwhile, would agree to peace talks with the Afghan government, and would prevent anyone using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies.

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In reality, this was not a peace agreement, but a fairly obvious smoke screen for a US withdrawal (much like, it has to be said, the Russian withdrawal 30 years earlier). The US had failed to achieve its goals and was leaving.

Since the signing of the accord, the US has broadly followed its side of the bargain, reducing troop numbers and releasing prisoners. The Taliban, however, have not — instead upping its attacks on the Afghan government, while stonewalling any attempts at negotiation.

And so reports from Afghanistan indicate that several provincial centres, including Kandahar, arguably the most important city in Afghanistan after Kabul, are in danger of falling from Afghan government control. Newly elected President Biden is said to be reconsidering whether it is safe for the US to be leaving Afghanistan at all.

All of which sounds like very sensible analysis, and reflects the sort of article you might read in the New York Times. But it is based on a massive assumption: that the Taliban are a coherent organisation with a defined membership, an organisational structure, a guiding framework of ideas and a leadership able to exert control over its fighters.

In turn, these assumptions support the so-called insurgency narrative: that the Afghan government and its international partners have been fighting an insurgency called the Taliban who grow drugs, throw acid in girls’ faces and are generally evil. In this telling, the Afghan government and its international friends are, by definition, good. It is a binary depiction of the war: good versus evil, black versus white, us versus them.

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But what if this dynamic wasn’t actually what was generating most of the violence? For most of the violence in Afghanistan today is driven by hyper-local issues, such as land disputes, access to agricultural water, fights over drugs, generational feuds and abuses of administrative power. Indeed, when the Afghan communist party, heavily supported by the USSR, took power in a coup 43 years ago and precipitated a civil war which has been raging ever since, it unleashed a series of pent-up tensions in the country between conservatives and progressives, the educated and non-educated and, most importantly, between various local interest groups — mostly based on kinship — desperate to control their territories.

This same multifocal civil war continues today, with most of those people fighting the Government doing so for personal or local reasons. Perhaps they have had their land stolen by a warlord. Perhaps they are the victim of predatory behaviour from a local official and need to fight back to maintain their honour. Perhaps they are trying to sell their drugs, or protect their village, or enact a feud. The reasons are endless, but all of them are exacerbated by the fact that Afghanistan has nothing resembling a central government that adjudicates disputes and sets rules that apply to everyone. In fact, the Afghan government is as riven by local factional motivations as the Taliban.

What those on both sides do share, though, is a willingness to accept weapons from anyone — including, but not limited to, the Americans, the Russians, Pakistan and the Taliban — in order to pursue their own personal aims. Importantly, because of the strength of local issues in driving the conflict, the degree to which all these sponsors are able to control the on-the-ground actors is highly questionable.

So, what does this look like in a district in, for example, Kandahar Province? Imagine two villages, A and B. Running between these villages is a water course that both need for their agriculture. Because there hasn’t been a functioning government in Afghanistan for two-thirds of a lifetime — life expectancy is 65 — there is no functioning water management, and these villages are locked in a zero-sum battle over access to water (layered, no doubt, with multiple personal feuds).

Luckily, someone in village A has a relative in the provincial police and manages to have the village militia enrolled in it; they now have access to weapons and the confidence to label village B as “Taliban sympathisers” or some such slur. Village B, in response, decides to send an elder who fought in the mujahideen to the Taliban leadership in Quetta. When the elder says that village A are “westerners”, he is given enough weapons for village B to create their own militia.

Of course, whether village B accepts weapons from the Taliban before or after they are labelled “Taliban sympathisers” is a moot point — the key thing is that everyone is manipulating everyone else in order to access resources that will bolster their cause. That partly explains why commanders and militias change sides all the time, and most actors very sensibly maintain feet in both the government and Taliban camps.

In 2011, I remember meeting a local Taliban commander who had been welcomed into the Afghan government and supplied with motorbikes and weapons to form his own (government-aligned) village defence militia. He had switched back less than a month later: in Afghanistan, survival always trumps ideology. Even the Afghan government sometimes deploys the Taliban and ISIS as spectres to ensure funds and commitments from international partners, such as the US.

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Yet this mythologised Taliban died in 2001, when Pakistani funding all but dried up. So to describe the country’s civil war without reference to its vast array of tribal alliances, as a recent New York Times article does, is to miss the fundamental point. Likewise, while it may be hard to describe exactly what the Taliban are, it is not difficult to describe what they are not; they are not, as this BBC article helpfully describes, a coherent organisation. But it is upon this assumption of Taliban coherence that the plans of the Afghan government, the US and all the other involved countries rest.

And that could have serious repercussions. For assuming that the US continues on their withdrawal (and other countries follow them, because they can’t exist without the massive US logistical footprint in the country), the country is going to fragment, much like it did in the 1990s when the Russians withdrew.

In a mirror of today, it was assumed then that the mujahideen, who fought the Russians throughout the 1980s, would take over the government. But they were utterly divided, more interested in pursuing personal interests, so they ended up fighting each other. History is meant to rhyme, and not repeat, but in Afghanistan, the latter seems highly plausible.

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Will China get stuck in the Afghan quagmire?

By Mike Martin

When I speak to friends in Kabul, they are terrified, and trying to get themselves and as many relatives as possible out of the country. Afghanistan, they say, is about to collapse into tens or hundreds of fiefdoms. Those over 35 or so have memories of the different factions fighting over Kabul in the early nineties — the rocket attacks, the rapes and the brutal pogroms inflicted on the neighbourhoods of opposing ethnicities. Afghanistan’s current leadership, whether government or Taliban, won’t be able to be control it any more than anyone else.

And so we come to the recurring question of the last 20 years: what should the US President do about Afghanistan? Well, President Biden, there are a number of practical decisions to take. If you want to stop Afghanistan splintering into random fiefdoms, you should keep a minimal number of troops in the country and spend enough money necessary to keep the national ring road open (there is only one main road in Afghanistan), and the provincial centres in government hands. Accept that you are there for the long haul, like in Germany or South Korea, and see it as part of your policy towards China, a neighbour with acute interests in Afghanistan and the surrounding countries.

But as you reconsider America’s policy towards Afghanistan, you would do well to remember that, above all else, you will not be able to beat the Taliban, because what you understand as the Taliban simply do not exist.

The as-yet-unsigned peace agreement stipulates that America will rapidly reduce its troops in Afghanistan (currently around 14,000) in return for Taliban guarantees that they will not host international terrorist groups that threaten the US or its allies. Additionally, the Americans would release 13,000 — yes, 13,000! — Taliban prisoners over the coming months. Once the US has withdrawn, the Taliban would then hold talks with the Afghan government.

This sounds like fantastic news, and it would be, were it the whole story. The truth, however, as so often in Afghanistan, is much more complex.

Afghanistan is in a parlous state with a worse and deteriorating security situation, over 2.7 million refugees and a recent heavily-marred presidential election, which saw a narrow win for the incumbent, Ashraf Ghani, on a turnout of just 28%.

It is against this backdrop — little changed for the past five years — that President Trump has announced his desire to withdraw American forces from overseas conflicts and commitments. Afghanistan was a prime candidate: the US could see that they had failed to achieve barely any of their objectives (as has been made very clear in the recent Afghan papers published by the Washington Post). The US duly dropped its previous red line that the Afghan government was included in the talks — for the last decade the Taliban had refused to speak to what they call a “US puppet” —  and the talks began in Qatar.

However, it is not clear that the senior US leadership understands why they lost the war in Afghanistan. Quite simply: this is because the US and its allies characterized the Afghan war as one of supporting an Afghan government against Taliban insurgents; whereas in reality it is a 40-year multi-focal civil war with local tribal, narco, and other criminal interests fighting over hyper-local issues, and sucking in outside sponsors. Violence is driven much more by local disputes over land and water than over ideologies like democracy and Islamism. Fighters and commanders change sides all the time, and survival is paramount in decision making.

The difference is important. Political insurgencies, like the US imagines it is facing in Afghanistan, can be solved with a combination of military pressure and negotiations where concessions are made. Multi-focal civil wars only fizzle out when outsiders stop supplying money and weapons to on-the-ground actors, and these same locals engage in local reconciliation efforts. The US has effectively been fighting the wrong type of war in Afghanistan.

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And it seems that this misunderstanding is going to be repeated in the peace deal. If it is signed as currently described, the Taliban leadership guarantee that they will not host transnational terrorists on Afghan soil. But the Taliban leadership is not in control of most of the violence in Afghanistan — that is in the hands of local warlords and drug militias — so they will not be able to enforce their side of the bargain, even if they wanted to.

So what is likely to happen if, as looks highly likely, the peace deal gets signed?

In a crude analysis, western military support has enabled the Afghan government to keep control of the country’s main ring road and its provincial centres. Most, or much of, the rural areas are in the hands of local actors with various temporary allegiances. The absence of this military support will likely cause even more of the country to slip into local hands, disintegrating even further. Levels of violence and numbers of refugees will increase. There is a real possibility of government collapse.

Uneasily watching this is China, with whom Afghanistan shares a border. Arguably, China has greater interests in Afghanistan than the US has had, once it had completed the initial post-9/11 routing of the Taliban government. Broadly, these interest break down into three baskets: economic, counterterrorism and geopolitical.

On the economic side, China has invested in multiple large-scale projects in Afghanistan since 2001, not least a $4.5bn copper mine near Kabul and a $300m petroleum project in the north of the country. These effectively freeload off security that has been underwritten by the US and its allies. Secondly, counterterrorism: from the Chinese perspective the Afghan-bordering Xingjian province is a hotbed of terrorist activity, with links to networks in Afghanistan.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, China views Afghanistan as a key location in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Not only does the country border the northern route (from China, through the ‘Stans, to Europe), but Beijing is actively considering a so-called “Five Nations Railway” from China, through Afghanistan and Iran, to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.

China also announced last year that Afghanistan is going to be linked up to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a $62 billion series of infrastructure projects originally designed to link China to Pakistani seaports, but with eventual plans to join Pakistan to central Asian energy markets.

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The strategic question for China is whether to continue pursuing these interests in Afghanistan: all of these avenues require a level of stability and security in the region above the current levels, let alone if the country disintegrates after the US withdrawal. And if China does decide to continue on its current path, the even more difficult question is how it should set about securing these interests in Afghanistan.

Does it, at one extreme, go down the route taken by the West, and before it Russia, deploying soldiers around the country? After all, it currently has small missions training Afghan troops in Badakhshan province, in areas that border China, so could we see something like this expanding across key places in the country?

Presumably this would involve partnering with the Afghan government and mentoring and training its forces. But would China’s authoritarian, statist, centralising approach work in a land that, as my 93-year-old grandmother observed to me before I first went there, is so full of unrepentant individualists?

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Perhaps China merely funds and arms a faction in Kabul (a government?) in order to keep secure the areas of the country important to it? But would this work, or would the money end up building villas in Dubai for the Afghan warlords most able to take advantage of their largess? Are there other options, involving proxies or other nations? Pakistan, for instance, has previously worked closely with China on Afghanistan.

How does China achieve its aims without getting their hands stuck in the Afghan mangle, like so many have before?

This will be the year of the US withdrawal. It will also be the year that Beijing has to make up is mind on Afghanistan. To those of us in the West who think that China is an unstoppable behemoth, this dilemma is a useful reminder that the world’s soon-to-be largest economy also faces real-world, least-worst, strategic choices — just like the rest of us.