Taliban Won the war but Could they win the Peace?

How the Taliban won the war – but not the peace By Wahab Raofi The Taliban will fare no better ruling Afghanistan than the American-backed Ghani government did. As so many rulers before have found, the area is ungovernable. Like a bloody conqueror from the past, the Taliban have sent a clear warning to the people of Afghanistan – anyone who resists them and their fundamentalist creed will live in fear. Pouring into Afghanistan from their hidden sanctuaries, their goal is to create an Islamic state, much as ISIS hoped to do in Iraq. How did the Taliban defeat the American-trained Afghan Army – seemingly without firing a shot? My answer, as a former resident of Afghanistan with many relatives and friends there, is not military, but political. The will of the Afghan Army to fight had become nonexistent. Just as the American public were tired of what Donald Trump called the American “endless war,” Afghans too were tired of this protracted and pernicious conflict. Almost every Afghan family had lost loved ones and a hundred thousand had become homeless as a result of fighting between the Taliban and the government forces. At this point, peace under the Taliban seemed preferable to war under the Americans. Afghans had no incentive to face up to the Taliban and fight for a government they despised. The U.N. mission in Afghanistan reported in its 2021 midyear update that 3,254 civilians were wounded in the first half of this year and 1,659 killed, 47% more than the same period last year. The Afghan people’s support of their government has been tested by corrupt leaders fighting amongst themselves, and reportedly stealing money from their people. Ashraf Ghani, the leader of the Afghan government, is a former World Bank staffer and coauthor of Fixing Failed States. Instead he created one. He and the other leaders lived separated from their people in walled mansions in the city of Kabul. The people want to see them stripped of their perks and to force them to account for their wealth. Afghans are fatigued by lack of economic progress and poverty, hundreds of thousands have fled the country for Europe or neighboring countries in search of jobs and security. The soldiers, many of whom have not been paid in months, were part of an army riven by mismanagement and corruption, with officers who pocketed salaries of “ghost soldiers” paid by American taxpayers. So if they despised their leaders, are the people welcoming the Taliban? Not a chance. Too many abhor the Taliban’s atrocities for them to truly welcome Taliban rule. The Taliban face the same divided country that the Afghan government did. The first decree the Taliban leaders have issued in the areas under their control is to make women wear the hijab and prohibiting them from leaving their homes without a male relative as an escort, a practice known as mahram. Afghans cannot be forced to turn back the clock at the barrel of a gun. And most do not believe that the Taliban have the capacity or capability to rebuild Afghanistan. They will face a wall of resistance, much as their predecessors did. Slogans and ideology will not keep them long in power, any more than it helped the Soviets in the 1980s. So what should the world do? The US and the rest of the free world must not recognize the new fundamentalist regime that rejects women’s rights and human rights. Any other action will encourage radical Islamists in any nations that recognize the Taliban government. And now that the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan, they’ll find it just as difficult to rule as the Ghani government did. It remains a people divided across ethnic and regional lines, with non-Pashtuns and Shia Muslims unwilling to bend to the will of the Taliban. A Taliban dictatorship enforced militarily is not sustainable for long. In the end, Afghanistan will once again break up into ethnic subgroups in charge of their own provinces. Nation building here is a failure – it was under Ghani, and it will be under the Taliban. The people will continue to suffer until this breakup happens – and without the financial support that propped up the country for so long, the Taliban rule, while brutal, can never be stable. -- Wahab Raofi is a graduate of Kabul Law School and worked at various levels for the Ministry of Justice in his native Afghanistan. He immigrated to the United States, has a home in California, and worked with the NATO/International Security Assistance Force as an interpreter in Afghanistan.