The world is watching Afghanistan with concern and wondering what will happen to the country, which has been occupied for twenty years, after the withdrawal of American troops.
"We didn't go there to build a nation," Joe Biden said the other day, and we really didn't. They went there to, among other things, end the operations of al-Qaeda and hunt down Osama bin Laden. However, the euphoria that resulted from the initial successes of the war - the almost complete defeat of the Taliban and the escape of Osama and his troops to Pakistan - has now melted away. Of course, the occupation also had advantages for the locals, such as rights for women and children, a pluralistic political system, or the possibility of free choice and entrepreneurship. From 2014, however, in defiance of multi-party democracy, President Ghani put decision-making in the hands of a narrow political clique. The ever-increasing tensions, as well as more than four decades of incessant warfare, including the Soviets, have exhausted the people, and in some layers of society, they have reawakened sympathy for the Taliban. People want stable governance, which could even mean a Taliban leadership, and they have a good chance of seizing power, given that they currently have full control over a third of the country, but there are also reports that say it's more like 85 percent.
According to the Taliban's own admission, it is a supporter of peaceful negotiations, on the other hand, Field Marshal Austin Scott Miller, who was the last commander-in-chief of the occupying American troops, predicted before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives that chaos and bloodshed would be expected. According to many, civil war is inevitable, and for the time being it is not even certain whether the foreign affairs employees will stay or whether the Americans will leave the country completely alone after August 31st. The worst version of the withdrawal plan would be to bail out not just military and government employees, but all Americans. By the way, the USA had to face a similar evacuation crisis in Vietnam and Iraq, but neither of them was completely successful. The most serious danger, however, awaits the hundreds of thousands of people who have collaborated with Western governments and forces during the 20 years of occupation: volunteer militants, security guards, interpreters, suppliers and journalists. Many people are urging the speeding up of the "refugee visa" program, since 2014 around 26,000 such visas have been issued, but Russia, China, India, Pakistan and even Iran should be included in the program, and as a matter of fact, the chances of this are converging towards zero .
What happens when the Taliban comes to power? The radical form of Islamic legislation, Sharia, would be restored first at least this is what 38-year-old Taliban judge Gul Rahim said in an interview with Bild. He also reported on two recent convictions, in which a man's hand was cut off after committing a burglary, and in another case of hanging kidnappers and people smugglers. He also said that homosexual men would be stoned to death or placed in front of a high wall, which would then be thrown over them. Women will be able to leave their homes with prior permission and attend school as long as the teacher is female and they all wear the obligatory hijab. I note that Afghanistan is not the only Muslim country where the rules are similar, but the nexus of the bright-eyed West is quite different with those less poor countries.
For some, of course, all this is terrible, for others it is welcome, and although we can have our opinion, it is not our business to tell them how they should live. We don't like that either. And it seems that the USA is also forced to view this in the same way, hoping that under a future Taliban rule, Afghanistan will not once again become a terrorist paradise, which would once again pose a threat (not only) to the Western world. In any case, during the two decades spent there, the Americans could also learn - among many other things - that the enemy of the enemy is not necessarily a good friend.
Experts noticed the practice of bacha bazi (boy game) as early as the 1980s, when mujahideen commanders fighting the Soviets recruited young boys from villages for the purpose of sexual relations, i.e. pedophilia. This was also the reason why popular anger called the Taliban to life in the mid-1990s. The rich and prominent Pashtuns like to dress the boys in women's clothes and make them dance at their events, but sometimes even marry them. However, after these good Afghans acted as allies in the fight against the Taliban, the American soldiers had to acknowledge that they were fighting for the noble cause hand in hand with pedophiles. Later interviews and court testimony revealed that soldiers and marines were ordered not to intervene, even when Afghan allies were raping the boys on military bases. Because it's part of their culture. For some, however, the thread broke and they had to face military punishment, like the two Americans who beat an Afghan commander in the head because he chained a little boy to his bed. However, from the point of view of the American strategy, the USA had to cooperate with those who did wrong, but did not pose a threat to national security, as opposed to the Taliban.
Dee Brillenburg Wurth, a child protection specialist at the US mission in Afghanistan, commented on the phenomenon as follows:
"like it or not, there was more rule of law under the Taliban".
And it follows that those Afghans who feel their children are in danger will welcome a protective Taliban leadership that sweeps away pedophiles like drafts. Unless they flee to a rich and welcoming continent…
We can rightly ask the question, what does the European Union have to do with this?
On the one hand, since the USA will soon be separated by 11,000 kilometers and an ocean from the largely self-inflicted problem, unidentified masses of people will start, from whom it will be impossible to filter out the terrorists. It is not as if Europe can do anything with the majority of Afghans, as has been proven in recent years. On the other hand, due to the new situation, the repatriation, which has been working slowly until now, will stop completely, so, for example, the murderers from Vienna still cannot be deported back. Foreign Policy, the mouthpiece of the State Department in Washington, also ordered that
"the EU states, especially those that took part in the NATO mission, must do their part in accommodating the Afghan refugees", and self-consciously he even added that the selfish Europeans "deported them in recent years with the excuse that they are not war refugees, but economic migrants. Now, however, a full-scale civil war is raging in the country".
One word, more than a hundred, among the issues of the national consultation, migration is not only out of habit, and the prime minister does not intend it as a campaign trick when he talks about the possible consequences of the American troop withdrawals. That's the way it is, and it's not good. Absolutely not. Perhaps only the fanatical defenders of rights and lovers of an open society can drool over the civil war aduas, when the gates of Europe will once again be pounded by Muslim masses.
Photo: AFP / Members of the Taliban delegation in Qatar
