As the story goes, after God had created man with clay, He found that there was a little bit of extra clay. He affixed it to Adam’s abdomen. It became appendix which, incidentally, has no functional role in the human body today. It was, perhaps, needed for the digestive system when man ate raw meat and fish. However, appendix can cause enormous pain and even death when it creates a condition called appendicitis. 

There is a similar creational story about Afghanistan, which I came across in Ahmed Rashid’s classic work ‘Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia’. When Allah had made the rest of the world, He saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and threw them down to the earth. That became Afghanistan.

Certainly, the story does not do justice to the landlocked nation, which the famous Indian poet Mohammed Iqbal described as “the heart of Asia”. The early 20th-century British Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, called Afghanistan “the cockpit of Asia”. This shows the historical role played by Afghanistan, which is otherwise a poor nation.

To put it in a better, modern context, nearly 100 per cent of the Afghans use toilets, a level India is yet to reach, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-touted Swatch Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), under which the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, has been reduced to a symbol of toilet.

When I think of Afghanistan, I think of Kabuliwala, a dry fruit-seller who visits Kolkata every year, to see a girl with whom he develops a filial relationship. It is an enchanting short story by Rabindranath Tagore, later developed into a full-length feature film by the same title. I had to study the story while I was at school.

Today, most of us are in mortal fear of the Kabuliwala, as media reports suggest that it is only a matter of weeks before the Taliban recapture Kabul and stage a spectacular comeback to power. Already, a large swathe of land in almost all the regions of the country are under their control. And they are no longer beholden to anyone! It is a victory they achieved themselves.

Of course, the Taliban’s possible return has been facilitated by US President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by September 11. There are at present less than 2500 American troops and 500 NATO troops in Afghanistan. 

The date was chosen for a particular reason. It was on September 11, 2001, that a series of coordinated terrorist attacks were made after four US aircraft were hijacked by 19 members of al-Qaeda. The attacks killed 2,977 people. 

The Americans believed that the attacks had the blessing of the Taliban. Joe Biden’s predecessor and the person who sent the American and NATO forces to Afghanistan, George W. Bush, has described the decision as nothing but foolish. 

The question that comes to the fore is whether President Ashraf Ghani’s government will be able to survive the US withdrawal. There are doubts about its stability, given the fall of almost all the trading posts and land ports, save those in Kabul, to the Taliban. 

One thing that can be said with certainty is that the Taliban in 2021 are far stronger than they were in 2001, when the US forces invaded Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. 

The US President has said that it was never America’s desire to install any particular type of government in Afghanistan. He is not truthful when he says this as the US had spent considerable resources to plant and strengthen democracy in Afghanistan. 

He said that his country had done everything possible to strengthen the police and the military there, little knowing that the strengthening was not sufficient to take on the might of the Taliban. It looks like the West has changed its equation with the Taliban. It has to, as Afghanistan has also the reputation of being the graveyard of many an empire from the Ottoman to the British to the Soviet to the American.

In the 19th century, Britain tried in vain to subjugate the Afghans. They waged at least three wars to conquer the nation. Finally, they realised that it was easier to buy them than to fight them. They used bribes to win their support to keep the Russians at bay. It was called the great game between the British and the Russians.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union tried to control Kabul by even invading the nation and installing a puppet regime. George W. Bush in his autobiography ‘Decision Points’ describes the situation, “With assistance from the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the rebels inflicted 15,000 casualties and drove out the Soviets in 1989. Two years later, the super power collapsed”.

At that time, the US made the same “mistake”, George Bush says, is making now. The US withdrew itself completely from Afghanistan. The sophisticated arms that the US supplied to the Afghan rebels, known as the Mujahideen those days, began to be used against one another with the main enemy gone. In the vacuum arose the Taliban, mostly drawn from the Pashtuns, who constitute about 40 per cent of the population. 

When the Taliban captured power, many saw them as liberators but, soon, they began to expose themselves as cruel despots. “After the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban are the most secretive political  movement in the world today”. 

The former President, Mohammad Najibullah (49) was caught from the UN compound, thrashed, castrated and killed. His body was shown hanging from a pole at the Kabul football stadium, where petty criminals and girls who eloped with their lovers were publicly killed. Worse, they could not even tolerate the existence of the world-famous Buddhas of Bamiyan.  

The Taliban turned out to be ruthless monsters who banned even the little pleasures of life like singing, dancing, sports and games. Women were not allowed to go out of their houses, except with a close male relative. If, by chance, the hijab was not properly placed, the religious policemen were there to give the woman a thrashing. Women’s education suffered. The justice system they introduced was not based on either Sharia or any kind of law.

They allowed terrorist organisations everywhere to look up to them as their patron. Kashmiri insurgents began to get support from them. What’s more, some of the Mujahideen, who had no work after the ouster of the Soviets, were attracted to Kashmir to wage a jihad against the Indian state.

Now that they will soon be back in power, the world will have to find ways to deal with them. I remember how the then Indian Foreign Minister, the late Jaswant Singh, who accompanied a terrorist all the way to Kandahar to hand him over to the Taliban in a deal, used such words as “the honourable minister of foreign affairs” while shaking hands with his “counterpart”, who was just a war veteran with no other accomplishments of any sort.

Already, British Defence Minister Ben Wallace has stated that Britain would not have any problem in dealing with the Taliban if they came to power, provided they functioned within certain international parameters. What is clear is that the world is getting used to the idea that it will have to, sooner than later, deal with the Taliban. 

There is also a growing realisation that the West had wasted its resources over two decades in its bid to democratise the Afghan society. They did not know that one shoe does not fit all. What is good for the US is not good for Afghanistan, which has a history older than that of the US. 

Much will, of course, depend on how the Taliban behave once they capture power. Will they behave in a responsible manner or will they be playing into the hands of such terrorist outfits as the al-Qaeda? 

India, too, will have to reconcile itself to breaking bread with the Taliban. When the Taliban came to power, following the ouster of the Soviet troops, India was not one of the three countries, including Pakistan, which recognised the regime. Yet, India tried to help the new regime by running Ariana Afghan Airline. Service of the aircraft and managing the inventory, including the radar for navigation, were India’s responsibility. This was done essentially to build bridges with that nation.

During the last 20 years since the Taliban were ousted from power, India has made huge investments, worth at least $3 billion, in the information technology, education, agriculture, irrigation and power sectors. By the way, Afghanistan was one of the first countries to receive the anti-Covid-19 vaccine India had produced. 

However, there is a threat to the Indian presence there owing mainly to the enormous influence Pakistan has on the Taliban. Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton was not wide of the mark when he said that Pakistan was solely responsible for the Taliban returning to the centre-stage of Afghan politics. It provided safe sanctuaries when the US forces were pounding the Taliban.

The possible return of the Taliban has greater implications for India than the US which is situated thousands of miles away. Pakistan is quite capable of using them to wage a proxy war with India. They can also create problems in Kashmir. 

The US is no longer interested in investing in West Asia, as it is more interested in containing China which today has a larger Navy than the US. Rather, it wants to fortify its position in the Pacific and Indian Oceans where the Chinese are determined to have the number one position. Under such circumstances, India cannot expect much from the US. In other words, India will have to adopt a cautious approach vi’s-a-vis the Taliban.

While a few sections of the Pakistani society are thrilled by the possible return of the Taliban, they also pose a threat to its own security and integrity. It is the militant sections which are enthused by the new turnaround in Afghanistan. A collaboration between them and the Taliban could prove dangerous for democracy in Pakistan. 

Also, allowance must be made for the fact that much of what is today Pakistan was ruled for at least two hundred years by the Afghans. They had an Empire which was lost to them because of internecine clashes among the ruling clans, aided and abetted by the foreign powers. The British were able to instil in them an impression that without the British aid, they could not carry on as an independent nation. They were won over intellectually, rather than by force.

The Pakistani system of government may not be the perfect one but what the Taliban would like to suggest as an alternative is worse. Unlike other Islamic countries, Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal which is what should worry the whole world. 

If the Taliban are able to destabilise the Pakistani government with the support of the militants in the name of political Islam, the world will face a threat which is indescribable at present. So, the return of the Taliban is not something in the interest of Pakistan’s own survival. 

The Afghans are a race of people who can fight for the sake of fighting. It is said that they do not need any particular cause to fight. “Give them arms and they will fight”, goes a popular saying.

One can only hope that 20 years of fighting would have opened the eyes of the Taliban leadership to adopt a more sophisticated worldview under which women’s education and tolerance of other faiths and their practices are viewed differently. Every country and political organisation would like to move forward, rather than backward. One can only hope that the Taliban are not an exception to this general rule.