Afghanistan – Ghani = AF-stan?

When is it ever pleasantly quiet on a battlefield for a war to be considered cold But thatrsquos precisely what the Cold War wasmdashup until the last decade of last centurymdashbetween the US and the then USSR Because things never really reached boiling point inside those countriesThe wars on behalf of both the superpowers were hotly fought on foreign soilsproperties Often engaging locals of those landsmdashwhether Korea Vietnamhellip Or indeed AfghanistanWhich the Soviets invaded in 1979 staying around for a decade while the US armedmilitarised Afghan Mujahideen Islamist guerillas in those parts to take on their global rival instead Itrsquos unlikely the US cared so much for the AfghanIslamictribal norms being threatened by a foreign power Around 15 million Afghans died in this Cold WarWhy For being a place of ldquostrategicrdquo importance Which is what Afghanistan was for both the British and the Russian empires in the 1800s up until early 20th CenturyThe cover of Ahmed Rashidrsquos book TalibanThe riches were in Central Asia where the Russians were India too close for comfort was the jewel of the British crown The British fought to take Afghanistan under its wingmdashin order to keep Russians from invading India This Cold War that played out was then called The Great GameWhat to make of Afghan people in all of this living for centuries inside arid battlefields and around merciless deaths ldquoTheir story and their character involve immense contradictions Brave magnificent honourable generous hospitable gracious handsome Afghan men and women can also be devious mean and bloody mindedrdquo is how the worldrsquos leading Pakbased expert Ahmed Rashid describes them in his seminal book Taliban The Story of the Afghan Warlords 2001 Which tallies with dusty popular images of men brandishing Kalashnikovs from Datsun twodoor pickup trucks and the genteel Kabuliwala from Tagorersquos short story from the late 1800sOr of course the fun current Afghan Diaspora you meetmdashcharming you with a common love for the singer Arijit Singh whose songs played prominently in Kabulrsquos cafeacutesmdashover whatrsquos generally a shared Eastern fondness for all things BollywoodIn fact when you read about Afghanistan from centuries further back in Rashidrsquos book is when Bollywood names come alive even more Starting from 1300s when Taimur on whom Saif Ali Khan named his son the descendant of Genghis Khan who captured Hairat in Afghanistan Taimurrsquos son was Shah Rukh He moved the capital of the Timurid Empire to Hairat in 1405In 1500 Taimurrsquos descendant Babur was driven out of home in Ferghana valley in Uzbekistan He went on to conquer Kabul in 1504 and then Delhi to establish the Mughal dynastyWhat does any of this medieval history have to do with medieval minded men called Taliban a second generation of Pashtun Mujahideens chiefly educatedindoctrinated in Pakistan who took over Afghanistan in the mid 1990s Nothing Except when you consider a place that has suffered more for where it ismdashrather than whatrsquos in itAs the Soviets left in 1989 rivalling warlords from multiple tribessects fought over commanding portions across 34 provinces This instability proved detrimental for Pakistan in 1993 under Benazir Bhuttomdashlooking to use Afghanistan for the shortest landtrade route to Central AsiaA oneeyed Jack Mohammed Omarmdashwho people still donrsquot accurately know what he looked like or when he was born he died in 2013 that people learnt about in 2015mdashwas emerging as a Pashtun Robin Hood figure for his justice system The young Taliban meaning lsquostudentsrsquo in Pashto that grouped under him could be Pakistanrsquos dependable proxiesAs Rashid recounts ldquoIn just a couple of weeks this unknown force had captured the second largest city in Afghanistan Kandahar with loss of just a dozen men By December 1994 some 12000 Afghan and Pakistani students had joined the TalibanrdquoIf yoursquore old enough to have read accounts of what followed they were essentially lsquoRipleyrsquos Believe It Or Notrsquo columns in international including Indian pressmdashsmashing of TV sets public stoningbeheading banning of music sports decreeing all men to grow a beardEven if in horror the world looked away mid rsquo90s onwards Until September 11 2001 when Taliban was used as shoulder for an attack on the US by the multinational group Al Qaeda Post Cold War for the first time things got fatally hot in the WestThe US drove out Taliban Public health and womenrsquos education Irsquom told improved considerably That war got over in 20 years Whatever the conclusion America left the building And the Taliban returned on August 15 2021 just as swiftly as they had first popped up in the rsquo90sWhat was their original goal An ancient religious state inspired more by tribal codes And while Taliban Pashtuns donrsquot like Hazaras or as Sunni Muslims canrsquot stand Shias or as Deobandis canrsquot get along with Salafists the IS what religionists of a fanatical type are united on is their common hate for womenmdashthrown out of schools wiped out of streets stripped of human rightsThatrsquos the first war aimed against half of humanity to look out for in 2021mdashwhen technology allows public shaming of Taliban if they errmdashin a way that it was not possible in the rsquo90s Certain rights look globally nonnegotiable two decades hence If the worldrsquos at it think theyrsquoll care As must the brave living withinMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper