What do the Taliban Really Want?

 What do the Taliban Really Want?

We need to remember what we were trying to achieve in Afghanistan: all the people we educated and all the things we did towards that goal, and not whisk the resultant human capital and embedded values and economic opportunities out of that country by the planeload, on wings of fear. 

by Cheryl Benard

I predict that five or ten years from now, studies will be conducted, and books written about the Great American Afghanistan Hysteria of 2021.

How was it possible, we will ask in retrospect, that a superpower threw facts, reason, its own national interest, the pursuit of peace, geopolitical considerations, and simple common sense to the curb? And instead engaged in reckless, perfectly counterproductive actions while wallowing in panic and rumors.

As I write this, I am reading that “the Taliban are feeding women’s bodies to the dogs” and watching a video of a woman filming herself running from nothing in a deserted area while screaming “Afghan women are running for their lives.” I am reading that “the Taliban are shooting into the crowd.” Former President George W. Bush is on TV talking about rape. General David Petraeus, who failed to make a dent on the Taliban when he was in charge, is in the Wall Street Journal calling for the U.S. military to go back in. Reason has fled and facts don’t matter.

But let’s try. Let’s try to look at some facts.

In the past, as a matter of record, I was a determined opponent of the Taliban. And I’m not their fan club now. I’m reserving judgment—but judgment requires facts, and so far, the facts support their claim that they have changed. Here are a few facts, listed by topic of concern. All of it I have personally verified by speaking to the individuals affected, or from original source material.

Religious minorities

The Taliban have said that everyone of a different religion will be able to practice it undisturbed. What have they done? According to Shi’a leaders, Shi’a local individuals, and the international Shi’a grapevine, they in fact made it possible for the Shi’a major religious holiday of Ashura to be celebrated safely, in Mazar-i-Sharif, with the participation of women, for the first time in many years. In the past, the Ghani government was unable to guarantee protection to the Shi’a and they were regularly attacked, with fatalities, by Sunni extremists or by ISIS.

Similarly, the Hindu minority has been visited and reassured by a Taliban delegation that they will be safe and should stay.

Women

In this regard, we have had a number of main concerns: their right to education, their right to be in public and take part in public life, their right to work, and their protection against rape, forced marriage, and abuse. The Taliban are on record on some of these with statements, on others with their actions so far, and on some, it’s too soon to say. On education, they have specifically addressed female students and encouraged them to continue with their studies. On work, they have sent delegations to hospitals and met with female doctors and staff, praised them for their work, and asked them to continue. On public life, they have not interfered with female journalists including TV news anchors, who are on the air and reporting and interviewing Talibs. On forced marriage and rape, many of us have reached out to women’s groups in the country, and there is no substantiation for these stories. A friend of mine is associated with an organization that runs shelters for precisely such victims across the country—they have seen none. Forced marriage is strongly forbidden by the Quran, as is rape. Sexual misbehavior has been rigorously sanctioned by the Taliban in the past and there is no reason to believe that their views have changed. I would still be concerned about their views on adultery, which they previously punished as the Quran prescribes, i.e., by flogging in the case of the unmarried and death in the case of the married. It has not happened yet this time around, but it could. This, along with all the other things we are hoping to avert, is far more likely to happen if we lose our influence over them or if they conclude that it doesn’t matter if they play nice, because we will condemn them and make up stories about them anyway. 

Cultural heritage

Last time around, the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, one of Afghanistan’s and the world’s great and irreplaceable treasures. They marauded through art museums and film archives and burned music tapes and videos. I belong to an organization, ARCH International, which focuses on cultural heritage in war zones and post-conflict areas. We were in a state of high alarm about this repeating itself, so in November 2020 we sent a request to both sides in the then-peace talks in Doha, the Afghan government side and the Taliban, asking them to commit to the protection of historic and cultural heritage and explaining why that was the right thing to do and why these things were valuable for civilization and for their country. Somewhat to our surprise, the Taliban responded not just to us, but by sending an order to their commanders in the field to protect cultural heritage and archaeological sites and—more than we had asked for—to prevent looting. When the director of the Kabul Museum reached out in a worried panic about criminal looters, this gave us the impetus to return to our interlocutor and ask for help. Promptly, the Taliban dispatched four guards to the museum, connected the director with the nearby security station, and their new Minister of Culture, Mudshahid, personally visited to assure him of support. 

Fear and panic

Everyone on the ground in Afghanistan has good reason to be very nervous. The Taliban have engaged in what the press is calling a “charm offensive” and have issued multiple reassuring statements. I put these last because they are just words, but I include them because so far, the Taliban have honored them. They asked all government bureaucrats to remain at work and promised there would be no reprisals against anyone who supported the former government or worked for the Ghani regime or the Americans. There are no credible reports of reprisals. They appealed to the mob of young men at the airport to go back home and stay and help build their country, instead of “begging to be loaded onto American airplanes like sheep” and propelling themselves to foreign lands. They set up a complaint number and process, which they broadcast on the streets and in the markets over loudspeakers, encouraging people to report any misbehavior by any Talib to receive assistance. This is designed to address two likely problems—undisciplined individual Talibs misbehaving and criminal impostors seizing the opportunities inherent in chaos. I know at least one women’s organization that successfully called the Taliban “hotline” when someone claiming to be Taliban demanded their vehicle. It’s true that many people report their cars being commandeered. The Taliban say it’s not them, because they have plenty of cars—and SUVs and tanks for that matter—from the fleeing Afghan army courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers.

Let’s take a step back and evaluate. We had put all of our cards on the Afghan government, whose elections we funded, curated, and organized. We built an expensive army and air force that turned and ran at the first challenge. We trained and educated and funded a network of civil society activists and “leaders” who turned out, like their army, to be runners, not even attempting to take a stand for their values and supposed missions but racing to the airport instead.

As the realization that our Afghan experiment was not going to succeed finally began to sink in, under the Trump administration, we made the decision to pull our troops out of this endless and fruitless war. We struck an agreement with the Taliban: we would withdraw, they would not interfere with that or attack us, and they would begin peace talks with the Afghan government to design a transitional new government in which they would be included, with elections for a permanent government to be held down the road. For two years, they honored their side of the deal. Not a single American was killed, not even once we were downsized and vulnerable. They drafted a series of technical proposals as starting points for discussion with their government counterparts, from whom nothing came in return. They consulted us and listened to our “red lines” regarding human rights, women’s rights, and other matters of concern to the international community. They were fully prepared to negotiate.

Who didn’t show up? The Ghani government. Ashraf Ghani believed that if he just remained intransigent, the United States would reverse course and agree to keep fighting. When that magic outcome did not materialize, he pinned his hopes on the U.S. elections, sure that Joe Biden would undo what Donald Trump had started and send the troops back in. When that did not happen either, he gave a series of fiery speeches on how he didn’t need the Americans because the Afghan army would make short shrift of the Taliban. Finally, as the Taliban swept across most of his country meeting zero resistance from said army, he agreed to a deal. They would refrain from entering Kabul, there would be a two-week ceasefire, during that time they would negotiate a power-sharing agreement with the government—though it would no longer be the 50/50 arrangement Kabul could have gotten two years prior—and in exchange Ghani would commit to resigning his office at the end of that period. Ghani agreed. Then he secretly packed up and fled in the night, scuppering Kabul’s and his government’s last chance at an orderly transition

With the government thereby having folded, and with little alternative, the United States tolerated the Taliban taking charge of the city.

And then, for no reason that one can identify, nothing having happened to set it in motion, the Biden administration embarked on a series of fatefully poor decisions. They had already prematurely closed Bagram—one of the most secure bases in the world, a resource that would have been perfect for the evacuation and ongoing emergency embassy operations, and the facility that should have closed last. Now they announced that they were reducing, and shortly thereafter that they were closing, the U.S. embassy. They announced that they were sending in 3,000, then 4,000 troops to assist with this evacuation. They announced two visa programs, first for people who had worked for us as translators, soon expanded to anyone who had worked for the embassy or a government program or the military, then a second one for people associated with U.S. media or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). For the latter, a completely absurd set of rules was put in place—people could not apply from inside Afghanistan, they were not eligible until they had reached a third country, in other words, they needed to get themselves to Pakistan or Tajikistan or Uzbekistan, which was already impossible at that point since the Taliban controlled the borders. And just to add another level of impossibility, the embassy website warned that such applications would take a very long time to process and not to expect assistance in the interim.

With no reasonable route open but a visa program suggesting that we believed such persons to be highly vulnerable, no wonder they panicked. Meanwhile, U.S. helicopters were buzzing back and forth in the sky, the embassy was vacated and the flag hauled down, additional troops were arriving at the airport to hustle people out and the message was clear: the Americans expect a bloodbath. Social media did its part. Twitter and TikTok told one and all that you simply needed to get to the airport, no documents or identity cards needed, and the Americans would fly you to Paris, Canada, or the United States. Google decided to block any Taliban messages or anything favorable to the Taliban, including their assurances that they weren’t planning retribution, that civil servants could calmly show up for work, and that it was a new day, and all was forgiven. Even their orders to their commanders instructing them not to harass anyone and not to commandeer peoples’ property, which many offices and NGOs had ready to play for any Taliban who might show up at their door, were taken down.

We all saw the results: a mob of young men rampaging on the tarmac and ultimately reaching such a fever pitch of craziness that they clung to the departing planes and in some cases, held on so long that when they finally fell, they died. That was a shocking visual, as were the pictures of a woman handing her baby to a soldier over strings of barbed wire. Bad visuals are bad for domestic politics, and partisan politics are bad for intelligent decisions about our shared national interest. The Republicans forgot that it was their administration that started the withdrawal and seized the chance to slam the Democrats. The Democrats forgot that they are against endless wars and intervening in other cultures and decided that each and every Afghan must be brought to America. The Biden administration, accustomed to journalist adulation and flustered by the bad press, ordered mass evacuations pronto. Of the first 8,500 flown out without vetting or papers, only 250 turned out to be qualified. The others had simply stampeded themselves into the airlift. How long do you think it will take for ISIS to see the open door into America, if they have not already? Should journalists who can’t even be bothered to fact check, who are under pressure to produce dramatic reports and heart-rending photos, be making America’s foreign policy? Should visuals and panic dictate our conduct?

In Kabul, the Taliban were visiting the foreign embassies, offering to post guards, and asking them to stay. The French stayed. The Russians stayed. The Chinese stayed. Why didn’t we? Or at a minimum, seeing that the Taliban have no apparent plan to attack us, and didn’t for two years when they could have, why didn’t we reevaluate our decision and go back? No embassy means no refugee processing, which means no orderly way for people to try to get out if they are so qualified, which means chaos at the airport.

The Taliban must be finding all of this so confusing. Already stunned by their own success, and almost certainly not ready for it, they have tried to respect our expectations and avoid the things that outraged everyone before, but we just won’t let them. Can’t we wait and see, at least briefly? I know who’s not waiting: China, Iran, and Russia. Russian diplomats in Kabul, in relaxed conversations with journalists, are already expressing optimism in the country’s future and confidence that the Taliban are not planning punitive actions against former opponents. As we push the Taliban away, others are more than happy to embrace them. And they won’t be demanding things like human rights or freedom of the press—if we care about any of that, we can’t abandon the field. China has already announced the construction of a railroad, which by sheer coincidence happens to go to the areas with major mineral deposits. We stand to lose our huge investment; see our adversaries walk away with the gains; scupper Afghanistan’s chance to modernize and democratize—perhaps more slowly than we wished but more organically and sustainably instead; and lose a geostrategically crucial region. Future analysts will ask why. The answer: out of sheer stupidity.

Matthew 7 tells us: by their actions shall you know them. We seem sure that the Taliban haven’t changed and can’t and won’t. Shouldn’t we await their actions? Let’s encourage them to form a moderate, responsible, and inclusive government. Let’s understand that we are making a moderate, progressive Afghanistan impossible by removing, potentially to the tune of one million people, all their educated citizens, their English-speakers, their strong young men, their “woke” young women, and their minorities. Let’s know that one day, when we look back, we will see that we committed not only a brain drain but also an ethnic cleansing project, taking away the Hindus and the Sikhs who have historically been part of that country, permanently changing the face of Afghanistan to its impoverishment.

We, too, will ultimately be judged by our actions—which at this moment are rash, short-sighted, driven by irresponsible sensationalist journalists instead of judicious political leaders, destructive to our national interest, and murderous to Afghanistan’s chance at peace. Let’s not do this.

We need to freeze the evacuations until we have an orderly process in place. This may change, but currently, there is absolutely no reason for haste and every reason for caution. We need to reopen the embassy and stay in close contact with the Taliban not only to monitor them, but also to try and shape their behavior—which, so far, they appear amenable to. We need to remember what we were trying to achieve in Afghanistan: all the people we educated and all the things we did towards that goal, and not whisk the resultant human capital and embedded values and economic opportunities out of that country by the planeload, on wings of fear.

Dr. Cheryl Benard was program director in the RAND National Security Research Division. She is the author of Veiled Courage, Inside the Afghan Women’s Resistance; Afghanistan: State and Society; Democracy and Islam in the Constitution of Afghanistan; and Securing Health, Lessons from Nation-building Missions. Currently, she is the Director of ARCH International, an organization that protects cultural heritage sites in crisis zones.