Left Party ǀ The end of the occupation — Friday

When the Bundestag votes on the Bundeswehr mandate to secure the evacuation of local forces in Afghanistan on Wednesday, the Left Party will not be faced with an easy task. As a voice of the peace movement, she has so far voted against every deployment of the Bundeswehr. But the situation in Afghanistan is catastrophic, for many people the security situation has become extremely dangerous. How at least a few people can be saved is not a question that only those who are responsible for this NATO mission have to ask themselves - this task is the responsibility of everyone, including and especially the left. Because one thing is certain: neither the counter-argument that the sovereignty of an independent state has been violated nor the accusation that imperial interests have been enforced play a significant role in the question of the evacuation.

But the inner-left voices after the Taliban's triumph are diverse, and a battle is raging over the sovereignty of interpretation of the political situation. The social media timelines of some anti-imperialist leftists read an intolerable romanticization of the Taliban as an anti-imperial force. This assessment shows a ignorance of the regional power-political conflicts and their colonial roots.

There are those on the left who welcome any rebellion against imperialist policies by the EU or the USA, and in doing so also use states such as Iran as a positive point of reference – thinking here is strongly dominated by geopolitics, accompanied by a romanticizing image of fundamentally religious groups such as the Taliban. The left-leaning magazine marx21 – usually known for more differentiated voices – published an article a few days ago that exemplifies this ominous sympathy.

In the text, entitled "Return of the Taliban: The End of the Occupation," authors Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale sometimes praise the Taliban's judicial system. It is necessary for the Taliban to continue this fair and inequality-protecting justice system: "Their track record to date is favourable."

This assessment by the authors is based on the correct fact that the judicial system installed by the NATO powers was also highly corrupt. The actions that have been going around the world in pictures and videos from Afghanistan for weeks and have now been confirmed by the UN and Human Rights Watch are apparently irrelevant for the assessment of the Taliban judicial system: surrendering soldiers of the (now former) Afghan army are being Taliban fighters first humiliated, then executed. The picture of a woman being publicly flogged by the Taliban in Herat has also been circulating on social media for a few days. Her offense was a phone call to a man who was not her husband. According to Taliban norms, adultery is punishable by public stoning. A phone call is enough for this.

Also in Herat, after a Friday prayer, there was a parade where several men were dragged through the streets by the Taliban. Painted their faces black to humiliate and desecrate them. The alleged injustice: theft.

Public executions of senior government officials in a stadium have resumed in Kandahar. These are just the examples that can be documented with pictures and videos. Numerous (eyewitness) reports and stories from those affected confirm forced marriages and kidnappings throughout the country.

Socialist united front with the Taliban

So what is behind these whitewashing of atrocities and the attempts to relativize groups like the Taliban in their cruelty? Put simply, these attempts are probably based on the naïve idea that fundamentally religious ideologies like those of the Taliban are just a variety of petty-bourgeois rebellion by the oppressed class. Even with groups like these, it is important to build a kind of united front against capitalism. The aim must be for socialists to move to the top (Chris Harman, political Islam, p. 60 ff. 2012).

This notion and the resulting narrative of an oppressed class that has just conquered imperialism leads to this narrative: The Taliban really just have the wrong ideology, but a victory against imperialism and thus against one of the most aggressive forms of capitalism is still a Victory - and therefore somehow uplifting. Fist up, or, as I had to read in a comment column discussion among people in not unimportant positions in left-wing organizations: Toast to that first! For revolutionaries in Europe and America, the young people falling out of planes are primarily images on screens, which means they are quickly faded out. After all, when was the last time people in this country raised their glass of Lambrusco to toast the overthrow of an order?

It is different

But anyone who speaks of a Taliban victory over imperialism or a failure of NATO has not understood the power politics of the world order after the Cold War. Why should NATO have failed? Who actually believed that the US or the NATO alliance invaded the country because of human rights and democracy? Indeed, more geopolitical thinking would be appropriate here. Even the belief that this alliance, led by the US, wanted to completely "defeat" the Taliban is incorrect. The 2001 invasion was already accompanied by negotiations with the close ally Pakistan, an artificial, colonial and religious-fundamentalist state construct from the time of British colonial rule, which was created as a buffer zone to the Russian sphere of influence when it split from Afghanistan and India in 1947. The Taliban fighters have been granted safe conduct to retreat to the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not for reasons of humanitarian martial law, but because the Taliban government had been installed by Pakistan by that time and they wanted to send the trained fighters back alive to the ally.

If NATO had wanted to defeat the Taliban, they would have fought their main military advantage: their safe haven, the Pakistani border area with Afghanistan. Here the Taliban were supplied by their ally Pakistan: medically, militarily, ideologically and with offspring. The families of the fighters and the economic trade and supply routes of the Taliban economy have always been protected. During this time, the Taliban not only received significant financial support from Qatar, the Emirates and Pakistan, but also built up a considerable economy of violence with income from the opium business, protective tariffs and taxes and were easily able to pay their fighters many times more financially than the Afghan soldiers . At no time was Afghanistan as important as the alliance with the nuclear power Pakistan, whose military budget the USA supports with several billions a year. The untouched seat of the Taliban leadership is in Quetta, a major city in Pakistan, and is now being relocated to Kabul without further ado.

No, imperialism was not defeated, the USA withdrew for domestic reasons and a foreign policy that has been strategically fundamentally different since Barack Obama. They ended up seeing the Taliban as a more useful partner than the corrupt Afghan government. The US has been conducting withdrawal negotiations with the Taliban since February 2020, still under Donald Trump and to the exclusion of the Afghan government. In addition to the Taliban's assurance that Afghanistan should no longer pose a threat to the United States, the result of the agreement even includes the passage that economic relations should be maintained. The journalist Paul Nuki from the British Telegraph suspects a potential "new US/Afghan narco hub" behind this.

The USA and NATO may have lost their reputation and credibility. The assurance of Afghanistan as a sphere of influence has been negotiated since February 2020. From now on, however, without ground troops and therefore cheaper than before - and also in accordance with the new domestic political situation and changed foreign policy. The negotiated document also expressly stated that the United States would not recognize the Taliban emirate. An unrecognized government is easier to attack under international law, for example with mild means from the air - as a reminder of the agreement. Just in case.

Even if one considers it politically justifiable to ignore all the threatening murders, the threatening rapes, the threatening enslavement of women as “collateral damage” of geopolitical struggles in the fight against imperialism: who actually imagine an anti-imperialist “united front” with these Taliban who should urgently train himself in power-political and geostrategic questions beforehand - in order to really be able to take over the intellectual leadership over the "poor peasants in sandals", as Lindisfarne and Neal put it, who are currently in the military jets of the Qataris between Doha, Kandahar and Kabul jet.

Moheb Shafaqyar is a lawyer, exile Afghan and lives in Berlin. He is a member of the Left Party