Yeah, but when 40% of the doctors, for instance, were women and the Taliban ban women from work/careers, where are they going to get their educated people from? It’s just another example of running a country by ideology.
The communist Afghan government did some good things (like supporting the emancipation women) but they did lots of impractical ideological nonsense, too. They cancelled debt to the landlords so the landlords stopped lending money and the lives of country people started to fall apart. The communists put decrees on land ownership which changed who controlled the water and ended up causing massive crop failures. This set desperate regional groups against each other and disaster after disaster followed.
The communist government came down hard on the rural protesters and the protesters retaliated by killing several Soviet advisors. The communist government retaliated by raining down bombs flattening Herat and killing up to 25,000 people and from that, the Mujaheddin were born.
Originally, the Mujaheddin were anti-communist rather than pro-Islamic. They sent their children to Islamic schools in Pakistan and fought the Afghan army (and later the Soviet army) from the hills. A couple of decades later these kids returned to Afghanistan as the Taliban (Taliban means ‘student’) and they came to take back Afghanistan with the aim of turning it into a religious state under Sharia Law.
Now the Taliban want to inflict THEIR impractical ideology on the land without thinking through how it’s going to work and ironically, it is the Taliban who are coming down harder than the communists on anyone who dissents. The same old ideological nonsense creating new problems as they attempt to solve old ones and on and on and on it goes.
Because militaries exist to defeat military opponents in warfare. Militaries are ineffective at working fundamental cultural transformations, remaking foreign people into little copies of the people that sent the armies.
Maybe that’s why Afghans have flocked to such hard-core extremist versions of Islam. Because they feel themselves under constant threat by outsiders who want to remake them in somebody else’s image. So they grasp tighter and tighter to things that they perceive as theirs. Backsliding and compromise become tantamount to treason. Extremism flourishes.
If the rest of the world adopts a hands-off policy in Afghanistan, the result won’t be pretty. Certainly not for women, gays or religious minorities. But if they finally stop feeling threatened, there may be local voices of moderation and toleration appearing. The whole crazy culture might start to normalize.
A century from now Afghanistan would still be Islamic, even fundamentalist Islamic, but I expect that it might be far more easy-going than today. At least if they stop feeling constantly backed into a corner and forced to fight.
One could make the same kind of quasi-Marxist observation about public schools, public health care, green energy schemes and social spending of all sorts. All of them are attempts to milk money out of the system by people who have financial interests in the results. They are driven in the popular imagination by idealism without an exit-strategy since this world will never be a heavenly paradise and there will always be somebody suffering… somewhere.
I’m much more inclined to think that the Western world’s failure in Afghanistan wasn’t the result of evil capitalism so much as it was the result of well-intentioned evangelical idealism and the unrealistic nation-building schemes that our missionary impulse gave rise to. We wanted to help those poor Afghans, even if most of them didn’t want that help. We wanted to pull them kicking-and-screaming into the 21’st century, even if our vision of secular progress was something that few of them wanted to embrace.
I agree in part with this. We wanted to “help” them even if most didn’t want our help. We had unrealistic nation-building schemes that our missionary impulses gave rise to. Our vision of secular progress was something that few of them wanted to embrace, though that, I think, is mainly true in the majority agrarian countryside, and among the ethnic Pasthuns, of whom the Taliban are representative. I doubt it’s true of most women in Kabul and other cities.
However, I think the main goals of the U.S. in Afghanistan were threefold, and among them was not to help the people there.
First, we wanted to convert Afghanistan into a Western client state as a counterforce against China, Iran, and to a lesser extent, Pakistan.
Second, we wanted to make sure Afghanistan could no longer serve as haven for Qaeda and other terror groups.
Third, we wanted to open Afghan markets to Western exploitative capitalism.
Helping the people there was last on our list. That is why I put “help” in scare quotes up top. For us, helping them really just meant helping oursaelves.
I do think, though, that certain individuals, among them Dubya, sincerely wanted to see our Afghan intervention actually help people. I believe Bush when he said recently that he grieved for the plight of Afghan women under the newly reinstalled Taliban.