In 1948, Afghanistan was a land of tribal feudal villages with busy little cities as nodes of the tribal networks. Most people were farmers or herders, but Afghanistan was also one of the last places on Earth with a significant population of nomads. The country had few exports beyond raisins, lambskins, and carpets. The country was a patchwork of ethnic groups, and at least a dozen languages were spoken. Virtually every Afghan was a practicing Muslim. Sufis—Islamic mystics—were widely revered. When I was born, the country had been ruled for 122 years by a tribal monarchy, headed by the Mohammedzai clan.
Afghan society was divided into a public world and a private world. Both in the cities and in the countryside, people mostly lived in compounds. The public world belonged to men. Women lived their lives sequestered in the world of private compounds. When they ventured out in public, they wore chadris: full-length garments that covered them like body bags, with a postcard-sized mesh-screen for them to look through.
Then the Cold War began. Afghanistan became a chip in the competition between the Soviet Bloc and the Capitalist Bloc. The Mohammedzais tried to employ resolute neutrality to extract development funds from both sides. “I will smoke American cigarettes, but light them with a Russian match,” the country’s prime minster once said. Much infrastructure was built: highways, airports, dams, hospitals, hydroelectric plants. The monarchy pushed for progressive social change as well. In 1959 they had the chadri stripped of legal sanction. It was not outlawed, and most women continued to wear chadris in public, but none were legally obliged to. Schools sprouted across the country, including girl’s schools, and in 1960 or so, the country began to experiment with co-education. A public university was born, and within a few years, its student body included both men and women. Between the mid ‘50s and the mid’70s, the country went through perhaps 2000 years of social change. Predictably, that much change in just two decades strained the social fabric of a country already under duress from the Godzillas of global politics, the powers locked in a Cold War struggle that made Afghanistan one of its lines of scrimmage.
Then the country began to crumble. First, the king was toppled by his cousin Daoud, who went on to rule the country as its “president”. (No election was involved in this, not even a pretend election.) In 1978, a small group of Afghan communists seized power; they killed Daoud, killed the entire royal family, and assassinated the American ambassador, putting all their chips in the Soviet basket. Backed by Soviet might, they tried to generate radical social change in Afghanistan by force, savage force, shocking force, ruthless force, which triggered an overwhelming backlash. Virtually all sectors of the society took up arms against the few thousand Communists of the “People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan”. Backed against a wall, these few Communists drew ever more heavily on the guns and torture devices supplied by the Soviets. By 1980, the Soviets could see that their handful of proxies in Kabul were not going to be able to hang onto power; so they invaded the country directly. A brutal 12-year war began.
During that war, the Soviets held the cities, the rebels held the countryside. As a tactic of war, the Soviets tried to wipe out rural Afghanistan. They did it largely with carpet bombing that drove about a third of the population into refugee camps outside the country’s borders. The refugees were mainly women and children. The menfolk remained inside the country to fight as guerillas. At least two-thirds of the Afghan population thus saw their lives destroyed by the Soviet invasion. If such a thing were to happen in the United States, we’d be talking about some 200 million people homeless, wounded, or dead. Imagine the PTSD. The 12-year separation of Afghan society into a women’s world—in the refugee camps—and a men’s world—in the mountains—fundamentally altered the character of the Afghan social psyche.
America supplied just enough weaponry to the Afghan rebels to prevent the Soviets from ether winning or leaving. It was a Cold-War tactic. But in 1989, when the Soviet Union began to crumble, the Afghan Communists’ days were numbered. In 1992, an array of anti-Communist, ethnic armies rushed into Kabul, the country’s capital, slaughtered the Communists, and then started slaughtering one another. The next four years turned much of Kabul into rubble and reduced its population to about 300,000. The carnage was horrific. It ended when the Taliban—mainly boys and young men who had grown up in the refugee camps—drove out those many ethnic armies and took over Kabul and soon the entire country. By then the Cold War was over and new global war had begun. Call it “terrorism” or call it “war on terror”: the two terms refer to the same phenomenon. This new surge of global violence had a strong flavor of Islam against the West. Afghanistan therefore became a crucial nexus in this war, since the Taliban were radically reactionary Islamist extremists caught up in a dream of restoring some imagined past.
The events of 9/11 brought what was then routinely called “the world’s only remaining superpower” into the Afghan ring. The United States smashed the Taliban in short order and installed a new government, staffed by its Afghan allies in the war against the Taliban, many of them Afghans who had been living in exile in the industrialized world. These streamed back to receive the several trillion dollars of development aid showered on the country by the United States and other outside powers. The officials of this new government managed and mismanaged the hasty restoration of the country’s pre-war infrastructure. Kabul had a few hundred thousand people when the Taliban fell; it is now a city of at least five million and perhaps as many as ten. Cell phones abound even in rural areas. The country has highways and airports and wireless Internet and television stations and bookstores. Outside powers—China, India, Iran, and others—are aggressively mining its vast mineral resources—iron, copper, rare earth, uranium, and more. Afghan officials lucky enough to be stationed in the vicinity of these resources are pocketing bountiful commissions.
The United States controls two of the world’s largest military airbases—Bagram and Kandahar—in this country. Official American military deployment in Afghanistan has dropped drastically over the last decade and is expected to drop further still; but the country is crawling with private military contractors, a different kind of foreign army; and during the Obama years, the United States and its allies developed drone warfare as the sophisticated modern way of waging war, which the Trump administration continued. Therefore, the number of individual soldiers stationed in Afghanistan stopped working as a measure of American military involvement in the country.
In the later days of the Trump administration there was sporadic talk of American diplomats getting “the Taliban” to negotiate an end to the fighting. Meetings took place in Qatar, and agreements were reached, American diplomats were at the table, people claiming to represent “the Taliban” were at the table, but the government of Afghanistan, the one in Kabul, the centerpiece of the American project, was excluded from the talks. Those talk resulted in the Trump administration agreeing to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by May 2021. Trump lost the presidency in 2020, but the Biden administration announced that it would honor the agreement Trump’s team had reached, not by May perhaps, but at least before September 11. NATO announced that it would follow suit.
But as the troop withdrawals got underway, the Taliban began their final push. That summer, city after city fell to the Taliban or opened their gates to them–first Herat, then Lashkargah, then Kunduz . . . And finally, on August 15, citizens of Kabul woke up to find black-turbaned machine-gun toting Taliban cadre manning checkpoints throughout the city. The Taliban had taken the capital. The war was over–at least temporarily.
A chaotic rush to the airport ensued. Over the next two weeks, U.S. and NATO aircraft evacuated over 100,000 Afghans citizens from Kabul, many whom had worked with the Americans and now faced reprisals from the Taliban. Since then, a quiescent gloom has settled over the country. The Afghan economy had been propped up by foreign aid over the two decades of the American project. When the Taliban took over, Afghanistan had some $7 billion worth of assets in foreign banks. The American government, however, was able to cut off Afghan access to that money. On February 11, President Biden signed half of it over to the families of victims of 9/11. The other $3.5 billion was place in a fund for unspecified humanitarian aid to be spent in the future for purposes to be decided later. Today, reports say, about 28 million Afghan men, women and children are facing starvation in the winter of 2022.