Matthew Ployhart
During a presidential address on April 14, 2021, American President Joe Biden announced his intention to withdraw militarily from the country of Afghanistan by September 11 of that year, a process which his predecessor, Donald Trump, had begun the previous year with an even more ambitious withdrawal deadline of May 1. Broadcasted by ABC News, Biden stated the following: “After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders and intelligence personnel, with our diplomats, and our development experts, with our Congress and the Vice President, as well as with Mr. Ghani and many others around the world, I’ve concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home.” What followed was the swift collapse of a country that the United States had been propping up for twenty years, and the reestablishment of radical Taliban rule over Afghanistan.
Readers may recall how, in the ensuing months, press coverage of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan dominated the media. Images of smoldering buildings and wounded civilians emerged all over news outlets and the internet, while footage of gigantic planes with cargo holds packed with desperate evacuees fleeing the country, played on our television sets.
By August 15th, 2021, the Taliban retook Kabul. In just a mere five months following Biden’s speech, a government that the US had spent trillions of dollars on propping up over two decades, under the leadership of President Ashraf Ghani, crumbled in the face of Taliban militants. Bullets were fired, forces clashed, and high-profile officials and civilians alike desperately sought to flee the country.
Yet, despite its persistence in modern political discourse and conversation, many, including myself, remained rather ill-informed regarding the exact circumstances, historical and contemporary, that have culminated in the reestablishment of Taliban rule in Afghanistan that persists to this day. A recent panel lecture held in Clemson University’s Watt Family Innovation Center, however, allowed me and many other students and faculty to hear the facts and events leading up to and following the disastrous year of 2021. The lecture, planned and organized by Clemson’s Every Campus a Refuge (ECAR), was held on October 16, and allowed attendees to hear multiple experts on the region’s history and politics speak on the topic, including Afghan journalist Hashmat Vejdani.
Hashmat Vejdani, a chemistry teacher and journalist in Afghanistan, was among those fleeing the country in 2021. As a staunch advocate for women’s education, and a translator for US personnel, Vejdani was fully aware that he would be a target of the newly-established Taliban authority. On October 16, 2024, he described to Clemson students and faculty how he rode through the streets of Kabul with urgency. He changed out of his suit so he would not be suspected as a journalist should his car be stopped by Taliban soldiers. The country’s collapse was so dramatic that it came to haunt political discourse for several more years, with one American foreign policy professor of mine remarking in 2023 that Afghanistan was Joe Biden’s “Bay of Pigs” (a reference to the disastrous 1961 attempt by President John F. Kennedy to invade Cuba). One of my friends, remarking on the messy state of their house, once referred to it as looking like “the fall of Kabul” – a joke that I have heard several times comparing trivial messes and clutters to the violent collapse of the American-backed Afghan state.
A significant amount of time was dedicated to summarizing the historical circumstances that Afghanistan has found itself in over the centuries, from as far back as the 1500s. Clemson history faculty member Dr. Archana Venkatesh – a professor of women’s studies, digital history, South Asian history, and other topics, whose research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies – stated that Afghanistan is “the ‘Graveyard of Empires’ due to [its] geography.” A combination of mountainous impasses and sprawling deserts has ensured that, throughout history, “empire after empire…has failed to pacify what is today the…territory of Afghanistan.” Over the last few hundred years, efforts to establish centralized control in the area, even by local rulers, have not been particularly successful. Five major mountain ranges meet in the country’s north east, plus it lies on the historic mainland route between Central Asia and India, and has witnessed many groups passing through in one direction or another, many of them hostile to one another. Afghanistan has furthermore found itself entangled in the politics of foreign powers throughout the centuries, including those of colonizing European governments.
During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, territory disputes and arguments over political boundaries among British and Russian imperial forces, as well as local groups, in the region would result in multiple chaotic wars. This eventually resulted in the establishment of the Durand Line in 1893, separating British and Russian spheres of influence and largely serving as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan today.
In 1919, following the conclusion of World War One, the Third Anglo-Afghan War was fought between Afghan and British forces, resulting in British withdrawal and Afghan independence from foreign colonization. Over the next several decades, the country attempted to prove to Western powers that it was a legitimate, modern nation, and embarked on a determined effort to bring Western reforms to the state. Such reforms included the outlawing of forced marriages and polygamy, as well as the opening of schools. Yet these reforms, Dr. Venkatesh emphasized, were largely restricted to Afghan urban centers such as Kabul, and were largely “unable to penetrate the rural hinterlands of Afghanistan.”
In 1978, Afghan communist party adherents took control of the government, repressing Islam, but implementing many social reforms. However, when this government started to fail, the Soviet Union (USSR) invaded the country in 1979. The resulting conflict – which also saw US and United Kingdom-led efforts to support resistance groups fighting the Soviets and the Afghan government – would conclude in the USSR’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, at which point the country descended into bloody civil war, with the Taliban finally taking power in 1996.
The Taliban, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, “are a predominantly Pashtun, Islamic fundamentalist group” who “[impose] a harsh interpretation of Islamic law.” The Taliban government that emerged in 1996 would come to be known as one following a path of religious extremism, significantly stripping the rights of many citizens, including women. “They achieved this through a combination of bribery and force of arms,” Dr. Venkatesh stated, also noting that their rise to power was boosted by the fact that they promised to create stability in Afghanistan, which, to many Afghans, seemed far preferable to the instability and civil war pervasive throughout the country in the 1990s.
In 2001, local resistance leaders opposed to Taliban rule requested aid from the international community, as they deemed the Taliban as “giving the world a wrong perception of Islam,” and their rule as detrimental to the country. Only two months later, the infamous 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the US would occur that finally drew the American government to intervene in Afghanistan directly, with American soldiers on the ground and a full-scale war underway. Yet, by 2002, the Taliban were largely toppled, and Afghan democracy began to rebuild even before US involvement, according to Dr. Venkatesh.
However, despite the focus that the return of Taliban rule three years ago would bring to Afghanistan, another speaker at ECAR’s event, Dr. Amira Jadoon, emphasized another country for whom the situation has created excessive violence: that of Pakistan. Jadoon, who used to work at West Point, New York, is an associate editor of the European Journal of International Security, and author of The Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Strategic Rivalries and Alliances. She noted that “militancy…in South Asia has been present for a really long time…” and it is not expected to end anytime soon.
Dr. Jadoon devoted significant focus to the aforementioned Durand Line which serves as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and has been “the hotbed of militancy in this region.” To some extent, this has been predetermined by historical injustices, especially via the manner in which the British Empire had governed the area around the border, which saw the implementation of many draconian laws, depriving local populations of their basic rights. Dr. Jagoon stated that Pakistan essentially inherited that political system and continued to work with these oppressive rules and laws. Thus, the populations along the Afghan-Pakistan border, especially on the Pakistan side, suffer from low employment and frequent violence, as well as low literacy rates and restricted political rights.
Yet three crucial factors, broadly defined as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the Cold War, the 20+ year war on global terror, and US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, are the most direct causes of the present circumstances. In the first case, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created general chaos and allowed radical leaders such as Osama Bin Laden to organize the logistics of launching a global Jihad. In the second instance, the two decade-long war on global terror has resulted in the rise of many anti-government groups and militancy acts within places such as Pakistan, including by the Pakistani Taliban, in particular. These groups began cooperating, creating legacies that endure to this day. Finally, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago emboldened jihadists globally, witnessing a Pakistani Taliban resurgence at the same time that the Afghan Taliban retook Afghanistan.
Because of the long presence of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, “a lot of the local groups have realized that they can benefit” from working with this larger, global jihad, Dr. Jadoon noted, which allows them to obtain funding and resources. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not recognize the Durand Line – the Afghani-Pakistani border. There are Islamist anti-state groups, ethno-nationalist groups, sectarian groups, state-linked and sponsored groups, and transnational groups operating in the region, all of them interacting “with each other; they share members, they help each other out.”
The Afghan Taliban have promised the US that they will not harbor terrorists in Afghanistan anymore, but it’s not that straightforward – to a large extent, they are merely looking out for their own strategic interests, and they have made incursions into Pakistan. “Since August, 2021, militant violence has surged by 70% (2023) due to the regrouping of different terror networks [in Pakistan].” Due to the fact that the Pakistani Taliban had supported the Talabani insurgence in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, the Afghan Taliban are not particularly concerned about restraining the Pakistani Taliban. Furthermore, Jadoon notes that the Pakistani Taliban felt emboldened by Afghan Taliban victory, and were even one of the first groups to congratulate the Taliban after their taking of Afghanistan. Yet, despite the violence they have inflicted upon many Pakistanis, the Pakistani Taliban intends to present itself as a force fighting, not as terrorists, for the betterment of the state of Pakistan.
Contributing to the discussion was none other than Hashmat Vejdani himself. Having escaped to Pakistan as Kabul fell in 2021, he stated that he “recently moved to the US [6 months prior].” He recounted the chaos that unfolded in mid-August, as Kabul stood ready to fall to Taliban forces: On August 15, 2021, he stated that the media was very concerned, as the Taliban was then capturing most states and provinces. “On that day, everyone is trying to…go to their houses. It was 12 [o’clock]…The person that gave me a ride to my home, said to me that there were Taliban checkpoints.” Vejdani was advised to remove his tie. “It was hard for me to…change my dress in the car,” he noted.
Yet, largely thanks to support from civilian donors in the United States, Vejdani and his family were able to escape into Pakistan, where he remained, illegally, for two years before finally making it into the United States. “The Taliban promised [the] international community that they’ll change,” he stated. Education for women who were already in school, up to the level of PhD students, for instance, was supposed to be allowed to continue. Around 4,000 of the 12,000 media workers in Afghanistan he claimed were “ladies and girls,” yet “a lot of restriction [was placed] on [the] media day by day.”
It is this repression of women and journalists in Afghanistan that Vejdani seemed to find particularly concerning. “Most of the girls who are working as journalists in Afghanistan…[have left] the country,” he stated. “They stopped totally the universities and schools for the girls.…And they encourage the girls to marry with the Taliban soldiers.” This latter effort he described as an attempt to bring up a new generation of Taliban forces. “Women don’t have the right of job, or [of] going outside without” a close relation or family member present. “This is really concerning for all Afghan people…”
When asked about his thoughts regarding the possibility of democracy returning to Afghanistan, Vejdani expressed his doubts that the Taliban could be removed from power very easily. The best that Afghanistan could hope for, he stated, was for the Taliban to “accept a democratic government in Afghanistan,” yet the possibility that this will occur he seemed to acknowledge as extremely unlikely.
Dr. Jadoon, chiming in on this point, stated that she was even less optimistic. “As a person who studies war and terrorism all the time, and given the state of the world, I have a little bit more of a pessimistic outlook,” she asserted, noting the layers of complexity surrounding the current situation. “All the issues that we have in other countries are here [in Afghanistan] as well, but then there are even deeper issues – much deeper grievances. And there are so many actors exploiting the situation…And very little in what the regional governments [who often remain quite suspicious of higher levels of authority] are doing…” Jadoon also notes that, “there are a lot of regional rivalries,” and that “the militants and members of these groups transcend borders, so [the problem] can’t be solved by any one country.” Ultimately, Dr. Jadoon was clear on her opinion regarding the matter: until these the violence perpetrated by these groups stops, “there cannot be any meaningful transition to democracy [in Afghanistan]."
Vejdani expressed that Afghanistan is simply a victim of international terrorism. When the US arrived in Afghanistan, China, Iran, and other countries against the US came together to support the Taliban. After 20 years, “once again, [the] Taliban take over the government….And the people of Afghanistan are just the victims.”
One student present at the lecture posed a question regarding the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan, and what kind of strategies the panelists believe could be implemented to counter the suppression of Afghan women. Once again, largely pessimistic opinions were expressed, with Vejdani reflecting sorrowfully on the conditions that women face in Afghanistan. “The Taliban never [accepted] the education of women,” he noted, claiming furthermore that the Taliban view “women [as belonging] inside of the home, just cooking for us, and raising [kids].”
Vejdani contends that this treatment of women is not a proper reflection of Islam, stating that Islam values education. “All of the activities of [the] Taliban [are] against Islam,” he stated. “There is not anything against woman education in Islam.” Yet, as far as the possibility that the Taliban may someday relax their restrictive laws regarding the freedoms and activities of women, Vejdani remains doubtful. “They say: ‘it belongs to our culture.’ So, you see: Taliban will never change.”
Dr. Jadoon added to this, stating that “anything…the West does will be dismissed,” or interpreted as cultural imperialism hostile to Afghan society. Yet, Jadoon still acknowledges the potential for the beginnings of solutions to the current treatment of Afghan women to come from external sources. Muslim countries who interact with the Taliban, for instance, could put pressure on them to treat women with greater legal legitimacy. “Things…in Saudi-Arabia are even better, now, for women,” Jadoon noted, so pointing out the hypocrisy of the Taliban could theoretically be pursued.
Dr. Mashal Saif, moderator of the event, closed the lecture with important takeaways that they believed needed to be addressed. They noted that “the US unfortunately has also been deeply complicit in this violence. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Afghans have died from this [American violence],” including via bombings and other violent acts committed prior to US withdrawal. In fact, Saif noted that there were even many women in Afghanistan who wanted the Taliban to return simply because so many people had been killed in US airstrikes.
US activities in Afghanistan are indeed controversial, and there are moral and ethical considerations to be taken into account regarding American withdrawal from the country in 2021. Given the current circumstances that many find themselves in within Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, as well as the larger region, Dr. Saif ended on a note that I am sure we will all agree on: “I hope that, going forward, there is no collateral damage – these are human lives at the end of it.”
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