The joint statement issued on February 6 following the four-day visit by the Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan to China has been an exceptional gesture by Beijing underscoring the highest importance attached to that country as a regional ally. Beijing feels the need to underscore that not only does it back the government in Islamabad to the hilt but is determined to boost the ties, especially by boosting the flagship of the Belt and Road Initiative known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Aside its overt emphasis on the launch of the CPEC’s Phase 2, the two highlights of the joint statement are: one, the affirmation that ’stronger’ defence and security cooperation will be ‘an important factor of peace and stability in the region,’ and, two, the joint initiative to take up with the Taliban government the holding of the China-Pakistan-Afghanistan Trilateral Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue as well as the ‘extension of CPEC to Afghanistan.’

New trends have appeared in regional security during the past 6-month period since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last August, which are highly consequential for regional politics. For a start, all evidence suggests that various terrorist groups continue to operate in Afghanistan. And groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir or the Islamic State affiliates have a long history of working as the West’s geopolitical tool.

The acute humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan following the abrupt ending of western assistance in August and the U.S. vengeful decision to freeze the country’s funds abroad are being turned around as pressure points by Washington to engage with the Taliban Government with a view to manipulate its attitudes and policies. With the departure of U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad, the CIA is in direct control of Washington’s dealings with the Taliban.

The Oslo talks (January 23-25) between the Taliban and the U.S. has been a turning point. Notably, last week, the U.S. Treasury Department has unilaterally ‘tweaked’ the sanctions regime against the Haqqani Network. Funds can now be transferred to Afghanistan by international banks, and aid agencies are allowed to work with the Haqqanis. Alongside, President Biden has designated Qatar as a ‘major non-NATO ally’ even as direct flights commenced last week between Kabul and Doha (where CIA operatives dealing with Afghan affairs are based), and, furthermore, Qatar will now be operating the Afghan airports and controlling that country’s air space. Taken together, Washington is rapidly putting in place the infrastructure for conducting its operations in Afghanistan pending diplomatic recognition and the establishment of physical presence.

Meanwhile, the climate of Pakistan’s relations with the Taliban government has deteriorated. A surge of cross-border violence culminated last week in brazen attacks on Pakistani military. The picture remains hazy. Intriguing questions arise as to the culpability.

The internal tensions within the Taliban are no big secret. It is only to be expected that at a time when the group is trying to gain international legitimacy and tackle domestic crisis, internal tensions get accentuated, as interest groups competing for positions and privileges pull in different directions. Suffice to say, the Taliban is more vulnerable today than ever to infiltration and manipulation by the western intelligence.

Recently, Barnett Rubin, former State Department official and expert on Afghanistan who was a key aide to late Richard Holbrooke, took a historical perspective when he said, “The Taliban are the most unified organisation in Afghanistan. There has never been a significant split in the organisation. There are many differences and rivalries that are seized on by their opponents as evidence that the Taliban are divided, but they have never been divided in practice. The CIA spent $1 bn trying to split the Taliban and failed.”

That was time past. Time present may hold surprises. What is apparent is that while the Taliban government is being seen by the world community as the monarch of all it surveys in Afghanistan, Washington is singling out the Haqqani Network as its interlocutor. The folklore used to be that the Haqqanis were the blue-eyed boys of Pakistan. Equally, they became synonymous with brutal acts of terrorism. That said, however, the Haqqanis also have another side to their bio-profile.

Lest it gets forgotten, the great patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani’s rift with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the subsequent split with Hizb-i-Islami in 1979 was not due to the acceptance or rejection of radicalism but reflected regional geography and their respective tribal origins. The Haqqanis belong to the Zadran Pashtun tribe, a branch of the Kalani tribal confederacy inhabiting southeastern Afghanistan (Khost, Paktia and Paktika provinces) and parts of Pakistan’s Waziristan. That is what distinguishes the Haqqanis in the top rungs of the Taliban leadership in Kabul. Mullah Hasan Akhund, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Mohammed Yaqoob, etc. are largely drawn from the Abdali (Durrani) confederacy of the dominant Pashtun tribes.

True, the Taliban movement managed to put up a show of unity, but that was the period of the jihad against foreign occupation when clan and tribal identity got submerged and the friendship networks, or andiwali (Pashto for camaraderie) played an important cementing role. But even then, interestingly, the Haqqani Network had enjoyed battlefield autonomy while remaining politically subservient to the Quetta Shura.

Today, two factors become particularly important. First, no one knows whether the Taliban supremo Amir Hibatullah Akhundzada is still alive or not. There is a leadership vacuum. Second, since 2013-2014, Pakistan’s control of the Taliban had been progressively weakening following the assassination of several senior Taliban figures in Quetta. Now, these two factors combined together, there is no one with power or authority who can rein in the Taliban factions from going overboard. In all likelihood, Pakistan is helplessly watching. The cross-border tensions could well be a manifestation of this epochal transition in the Taliban’s tumultuous history.

Then, there is an interesting detail that has great relevance today. The Haqqanis and the CIA go back a long way. The Haqqani Network was the only Mujahideen group that then Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq permitted the CIA to have direct dealings during the 1980s jihad. How far that had anything to do with the Haqqanis’ devotion to ‘global jihad’ is a moot point today. The point is, it was in the safe hands of the Haqqanis that the CIA entrusted Osama bin Laden’s life and security during the 1980s jihad.

Is it coincidental that the U.S. has ‘tweaked’ the sanctions against the Haqqanis unilaterally so soon after the defeat in Afghanistan so as to revive their direct line of communication with them?

The regional states cannot but be worried. Simply put, the spectre that is haunting the region is the U.S.’ return to Afghanistan to finesse a new geopolitical tool for influencing regional politics in a wide arc of countries — Central Asian states, China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan. The China-Pakistan joint statement issued in Beijing on Sunday is a forceful signal from Beijing against any such attempt to use Afghan soil as a springboard to destabilise the region. But it is going to be an uphill struggle unless the attempt is nipped in the bud.

It is not without reason that the Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Kazakh counterpart Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at their meeting in Beijing on Saturday that ‘The dimension of China-Kazakhstan relations has gone beyond the bilateral scope and is of great significance to regional and even world peace and stability.’ The very next day, at the meeting with Imran Khan, President Xi emphasised that ‘as the world finds itself in a period of turbulence and transformation, China-Pakistan relations have gained greater strategic significance.’

By Scott RITTER

On Aug. 29, the United States murdered ten Afghan civilians in a drone strike. The U.S. Air Force Inspector Gen., Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, was appointed on Sept. 21, to lead an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the attack. On Nov. 3, Gen. Said released the unclassified findings of his investigation, declaring that while the incident was “regrettable,” no crimes were committed by the U.S. forces involved.

The reality, however, is that the U.S. military engaged in an act of premeditated murder violative of U.S. laws and policies, as well as international law. Everyone involved, from the president on down committed a war crime.

Their indictment is spelled out in the details of what occurred before and during the approximately eight hours a U.S. MQ-9 “Reaper” drone tracked Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of Nutrition and Education International, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that has been operating in Afghanistan since 2003, working to fight malnutrition among women and children who live in high-mortality areas in Afghanistan.

During those eight hours, the U.S. watched Ahmadi carry out mundane tasks associated with life in war-torn Kabul circa Aug. 2021. The U.S. watched until the final minutes leading up to the decision to fire the hellfire missile that would take Ahmadi’s life, and that of nine of his relatives, including seven children.

“The investigation,” Gen. Said concluded in his report, “found no violation of law, including the Law of War.” One of the unanswered questions relating to this conclusion was the precise nature of the framework of legal authorities at play at the time of the drone strike, in particular the rules and regulations being followed by the U.S. military regarding drone strikes, and issues pertaining to Afghan sovereignty when it came to the use of deadly force by the U.S. military on Afghan soil

Policies in Flux

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis speaks to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence July 20, 2017, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., following a meeting of the National Security Council. (DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)

At the time of the drone strike that murdered Zemari Ahmadi and his family, the policies governing the use of armed drones was in a state of extreme flux. In an effort to gain control over a program which, by any account, had gotten out of control in terms of killing innocent civilians, then-President Barack Obama, in May 2013, promulgated a classified Presidential Policy Guidance (P.P.G.) document entitled “Procedures for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets Located Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.”

The 2013 P.P.G. directed that, when it came to the use of lethal action (a term which incorporated direct action missions by U.S. Special Operation forces as well as drone strikes), U.S. government departments and agencies “must employ all reasonably available resources to ascertain the identity of the target so that the action can be taken.” The document also made clear that “international legal principles, including respect for sovereignty and the law of armed conflict, impose important constraints on the ability of the United States to act unilaterally—and the way in which the United States can use force.”

The standards for the use of lethal force set forth in the 2013 P.P.G. contain two important preconditions. First, “there must be a legal basis for using lethal force.” A key aspect of this legal basis is a requirement that the U.S. have the support of a host government prior to the initiation of any lethal force on the territory of that nation. This support is essential, as it directly relates to the issue of sovereignty commitments under the U.N. Charter.

When the 2013 P.P.G. was published, the U.S. had the express permission of the Afghan government to carry out lethal drone strikes on its territory for the purposes of targeting both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Later, this authorization would extend to encompass the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump issued new guidance which loosened the conditions under which lethal force could be used in Afghanistan, including the use of armed drones. The Afghan government continued to provide host nation authorization for these strikes. When President Biden assumed office, in January, he immediately directed his National Security Council to begin a review of the policies and procedures surrounding the use of armed drones in Afghanistan.

One of the issues addressed in this review was whether the Biden administration would return to the Obama-era rules requiring “near certainty” that no women or children are present in an area targeted for drone attack or retain the Trump-era standard of only ascertaining to a “reasonable certainty” that no civilian adult men were likely to be killed.

Complicating matters was the fact that the Biden administration was preparing for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, which required that the rules and procedures for use of armed drones in Afghanistan be altered to reflect a new reality where U.S. forces were no longer being directly supported, and that the armed drone program would be conducted in an environment where the Afghan government was the exclusive recipient of armed drone support. These new rules and procedures were part of what the Biden administration called its “over the horizon” (OTH) counterterrorism strategy.

Before the new OTH policies and procedures directive could be issued, however, the reality on the ground in Afghanistan changed completely, making the policy document obsolete before it was even issued. The rapid advance of the Taliban, coupled with the complete collapse of the Afghan government, threw into question the legal underpinnings regarding the authority of the U.S. government to conduct armed drone operations in Afghanistan.

Taliban fighters in Kabul, Aug. 17, 2021. (VOA, Wikimedia Commons)

The new rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban, did not approve of U.S. armed drone operations. Instead, the Taliban had executed a secret annex to the February 2020 peace agreement reached with the Trump administration regarding its commitment to dealing with counterterrorism issues in Afghanistan once the U.S. withdrew. President Biden determined that his administration would be bound by the terms of that agreement.

Two points emerge from this new environment—first, from a legal standpoint, the U.S. military remained bound by the “reasonable certainty” of the Trump-era policies regarding the use of armed drones, and second, from the standpoint of international law as it relates to sovereignty commitments, the U.S. had no legal authority to conduct armed drone operations over Afghanistan.

While the U.S. had not formally recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, President Biden’s commitment to adhere to commitments made under the terms of the February 2020 peace agreement, coupled with the fact that the U.S. was engaged in active negotiations with the Taliban in Doha and in Kabul regarding issues pertaining to security of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Kabul, make clear that for all sense and purpose, the U.S. treated the Taliban as if they were the sovereign authority in Afghanistan.

In Order to Be Legal

For U.S. drone operations on Aug. 29, to be legal in Afghanistan, the U.S. government had to either gain public approval for these operations from a sovereign authority, gain private approval from a sovereign authority, or else demonstrate that a sovereign authority was unable or unwilling to act, in which case the U.S. could, under certain conditions, consider unilateral action.

Gen. Said does not provide any information as to how he ascertained U.S. compliance under international law. Public statements by the Taliban appear to show that they did not approve of U.S. drone strikes on the territory of Afghanistan. Indeed, when the U.S. carried out a similar drone attack, on Aug. 27, targeting what it claimed were ISIS-K terrorists, the Taliban condemned the strike as a “clear attack on Afghan territory.”

The second precondition set forth in the 2013 P.P.G. authorizing the use of lethal action was that the target must pose “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” In his presentation on the Aug. 29, drone strike, Gen. Said stated that “[i]ndividuals directly involved in the strike…believed at the time that they were targeting an imminent threat. The intended target of the strike, the vehicle, its contents and occupant, were genuinely assessed at the time as an imminent threat to U.S. forces.”

When promulgating its 2013 P.P.G. on drone strikes, the Obama administration adopted an expanded definition of what constituted an “imminent threat” published by the Department of Justice in 2011, which eschewed the notion that in order to be considered “imminent”, a threat had to be a specific, concrete threat whose existence must first be corroborated with clear evidence.

Instead, the Obama administration adopted a new definition that held that an imminent threat was inherently continuous because terrorists are assumed to be continuously planning attacks against the U.S.; all terrorist threats are considered both “imminent” and “continuing” by their very nature, removing the need for the military to gather information showing precisely when and where a terrorist threat was going to emerge.

To make the case of an “imminent” (and, by definition, “continuing”) threat, all the U.S. needed to do in the case of Zemari Ahmadi was create a plausible link between him and potential terrorist activity. According to Gen. Said, “highly classified” (i.e., Top Secret) intelligence was interpreted by U.S. personnel to ascertain the existence of a terrorist threat.

This assessment was used to create a linkage with Ahmadi, and the subsequent “observed movement of the vehicle and occupants over an 8-hour period” resulted in confirmation bias linking Ahmadi to the assessed terrorist threat.

Who Was in Command?

Part of Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. (U.S. National Archives)

Zemari Ahmadi’s actions on Aug. 29, did not trigger the drone attack. Instead, the U.S. appeared to be surveilling a specific location in Kabul, looking for a White Toyota Corolla (ironically, the most prevalent model and color of automobile operating in Kabul) that was being converted by ISIS-K terrorists into a weapon to be used against U.S. forces deployed in the vicinity of Kabul International Airport.

This safe house was located about five kilometers west of Kabul International Airport, in one of Kabul’s dense residential neighborhoods. The specific source of this information is not known but given Gen. Said’s description of it as “highly classified”, it can be assumed that this information involved the interception of specific communications on the part of persons assessed as being affiliated with ISIS-K, and that these communications had been geolocated to a specific area inside Kabul.

One of the issues confronting the U.S. during this time was the absolute chaotic nature of the command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) infrastructure that would normally be in place when carrying out any military operations overseas, including something as politically sensitive as a lethal drone strike. It wasn’t just the policy guidelines for the use of lethal drone strikes that were in limbo on Aug. 29, 2021, but also who, precisely, oversaw what was going on regarding the employment of drones in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military and C.I.A. had completely withdrawn from Afghanistan when the decision was made to begin noncombatant evacuation operations (N.E.O.) operating from Kabul International Airport. The deployment of some 6,000 U.S. military personnel was accompanied by an undisclosed number of C.I.A. and Special Operations forces who were tasked with sensitive human and technical intelligence collection, including intelligence sharing and coordination with the Taliban.

To support this activity, an expeditionary joint operations center (JOC) was established by U.S. forces, led by Rear Admiral Peter Vasely, a Navy SEAL originally dispatched to Afghanistan to lead Special Operations, but who took over command of all forces when the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, left in July 2021.

Admiral Vasely was assisted by Major Gen. Chris Donahue, a former Delta Force officer who commanded the 82^nd Airborne Division. While both Vasey and Donahue were experienced combat commanders, they were singularly focused on the issue of securing the airport and evacuating personnel under a very constrained timeline. Managing drone operations would be handled elsewhere.

As part of President Biden’s vision for Afghanistan post-U.S. evacuation (and pre-Afghan government collapse), the Department of Defense had established what was known as the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism Headquarters at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. Commanded by Brigadier Gen. Julian C. Cheater, Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism, comprised of 544 personnel, was tasked with planning and executing missions in support of Special Operations Command-Central across four geographically-separated locations in the United States Central Command area of responsibility, including Afghanistan.

But Gen. Cheater had only assumed command in July, and his organization was still getting settled into its new quarters (Brigadier Gen. Constantin E. Nicolet, the deputy commanding general for intelligence for the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism headquarters, did not arrive until Aug. 11.) As such, much of the responsibility for coordinating drone operations into the overall air campaign operating in support of the Kabul N.E.O. (which, in addition to multiple C-17 and C-130 airlift missions per day, included AC-130 gunships, B-52 bombers, F-15 fighters, and multiple MQ-9 Reaper drones) was handled by Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center (C.A.O.C.), located at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar.

The Video Source

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman 1st Class Mike Eulo perform function checks after launching MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle Aug. 7 at Balad Air Base, Iraq. (U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton)

Gen. Said, in his presentation, made mention of “multiple video feeds” when speaking of the information being evaluated by U.S. military personnel regarding the strike that killed Ahmadi and his family. This could imply that more than one MQ-9 drone was operating over Kabul that day, or that video feeds from other unspecified sources were also being viewed.

It also could be that the MQ-9 that fired the Hellfire missile that killed Ahmadi and his nine relatives was flying by itself; the MQ-9 carries the Multi-Spectral Targeting System, which integrates an infrared sensor, color, monochrome daylight TV camera, shortwave infrared camera, the full-motion video from each which can be viewed as separate video streams or fused together. In this way, one drone can provide several distinct video “feeds”, each of which can be separately assessed for specific kinds of information.

The MQ-9 is also capable of carrying an advanced signals intelligence (SIGINT) pod, producing yet another stream of data that would need to be evaluated. It is not known if this pod was in operation over Kabul on Aug. 29. However, according to The New York Times, U.S. officials claim that that the U.S. intercepted communications between the white corolla and the suspected ISIS-K safehouse (in actuality, the N.I.E. country director’s home/N.I.E. headquarters) instructing the driver (Ahmadi) to make several stops.

Logic dictates that the U.S. military kept at least one, and possible more, MQ-9’s over Kabul at all times, providing continuous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance overwatch during the conduct of the evacuation operation. The primary MQ-9 unit operating in the Persian Gulf region at the time was the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron, which operated out of Ali Al Salem Air Base, in Kuwait.

Given the logistical realities associated with drone operations over Afghanistan, which required a lengthy flight down the Persian Gulf, skirting Iran, and then over Pakistan, before reaching the central Afghanistan region, the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron more than likely forward deployed a ground control station used to take off and recover the MQ-9 drones, along with an undisclosed number of drone aircraft, to Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar.

The time of flight from Al Udeid to Kabul for an MQ-9 drone is between 5 and 6 hours; a block 5 version of the MQ-9, such as those operated by the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron, can operate for up to 27 hours. It is possible that a single MQ-9 drone was on station for the entire period between when Ahmadi was first taken under surveillance until the decision to launch the Hellfire missile that killed him was made; it is also very possible that there was a turnover between one MQ-9 and another at some point during the mission. In either instance, a long-duration mission such as that being conducted on Aug. 29, would have been logistically and operationally challenging.

The crew from the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron was responsible for launching and recovering the MQ-9 drone from its operating base; once in the air, control of the drone was turned over to drone crews assigned to the 432^nd Expeditionary Air Wing, based out of Creech Air Base, in Nevada. These crews work with the Persistent Attack and Reconnaissance Operations Center, or PAROC, also located at Creech Air Base.

The PAROC coordinates between the 432nd Wing Operations Center, which serves as the focal point for combat operations, and the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism Headquarters and Central Command Combined Air Operations Center, both out of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The PAROC serves as a singular focal point for mission directors, weather analysis, intelligence analysis and communications for drone operations over Afghanistan.

At each node in this complex command and control system, the video feeds from the drone(s) involved can be monitored and assessed by personnel. Such an overlapping network of agencies was implied by Gen. Said in his presentation, when he spoke of interviewing “29 individuals, including 22 directly involved in the strike” for his report.

Given that Gen. Said’s remit is limited to the military forces involved, it is not known if he interviewed another party reportedly involved in the drone strike—the C.I.A. Multiple sources have indicated that C.I.A. analysts were involved in evaluating the video feeds associated with the drone strike of Aug. 29, and that they provided input regarding the nature of the target.

C.I.A. Involvement

Aerial view of C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Carol M. Highsmith, Wikimedia Commons)

The C.I.A. operates what is known as the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center out of its Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There, a fusion cell of intelligence analysts drawn from across the U.S. intelligence community monitor a wall of flat screen monitors that beamed live, classified video feeds from drones operating from around the world, including Afghanistan.

The C.I.A.’s involvement suggests that because of the confusion surrounding the legality of drone operations in Afghanistan following the collapse of the Afghan government, the Biden administration opted to conduct drone operations under Title 50, covering covert C.I.A. activities, as opposed to Title 10, which cover operations conducted under traditional military chain of command.

In any event, what is known is that an MQ-9 drone, flown by pilots from the 432^nd Expeditionary Wing operating out of Creech Air Base, in Nevada, was surveilling a specific neighborhood in Kabul on the morning of Aug. 29, where intelligence sources indicated an ISIS-K terrorist cell was in the process of converting a white Toyota Corolla into a weapon—perhaps a car bomb—that was to be used against U.S. forces operating at Kabul International Airport.

The U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan were on high alert—on Aug. 26, ISIS-K fighters had launched a coordinated attack using suicide bombers and gunmen on a U.S. checkpoint at the airport, killing 13 U.S. service members and some 170 Afghans, including nearly 30 Taliban fighters.

According to a timeline put together by The New York Times, Zemari Ahmadi left his home, located in a neighborhood about two kilometers west of the airport, in a white Toyota Corolla owned by his employer, Nutrition and Education International (N.E.I.). Ahmadi had worked with N.E.I. since 2006 as an electrical engineer and volunteer, helping distribute food to Afghans in need.

The country director for N.E.I. had called Ahmadi at around 8:45 am, asking him if he could stop by the country director’s home and pick up a laptop computer. Ahmadi left his home at around 9 am, and drove to the country director’s home, located about five kilometers northwest of the airport. The drone operators were surveilling the compound where the country director lived, having assessed that it was an ISIS-K safe house.

It is at this point the intelligence failures that led to the murder of Ahmadi and his family began. The country director, whose name has been omitted for security reasons, is a well-known individual whose biometric information, including place of work and residence, has been captured by a highly classified Department of Defense biometric system called the Automatic Biometric Identification System, or ABIS. ABIS, part of what the U.S. calls its strategy of “Identity Dominance”, was specifically set up to help identify targets for drone strikes and was said to contain more than 8.1 million records.

The ABIS, when integrated with other data bases such as the Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, which held extensive details on foreign contractors, and an Economy Ministry database that compiled all international development and aid agencies (such as N.E.I.) into a singular searchable Geographic Information System, or G.I.S., gives an analyst the ability to scroll a cursor over a map of Kabul, coming to rest over a given building, and immediately accessing information about who resides there.

Both the country director and Ahmadi, as Afghans affiliated with western aid organizations who moved with relative freedom around Kabul, were included in these data bases.

Massive Intelligence Failure

The MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft. (U.S. Air Force, Leslie Pratt)

The fact that a U.S. intelligence analyst could confuse the known residence/headquarters of a U.S.-funded aid organization with an ISIS-K safe house is inexcusable, if indeed these data bases were available for query.

It is possible that (because of the transitional environment) the events of Aug. 29 transpired with no definitive rules of engagement in place, and that the command and control structure was in a high state of flux, so that the data base was either shut down or otherwise inaccessible. In any case, the inability to access data that had been collected over the course of many years by the United States for the express purpose of helping facilitate the counterterrorism-associated targeting of armed drones represents an intelligence failure of the highest order.

The community of analysts, spread across several time zones and distinct geographical regions, representing agencies with differing legal and operational frameworks, began monitoring the movement and activities of Ahmadi. He picked up a laptop computer from the country director, which was stored in a black carrying case of the kind typically used to carry laptop computers. Unfortunately for Ahmadi, the ISIS-K suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. position at Kabul International Airport on Aug. 26 carried bombs that had been placed in similar black carrying cases, reinforcing what Gen. Said called a chain of “confirmation bias.”

Ahmadi then went on a series of excursions, picking up coworkers at their homes, dropping them off at various locations, stopping for lunch, and distributing food. Near the end of the day, Ahmadi returned to the N.E.I. headquarters where he used a hose to fill up plastic containers with water to bring home (there was a water shortage throughout Kabul, and Ahmadi’s home had no running water.)

Zemari Ahmadi. (Ptipti/Wikimedia Commons)

Analysts watching Ahmadi’s actions somehow mistook the act of using a garden hose to fill plastic jugs with water as him picking up plastic containers containing high explosives that could be used in a car bomb—another case of “confirmation bias.”

At least 22 sets of eyes were watching this, using multi-spectral cameras capable of ascertaining movement of water, temperature variations, all in high-resolution video feeds. How not a single pair of eyes picked up on what was really happening is, yet again, a huge failure of intelligence, either in terms of training as an imagery analyst, poor analytical skills, or both.

But even with all of this “confirmation bias” weighing in favor of classifying Ahmadi as an “imminent threat”, neither he nor his family were condemned to die. Under International Human Rights Law, lethal force is legal only if it is required to protect life (making lethal force proportionate) and there is no other means, such as capture, of preventing that threat to life (making lethal force necessary).

If Ahmadi’s car, upon leaving the country director’s home, had headed toward a U.S.-controlled checkpoint around Kabul International Airport, then U.S. personnel monitoring the drone feed would have had every right, under the procedures then in place, to consider Ahmadi a “continuing imminent threat” to American life, thereby freeing the drone crew to fire a Hellfire missile at the vehicle to destroy it.

Instead, he drove home, pulling into the interior courtyard of his building complex. At this juncture, Ahmadi and his vehicle could not, under any circumstance, be considered an active threat to American life. Moreover, with the vehicle immobile and still under observation, options could now be considered for “other means”, such as capture, to remove the vehicle and Ahmadi as a potential future threat.

While the U.S. and the Taliban had an implicit agreement that U.S. forces would not operate outside the security perimeter of Kabul International Airport, the Taliban were fully capable of sending a force to investigate and, if necessary, detain Ahmadi and his vehicle. The U.S. admits to actively sharing intelligence with the Taliban and acknowledge that the Taliban had proven itself capable of acting decisively to neutralize threats based upon the information provided by the U.S.

The Taiban interest in stopping a suicide bomber was manifest—they had suffered twice as many killed than the U.S. in the Aug. 26 attack on the Airport, and were sworn enemies of ISIS-K. All the U.S. had to do was pass the coordinates of Ahmadi’s home to the Taliban, and then sit back and watch as the Taliban responded. If the Taliban failed to act, or Ahmadi attempted to drive away from his home in the white corolla, then the U.S. would be within its rights under international law to attack the car using lethal force.

However, to get there the U.S. first needed to cross the legal hurdle of exhausting “other means” of neutralizing the potential threat posed by Ahmadi’s car. They did not, and in failing to do so, were in violation of international law when, instead, they opted to launch a Hellfire missile.

Ignoring the Children

The decision to fire the Hellfire missile was made within two minutes of Ahmadi arriving at his home. According to The New York Times, when he arrived, his car was swarmed by children—his, and those of his brother, who lived with him. For some reason, the presence of children was not picked up by any of the U.S. military personnel monitoring the various video feeds tracking Ahmadi.

The drone crew determined that there was a “reasonable certainty”—the Trump-era standard, not the “near certain” standard that would have been in place had the Biden administration published its completed policy guidance document regarding drone strikes—that there were no civilians present. How such a conclusion can be reached when, on review, the video clearly showed the presence of children two minutes before the Hellfire missile was launched—has not been explained.

But Gen. Said wasn’t the only one who saw children on the video feed. At the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center in Langley, at least one analyst working in the fusion cell there saw the children as well. According to media reports, the C.I.A. was only able to communicate this information to the drone operators who fired the Hellfire after the missile had been launched, part of the breakdown in communications that Gen. Said attributed to the chain of mistakes that led to the deaths of Ahmadi and his family.

Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said. (U.S. Air Force)

What Gen. Said failed to discuss was the communications channels that the C.I.A. information had to travel to get to the drone operators. Did the C.I.A. have a direct line to the pilots of the 432^nd Expeditionary Wing? Or did the C.I.A. need to go through the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism headquarters, the Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), the Persistent Attack and Reconnaissance Operations Center, or PAROC, or the 432nd Wing Operations Center, which communicated directly with the drone crew?

According to The New York Times, the tactical commander made the decision to launch the Hellfire missile, another procedural holdover from the Trump-era, which did away with the need for high-level approval of the target before lethal force could be applied.

The professionalism of those involved in reviewing the drone feed was further called into question when the analysts, observing a post-strike explosion of a propane tank in the courtyard of Ahmadi’s apartment complex, mistook the visual signature produced as being that of a car bomb containing significant quantities of high explosive.

Gen. Said’s report covers up a multitude of mistakes under the guise of “confirmation bias.” In his report he notes that “[t]he overall threat to U.S. forces at [Kabul International Airport] at the time was very high,” with intelligence indicating that follow-on attacks were “imminent.” Perhaps most importantly, Gen. Said writes that “[t]hree days prior, such an attack resulted in the death of 13 service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians. The events that led to the strike and the assessments of this investigation should be considered with this context in mind.”

If that is indeed the standard, then Gen. Said must consider the words of President Biden at a press conference held on Aug. 26, after the ISIS-K attack on Kabul International Airport. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Biden said. “We will not forgive, we will not forget.”

Revenge was clearly a motive, with the drone operators leaning forward to put into action the President’s directive to hunt the enemy down and make them pay. Did the drone operators see children in the video feed? They say no, even though the C.I.A. analysts saw them prior to the launching of the Hellfire missile, and Gen. Said saw them after the fact.

These same drone operators were riding high on four years of “hands off” operations, where they were free to launch drone strikes under a “reasonable certainty” standard which was put in place knowing that the result would be more innocent civilians killed.

“Some of the Obama administration rules were getting in the way of good strikes,” one U.S. official is quoted saying about the need for looser restrictions. Gen. Said makes no reference to the impact the Trump-era policy had on conditioning drone operators to be more tolerant of civilian casualties, even to the extent that they looked the other way if acknowledgement of their presence could prevent a “good strike.”

What’s Wrong With the Program

A BQM-74E drone launches from the flight deck of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen (U.S. Navy photo by Cryptologic Technician 1st Class Carl T. Jacobson/Released)

The drone strike that killed Ahmadi and his family in many ways embodies all that was wrong with the U.S. lethal drone program as it was implemented in Afghanistan and elsewhere, failing to further legitimate U.S. national security objectives while harming U.S. credibility by wantonly killing innocent civilians.

A case can be made for criminal negligence on the part of all parties involved in the murder of Ahmadi and his family. But it is unlikely that any such charges will ever be put forward. The attack clearly violates international law, although the Biden administration will claim otherwise.

Gen. Said acknowledges so-called “confirmation bias” without getting to the bottom of what caused those involved in the drone strike to get it so wrong. Gen. Said alludes to systemic problems, such as the need to “enhance sharing of overall mission situational awareness during execution” and review “pre-strike procedures used to assess presence of civilians.”

But systemic (i.e., procedural) errors can only explain away so much. At some point the professionalism of the individuals involved must come under scrutiny, both in terms of their technical qualifications to carry out their respective assigned missions, as well as their moral character in willingly tolerating the deaths of innocent civilians in the name of mission accomplishment. Gen. Said leaves open the possibility that someone, somewhere, in the chain of command of these individuals can decide that the events of that day was a byproduct of “subpar performance” resulting in some form of “adverse action.”

That, however, is just another way of excusing murder, of tolerating a war crime committed in the name of the United States.

The day after Ahmadi and his family were murdered by U.S. forces, ISIS-K, operating from a safe house near to where the N.E.I. country director lived, used a modified white Toyota Corolla to launch rockets toward the U.S. positions in and around Kabul International Airport.

Fortunately, there were no causalities. But neither was the ISIS-K attack thwarted by a U.S. drone program that had been tipped off in advance about the nature and location of the attack. The ability to kill innocent civilians while failing to interdict genuine security threats is perhaps the most accurate epitaph one could ascribe to the U.S. lethal drone program in Afghanistan.

consortiumnews.com

By Pepe ESCOBAR

Facing high expectations, a five-man band Taliban finally played in Moscow. Yet the star of the show, predictably, was the Mick Jagger of geopolitics: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Right from the start, Lavrov set the tone for the Moscow format consultations, which boast the merit of “uniting Afghanistan with all neighboring countries.” Without skipping a beat, he addressed the US elephant in the room – or lack thereof: “Our American colleagues chose not to participate,” actually “for the second time, evading an extended troika-format meeting.”

Washington invoked hazy “logistical reasons” for its absence.

The troika, which used to meet in Doha, consists of Russia, the US, China and Pakistan. The extended troika in Moscow this week featured Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan and all five Central Asian ‘stans.’ That, in essence, made it a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting, at the highest level.

Lavrov’s presentation essentially expanded on the themes highlighted by the recent SCO Dushanbe Declaration: Afghanistan should be an “independent, neutral, united, democratic and peaceful state, free of terrorism, war and drugs,” and bearing an inclusive government “with representatives from all ethnic, religious and political groups.”

The joint statement issued after the meeting may not have been exactly a thriller. But then, right at the end, paragraph 9 offers the real bombshell:

“The sides have proposed to launch a collective initiative to convene a broad-based international donor conference under the auspices of the United Nations as soon as possible, certainly with the understanding that the core burden of post-conflict economic and financial reconstruction and development of Afghanistan must be shouldered by troop-based actors which were in the country for the past 20 years.”

The West will argue that a donor conference of sorts already happened: that was the G-20 special summit via videoconference earlier in October, which included UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Then, last week, much was made of a European promise of 1 billion euros in humanitarian aid, which, as it stands, remains extremely vague, with no concrete details.

At the G-20, European diplomats admitted, behind closed doors, that the main rift was between the West “wanting to tell the Taliban how to run their country and how to treat women” as necessary conditions in exchange for some help, compared to Russia and China following their non-interference foreign policy mandates.

Afghanistan’s neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, were not invited to the G-20, and that’s nonsensical. It’s an open question whether the official G-20 in Rome, on 30-31 October, will also address Afghanistan along with the main themes: climate change, Covid-19, and a still elusive global economic recovery.

No US in Central Asia

So the Moscow format, as Lavrov duly stressed, remains the go-to forum when it comes to addressing Afghanistan’s serious challenges.

Now we come to the crunch. The notion that the economic and financial reconstruction of Afghanistan should be conducted mainly by the former imperial occupier and its NATO minions – quaintly referred to as “troop-based actors” – is a non-starter.

The US does not do nation-building – as the entire Global South knows by experience. Even to unblock the nearly $10 billion of the Afghan Central Bank confiscated by Washington will be a hard slog. The IMF predicted that without foreign help the Afghan economy may shrink by 30 percent.

The Taliban, led by second Prime Minister Abdul Salam Hanafi, tried to put on a brave face. Hanafi argued that the current interim government is already inclusive: after all, over 500,000 employees of the former administration have kept their jobs.

But once again, much precious detail was lost in translation, and the Taliban lacked a frontline figure capable of capturing the Eurasian imagination. The mystery persists: where is Mullah Baradar?

Baradar, who led the political office in Doha, was widely tipped to be the face of the Taliban to the outside world after the group’s takeover of Kabul on 15 August. He has been effectively sidelined.

The background to the Moscow format, though, offers a few nuggets. There were no leaks – but diplomats hinted it was tense. Russia had to play careful mediator, especially when it came to addressing grievances by India and concerns by Tajikistan.

Everyone knew that Russia – and all the other players – would not recognize the Taliban as the new Afghan government, at least not yet. That’s not the point. The priority once again had to be impressed on the Taliban leadership: no safe haven for any jihadi outfits that may attack “third countries, especially the neighbors,” as Lavrov stressed.

When President Putin casually drops the information, on the record, that there are at least 2,000 ISIS-K jihadis in northern Afghanistan, this means Russian intel knows exactly where they are, and has the capabilities to snuff them, should the Taliban signal help is needed.

Now compare it with NATO – fresh from its massive Afghan humiliation – holding a summit of defense ministers in Brussels this Thursday and Friday to basically lecture the Taliban. NATO’s secretary-general, the spectacularly mediocre Jens Stoltenberg, insists that “the Taliban are accountable to NATO” over addressing terrorism and human rights.

As if this was not inconsequential enough, what really matters – as background to the Moscow format – is how the Russians flatly refused a US request to deploy their intel apparatus somewhere in Central Asia, in theory, to monitor Afghanistan.

First they wanted a “temporary” military base in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan: Putin–Biden actually discussed it at the Geneva summit. Putin counter-offered, half in jest, to host the Americans in a Russian base, probably in Tajikistan. Moscow gleefully played along for a few weeks just to reach an immovable conclusion: there’s no place for any US “counter-terrorism” shenanigans in Central Asia.

To sum it all up, Lavrov in Moscow was extremely conciliatory. He stressed how the Moscow format participants plan to use all opportunities for “including” the Taliban via several multilateral bodies, such as the UN, the SCO – where Afghanistan is an observer nation – and crucially, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which is a military alliance.

So many layers of ‘inclusiveness’ beckon. Humanitarian help from SCO nations like Pakistan, Russia and China is on its way. The last thing the Taliban need is to be ‘accountable’ to brain-dead NATO.

thecradle.co

By Vijay PRASHAD

Afghanistan and Tajikistan share a 1,400-kilometer border. Recently, a war of words has erupted between Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and the Taliban government in Kabul.

Rahmon censures the Taliban for the destabilization of Central Asia by the export of militant groups, while the Taliban leadership has accused Tajikistan’s government of interference.

Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troops to the border, and held military exercises and discussions with Russia and other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the Afghan government — Zabihullah Mujahid — tweeted pictures of Afghan troops deployed to Takhar Province on the border of the two countries. The escalation of harsh language continues. Prospects of war between these two countries should not be discounted, but — given the role Russia plays in Tajikistan — it is unlikely.

Russian President Vladimir Putin awarding Tajik President Emomali Rahmon the Order of Alexander Nevsky in February 2017. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Panjshir Exiles

On Sept. 3, Afghanistan’s former Vice President Amrullah Saleh tweeted, “The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue. I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity.” A few days later, the Taliban took the Panjshir Valley, where Saleh had taken refuge for the past fortnight, and Saleh slipped across the border into Tajikistan. The resistance inside Afghanistan died down.

From 2001, Saleh had worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States and then had become the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (2004-2010). He had previously worked closely with Ahmad Shah Massoud of the right-wing Jamiat-e Islami and of the Northern Alliance.

Saleh fled by helicopter to Tajikistan with Massoud’s son Ahmad. They were later joined in Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe by Abdul Latif Pedram, leader of the National Congress Party of Afghanistan.

The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue. I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity. https://t.co/FaKmUGB1mq

— Amrullah Saleh (@AmrullahSaleh2) September 3, 2021

These men followed the lead of the Northern Alliance, which had taken refuge in Tajikistan’s Kulob region after the Taliban victory in 1996.

The personal ties between Ahmad Shah Massoud and Tajikistan’s President Rahmon go back to the early 1990s.

In March, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Tajikistan Mohammad Zahir Aghbar remembered that in the early 1990s Massoud told a group of Tajik fighters in Kabul, “I do not want the war in Afghanistan to be transferred to Tajikistan under the banner of Islam. It is enough that our country has been fraudulently destroyed. Go and make peace in your country.”

That Massoud had backed the anti-government United Tajik Opposition, led by the Islamic Renaissance Party, is conveniently forgotten.

Map of Afghanistan with Tajikistan to the north. (CIA, University of Texas at Austin, Wikimedia Commons)

After the Taliban took Kabul on Aug. 15, and just before Saleh and Massoud escaped to Dushanbe, on Sept. 2, Rahmon conferred upon the late Ahmad Shah Massoud the highest civilian award of Tajikistan, the Order of Ismoili Somoni.

This protection afforded to the Saleh-led resistance movement, and Tajikistan’s refusal to recognize the Taliban government in Kabul sent a clear signal to the Taliban from Rahmon’s government.

Rahmon says that the main reason is that he is dismayed by the Taliban’s anti-Tajik stance. But this is not entirely the case. One in four Afghans are Tajiks, while half of Kabul claims Tajik ancestry. The economy minister — Qari Din Mohammad Hanif — is not only Tajik, but comes from the Badakhshan province that borders Tajikistan. The real reason is Rahmon’s concerns about regional destabilization.

Tajik Taliban

On Sept. 11, Saidmukarram Abdulqodirzoda, the head of Tajikistan’s Islamic Council of Ulema, condemned the Taliban as being anti-Islamic in its treatment of women and in its promotion of terrorism. Abdulqodirzoda, the lead imam in Tajikistan, has led a decade-long process to purge “extremists” from the ranks of the mosque leaders. Many foreign-trained imams have been replaced (Abdulqodirzoda had been trained in Islamabad, Pakistan), and foreign funding of mosques has been closely monitored.

Abdulqodirzoda frequently talks about the bloody civil war that tore Tajikistan apart between 1992 and 1997.

Between 1990, when the U.S.S.R. began to collapse, and 1992, when the civil war began, a thousand mosques — more than one a day — opened across the country.

Saudi Arabia’s money and influence rushed into the country, as did the influence of the right-wing Afghan leaders Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Rahmon — as chair of the Supreme Assembly of Tajikistan (1992-1994) and then as president, beginning in 1994 — led the fight against the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), which was eventually crushed by 1997.

The ghost of the civil war reappeared in 2010, when Mullah Amriddin Tabarov, a commander in the IRP, founded Jamaat Ansarullah.

Great Mosque in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 2013. (Soman, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Cocons)

In 1997, Tabarov fled to join the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), one of the fiercest of the extremist groups in that era. The IMU and Tabarov developed close ties with Al Qaeda, fleeing Afghanistan and Uzbekistan after the U.S. invasion of 2001 for Iraq, later Syria. Tabarov was caught by the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani in July 2015 and killed.

As the Taliban began to make gains in Afghanistan late last year, a thousand Ansarullah fighters arrived from their sojourn with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. When Darwaz fell to the Taliban in November 2020, it was these Ansarullah fighters who took the lead.

Tajikistan’s Rahmon has made it clear that he fears a spillover of Ansarullah into his country, dragging it back into the war of the 1990s. The fear of that war has allowed Rahmon to remain in power, using every means to squash any democratic opening in Tajikistan.

In mid-September, Dushanbe hosted the 21st meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Council of the Heads of State. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan had several talks with Rahmon about the situation in Afghanistan. As the war of words escalated, Khan called Rahmon on Oct. 3 to ask that the tension be reduced. Russia and China have also called for restraint.

It is unlikely that guns will be fired across the border; neither Dushanbe nor Kabul would like to see that outcome. But both sides are using the tension for their own ends — for Rahmon, to ensure that the Taliban will keep Ansarullah in check, and for the Taliban, for Rahmon to recognize their government.

Globetrotter via consortiumnews.com

The 21^st century, geopolitically, so far has been shaped by the U.S.- engineered Forever Wars.

Forever Wars: Afghanistan-Iraq, part 2, ranging from 2004 to 2021, is the fourth in a series of e-books recovering the Pepe Escobar archives on Asia Times.

The archives track a period of 20 years – starting with the columns and stories published under The Roving Eye sign in the previous Asia Times Online from 2001 all the way to early 2015.

The first e-book, Shadow Play, tracked the interplay between China, Russia and the U.S. between 2017-2020.

The second, Persian Miniatures, tracked the Islamic Republic of Iran throughout the “axis of evil” era, the Ahmadinejad years, the nuclear deal, and “maximum pressure” imposed by the Trump administration.

Forever Wars is divided in two parts, closely tracking Afghanistan and Iraq.

Forever Wars, part 1 starts one month before 9/11 in the heart of Afghanistan, and goes all the way to 2004.

Part 2, edited by my Asia Times colleague Bradley Martin, starts with the Abu Ghraib scandal and the Taliban adventures in Texas and goes all the way to the “Saigon moment” and the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The unifying idea behind this e-book series is quite a challenge: to recover the excitement of what is written as “the first draft of History”.

You may read the whole two-volume compilation chronologically, as a thriller, following in detail all the plot twists and cliffhangers.

Or you may read it in a self-service way, picking a date or a particular theme.

On part 1, you will find the last interview by commander Massoud in the Panjshir before he was killed two days before 9/11; the expansion of jihad as a “thermonuclear bomb”; life in “liberated” Kabul; life in Iraq in the last year under Saddam Hussein; on the trail of al-Qaeda in the Afghan badlands; who brought us the war on Iraq.

On part 2, you will revive, among other themes:

Abu Ghraib as an American tragedy.

Fallujah as a new Guernica.

Iraq as the new Afghanistan.

The myth of Talibanistan.

The counter-insurgency absurdities in “AfPak”.

How we all remain hostages of 9/11.

The Pipelineistan Great Game.

The failing surges – in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

How was life in Talibanistan in the year 2000.

NATO designing our future already in 2010.

Afghanistan courted as a player in Eurasian connectivity.

And since July 7, the chronicle of the astonishing end of the 20-year-long Forever War in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021.

The majority of the articles, essays and interviews selected for this two-part e-book were written in Afghanistan and in Iraq and/or before and after multiple visits to both countries.

So welcome to a unique geopolitical road trip – depicting in detail the slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune that will continue to shape the young 21^st century.

Ride the snake.

Source: Asia Times

On September 25, 2021, Afghanistan’s Economy Minister Qari Din Mohammad Hanif said that his government does not want “help and cooperation from the world like the previous government. The old system was supported by the international community for 20 years but still failed.” It is fair to say that Hanif has no experience in running a complex economy, since he has spent most of his career doing political and diplomatic work for the Taliban (both in Afghanistan and in Qatar). However, during the first Taliban government from 1996 to 2001, Hanif was the planning minister and in that position, dealt with economic affairs.

Hanif is right to point out that the governments of Presidents Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021), despite receiving billions of dollars in economic aid, failed to address the basic needs of the Afghan population. At the end of their rule—and 20 years of U.S. occupation—one in three people are facing hunger, 72 percent of the population lingers below the poverty line and 65 percent of the people have no access to electricity. No amount of bluster from the Western capitals can obscure the plain fact that support from the “international community” resulted in virtually no economic and social development in the country.

Poor North

Hanif, who is the only member of Afghanistan’s new cabinet who is from the country’s Tajik ethnic minority, comes from the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan. The northeastern provinces in Afghanistan are Tajik-dominated areas, and Badakhshan was the base from which the Northern Alliance swiftly moved under U.S. air cover to launch an attack against the Taliban in 2001. In early August 2021, the Taliban swept through these districts. “Why would we defend a government in Kabul that did nothing for us?” said a former official in Karzai’s government who lives in Badakhshan capital, Fayzabad.

Between 2009 and 2011, 80 percent of USAID funds that came into Afghanistan went to areas of the south and east, which had been the natural base of the Taliban. Even this money, a U.S. Senate report noted, went toward “short-term stabilization programs instead of longer-term development projects.” In 2014, Haji Abdul Wadood, then governor of the Argo district in Badakhshan, told Reuters, “Nobody has given money to spend on developmental projects. We do not have resources to spend in our district, our province is a remote one and attracts less attention.”

Hanif’s home province of Badakhshan—and its neighboring areas — suffer from great poverty, the rates upwards of 60 percent. When he talks about failure, Hanif has his home province in mind.

For thousands of years, the province of Badakhshan has been home to mines for gemstones such as lapis lazuli. In 2010, a U.S. military report estimated that there was at least $1 trillion worth of precious metals in Afghanistan; later that year, Afghanistan’s then Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani told BBC radio that the actual figure could be three times as much. The impoverished north might not be so poor after all.

Thieves in the North

With opium production contributing a large chunk of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, it is often a focus of global media coverage on the country’s economy and has partly financed the terrible wars that have wracked the country for the past several years. The gems of Badakhshan, meanwhile, provided the financing for Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Jamiat-e Islami faction in the 1980s; after 1992, when Massoud became the defense minister in Kabul, he made an alliance with a Polish company—Intercommerce—to sell the gems for an estimated $200 million per year. When the Taliban ejected Massoud from power, he returned to the Panjshir Valley and used the Badakhshan, Takhar, and Panjshir gems to finance his anti-Taliban resistance.

When the Northern Alliance—which included Massoud’s faction—came to power under U.S. bombardment in 2001, these mines became the property of the Northern Alliance commanders. Men such as Haji Abdul Malek, Zekria Sawda and Zulmai Mujadidi—all Northern Alliance politicians—controlled the mines. Mujadidi’s brother Asadullah Mujadidi was the militia commander of the Mining Protection Force, which protected the mines for these new elites.

In 2012, Afghanistan’s then Mining Minister Wahidullah Shahrani revealed the extent of corruption in the deals, which he had made clear to the U.S. Embassy in 2009. Shahrani’s attempt at transparency, however, was understood inside Afghanistan as a mechanism to delegitimize Afghan mining concerns and push through a new law that would allow international mining companies more freedom of access to the country’s resources. Various international entities—including Centar (United Kingdom) and the Polish billionaire Jan Kulczyk—attempted to access the gold, copper and gemstone mines of the province; Centar formed an alliance with the Afghanistan Gold and Minerals Company, headed by former Urban Development Minister Sadat Naderi. The consortium’s mining equipment has now been seized by the Taliban. Earlier this year, Shahrani was sentenced to 13 months’ jail time by the Afghan Supreme Court for misuse of authority.

What Will the Taliban Do?

Hanif has an impossible agenda. The IMF has suspended funds for Afghanistan, and the U.S. government continues to block access to the nearly $10 billion of Afghan external reserves held in the United States. Some humanitarian aid has now entered the country, but it will not be sufficient. The Taliban’s harsh social policy—particularly against women—will discourage many aid groups from returning to the country.

Officials at the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), the country’s central bank, tell me that the options before the government are minimal. Institutional control over the mining wealth has not been established. “What deals were cut profited a few individuals and not the country as a whole,” said one official. One major deal to develop the Mes Aynak copper mine made with the Metallurgical Corporation of China and with Jiangxi Copper has been sitting idle since 2008.

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in mid-September, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon spoke about the need to prevent terrorist groups from moving across the Afghan borders to disrupt Central Asia and western China. Rahmon positioned himself as a defender of the Tajik peoples, although poverty of the Tajik communities on both sides of the border should be as much a focus of attention as upholding the rights of the Tajiks as a minority in Afghanistan.

There is no public indication from the SCO that it would prevent not only cross-border terrorism, but also cross-border smuggling. The largest quantities of heroin and opium from northern Afghanistan go to Tajikistan; untold sums of money are made in the illegal movement of minerals, gemstones, and metals out of Afghanistan. Hanif has not raised this point directly, but officials at DAB say that unless Afghanistan better commandeers its own resources, something it has failed to do over the past two decades, the country will not be able to improve the living conditions of its people.

Globetrotter via counterpunch.org

It was bound to happen: the remixed Saigon moment at Kabul airport and the stunning comeback of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, led by Pashtuns, has unleashed across the West a cheap Orientalization avalanche.

The whole of Afghanistan is now ‘threatened’ by the return of the ‘barbarians.’

Once again, Afghan women ‘need to be protected,’ all Afghans ‘need to be rescued,’ ‘terrorists will rebuild’ and Afghanistan may even need to be re-invaded for the sake of ‘civilization.’ All because of those wild tribal Pashtun barbarians.

Imperialist pathologies never die. ‘Barbarian’ yields from the Greek original barbaros – as in someone who could not speak Greek, or spoke it incorrectly.

When faced with the sophisticated Persians, the concept of barbarian evolved. And then the Romans gave it its final contours, encompassing people who could not speak Greek or Latin, those who deployed military skills, were fierce or cruel to their enemies, or came from a non Graeco-Roman culture.

All this eventually coalesced into a toxic Western cultural construct deployed for centuries, the ultimate, pejorative denomination for a warrior-like Other: uncouth, uncivilized, rural, non-urban, prone to violence and cruelty, maybe not a total savage, but close.

As a contrast, Imperial China always referred to various Central Eurasian tribes and peoples as warring, civilized, urban, nomads, agrarian, but never as barbarians.

Pashtun Afghanistan is a much more sophisticated universe than the prevailing reductionism that evokes rural subsistence economy, mud-brick architecture, caravans of nomads, burqas and bearded men in sandals brandishing Kalashnikovs.

So as a tribute to the late, great Norwegian social anthropologist Fredrik Barth, let’s subvert Orientalism by taking an – Orientalist! – magic carpet ride to the twists and turns of the Pashtun world.

It’s all about Turko-Persia

Afghanistan may be approached as southern Central Asia, as western South Asia, or as eastern West Asia.

The fact remains that Afghanistan, historically, is a crucial node of Turko-Persia – as much in culture and language as in geography.  Turko-Persia stretches east from Anatolia and the Zagros mountains, along the Iranian plateau, all the way to the Indian plains. This has been no less than the heartland of Persian empires.

Pashtuns have an immensely complex ethno-genesis. There are historians who identify Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan as far back as the Achaemenid empire in 500 BC.

Pashtuns may be descendants of the Hephtalites, which by the way are not the White Huns of Central Asia, as demonstrated by scholar Etienne da la Vaissiere. The Hephtalites defeated the Sassanid empire in the 5th century and occupied vast stretches of Bactria and Transoxiana.

But Pashtuns may also be descendants from the Sakas – nomadic Iranic peoples of the Eurasian steppe. And that, famously, would put them as descendants of the Sogdians and the Scythians.

Herodotus wrote that the Persians called the Scythians Saka, and later Oswald Szemerenyi in his 1980 classic Four Old Iranian Ethnic Names; Scythian-Skudra-Sogdian-Saka showed that Saka was the Persian name for all Scythians. An earlier form, Sakla, suggests historically the conquest of the entire steppe by northern Iranians – literally Scythians.

What’s certain is that Pashtuns have multiple origins; after all, they are a tribal confederation.

Pashtuns have a knack of linking multiple lineages (zai, in Pashto, as in ‘son of’) with tens of millions of people into a single genealogy, right to their – arguably mythic – common ancestor: Qais, a contemporary of Prophet Muhammad.

These lineages merge into larger clans (khel, in Pashto) and lead to tribal confederations, the most important of which are the Durranis, the Ghilzais and the Karlanri, which the British called Pathans. The Pathans are the indigenous inhabitants of the mountains that straddle what is now an artificial Afghanistan–Pakistan border; they only became Pashtuns much later, adopting their language and culture.

The 11th century capital of the Turkish Ghaznavids lay in what would later become territory held by the Ghilzai tribes. This intermingling is explainable because Afghanistan was always the eastern frontier of the Persian and then Turko-Mongol empires.

The large nomad tribal confederations emerged only in the early 13th century, in oases in the southwest Afghan desert, or congregating peasants in the eastern mountains. It’s an array of heterogeneous groups interlinked by a code and value system establishing their social relations: the Pashtunwali.

Pashtunwali rules

Pashtunwali has integrated quite a few elements of Muslim morals, but it’s in contradiction with sharia law in many aspects. French scholar X. de Planhol succinctly described it as “a set of rules that model the customs (adat), character (khoui) in relation to social exigence (raouadj), and thus define ethnic identity (khouyouna).” Pashtunwali regulates individual honor and also regulates a set of sanctions, with death prominently featured.

In the Pashtun world, everything must be decided by a jirga (assembly). They happen at every level – home, village, clan, tribe, whenever necessary. The number of participants varies from a dozen to thousands. I’ve been to a few. It’s a fascinating exercise in direct democracy.

There’s no ‘conductor.’ Results don’t come by vote, but by a consensus that must naturally evolve once there’s no opposition to a decision. Elders are way more influential than youngsters. This is how the Taliban decided their new caretaker government.

As much as the Pashtun code is one of the most meticulous on the planet, Islam has brought to the fore quite a few moral issues, sometimes in contradiction with Pashtunwali. To add to the complexity, there are juridical norms imposed by a hereditary nobility, coming from the Turko-Mongols.

Starting in the 11th century, Afghanistan received an influx of Turk nomads, preceding the 13th century Mongol conquests. At the time, virtually all of Bactria was Turkicized – except for the Pashtuns.

Balkh, the legendary capital of Bactria, which stunned Arab invaders described as Mother of Cities, the richest satrapy of the Persian empire, was the dominant city in the Afghan northern plains for millennia, located north of the Hindu Kush. Those waves of Turkish-speaking nomads were over-spilling from Turkestan, which included the khanates of Bukhara and Samarkand: they merged with the local Persian population, and Dari – which is Farsi (Persian) with a different accent – remained the predominant language.

Peshawar was a completely different story. Historically, Peshawar was closely connected to Kabul because it was its winter capital for centuries (Kabul was an Hindu kingdom well into the 11th century). Afghans lost Peshawar when it fell to the Sikhs in 1834; later it became part of the Raj when the Sikhs were defeated.

Peshawar is the Pashtun Mecca. Pashtun tribes living in the mountain valleys above Peshawar have never in history answered to any government. For them, there’s no border or ID papers: only their rifles.

A key Pashtun characteristic is that they have been living essentially at the margin of great empires. They evolved based on their own norms and had the freedom to build their own system of reference. And that explains why they are so independent.

Pashtuns identify two types of land: Yaghestan (the land of rebels) and Hokumat (the land of government). There may be serious internal social differentiations, but the whole Pashtun social body comes together when it’s a matter of facing external conditions. That explains the fierce fighting spirit against any foreign invader, be it British, Soviet or American.

So we’re talking about extraordinary social cohesion – with a coordinated reaction towards external events. No wonder Pashtuns believe the political structures they develop are superior. History has shown that once neighboring imperial structures started to weaken, Pashtuns ended up forging ‘their’ state.

And don’t forget the Turko-Mongols

Between the 16th and the 17th centuries, Afghanistan was squeezed between three empires: the Uzbeks of lower Central Asia, the Mughals in India, and the Iranian Safavids. The Mughals and the Safavids were fighting for Herat and Kandahar. Pashtuns privileged the Safavids, even though they were Shia. Afghan territory, a natural extension of Iranian mountains and plateaus, facilitated Safavid influence.

This went on until in the early 18th century when Afghan tribes rebelled against declining Safavid power. An independent political entity around the Durrani tribe emerged in 1747, and Ahmad Shah was crowned King of the Afghans in Kandahar, via a loya jirga (grand assembly).

This first Afghan state south of the Hindu Kush was quite homogeneous. The structure was basically Turko-Persian, in fact Turko-Mongolian, much more than based in Pashtun tribal tradition.

Since the late 10th century, every major empire from the borders of northern India to trans-Oxiana, Iran and Anatolia was founded by Turks or Mongols. Some would last centuries – like the Ottoman Turks. Afghanistan was in fact ruled by Turko-Mongols for no less than 750 years, until the Pashtuns formed a state in the mid-18th century.

Yet an Afghan state was definitively established only after the Great Game between the Russian and British empires. That was Afghanistan in the late 19th century, configured as a buffer state between Russian Central Asia and the Raj. The Brits needed it to block the road to India and the sea of Oman to the Russians, who were getting ever closer after they set a protectorate in Bukhara in 1873.

Drawing up the Russo–Afghan and Sino–Afghan borders was not a problem. The real issue was the border with the Raj along the 1893 Durand line, dividing the territory of numerous Pashtun tribes just so imperial Britain could control the main access points to the Indian subcontinent, the Khyber pass and the Quetta corridor. The Durand line was only definitively drawn in 1921. It divides Pashtun lands in two – and was never, and will never, be recognized in Afghanistan as a real border.

So if we had the first Afghan state with a strong Pashtun majority, the second was a colonial invention bearing a complex ethnic mosaic. Before the 1979 Soviet incursion and the 1980s jihad, that accounted for 40 to 55 percent of Pashtuns, 35 to 45 percent to Persian-speaking ethnic groups, and 10 to 15 percent to Turkish-speaking ethnic groups. It hasn’t changed much since.

The creator of modern Afghanistan, ‘Iron Emir’ Abd-ur-Rahman, actually ‘Pashtunized’ northern Turkestan, transplanting sedentary Pashtun populations from the south from the Durrani and Ghilzai tribal confederations, and then encouraging nomads to migrate.

And that’s one of the reasons why the ethnic composition of Afghanistan is extremely tricky, especially in the west and in the north. Everyone is in perpetual movement – alliances included (the Taliban profited from it for their lightening fast surge before arriving in Kabul on 15 August).

What is immutable is that across a structurally unstable nation, Pashtuns consider themselves top of the heap – and the ‘owners’ of the Afghan state. And yet their perpetual intra-ethnic strife always wins over communitarian solidarity. There’s always a huge clash between the Durrani – who in fact took over the state since the mid 18th century – and other Pashtun groups, especially the Ghilzai. The Ghilzais are more egalitarian in spirit and do not accept Durrani hegemony: they just consider them more manipulative.

Mullah Omar, for example, is Ghilzai. But former Afghan President Hamid Karzai is from Sadozai Durrani descent, an impeccable lineage, and later he inherited the leadership of the Popalzai sub-clan.

The Durrani elite supported Karzai in late 2001 because they identified him as their own return to power after the socialist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), civil war and Taliban interregnum.  Other tribes were deeply disorganized and could not agree on anything. The only other possible option would have been Massoud the Tajik, a true nationalist, and respected even by Pashtuns. But he was assassinated on 9 September, 2001.

Down with the nation-state

Pashtuns have a natural aversion to the Westphalian notion of the nation-state. After all, they see themselves as an empire within the empire. Centralized power usually tries to neutralize them by bribery built as a system of government (that was the modus operandi during the Karzai years).

Afghan political life, in practice, is set in motion by factions: sub-tribes, Islamic coalitions (what the Taliban de facto forged to come back to power), and regional groups, usually led by warlords since the 1980s jihad. Add to it religious conflict, with hegemonic Sunnism, the Shiism of the Hazaras and the Ismailism of the Pamiri Tajiks always clashing.

In Afghanistan, Islam is as much ideology (the 2004 constitution recognizes an Islamic Republic of Afghanistan) as religion. It’s the stepping stone of Afghan identity, Pashtun or not. Every tribal member adheres wholeheartedly to Islam, even when there are glaring differences between sharia and pashtunwali. Afghans as a whole may be defined as the quintessential Natural Born Muslims.

The ‘historic’ 1990s Taliban – who now compose the majority of the interim government – are Pashtun tribals who speak Pashto and so affirm their identity, much more than emphasizing being member of a particular tribe. What is unshakeable for these men issued from rural conservatism is their suspicion of the city – especially Kabul and its modernists – and the Pashtun superiority complex in relation to other ethnic groups.

Even as the NATO-occupied Karzai years were a disaster, the Taliban were also in crisis and in internal disarray most of the time. Their ideology could be accused of being more Pakistani than Afghan: after all, the Taliban as a movement was born in Pakistani madrassas, and the leadership all these years was based in Balochistan.

Taliban 2.0 may suggest they are venturing beyond tribal identity, and the perennial Durrani–Ghilzai confrontation is being pushed to the background. But the bitter negotiations for the interim government seem to spell otherwise, opposing the Doha ‘moderates,’ some of them Durrani, some Ghilzai, to the ‘warrior’ Haqqanis, who are Karlanri.

In Afghanistan, prior to the latest horrendous four decades of war, the center of the rural political order revolved around landowning khans. As a rule, they were allies of the state. But then, starting with the 1980s jihad, this old elite was smashed by young, self-made military commanders who rapidly built their own political bases. The new generation, who fought NATO on the ground, now also expects to have a future in the new Kabul arrangement. As far as state building goes, this will be extremely tricky to negotiate.

So the big question now is how the old Pashtun breed, having learned the lessons of their dismal governing experience in 1996-2001, will be able to circumvent the inherent weakness of every Afghan central government. The periphery tribal system is bound to remain very strong, with nearly autonomous territories controlled by warlords that are not tribal chiefs, but in fact competitors for regional power and sources of income that should be feeding the state coffers.

And here is the ultimate challenge for these Pashtun warriors: to forge an Islamic system where the center can hold. The dire alternative, to paraphrase Yeats, will be mere anarchy loosed upon the Afghan world.

thecradle.co

After the Taliban named an interim government that was regarded as quite controversial inside Afghanistan and did not exactly please the nation’s Eurasian neighbors, I asked Dr. Ejaz Akram, Professor of Religion & World Politics at the National Defense University in Islamabad, for a detailed analysis. He sent me an astonishing, unique essay that is a must read for both East and West, presented here in a slightly edited version but with its mighty punch intact. Dr. Ejaz carries the necessary authority to not only map the regional chessboard but to suggest to the Taliban the righteous paths to heal Afghanistan after four decades of imposed war (P.E.)

On the demand for an “all inclusive government”

Imagine if the French revolutionaries were asked to retain the elements of the kingdom of Louis XVI while forming the new republic to keep it all ‘inclusive’.

Imagine that the American revolutionaries were asked to keep the British loyalists as a part of the new American republic to keep it all inclusive.

Imagine that the Bolsheviks were asked to keep the Czarist loyalists in the government to keep it all inclusive.

Imagine that Chairman Mao was asked to keep the Kuomintang as a part of his new set up to keep things all inclusive.

Imagine that Imam Khomeini was asked to keep the elements of Reza Shah’s puppet government to keep the new Iranian government all inclusive.

Imagine that Erdogan was asked shortly after the coup to keep the Gulen movement intact to keep the Turkish government all inclusive.

Imagine that the Saudis are asked to give due representation to a quarter of its Shi’ite population to keep the Kingdom all inclusive.

Imagine that India’s Modi is asked to give full citizenship rights to Muslims, Sikhs and other minorities to keep RSS-India all inclusive.

If all of the above cannot be, then what logic is the so-called international community practicing when asking the Taliban to keep those who aided and abetted the utterly unjustified foreign occupation as a part of their government to keep things all inclusive?

What happened in Afghanistan was not a mere change of government. A puppet state responsible for killing their own people and spreading subversion in the region was overthrown. Any talk of government comes after the state formation is complete. To keep the elements of the Ancien Regime is to keep the fifth columnists alive who can undo their half-century long struggle to keep foreign rule out. It is like asking a surgeon not to remove all the cancerous tissue from a cancer patient as it might come in handy later.

A state is one group that has to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. All other groups have to be disarmed and disbanded. After the state is formed and all groups subscribe to a creed that is shared by all, only then a government can be formed by a wider group of people who will reflect peoples’ sensibilities and beliefs and values. If that government does not do that the people will not consider it legitimate and the state will stage a coup and send home the government.

That state’s legitimacy comes from a principle to which the population of that country subscribes through their primordial socio-religious moorings. This common denominator in Afghanistan is none other than Muslim beliefs and values. Even though the Taliban’s overwhelming force are Pashtun (which means they practice Pashtunwali code and its understanding of Hanafi Sunni Shariah), non-Pashtun Afghans are all Muslims too. So, their common denominator still remains Islam.

Therefore, for the Taliban to insist that their rule should be built on Islamic principles is rooted in sound logic. To expect that the Afghans will subscribe to Swedish liberalism is a daydream. Ashraf Ghani was prepared to go down that foolish path, but the Taliban are too smart to do the same.

Keep in mind that the Taliban took control of the entire country without a fight. The so-called Afghan National Army disbanded so easily and hugged the Taliban fighters and many even joined them. If public opinion is not behind a resistance movement, it can never succeed.

This is the proof of Taliban’s inclusion. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the French revolutionaries, the American revolutionaries, the Saudis, the Iranians and many others who butchered their opponents on their path to power, the Taliban gave general amnesty to all. Who has more mercy in their hearts, the progenitors of the modern republics or the Taliban? We have never seen such a spectacle in recent human history. If this is not inclusion, then what is?

The reason the “international community”, as in a gang of Western nations gone rogue, is shrieking and fretting over an Islamic system for Afghanistan is because of their habitual and historical prejudice against Islam and Muslims. From crusades to colonialism, in the West’s imagination, Islam is the ultimate boogeyman. Edward Said illustrated that quite well in his famous classic, Orientalism. The contemporary Islamophobia industry is another proof of the West’s unfounded hatred of Islam. One would only hope that the Chinese and Russian political systems do not allow their ruling elite to go down that path, or else the long-term consequences for both these superpowers may not be pleasant. So far, their state media are toeing the Western logic of inclusivism, similar to their pro-America positions in the aftermath of 9/11, without much reflection as to who was right and who was wrong. We have faith that these two political systems will make better judgments this time around.

Another absurd proposition by the “August” international community is that the Taliban must fulfill the promises they made overnight. This is like asking a newborn baby to start running immediately right after being born. For anyone who knows the ABC of statecraft should know that it is not possible. First the state has to be consolidated. This will take a few months.

The interim set up must not include elements of the Ancien Regime who were on the payroll of the enemy they fought for twenty long years. Then a variety of cross-ethnic elements in the country must be recruited who subscribe to the common denominator of beliefs and values that the state is expected to be a vanguard of. This is inclusion and this will yield legitimacy of the state in the eyes of its people.

Once the state is consolidated, a government should be formed in accordance to Islamic principles. Islam is neutral to the form of government. It only insists that regardless of the form of the government, the outcome must be justice. Whether it is a kingdom, a city-state, a democracy or any other form, the outcome must be justice.

The Quran also suggests that justice is not equality. Equality is giving everyone the same; justice is giving whomever their due. Quran is kitab-al-insaf (book of justice) and not kitab-al-masawat (book of equality).

After the period of state consolidation, government formation should be achieved on the principle of meritocracy, and not multi-party democracy, in which global capitalists will turn democrats into their prostitutes and rip off the people. Honest and competent people from all ethnic backgrounds should be chosen, then trained and then run the government.

But that phase comes after the state formation process in which it must never be forgotten that that community which struggled and sacrificed enormously to throw out the foreigners should have more say in matters of state formation, compared to those who sided with the oppressor to kill their own people and their neighbors. This is common sense, which is beyond the IQ of the “international community”.

A message to the Taliban

I extend my congratulations to the ghazis of the Emirates of Afghanistan and offer prayers of condolence for those mujahideen who became martyrs in their jihad against the oppressive, atrocious and cruel governments of the U.S. and its Western allies. In two centuries of humiliation against the Muslim world, you buried the British, Bolsheviks and Yankees in your mountains along with their empires.

The hardships you have suffered and the sacrifices you have rendered for the millat have produced a character in you that is worth being proud of. Now that you have successfully defeated the foreign occupation, lots more needs to be done. The world is already suggesting you to adopt a direction which will be disastrous for you in the long run. As a scholar who is familiar with the West and East Asia, as well as the various understandings of Islam within the Islamic civilization, perhaps I am in a position to make some humble suggestions that may prove useful in charting out your future.

First and foremost, the sword from your right hand can now shift into your left hand, and you will have to grab the pen in your right hand.

Your military resistance era is now over, but you still need to defend and develop your country. While your enemies are still planning to bomb you, their kinetic efforts will be supplemented by a mischievous hybrid war, for which you may not be fully prepared. Without the power of knowledge, this hybrid war cannot be won.

Your decades-long steadfastness comes from the principle of istiqamat (one of the nine principles of Pashtunwali). You were tortured, incarcerated and killed, but the enemy could neither buy you out with money, nor could they bludgeon you into submission over the last twenty years. This shows that you have basirat (ability to see beyond the apparent facades and false promises).

These are quintessential aspects of character, which are necessary prerequisites of a morally and spiritually upright leadership in statecraft. Basirat comes from tazkiyya-i-nafs (cleansing of the soul), which in turn comes from austerity and being strict with yourself and generous with others. This too, you proved after you gave general amnesty to all who fought against you, even though it would have been perfectly Islamic to demand retribution as was done by the Nuremberg trials conducted by the victors of WWII.

Bear in mind that movements start with great spirit which wanes over time because the adherents recede into their comfort zones, become complacent and are finally overcome by the forces of evil that always lurk behind the shadows. Afghanistan will soon become one of the world’s richest countries under your leadership. Make sure that your peoples’ needs are met and they have moderate prosperity, or else excessive riches will make your population fat, lazy and coward like the Gulf Arabs.

The last big wave of Western oppression came to Afghanistan after 9/11. This wave will take about 2-4 more years to finally wane and subside permanently. When it wanes, like a tsunami it will take many unwanted bad things from your neighborhood also. Even though you do not want to transform your neighbors, many of us are already beginning to be transformed by your victory. The Kashmiri movement, the Khalistan independence movement, the Palestine movement, and the movement against corruption in Pakistan are already drawing inspiration from your victory against forces of oppression.

Islam does not accommodate secular liberal political philosophy, from the womb of which the modern democratic fraud was born. Steer clear of it. Modernist Muslims will tell you that the concept of Shura is democracy. It is not. Shura is not Western style democracy, but a system of consultation prevalent at all tiers of society, from the realm of the family to the state. Use that at every level, as you have during your resistance years.

How to deal with the big powers

The governments of Western countries were your enemies. They occupied you, spilled your blood, and destroyed regional peace. You may forgive them, but do not forget. It is best to do aggressive diplomacy at the moment, but under no circumstances should you deal with them with clemency. They do not deserve it. Starve if you have to, but do not yield to these forces. Apply the law of Pashtunwali and Shariah in dealing with them.

You say that Pakistan is your second home. If you form your government according to Islamic principles, it will eventually become a part of your first home. Afghanistan is not a nation. It is a territory that comprises many nations. Pakistan is not a nation either. It is a union of four big nationalities and a few smaller ones. It too came about in the name of Islamic values but its corrupt and westernized elites forgot the original mission. So many Pashtuns, Hazaras and Tajiks came to Pakistan successively through various wars and made it their home. You can too, not as a refugee, but as confederated citizen.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have learnt that on matters of defense and foreign policy, both need to be on the same page, or else there will always be trouble. If we do integrate defense and foreign policy, the economic control of your resources can remain in the Afghan hands just as the economic control of Pakistani resources may remain in the Pakistani hands.

This will only work for the short run. But since you are landlocked, you need to have access to the Pakistani territory in a way that Pakistan doesn’t need access to your territory. However, since trade with landlocked Central Asia is paramount, you can allow access to Pakistan to have access to Central Asia through which a one-sided dependency will turn into co-dependency, which will be better for both countries. Moreover, consider the following very important point.

Afghanistan is approximately 653,000 sq km, out of which arable land is only a little less than 12%, amounting to 78,360 sq km. One sq km has 247 acres. In the U.S. one acre feeds about 1-2 people. In Afghanistan, if one acre fed 10-15 people, then you can only feed less than 2 million people out of a population of approximately 38 million. The other 36 million have to be fed from Pakistan, because it is the cheapest source of surplus wheat. Pakistan’s 882,000 sq km has more than 40 percent arable land and it produces surplus wheat and rice.

You need Pakistan for your access to the sea, food security and building up a modern defense capability. If you keep practicing Afghan nationalism, and Pakistan also keeps practicing Uncle Tom’s backward ideologies from the bygone days of European enlightenment, both will remain adversaries. Pakistan will remain poor and you will starve to death. By the time you dig your resources and sell them for food and building infrastructure, you will keep indebting the Afghan people.

Pair up and partner up with Pakistan’s various sectors, except your politics. If you pledge your politics with Pakistan, we will let you down. Until a fully awake political elite comes into life in Pakistan, you should stay away. If and when it happens, then integrate with Pakistan as closely as possible.

You are most likely to produce an Iran-type of social space in the beginning. But make sure not to follow the Saudi model, because it is utterly un-Islamic. Remember, Muslim women have led armies of men in our history. We produced female scholars before any other civilization could do so. We even produced female sultanas before anywhere else.

However, since the last half a century, Afghanistan saw no peace, and women’s predicament, similar to men was focused on survival only. So, your current policy regarding women in Afghanistan is realistic enough for a conservative, warn-torn Pashtun society.

Others do not share the same outlook. Stick to Islamic injunctions and protect your women. Disallow man-hating feminist ideologies to protect the family unit. There should be enough freedom for our women. Our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of our mothers, sisters, daughters and wives. Resist all pressure from abroad on this account and gradually re-engineer society in which women will be modest but fully participating in our civilizational and national lives.

From the point of view of food security, revisit the Islamic position on population control. Family size now should be smaller than the days of war. In two generations, manageable population size in Afghanistan should be below 20 million, as in the case of Pakistan, which should drop from 220 million to 150 million.

Note: a complementary essay will deal with Islamic economics, finance, the role of the Afghan Central Bank and the limits of Western capitalism.

Much has been written about the partners which the Taliban are signing up. But its relations with Iran is the only issue which the whole world is watching with bated breath

The creation of a new government in Kabul has sent ominous signs to the weary West of how seriously it can take the Taliban. Much hope was placed on it including a few members, as ministers, of other groups from the previous government. In the event, it was made up entirely of Taliban figures and not even one woman. Similar to most faint indications that the Taliban have changed in recent weeks, it showed that in fact, really nothing has changed at all. In fact, the only real thing which has changed between the Taliban on the late 90s and the colourful figures brandishing weapons in Kabul today can be summed up with one word: smartphones.

2021 is really a different place than 1996 and so there are some indications that at least the Taliban doesn’t wish to be an international pariah but needs to build strong relations with regional players. For one, it’s entirely penniless and there are already signs of an economic meltdown which would soon make the country an economic basket case, which of course has implications towards internal strife and terrorist groups flourishing. But also just the mere function of being able to govern – something that the Taliban have shown in the 90s it is really not capable of doing – is now more important than ever. One of the statements released which can be accepted on face value is that the Taliban wants cordial relations with the U.S. If the right balance was struck and the Taliban could curb its human rights atrocities, that is always a possibility that Biden will have to mull over, as well as the West’s regional partners. But in the end it will not be gruesome Sharia law which the Taliban carries out which will sway Biden. More who the Taliban are teaming up with. And who they are not. Ultimately the U.S. president is looking for a partner in the region for him to reach his goals. And Iran is top of the list.

Pakistan will always be a big brother as its intelligence division played a huge role in not only supporting the Taliban all these years but also in its final victory. Pakistan fighter jets buzzing the rooftops of the Panjshir valley was a recent message not only to the resistant fighters below but also to the U.S. and its partners. Yet as America and Britain wake up to the Big Brother role of Pakistan and adjust their aid programs to Islamabad, many will look to the relationship that the Taliban is cultivating with China and Russia and asking if Kabul has “fallen” into the hands of the so-called “axis of resistance” or can it still be “saved”?

Could the Taliban have it both ways and be a satellite of China and Russia but still enjoy Uncle Sam’s checkbook to keep its hospitals running and salaries paid of civil servants and military?

The answer is yes, but so much depends on Iran. All eyes are on Tehran for this riddle to be resolved. If the Taliban’s relationship with Iran worsens (due to perhaps poor treatment of Afghanistan’s Shia minorities), the Washington will exploit this for its own objectives. If the Taliban shifted away from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel could well approach its leaders and build (financial) bridges to help heal its ailing economy while an anti-Iran agenda gains momentum. The Taliban doesn’t have to go to war with Iran to exploit this situation. It simply needs to go from ‘frenemy’ to ‘enemy’ and close its borders.

With the egregious mismanagement of the country, anything in possible in Afghanistan right now as the Taliban comes to terms with money and food shortages from an economy already in a tailspin.

Regionally, super powers’ woes will affect Afghanistan.

Recently both Iran and Saudi Arabia held talks in Baghdad which is signalling a thawing of relations and places the U.S. in an awkward position over its long-running talks with Iran and the JCPOA. If the U.S. walks away from the farcical talks, then this could be seen as a provocation to Iran’s hard-line leaders.

The Taliban has also had meetings with Tehran going back some time and so there are diplomat channels which already exist. Everything now really depends on which way Iran turns and whether the Taliban can control its own country and stop it short from falling into the abyss of its old ways in the 90s. America, the UK, Saudi Arabia and Israel are all waiting patiently and are in no hurry to make snap decisions which they will bitterly regret later on. The Taliban becoming an ally of the West is not far-fetched though. As indeed is for the West to arrange some attacks on Shia minorities in Afghanistan to steer Kabul towards its hegemony.

The United States may have suffered a shameful, historic defeat in Afghanistan, but there is still a silver lining in this cloud for the imperial planners in Washington.

The destruction, anarchy and trillions of dollars wasted in prosecuting a 20-year war can deliver a consolation prize for the United States. Namely, by making Afghanistan a cauldron of destabilization for China, as well as Russia, Iran and the Central Asia region.

When President Joe Biden was asked this week by reporters about the future relations between Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and China, he sounded remarkably relishing.

“China has a real problem with the Taliban,” said Biden. And not only China, he added, but also Russia, Iran and Pakistan. “They’re all trying to figure out what do they do now. So it will be interesting to see what happens.”

The American gloating here is sickening. Washington destroyed Afghanistan over two decades from a military occupation that inflicted millions of casualties and refugees. (Four decades if you count the covert CIA intrigues with the Mujahideen precursors of the Taliban and Al Qaeda).

Thus, more appropriately, an international tribunal for war crimes should be established to investigate and prosecute U.S. political and military leaders. At the very least, Washington should be billed with trillions of dollars for the postwar reconstruction of the Central Asian country – a country that U.S. leaders promised they were there for “nation-building” but in reality ransacked.

Yet in spite of this hideous, glaring legacy, here we have Biden enjoying the prospect that the smoldering remains of Afghanistan bequeathed by the Americans will cause future problems for perceived geopolitical rivals – in particular China.

Beijing, Moscow and Tehran have been cautiously reaching out to the Taliban since they took back control of Afghanistan on August 15 after the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul collapsed. Actually, communications were established by the various parties several years ago, even though Moscow for one still officially designates the Taliban as a terrorist organization.

The interim government unveiled this week by the Taliban has raised concerns that the new administration in Kabul is dominated by the old guard of the militant group which ruled prior to the U.S. invasion in 2001. That, in turn, raises questions about the Taliban leadership’s avowed commitments to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a hub for terrorism and narcotics which of course would present major security challenges for regional neighbors.

China has urged the Taliban to cut ties with terror networks belonging to Al Qaeda and the Turkestan Islamic Movement. The latter is an umbrella for Uighur jihadists who have been waging a years-long terror campaign in China’s Xinjiang western province which shares a border with Afghanistan. Uighur separatists have found safe haven in Afghanistan with the Taliban’s consent. Potentially, therefore, Afghanistan could pose increased security headaches for Beijing.

To this end, China has been diplomatically engaging with the Taliban and promising massive capital investment in Afghanistan for postwar reconstruction. From Beijing’s point of view, this is not just about buying security guarantees. Afghanistan stands to become a key link in China’s Belt and Road Initiative coupling Eurasian economic development.

For the Taliban, partnering with China and other regional powers makes sense too. They get the vital international recognition they require for underpinning governance. And they get badly needed funds for reconstruction. This is made all the more urgent because Washington and its Western allies have been reluctant to engage with the new rulers of Afghanistan. The U.S. has frozen foreign assets of the country since the Taliban swept to power.

So, it would seem to be very much in the interests of the Taliban to comply with the concerns of China and other regional states to stabilize the country and prevent it from descending into a conduit for terrorism.

Moreover, Beijing is also confronted with other terrorist dangers lurking in Afghanistan which threaten to harass China’s ambitious economic plans.

There has been an uptick in deadly attacks on Chinese diplomats and workers in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan province. The attacks have been reportedly carried out by the Baluchistan Liberation Army and another outfit called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. These groups are motivated to disrupt the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that stretches to the port of Gwadar in southern Pakistan that links to the oil-rich Persian Gulf, as well as the wider Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. That corridor is another key link in China’s transcontinental economic expansion.

The Baluchi militants are based in Afghanistan’s Kandahar city – a Taliban stronghold – and have, at least in the past, been supported by the Taliban. There are no suggestions that recent attacks on Chinese personnel and business interests have been abetted by the Taliban. But it is no doubt an acute concern for Beijing that the Taliban will be able to rein in militants that operate from their territory.

Hence, China and the Taliban rulers have a precarious balancing act ahead of them. China, like Russia, Iran and other regional stakeholders, needs a stable political environment for realizing economic ambitions. The Taliban need that stability too if their nation is to rise from the ashes of America’s “longest war”. And they don’t want to antagonize internal strife by combating militant groups.

But if Washington and its dutiful European allies decide to make Taliban governance troublesome by engendering adversarial international relations and obstacles then Afghanistan could, in consequence, pose serious security disruption for China as well as Russia, Iran and others. The Taliban may not be able to guarantee security, even if they wanted.

Arguably, a motive for Washington going into Afghanistan two decades ago was not the supposed revenge for the dubious 9/11 terror incidents, but rather to assert geopolitical control over China and Russia’s backyard. Militarily, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan turned out to be a disastrous failure and at a ruinous cost for future American generations.

But for U.S. imperial strategists, the notorious Afghan graveyard of empires is not an entirely deadbeat loss. As President Biden noted gleefully and cryptically this week, “China has real problems… it will be interesting to see what happens.”

Plan A didn’t work out so well for Washington. Time for Plan B.