The appalling chaos to which the American withdrawal gave rise, after the capture of Kabul by the Taliban a year ago to the day, will have been in the image of the two decades of foreign occupation of Afghanistan. We understood early on that by signing the Doha agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, under the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States was thinking only of taking to its heels, basically indifferent to the preservation of fragile spaces of freedom open despite everything over 20 years. Trump prepared the ground, and Joe Biden closed the march, in the confusion and violence that we know, betting that to do so at the start of the presidency, the crime of having abandoned the Afghan women to the rigors of rigorism medieval Taliban would not weigh heavily on American public opinion for long.
The United States and its allies, including Canada, are showing hypocrisy today by linking the resumption of aid to Afghanistan, which the country has an immense humanitarian need, to “respect for human rights “. Yesterday 80% subsidized by the international community, the Afghan state is now bloodless as at least half of the approximately 40 million Afghans sink into unspeakable poverty. Sitting on their main principles and giving themselves a clear conscience by conveniently resorting to sanctions, the Western countries, falsely surprised that the Taliban do not respect their commitments, completely lack credibility.
Promise of inter-Afghan dialogue and more “inclusive” governance; promise that Afghanistan would no longer serve as a sanctuary for al-Qaeda: the Taliban, equal to themselves, quickly proved that they would not stick to it. What a fool’s bargain! A series of measures enacted since March — the exclusion of girls from school and the guardianship of women in public spaces, the imposition of the burka… — have clearly demonstrated that the “new” Taliban were substantially similar to those who held power between 1991 and 2001, or at least that the ultrarigorist wing of the movement was dominant – following the same dynamic as in neighboring Iran. The July 31 assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, killed in Kabul by an American missile fired from a drone, showed that the links between the Taliban and the jihadist nebula were also tight today as they were at the time of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
A year later, no state has recognized the Taliban regime. Neither China nor Russia. Faced with the cries of alarm launched by NGOs, the United States and the United Kingdom have loosened the noose in order to facilitate the distribution of emergency aid, but this will not be enough. In all of this, Canada has behaved deplorably: in addition to the fact that its bureaucracy is still lagging behind in welcoming Afghan refugees, it continues to prevent, in the name of its Anti-terrorism Act, organizations such as the Red Cross to send food and medicine there.
Helping the population without helping the regime that represses it: a recurring dilemma in international relations. In this case, it would be necessary to put pressure on the Taliban government in a much more calibrated way. All-out sanctions will not turn the Taliban into feminists tomorrow, argues the International Crisis Group (ICG), which urges Washington to “swallow the pill” and build bridges with them in targeted areas such as agriculture and rural development.
An aggravating factor: the Western approach also contributes to deepening the dependence of Afghans on the opium market, of which the country is the world’s leading producer. A market that the United States allowed to develop under the occupation, contributing to deepen the problems of endemic corruption and to remake Afghanistan, from the mid-2000s, a narco-state.
Finally, it is not so much the social repression applied by the Taliban that worries the United States as the threat to their national security posed by the Taliban’s relations with al-Qaeda. Evidenced by the targeted assassination of Al-Zawahiri, which was by extension a warning to his protector, the very influential Afghan Interior Minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the movement of the same name. This means that from a distance, the United States is continuing the war in Afghanistan, with innovative military technologies. However, the fact is that this extrajudicial execution, which raises ethical and legal questions regarding the exercise of force, will not prevent al-Qaeda from prospering.
In an interview last March, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, well placed to know what it is like to be used by the Americans, invited Ukraine “to learn lessons from Afghanistan and not let the great powers wage their war there by proxy”. Note to ponder. Because the United States cannot be counted on to do so.