Dr. Kamal Helbawi* (experienced observer)
Mohammed Iqbal Asaria**, CBE
Hashim Nawrozzadeh*** (Social and religious activist)
Saeed Emad (Global Afghan Forum)
The recent upheaval in Afghanistan has caught many by surprise. It happened fast and was a comprehensive route of the old regime that had been propped up by the American-led Western alliance for twenty years. Within days of President Biden’s decision to pull American troops the Taliban made their final onslaught and captured most of the country. Several questions are being raised: What has happened? What will happen to this troubled country? Has the Taliban really changed? Is a new regional alliance being constructed with new players? Is American influence in the world doomed?
Tuesday 24th August 2021
Chairman: The topic of this week’s programme is the Western debacle in Afghanistan and we have to evaluate what is happening after 20 years of American, European, NATO presence in that part of the world and the reason why the bombing took place in Afghanistan. So really the recent upheaval in Afghanistan has caught many by surprise. It happened fast and was a comprehensive rout of the old regime which was propped up by the American-led Western alliance for 20 years. Within days of President Biden’s decision to pull American troops out the Taliban made their final onslaught and captured most of the country.
Several questions are being asked: what has happened, what will happen to this troubled country? Have the Taliban really changed? Is a new regional alliance being constructed with new players? Over the last few days since the 15th of this month hardly two weeks since the Taliban captured Kabul there has been a lot of analysis and the whole media circus has forgotten about corona virus and it seems that no one has died from COVID for the last two weeks and this has become the most urgent story that everyone is covering.
America really wanted to retain influence as a major stake holder but now they have not only been marginalised from Afghanistan. The regional countries are ready to bridge the gap that America wanted to have. One of the stories that was related on one of the broadcast media was that whilst NATO, the Americans and the British are trying to leave Kabul the Chinese, the Iranians, the Pakistani and Russian ambassadors were having a cup of tea comfortably in Kabul and discussing the future of Afghanistan.
One can see what has happened. And we can talk about whether the Taliban of 2021 is any different from what it was 20 years ago. I believe they are. The maturity is showing and they are trying to bring everyone on board, especially if we see what has been happening over the last few days. It was also the Ashura period and the Shias were very concerned as to what might happen but it appears there were no shootings or killings that took place as happened in previous years.
So let us hope that the nation finds peace and calm. Without peace and calm no nation or region can develop properly.
Hashim Nawrozzadeh: In the short term the answer to the question have the Taliban changed is ‘no’. What we are seeing is a continuation of Trump’s foreign policy of America first. The fact that they pulled out the troops before they started looking at civilian evacuation tells you something profound. America first. They left no protection. They left all the people who had helped them in the past twenty years, all the interpreters, all their families all the people who had helped them at the mercy of the Taliban. At the end of the day there are going to be new players and we are seeing the fruition of years of planning.
In 1997 a US diplomat said after the conquest of Kabul ;”The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be ARAMCO pipelines and an emir and a parliament and lots of Sharia law. And we can live with that.” There is a general resignation within American foreign policy: America first and what happens to the rest of the world is of no concern to them except they want to still maintain this power that they seem to have falsely got into their heads that they are the most powerful nation in the world and they have the best democracy in the world.
So as far as American foreign policy is concerned it is entering a new phase. The war machine, the raw unharnessed, unashamed, unaccountable reckless and rampant disregard for human rights continues. And what we are seeing is an example of this in Afghanistan where they pulled out their troops first. Anybody with a bit of sympathy for the Afghan people would of have said let us keep the troops until we have evacuated everybody that we need to evacuate. They did the opposite. They took out their troops first which shows that they have no regard for those people who have supported them. By no means do we know who is getting on the planes and who is getting out.
It is disorganised but it is organised disorganisation. American foreign policy is entering a new phase – there are new partners, let us say players coming in. The failure of the US policy in Yemen and how they propped up ISIS and they trained them and so forth is an example. They will train people, they will develop them, they will give them arms and also when it suits them they will let them down and this is coming to fruition now.
What we are seeing is the whole area in disarray which is what they want. They do not want people to come together and look for peace. The war machine continues and the American businessmen are the biggest people who have benefitted for the last 20 years. They have not lost. It is the American people who lost, the American tax payer and I think a lot of questions should be asked from the present administration. The last administration had a lot to do with it but the present administration with all the moral high ground now have to be held accountable. So this is my brief analysis of whether American foreign policy in the world is doomed.
What will happen to this troubled country? There is no doubt that there will be a resistance. They are the very same people who kicked out the Russians and the British. But what we are going to see is a blood bath. What will happen is that there will still be a lot of resistance and the brunt of this civil war that is going to take place will be borne by the innocent Afghans in the middle and now the Americans have left billions of dollars of ammunition and arms at Bagram airport for the Taliban to take. They are already starting to use them. The most sophisticated airport in the world has been left to what was a few days ago regarded as a terrorist organisation.
This sets a very dangerous precedent in the world. One day they are terrorists, especially the Hakani network and people like that who are known for their atrocities especially against the Shia. By the way, one point in history that everybody should know. Before the formation of Afghanistan. It was formed in the 1920s but in 1865 67 percent of greater Hurasan was made of Hazara. They were the largest ethnic group living in Afghanistan. Now they make up only 18 percent So for the past 150 years there has been a concerted effort to ethnically cleanse the Hazaras. There has been a huge exodus of Shia from Afghanistan and that has been notable and the Shia have always been the under dogs, third class citizens in Afghanistan. It did not matter which king was in power they could only reach a certain level and then they were suppressed.
This is now just a continuation. The Taliban tried to send overtures of compassion and brotherhood. But it was only two months ago that a girl’s school was bombed in a Shia area and over 100 school girls were massacred. At the end of the say they said we didn’t do it. But there are a lot of people who have come to Taliban from Pakistan and Syria and many foreign fighters who are directly collaborating with the Taliban.
Saeed Emad: Thank you for having me first of all and peace be upon all of you. We forecast the Afghanistan situation ago twenty years ago. I will narrate a story that happened in 2002 in Kabul. The United States ambassador asked to meet my father. The Taliban regime was close to collapsing and the Americans came to Afghanistan very quickly without the consent of the people.
It looked as if everybody in the country was happy. The ambassador who was near the end of his term of office asked my father what is your message? Are you happy? My father said we are not happy. This is the biggest mistake you are making. You are making history repeat itself. You have not learned a lesson from the Russians, the British, Ghengis Khan and from Alexander the Great and the consequences which they faced. You will face the same consequences as the Russians. The Afghan people and the country are not happy and they will not allow any invaders to have a successful presence in the country.
My message at the time and I was very young – I had a fear because of the presence of the United States troops in Afghanistan. I thought they would do something bad to my family. They may take my father to prison. My father made a strong point at that time. He said there would be a day when the United States would withdraw their troops. The United States will spend millions of dollars in the country without seeing any results. As a friend my suggestion is that you go back to Bush and tell him to withdraw the troops now. Yes we have a problem with the Taliban. There are so many problems. The regime has collapsed but the point is that without the interference of the US the Afghans can sit down and make a good coalition government to have a lasting peace in the country. We should not deprive any party from participating.
That was a clear message in 2002 which my father forecast. And this day happened with very bad consequences and a very bad outcome and so many Afghan lives have been lost. If I would like to analyse why the government collapsed so quickly I can speak about four factors which are internal factors.
The first and most important factor was that Ashraf Ghani created a corrupt system in the country. The government was very corrupt. He was an embarrassment to democracy. There were elections in Afghanistan two years ago. Actually he tried to frame the election in his interest. Everyone in the country knows that the election was framed by his team and his group. The first factor was a corrupt regime and a corrupt government and administration.
The second factor was the administration of justice. There were so many who had land and the judicial part was violated by the mafia groups in Kabul especially. From the other side the Taliban tried to reach the people in the mountainous regions and to bring justice to them. A local person instead of going to the government to get justice was forced to give bribes to the government officials. If they went to the Taliban this side would try to create a bond with the local people and try to bring justice to them. They were doing this for ten years so the gap between the government and the people started 12 years ago. It was growing day by day.
The Afghani military were very well equipped by the US and financially there were not many problems. But there were two problems which I will outline. As in Iraq there was the registration of ghost soldiers who did not exist. You may have heard that there were 300,000 soldiers in the country. This was far in excess of the reality. Because of this corrupt system the salaries of these ghost soldiers were taken by the heads of the commanders or by the Defence Ministry or by the Interior Ministry in their own pockets. So the 300,000 soldiers do not exist.
The second thing was that the Afghani administration unfortunately appointed people who were not well educated in the military of in warfare. They were put in charge of the military. When they wanted to defend the soldiers the commanders were telling them leave your weapons and evacuate. This was the strategy. They did not defend their country. Ghani gave all the authority to one of two people. The others had authority but they were not well trained. They were not connected with the locals. The Taliban won the hearts of the people.
The third factor for all these years was a corrupt system. The Afghan people felt that democracy was going to invade their culture and Islam. They were not happy . They felt that democracy was ruining their culture and their religion by looking at tv dramas.
The fourth factor was that the Ghani administration rigged the elections and Ghani tried to run the country by himself. And in one day the administration collapsed into the hands of the Taliban.
The mistake the Americans made is that they were trying to impose some individuals onto the Afghan people like Ghani and some other figures who the Afghan people saw as puppets. This led to widespread corruption and it was easy to overthrow them.
Iqbal Assaria: I remember that we have observed this whole situation for the past 40 years. When we started Afkar magazine we were already getting reports from Pakistan about all kinds of people. I would like to start with two anecdotes. America’s slogan for Vietnam was if you can’t win declare victory and call the boys home. Biden did not even declare victory. He just called the boys home. This is the difference between post Vietnam America and the America of today. It has lost confidence in doing anything. You can see the global embarrassment. How is it that a super power is not even able to protect its own citizens? How can it depart at night from a major airbase without telling its Afghan compatriots? That shows a complete lack of trust between the two sides and that contributed to the rapid collapse.
The other anecdote was that I was talking to one of my close friends from the region and he said to me look the Afghan people had a choice of being flogged to heaven by the theocrats meaning the Taliban. They will flog you and you will still go to heaven. The other choice was to be subjected to barbarity by the civilised West. So there was no choice. You have to say I am okay with flogging to heaven.
There is a descent into a very bad situation. We have to have long memories to see how these things work. In the 70s and 80s we had the NATO alliance and the military industrial complex promoting the cold war with the Soviet Union and later China and mobilising huge amounts of forces in terms of arms development, contractors, mercenaries and all kinds of things.
If you go back and you look at the speech of the NATO secretary general on the day the Soviet Union collapsed. He said we now need to find a new enemy because the people will not support these budgets if we do not have an enemy. The Soviet Union is gone so I suggest we find the Muslims as the new enemy. So they found a Muslim enemy and 9/11 gave them an excuse to go even further.
President Trump recognised that the people of America are no longer going to fund this kind of expenditure. So they said we now find a new enemy. And the new enemy is China. So all of these guys now want to jump onto the bandwagon defending the USA against China. Britain is a small power and it sends warships into the Sea of China. But they are worth millions of dollars. So the military industrial complex sees this Afghan thing is lost as far as money earning capacity is concerned. We have had enough for contractors. So lets move on.
The Taliban was first nurtured by Pakistan and America and later ditched and so on. They are not an unfamiliar entity. But they have now come on top of 20 years of failure of the NATO alliance to create any viable state. They were just relying on proxies.
I am very worried to where this situation will lead. I remember President George Bush junior (the senior one was slightly more sensible) the architect on the war on terrors. After a few years of the war on terror he said to his advisors we can’t continue this. If we continue to throw three million dollars missile on every hut and this is futile.
As bad as the situation is we need to see what can happen. There are worries about the second or the third incarnation of Taliban in terms of other minorities and sects in Afghanistan. The signals are not bad but whether the leadership can control the rank and file I don’t know.
Let us look at the surrounding countries. Let us look at Pakistan. Pakistan is a triple A rated country. It means different things. In Zia’s time it means American, army and then Allah. And this triple A switches from time to time. Today I would say it is army, Allah and America. America has shifted to the third position. Pakistan has a border with Afghanistan. The Taliban have had a vey big incubation period in Pakistan. Today Pakistan is more confident that Afghanistan without overt American influence will not be that bad. That is its analysis.
The second country which has a big border and a big interest in what goes in Afghanistan is Iran. Iran has been hosting between two – four million Afghan refugees for the past 20 years. Nobody acknowledges that. I understand that for the past ten years Iran has been discussing with the Taliban what should be done. They reached an agreement on three or four points: trying to avoid civil war in Afghanistan. The assassination of General Sulemaini was somehow linked with Iran’s policy in Afghanistan. The Americans were worried that the Iranians would have a key influence in Afghanistan. There was a little bit of hope. The Iranians do not have a problem with Afghanistan if there is no civil war. It is up to them how they want to sort out their country.
The third country is Tajikistan which is on the other side of the northern alliance. They have not been so forthcoming with the Taliban but they seem to have reached a sort of balance of between the two.
From the neighbours point of view the departure of the Americans does not mean much. From a psychological point of view it may encourage them to say that they will not think of coming back again.
A year ago I had the opportunity to have a holiday in Vietnam. We went from north to south Vietnam being told about what the Vietcong had done. But we could not see any American company. All the companies are Japanese, Korean etc It seems that American companies have been completely wiped off that place because of their behaviour in that country and I suspect something like that will happen in Afghanistan as well.
So here we also come to the ethnic composition of Afghanistan. Over the past 200 years there has been a systematic decimation of the Hazara people – from a near majority they were reduced to about a third but they are still there. Then the Taliban or the Pushtuns account for about less than 40 percent of the population. So sixty percent is not Pushtun. There has to be a balance of power between these different groupings and if the Taliban are sensible they will work out something.
Afghans are not against the Islamic culture. They may be worried about the application of that by force but they are not against the culture. The Taliban may now be minded to make a good accommodation with the other parties.
I want to speak about the slogan of the promotion of democracy which the people in the West have been promoting – women’s rights and so on. When we see from the Arab spring for example Muslims coming to power through democratic elections it is the biggest problem. They can’t do anything about this so they turn a blind eye to military rule. In Tunisia they are turning a blind eye to a constitutional coup. In Algeria before that they really turned a blind eye to French participation in the military takeover of the country when the Islamic Liberation Front was bound to win the elections.
So the lesson is there. Democracy is just a kind of decoration which if it happens we don’t want it. But we want it as a slogan to interfere. And these are lessons which have to be learned over and over.
And the last thing I want to say which is really a little bit sad is that our government is saying if the Americans leave we cannot even hold Kabul airport ourselves. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with an urgent need to see if we can get into dialogue with different people with humility and consideration of equal rights instead of just trying to impose ourselves in a place where we are not welcome.
So what is the West going to do? They are looking at economic leverage. The Americans have already frozen the central bank reserves of Afghanistan. They have suspended the loan to help with the pandemic. So they are trying to tighten the economic screws. The condition that they have put is that until the government is internationally recognised they will not be able to work with them.
Finally we come to three other countries which have an interest. One is China. China has the belt road initiative in Pakistan and it may want to do more. China also has an interest in the Taliban not coming to defend the Chinese Muslims. So China has its own agenda and if the Taliban come to terms with them it might help them to overcome US sanctions.
Russia may look for influence there which they might get.
India is the third country. It has always seen Afghanistan as a country where they need to have influence. They do not want Afghanistan to side with Pakistan as far as Kashmir is concerned.
So you can see from this very elementary analysis that the situation is very complex and it does not rely on whether the US is there. If the US is there it makes it worse. Then there are corrupt war lords, American contractors and all kinds of military people make a bigger mess of the country.
The only way forward is for what Iran was trying to see – if a civil war can be avoided. Then other problems can be worked out. When aid for Afghanistan started Iran pledged more than any other country and has been developing infrastructure in the West of Afghanistan and even now it is most able to resist the blockade from the West.
One of my friends an Australian professor told President Carter you are experts at being cowboys. The Iranians are experts as chess players so you better be careful.
Dr. Kamal Helbawi: I would like to complete the picture that the previous speakers tried to introduce. Some of the knowledge I am sharing with you is directly from the field. We have a strong relationship with the mujahideen. We had good relations with Harakat Islami and Nabi Mohammed who is considered a Taliban. He was the vice president with Rabbani when he came to power in 1992 for some years. We also had good relations with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the founder and current leader of the Hezb-e-Islami and the great commander Mualana Sami ul-Haq the father of the Taliban. They have their own culture, they have their own background, they have their own schools. They have good relations with the Deobandi school in India.
The Hakani network which is well known played an important role in the long wars in Afghanistan whether with the mujahideen in the 80s and 90s or with Taliban during the last 20 years against the Americans. So they fought against Russia and America. They fought for their country against the invaders whether easterners or westerners.
The other point I would like to make is that to get rid of the mujahideen in the early 90s those who conquered the Soviet Union, Pakistan and America had a role to organise the Taliban thinking that they will be a toy in their hands. But they proved to be otherwise different until now.
The dialogue and discussion in Doha in February 2020 that created an agreement between the Taliban and the Americans showed some sign of success and shows clearly the American defeat and the Taliban’s good resistance to any invasion especially after some of the mujahideen allied with the American supported the government whether Kharzai or Ghani.
America is preparing in my own understanding many Kharzai’s in different countries.
Undoubtedly the present Taliban are not a copy. Everything is changing in the world. Not only in Afghanistan. Even the super powers are changing and there is a dominant belief in America and the West that Islam is the source of terrorism and Afghanistan is a good example of this along with 9/11.
Iqbal Assaria referred to the enemy. Rand Corporation papers, conferences and books tell us what Islam we have to follow as Muslims to please America and the West. The book Civil Democratic Islam by Cheryl Benard and Zalmay Khalilzad shows this. The man who facilitated the agreement between America and the Taliban was Khalizad himself but he failed to get a good result for a dialogue between the Afghan parties themselves.
In the 80s and 90s I wrote a book about international strategies in Afghanistan in Arabic. There strategies changed. The losers are the ones who did not change. The Taliban are changing. If they do not change they will lose again and the conflict will continue.
Allah did not create the Muslim ummah with intellectual inferiority but we resorted to others to solve our problems – Americans, Russians and the West to solve our problems. We are greatly responsible for most of our serious challenges. We failed as an ummah to teach them a good lesson. The Taliban are a second lesson for the Americans but the first lesson was the Islamic Republic of Iran. I hope that the West will understand and begin to deal with us as human beings. Before they ask the Taliban to take care of human rights and women and others they should understand our culture and our understanding of Islam.
I see that in the West there are some good signs. Germany proposed to help the Taliban government with $200million and have good relations with them. One of the most important points is that the West is trying to impose its version of democracy, freedom and human rights, whether it is right or wrong, whether it is halal or haram.
I think the Afghanis are going to resort to the loya jirga more than to elections. These points need a long discussion and a long explanation.
*Professor Mohamed Iqbal Asaria is globally recognised leading expert in Islamic Banking, Finance, and Insurance, and has advised many banks and insurance companies in the UK on their launch of Islamic financial services. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants and a graduate of the Victoria University of Manchester where he also completed his masters in Economics (Accounting & Finance). He was awarded the CBE in the 2005 Queen’s honours list for services to international development. He is a trained Economist and Accountant, and an Adjunct Professor of Islamic Studies at INCEIF, the Global Islamic Finance University, in Malaysia. He also teaches a number of post graduate courses in Islamic Finance, Banking and Insurance at several leading universities including CASS Business School, CASS Executive MBA program in Dubai.
** Dr Kemal Helbawy is the former official spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, one of the founders of the Saudi World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), and one of the founders of the Muslim Council of Britain, a U.K. umbrella organization comprised largely of Muslim Brotherhood organizations. He is currently the director of the London-based Center for the Study of Terrorism (CFSOT) which purports to be an anti-terror think-tank. Between 1988 and 1994 he was in Pakistan where he edited a monthly newsletter focusing on Afghanistan.
