In their original designation, the Taliban were Islamic students. But by the end of last week and in an ironic reversal of role, it was the hardened and ferocious militia that was teaching America and the rest of the world master class lessons in national determination and commensurate military firepower. The student had become the master.
As the Taliban fighters encircled Kabul and then began to swoop on the Afghanistan capital in classic military fashion, you got a sense that a major military humiliation and comeuppance of a superpower was under way. At the same time after you have taken away from the equation the natural fighting instincts of the Afghan people, one also had a sneaking feeling that the master-drummers in this Taliban tango are in the background.
Unless something dramatic had happened in the twenty years since they melted away after the punitive pounding by the Americans, the kind of superior intelligence, logistics and armaments required to put this together is beyond the ken of an irregular fighting outfit. America’s oriental and Asiatic enemies are laughing all the way at the humbling and discomfiture of the greatest military power the world has seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire.
The scale of America’s military reversal is stunning and stupendous to say the least and it is a matter for military experts to evaluate. There are eerie echoes of Saigon, 1975 when the defeated and bedraggled American forces were forced into a precipitate and disorderly evacuation of the old South Vietnamese capital while the doughty Vietnamese warriors waited in the wing.
Forty six years after, history does repeat itself, but not in exactly the same fashion. This time it is a comic horror show with the heavily bearded Karl Marx watching with a sickened guffaw. It is not quite Saigon. Unlike the Gadarene rush out of Vietnam, American soldiers are still technically in control of Kabul’s Hamid Karsai International Airport where they are supervising an increasingly messy and chaotic evacuation of American personnel and Afghan dependants.
The victorious Afghan militants know which line not to cross in order not to invite the wrath of a stung American scorpion. The Americans also know why a gung-ho militarism can no longer suffice. If only this lesson had been taken to heart twenty one years earlier! Perhaps there would have been no 9/11 and there would have been no botched invasion.
The world is changing indeed, but not in a manner we envisaged and which any pundit could presage. Whereas the affronted Vietnamese nationalists waged a war of self-determination distinguished by its ideological clarity and immense self-possession, the toughened Taliban warriors are waging a war of ethnic determination based on a crisis of civilization and a differing perception of global political values based on religious orientation. It is a duel unto death.
The tragedy of modern America is the tragedy of a strong powerful man without much countervailing discretion. Discretion is famously described as the better part of valour. In Yoruba cultural parlance, the strong man without discretion is usually dismissed as the king of cowards. The Americans ought to have known that historically the Afghans fight like eunuchs with nothing to lose except earthly encumbrances.
The notorious Afghan Khyber Pass has been the graveyard of many mighty western armies from time immemorial. Many European generals have perished in the mountainous gorge which straddles present day Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a storied encounter, the remnants of the Anglo-Indian forces were wiped out to the single man who lived to tell the story.
What the Americans were trying to do in Afghanistan would require staying put for at least two hundred years and not a mere twenty. Yet in our modern world with its radically revolutionized timeline, a single year can appear and feel like an eternity. Every other thing happens so fast, but people do not change that fast.
Changing the cultural values and political attitude of a proud and recalcitrant people cannot be an overnight combo. It takes decades of domestication and intense cultivation which require continuous presence and eternal alertness. In the long run, both the person drying the cocoa pod and the cocoa pod itself must suffer evaporation and evisceration together, according to an acute West African observation.
It is this evaporation and evisceration that the Americans fear most, particularly the reaction of outraged citizenry aptly summarised by the phrase “Vietnamese Syndrome”. This is when donor fatigue meets host rejection. But nation-building has never been a quick fix. America should learn from imperial masters of olden times.
For every nation so built in the imperialist image, you must collect a mountain of rumbling bones. The bones continue to rumble in postcolonial Africa, Asia and everywhere else. While the French have maintained a discreet taciturnity over the current Afghanistan debacle, the wily British have wisely ruled out even the remotest possibility of a military intervention.
The Americans are a victim of the brave new modernist world they have helped to inaugurate. Without formal annexation which would be frowned up by the rest of the world as colonial occupation, it is no longer possible to occupy other people’s land and countries in the name of any “civilizing mission”. The world has since moved on. The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the Arabs, the Vietnamese and now the Afghans would have none of that.
The standard American response to this is to crow that America does not do nation-building. This intellectual betise is a dubious repudiation of the doctrine of manifest destiny, the notion of American Exceptionalism and the entire Jeffersonian ethos on which the modern American nation was founded.
The radical repudiation of British overlordship, the extermination of the native Indians in their ancestral habitat, the forcible assimilation of African slaves into the rubric of the new nation and the dislodgement of the French, the Mexicans and the Spaniards from their vast possessions in North America, are nothing but clear examples of involuntary incorporation in the name of nation-building albeit on the same continent.
So also are the serial occupation of Haiti, the dislodgement of the Spaniards and the formal colonization of the Philippines as well as the forcible incorporation of the Hawaii islands at the end of the Second World War. Lest we forget, the Americans also spent time in Japan at the end of the Second World War engaged in both nation-building and nation-rebuilding.
One or two of these efforts might have come off as cack-handed and half-hearted but the messianic urge to remould the world cannot be doubted. The American debacle in Afghanistan is predicated on a miscognition of changing global realities and cultural orientation based on countervailing civilizational values.
Whereas a contrite and remorseful Japanese nation was willing to renounce its rampart militarism and shift its old warlike ethos to the economic development of its people, the Pashtun Afghan hegemonists remain resolutely wedded to an Islamic feudal past. How this feudal anachronism now powered by the wild and merciless fanaticism of the reenergized Taliban zealots will play out in the light of colliding modern realities remains to be seen.
So are the Americans right or wrong? This is not a moral or ethical question at all. In every human epoch up till this moment, the ruling ideas have been the ideas of the ruling empire or ascendant people. What the Americans have tried to do is not different from what the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Turks and the English tried to do with varying successes.
Those who are seized by the wanton urge to massacre and destroy do not leave any legacy. Despite the fact that the Roman Empire was upended by the barbarians, Roman legacies survive till the present era. But for the triumphant victors themselves, such is the cunning of history that what often survive them are far from the intended results.
Postcolonial Africa and Nigeria in particular play host and hostage to the pathologies of British colonization. Yet repeated political and military humiliations by the west have not turned the Iranians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Singaporeans and the Indians into cultural, economic, spiritual and intellectual slaves of hegemonic western powers. Serial military defeats have driven these ancient people back to the deep reserves of their culture and extant civilization.
Consequently, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Singaporeans have managed to evolve a unique, home-concocted brand of capitalism which is proving superior to western capitalism in terms of service delivery and the economic emancipation of the greatest number of their people. India excels intellectually and is proving a giant in technological innovation.
In the wake of the engineered and orchestrated collapse of socialist ideology in the old Soviet Union, Russia has lapsed into a hyper-Slavic nationalism that is far more potent and virulent than anything the west witnessed in the high noon of socialist daredevilry. Through revolutionary upheavals and severe self-isolation, the hardened and disciplined Vietnamese have been able to negotiate a delayed entry into the orbit of global capitalism far more favourable to their people rather than being dragooned into tame compliance.
So, the world does change but not in the way anybody could envisage. The owl of Minerva always begins its flight after the event. This is the fundamental lesson the victorious Taliban ought to have taken to heart. As the advanced team of Taliban helmsmen gathered round the ornate desk in the deserted presidential palace at Kabul last Sunday, not even their most gifted astrologers and political star-gazers could have predicted the turn of events and the speed and precipitate pace of American retreat. Not even the best and brightest State Department policy wonks could.
But judging by subsequent events, the Taliban seem to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Their trigger-crazy enforcers seem to be back on their beat after twenty years. Ethnic resentment and uncoordinated resistance seem to be brewing against the return of the country to the war-like hegemony of the Pashtun tribe. They are by far the majority ethnic group but the nation also contains a generous sprinkling of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Arabs, Balochs, Gujaris, Turkmen, Brahuls etc.
Twenty years of American occupation could not have been completely in vain. There is a whiff of democratic enlightenment abroad. Afghan women appear to have become more outspoken and less likely to be fazed by Taliban thugs.
If the Taliban choose to return the country to the Stone Age barbarities and cruelties, the summary executions and wanton desecration of the sacred pre-Islamic heritage that marked their first coming, they are likely to be met by growing resistance and sustained international isolation. That can only turn the country into a hotbed of geopolitical contentions and fierce jostling among the superpowers leading once more to national ruination this time on an epic scale.
Were the Taliban so minded to project Islam as a humane and progressive religion, what they ought to do now, rather than resort to raw militarism, is to find the intellectual, cultural and economic resources to restore their war-shredded country to the golden age of Islam when women were the leading lights, where brilliant philosophy and speculative science flourished and where a knowledge society in its rudimentary stage was the order of the day. It was known as Andalusia.
In summary, it is obvious that we live in an increasingly conflicted and mutually antagonistic stage of human development. The irony of this is that it is due to increasing material prosperity and spiritual emancipation in many societies which has made it possible for peoples, cultures and nations to reassert their primal identities against the hegemonic pretensions of globalised capitalism.
In other societies such as we have seen with the Taliban it is a combination of nationalist aspiration and theological embroilment with religious values they view as hostile and completely antithetical to theirs. Whatever the combinatoire, it appears the era of a unipolar world in which a lone superpower determines the fate of human society is in its last throes.
This is the principal lesson of the American debacle in Afghanistan. The Roman Empire did not die from a single wound but from multiple injuries. It is a teachable moment for the greatest power the world has seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire.
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