Good evening, everyone. My name is Michael Willis. I'm the director of the Middle East Centre here at St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to the second of the Middle East Centre's webinars focussing, focussing on contemporary events in the region, the second that we are holding this term. Two weeks ago, we looked at Tunisia. This week we are moving to the other end of the region to look at recent developments in Afghanistan.
Now, Afghanistan is a country we traditionally have not covered very regularly or extensively in the Middle East Centre, but one that is quite obviously has strong, both strong links to and significant influence on the Middle East region. And to discuss this topic, we are very pleased to have two noticed specialist on Afghanistan. We have Kate Clarke. Kate is co-director and senior analyst at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a policy research NGO based in Kabul, where she's been since 2010.
Kate has been researching and writing on Afghanistan for over 20 years as a journalist, analyst and documentary maker. She was BBC correspondent in Kabul between 1999 and 2002 and was the only Western journalist based in Afghanistan Dreamer last year of the Taliban emirate, and was in fact expelled by the Taliban in March 2001, largely for her coverage of the destruction of the statues of Buddha Bamiyan.
Kate returned to Afghanistan in November 2001 and thus witnessed the fall of Kabul, both in 2001 and very recently, of course, this last summer in 2021. The research and publications have focussed on the conflict in Afghanistan, including militia formation and investigations into breaches of law of war detentions and the use of torture. She has also written extensively on Afghanistan's political economy as well as its wildlife and the environment.
Kate knows the Middle East region also very well. She holds in May in Middle Eastern politics from the University of Exeter and has lived and studied and worked across the region. Our second panellist tonight is Ibrahim Marashi. Ibrahim is associate professor of Middle Eastern history at California State University San Marcos and is currently visiting professor at the University School of Global and Public Affairs in Madrid, Spain, from where he joins us this evening.
Ibrahim obtained his doctorate here at Nancy's College at the University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And Ibrahim achieved quite a significant seat in the fact that his doctoral thesis actually became briefly, certainly nationally famous and in fact world famous due to it being plagiarised by official officials in the UK government in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And what those of you remember, certainly those of you based in Britain will remember is the dodgy dossier affair that was based on plagiarised from Ibrahim's thesis. Ibrahim's work as focussed mainly on Iraq, and he's probably several books on Iraqi history. But over recent years, however, he has focussed increasingly on Afghanistan, specifically looking about how we understand it can teach Afghans Afghan history over last two decades.
And also and this relates very much to us in the Middle East Centre, how the discipline of Middle East studies should relate to Afghanistan again and neighbouring countries of a region sometimes regarded part of it, sometimes regarded as its next to it. And these sort of issues about the relationship with it. Now, before I move to our speakers, I just wanted to say that we will be taking the speakers.
We speaking for 15 minutes each, then we'll be opening up the floor to questions and discussion. Now, if you would like to pose a question to either of our speakers, please do so. If you see the Q&A function on on Zoom, a little Q&A button. If you press that you can type in your question and then I can pose it to the panellists in the question and answer session. Please feel free to put your name in. Similarly, if you prefer to remain anonymous, that's absolutely fine.
And we will. We won't mention your name, but every is fine. So as we go from a talk, feel free to enter them at any time, and then we'll have them at the end and we'll be able to put the questions to our panellists. OK, so we'll move to our panellists. The first will be we working. Speaking would be Ibrahim Ibrahim.
Thank you for that introduction. As well as. Organising this event that I began considering back in August after the fall of Kabul, the particular subject that I wanted to deal with is the notion of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires. Notice I put a question mark because this trope came into use and August and last August, and what I wanted to do was interrogate.
Where did this come from? Because. You might get the impression that this was something that might have been said by, let's say, a imagine one of the Anglo Afghan words and colonial officer with a helmet after leaving Afghanistan after the second Anglo Afghan war, saying This is the graveyard of our empire. But in fact, the appetite it's a it's really a historiography. It really only emerged in the Journal of Foreign Affairs and if the journal Foreign Affairs has given us.
Terms have entered our lexicon, such as the clash of civilisations, so too did it introduce the graveyard of empires? It was. It's not a historical term. It was a term coined and on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan after 2001, but has been used kind of reflexively kind of in the assumption that this is what the British Empire considered Afghanistan or the Soviet Union. So just briefly speaking, how did I get interested in Afghanistan?
And the story of my Ph.D. research is really reflective of the state of knowledge of Afghanistan and Afghan history around prior to nine 11, I should say. So growing up in the US, as a child in the 80s, there was really two stories that I grew up with on the Seven O'Clock news. Before I knew this was on a 24 hour news cycle, one was the Iran-Iraq war, which involved my actually two ancestral homes, both Iraq and Iran. That was always in the background. And the other was the war in Afghanistan.
Those were the wars in the 1980s, particularly from the region that I identified with the Lebanese Civil War had started in 1975. More or less was no longer newsworthy by the 80s and really after my college education, when I was trying to choose a page, the subject was either going to be the Iran-Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan. Both would prove to be difficult to do when I was considering doing a in the US because in terms of Afghan scholars who worked on Afghanistan.
So we're talking about the very late late 90s right before 2001. There was one political scientist, the entire of the US who worked in Afghanistan and one anthropologist and another political scientist was really in the policy circles but really primarily focussed on Pakistan and who told me doing a Ph.D. on Afghanistan in the US would be impossible. That gives you kind of a state of the knowledge of Afghanistan given. And keep in mind also, Middle East studies didn't really touch it.
South Asia studies really considered Afghanistan as an appendage. This was the reflection of the state of knowledge of Afghanistan in the US, and I would argue it also in terms of the US State Department. You had this kind of mirroring effect where the knowledge of Afghanistan was quite well, look, the same went for Iraq.
Iraqi history there was really no one in the US working in the late 90s working on Iraqi history, and it says a lot prior to 2001 and 2003, the dearth of knowledge, at least in academic circles, on both Iraq and Afghanistan. But and of course, in the introduction, you know how the story ended. I ended up going to the Middle East centre of Oxford to do a history of the Iran-Iraq war, which later became a history of the Gulf War of 1991.
So, so that's on one level talking about the kind of the state of knowledge on both countries. But here we're going to be focussing on Afghanistan prior to the war in Afghanistan. Now, finally, to interrogate the graveyard of empires, I told you the context in which the term emerged. And just like the clash of civilisations, often history is needed to more or less deconstruct these terms that have so much been in our lexicon.
Let's think of this term that emerged in the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan, and let's look at the historical record. So where does Afghanistan and the Persian Empire begin? Or and I would argue it's an artificial arbitrary distinction. It's more or less a continuum. And not only the origins of rasp patriotism could most likely be traced to somewhere in Afghanistan.
Of course, becoming the official law of the state religion of various Persian empires, Afghanistan was not the graveyard for Alexander the Great. In fact, he left the legacy as the city of Kandahar would have been one of the Alexandria that were left during Alexander's career. So not only was it not the graveyard of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Hellenic project, but what you saw was kind of a hybridity, a flourishing of the local country cultures, as well as a lannert culture.
Do you go to the early Muslim empire under the caliphate and then in the early phase of the Roman Empire, now only. Neither was Afghanistan the graveyard of that empire. But of course, the adoption of Islam in this area is relevant to this very day. Jump to the 1800s, the era known as the gunpowder, not only was, in other words, the notion of the graveyard of empires is Afghanistan is an area that's acted upon.
It sucks in potential imperial aspirants and then ultimately more or less and traps them in a quagmire. If you jump to the 1500s, the Mughal Empire actually began in Kabul. In other words, Afghanistan or we could call Afghanistan in this case, is the birthplace of empires, if you will. And rather than being a graveyard of empires, the Afghans were responsible also, particularly in the fields of the Pashtun tribes, for bringing the collapse of an empire.
Not necessarily it being invaded, but then invading. And that was the Zafar bid empire. And I just have this screenshot of the Mughal Empire to remind us, in other words, Afghanistan could we don't think of it as the font of a kind of civilizational entity, but that this is what this lecture is trying to remind us.
And then finally, when we get you, the British experience in Afghanistan, here are we could find something similar in terms of the British experience, which was really a reflection or an outcome of preventing Russian expansion towards its interests in the Mughal Empire. Otherwise known by another trope, the great game the graveyard of Empires was used to disappear or is used to describe the British experience in Afghanistan,
the Soviet experience and the American experience. But what I've been trying to do was delineate what is the difference between Afghanistan being part of the empires of the past and the British Imperial, the Soviet Imperial and the American Imperial Project? And what all three have in common was, of course, those three entities mentioned were more or less what you consider Western trying to impose a certain their own interests without any kind of consideration of local culture.
No attempts at hybridity and of course, in those cases, those foreign attempts of the imposition of their cultures, whether it was their imperial culture, I should say British, Soviet or American ultimately were undone. In Afghanistan, in other words, rather than being a graveyard is more or less a site of imperial western, I should say Western imperial hubris, and I think that is a distinction that has to be made when looking at the broad span of Afghan history.
So now with situate the history of Afghanistan very briefly in the Cold War. And here are show images of the streets of Prague in 1968, when there was during any episode of the Cold War, when there was a communist regime that seemed to resist the control of Moscow more or less. The solution was to send in the tanks, whether it was Hungary 1956, Prague 1968 or Kabul. Nineteen late nineteen seventy nine.
The usually the deployment of the Soviet military was enough to change the government and ensure the rule of a pliant communist regime. So in other words, whether it was Hungary, Prague or Kabul, it was Kabul where we saw the failure. So here we have the images of the Soviet tanks going into Kabul in 1979 and 1980. And this is. Bring me now with the Soviet invasion.
I prefer this map of where we kind of reimagined the Middle East and Southwest Asia because it will map like this, we can appreciate Afghanistan's position with the region. So in other words, I'm situated. The history of Afghanistan with an empire briefly discussed Afghanistan's history during the Cold War. Now, if I could situate Afghanistan with the 1980s and the Middle East and then take it to the present and then leave it off for Kate will continue this narrative.
It's this when we look at Afghanistan in the 1980s, I would say Afghanistan is related to the Middle East, or if we could use this term, just Southwest Asia, then we could see it as one continuing on one geographical continuum. What does Afghanistan represent? First of all, vis-a-vis the Arab world, I would say the 1980s represented the failure of various Arab regimes to deal with their political Islamist movements.
Afghanistan If we look at whether Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and the various foreign volunteers who have come from Algeria, Yemen, Syria and each and every single one of these states, there was the failure of the various Afghan fighters to see a role of political Islam within their various home countries that resulted in them finding refuge in Afghanistan and implementing their vision in Afghanistan.
So on one level, that's it's just a reflection of the history of political Islamism of the eighties. On the second level, then, is ideation in the kind of Islamist imaginary where the political Islamist project succeeded, where it was a transnational political Islamist project in Afghanistan and according to the Islamists, imaginary on an ideation the level that brought the collapse of the Soviet Union as of 1989, when the next level I would connected to is then during the 1980s,
continuing to would say to some levels to the various present Afghanistan as a side of a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which I would argue goes back to the 1980s. And during this proxy conflict, and also to some extent, that existed in neighbouring Pakistan, which is also why I'm kind of keen on taking South Asia and also including getting into an entity called Southwest Asia, where they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, particularly in Afghanistan.
This led to various forms of Arab Islam taking root. There was one mujahideen fact, then that of Abu Sayyaf that was ostensibly Wahhabi, and we could say the forms of Islam practised by ISIS. I wouldn't say are inherently Afghan in character. They are Islamic Islam because they have the South Asian context. But the various forms of Islam that took root in Afghanistan, I would argue, had their origins in the Arab world.
And then finally, the fourth level is one of a human security framework that unites Afghanistan with the rest of what we call the Middle East. And when I'm talking about a human security is the following of those kind of liminal peoples. As a result of this conflict, I shouldn't say $11, but precariat those in a precarious situation, those vulnerable. I'm particularly talking about refugees.
We've seen refugees in Pakistan who were, of course, introduced to various forms of Islam that usually came from Saudi Arabia. But I'm also talking about refugees in Iran that would later be used as fighters in the Syrian Civil War. It's this how this place ends up being part of Middle Eastern politics, particularly in the case of the brigades recruited from the Hazara minority of Afghanistan. They found themselves as forming battalions in the Syrian Civil War.
So those are the various ways I would connect. Situate Afghanistan in the greater history of the Middle East, and then finally, to start to conclude just two primary sources again, going back to the history of situating Afghanistan's history during the Cold War and looking at resonance with the present. And this is the various language, and I underline the key points. Various language that you would find familiar coming from Biden's White House, the attempts to not portray.
If you look at this document from 1987 or 1989 noticed the emphasis on language, this is not a withdrawal. This is not sorry, a route or a light. Look at it in 1987, the emphasis on this is the withdrawal that we've planned. And then again, two years later, if you look at sentence number three, this is withdrawal not to. And again, now look at sentence number one. And here we come to the historical tropes that we use back in number one, a sentence number one that I took from this primary source.
This is not analogous to the situation in Vietnam, as uttered by this official in 1989 and again in August, when we see the repeated emphasis this is not Saigon 1975. And then finally, to conclude with an image and two maps of this image says it all in terms of the Soviet invasion was really a project that allowed the communist government of Afghanistan to control the roads. And the urban. City centre of Afghanistan, when the Soviets withdrew. What we see is the next phase of Afghan history.
The Afghan government was able to control the roads, the various urban centres. But the next phase would be the Civil War and within the Civil War. I'm setting up today's presentation. If you look at the various mujahideen factions here, we have Afghanistan ripe for a economic system. We rarely call it a warlordism.
The control for fives and mini economies that will set up Afghanistan's instability during the 1990s, and if I show you this image and then finally, this image that came from the American NATO experience in Afghanistan, again, you see a similar dynamic. The blue represents the various cities that were controlled by the ISAF forces as well as the roads. But if you see the story here of kind of where the Taliban was operating or the various areas here, you have again a reflection of what?
Connected, the Soviet and the American experience controlling the urban centres and the roads was easy enough if you had superior military power. The mountains, the provided harder geographical locations for either superpower to secure Afghanistan. And within that context, that's where I would want to conclude, not really.
Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires, but Afghanistan is an area that administration is difficult and will ultimately fail when the project is imposed from the top down when the project attempts to be centralised. And that's the story I think of the Soviet and the American experience to create a centralised government in both cases where the history of this particular area has always been one of decentralisation.
Sophocles, there? Thank you. Thank you very much, Ibrahim, for giving us a very interesting and very comprehensive and very short space of time. Outlook on Afghan history, particularly how it's been misunderstood in the past and thank you particularly by linking, was showing all the ways that it links into the Middle East. I have to admit I thought the graveyard of empires I'm biased quote was again, similarly from some 19th century British officials.
So that was very interesting to know that a lot of the things we sometimes think of long history are actually a recent invention. That's a feature in history. But thank you. Now tend to Kate Clarke. So, yeah, I'm reminded of the joke that Afghans say that their country is not a graveyard of empires. It's a graveyard of Afghans. And we've seen an awful lot of dead Afghans over the last 40 years as various countries and groups have fought over it.
So as I have, I've been doing a lot of these briefings. I do quite a lot of them anyway. But particularly since obviously the fall of Kabul, there's been a renewed interest in Afghanistan, and I thought I would take the opportunity to speak to an audience of Middle Eastern people or people interested in the Middle East to take a slightly, you know, a different look at Afghanistan, which is to look at it as a frontier state, which is, of course,
is one of the, you know, the classic theories for looking at the Middle East and the oil producers in particular. And of course, one of the other ways in which my, my my will will fit into Ibrahim's. It's been a frontier state since it's basically since it was formed as a modern state in the late 19th century by Amir Abdurrahman Khan. How did he consolidate the modern state using British subsidies? So he, you know, he announced a jihad and conquered the Hazara Shias in the centre of the country.
He forcibly converted the people who had been living in Carfare Tristan. It was renamed Nuristan. Some really horrible things happened with the with the use of British subsidies. That was really when Afghanistan became a frontier state, and it has not stopped ever since. Through the Cold War, the USSR and the U.S. vied for control through the wars of the nineteen and 90s. And of course, also after 2001 with. And I think one of the key things is that why would anyone bother with Afghanistan?
It's isolated, it's poor. It doesn't have natural resources. The key thing is, everyone has always wanted no one else to control it. So British India didn't want Czarist Russia to control Afghanistan, USSR and the US. And since 2001, of course, it was the America America and its allies didn't want Taliban and al Qaida to control Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been a frontier state for four generations, but since 2001 it's been a frontier state on steroids.
I mean, the amount of money coming into the country since the invasion is eye watering. Not just aid, though that's been a lot, but also the money that was given to foot to the army and the police, and especially the money that was spent by the military. The various foreign armies that were based in Afghanistan. Billions. Billions of dollars. And it's it's had the same sort of effects that you would expect in a classic rentier state run to a state.
There's the sort of financial autonomy of the elites. They don't answer this for the people, they answer, if at all, to the donors. I mean, up until 2000, August, the 15th 2021. No taxation without representation, actually very little taxation in Afghanistan and calls for representation have been very weak. We've had this sort of sham parliament sham elections. Weakening of the domestic economy, we end up in 2021 with Afghanistan importing six times as much as it exports.
And that the difference is covered by important imports, medicine, food, oil, gas. And staple food. So it has all the sort of what you would say is a sort of classic classic frontier characteristics, corruption, nepotism, the importance of a vertical political organisation rather than horizontal. But then it's also very different from you. Think about Iraq under Saddam or Libya, and of the Durfee, you don't see the consolidation of the state.
We saw it with Abdul Rahman Khan in the late 19th century. We don't see it with the post-2001 state. And it's strange. Why is that the case? And I think you can look at where the where the rent went. Not to one party or to one one leader, but to a multiplicity of actors. So the Americans got rid of the Taliban and this sort, a slew of commanders and factions grabbed control. They were.
It was commanders who were the new district governors, provincial governors, generals, corps commanders, ministers, you name it pretty well. Most people, apart from there, was a few exceptions. Hamid Karzai was one. Ashraf Ghani was another. If you look at the first cabinet, four fifths were either military men or civilian members of armed factions, and they absolutely used the state as spoils with divvied up divvied out that the.
The positions look at the first hundred generals, 90 were from one ethnic group belonging to the same as General Fahim, who is the defence minister, mainly from his his faction and that faction controlled Kabul controlled Defence Intelligence, Foreign Affairs Police.
You know, it was a real, real grab of power. And of course, with the Americans and others giving all this rent to Afghanistan, they absolutely consolidated those men's power so largely military and they became they sort of mostly moved out of the political arena, but they continued to be a mainstay of where political power stayed in Afghanistan. And there was a sort of this parallel state. It was called a sort of kitchen cabinet under Karzai.
Ghani, the later President Ashraf Ghani he had, he created various commissions that he had more power in the ministries in some respects. So what happens? You do have a reduction in the rent with the international forces mainly living in 2014. You do have a more tax coming in from the from the state does gather more tax and Ashraf Ghani. But this year, the rent still amounts to 43 percent of GDP. 43 percent of GDP. 75 percent of public funding.
50 percent of the government funding of the government's budget. Even the you know, the Taliban, in fact, so funds the education fund schools. Women's groups, the frontier groups, civil society groups, the frontier groups, largely with some honourable exceptions. They are funded by the donors. The Taliban are funded basically by the donors. I mean, this is especially the case when the Americans had this surge, when they had 100000 troops on the ground.
Barack Obama was trying to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, even though at that point they probably would have gone voluntarily. You know, the Taliban were taking 10 percent of an estimated 10 percent of the of the logistics bill that the American army would fund were paying to get supplies to their bases 10 percent. And even in the last few few years, we've been doing research my organisation looking at what it's like to live under the Taliban.
We looked at service delivery in the areas controlled by the Taliban. The Taliban were taxing effectively. A lot of that money came ultimately from from rent, but they didn't spend they didn't spend on education or schools or health. They ran no services. All those continue to be run by NGOs, by the government and ultimately largely paid for by donors.
So what happens what happens on the 15th of August is the Taliban, they've decided to go for a military because they had this, you know, political negotiations, a deal on the table that the Americans are negotiating with any government were happy with, but there was a negotiated programme. A ceasefire was offered, but no, they went for a military victory and they succeeded. A disaster, an absolute disaster, they killed the goose that had been laying the golden eggs.
Because not only, you know, Western donors don't really like governments that come to power by force. They particularly don't like governments coming to power who they've been fighting for many years and especially once they've got sanctions on. So both you and you and particularly us are very, very tricky to avoid. So overnight, the rent went. Aid cut, largely cut.
That was funding civil suit, you know, hundreds of thousands of civil servants salaries, education, schooling, agricultural inputs, infrastructure projects, you name it, and all the services that are then paid for by those, those people, those salaried people. The reserves are frozen, they're large in America, also in Germany, and you can eat the frozen. The World Bank funds are frozen.
There's this dearth of dollars in the country and of Afghanis, that's the local currency because they were printed outside. Tel Aviv, that sort divvy up the spoils, but there isn't much. There really isn't much, and there's been quite a lot of complaints from fighters about, you know, it was much it was much more fun during the jihad. A. What we have, we have paralysis in Washington.
You know, the lovely project has failed and there and the way that Biden timed it with the withdrawal about two and before night, the anniversary of 9-11, it meant that on the 20th anniversary of 9-11, their enemies were in charge. They'd lost a state within a few months. And and America is the big player in Afghanistan, it's May it was the major donor. It's the major player on the World Bank to determine what the World Bank does.
A US sanctions are particularly devastating because the international banks don't want to go against the U.S. when it comes to transactions, so commercial transactions that are out. The US Treasury did make some waivers to allow humanitarian other urgent needs to go to Afghanistan. It's really, really difficult because you. It's actually very difficult to actually get money into the country.
People wanting to send money home or people like me have got friends who are now really struggling getting reparations or final, you know, finances to people in countries really difficult. One in 20 households in Afghanistan have enough to eat and the country is on the verge of famine. So just over half of the country this winter. Always a lean, hungry time are either in crisis or emergency mode. And this is because you've got you've had a really bad drought and that's a global warming problem.
Plus, the fighting really intense of fighting earlier in the year, plus the pandemic and then this lack of aid, so you've got rural poverty and you've got urban poverty, really, really brutal. Health care systems collapsed almost. Schooling is tricky, so, you know, the donors are left. No leadership from it, from America. The donors are very, very they don't really know what to do because they don't want Afghans to starve to death, but they don't want to work with the Taliban.
The, you know, the easy political option has been humanitarian aid because it's apolitical but actually delivering. It's difficult and it's a drop in the ocean compared to the rest that Afghanistan was getting. It does not cover what Afghanistan has lost. So even though thank the Lord, the war is over, and that's of course, you know, the war is over. We've got the first real peace for 20 years.
There were a number of years where where there was peace at the start of the American intervention, but otherwise it's first time for 40 years. And that's wonderful. It has marginal economic interests. You know, people couldn't get into the field this year to irrigate, to water, to harvest, to get the food, to get crops to market, for example. But it doesn't make up for these huge, calamitous economic losses, and the Taliban have not been able to.
And they're so concerned with internal cohesion, with keeping themselves together with rewarding their thought that the followers that they have not been able to make the concessions that could have made it easier for the Western donors to carry on funding, keep the schools open for girls, allow women to work, don't carry out reprisal killings, have some sort of inclusive government at the moment. We've got a government that's pretty much what it's all male.
It's largely Pashtun, which is one of many ethnic groups, mainly from the South, pretty well, all madrassa educated and very little thought to trying to match the minister's experience with his ministry. We saw the same in in 2001. It's not new in Afghanistan. And actually, the reprisal killings there were far, far worse. There were massacres, but it doesn't help Afghanistan in the current situation.
And. It's difficult to imagine at the moment that Afghanistan won't become again one of the poorest countries in the world with an eviscerated middle class, the poverty stricken middle class and a lot of the things that have been great about the last 20 years.
Girls going to school, boys going to school education, education opportunities, up to further education or higher education, better press institutional knowledge in things like how to run a modern economy that it's very fragile and it could well be lost in the next few months. So I'm just going to kill one joke, Michael, and then I pass on to you, and it's sort of like, I have to credit Michael Semple, who's a professor at Queen's University Belfast.
It claims it comes from the nineteen nineties, but I'm not entirely sure he didn't come up with that reasoning. So it follows Mullah Omar, who was the founder, one of the founders of the Taliban, and he was the first leader, the Supreme Leader, a male. And he's with his his advisors unless he asks them. So is Afghanistan one of the richest countries in the world? And they say, Oh no. Melissa, Melissa, Melissa with one of the poorest.
And he says, Why is that? And they and they say, we don't really know. And he says, Well, what are the richest countries? They said, Well, it's Germany and Japan. So how did they become rich? Well, they picked a fight with America. They lost an America, funded them, and they became richer than you could ever imagine. So strikes is so, so so. So we should pick a fight with America, and they start to wonder, you are the wisest leader ever.
And he says, yeah, it's just one problem. What happens if we win? Thank you very much, Kate. It's not a it's it's rather unusual to have a seminar in Afghanistan and you have us laughing, but some of those perhaps given how quite depressing some of the things that have happened, they're having. It's not about that, but that it's a rather particular take on it. But thank you very much for that. I mean, Michael, and if you've hung out with Afghans, you will know that it's not Iraqis and Syrians.
They specialise in it because of the horrors. So I'm not making light. The situation is, though, nowadays, I mean, I, you know, I work on Algeria, and there was an enormous boom in jokes about during the Civil War in the 1990s is thought to have the mechanisms of people cope. But thank you very much for the Iraqi jokes as well. After 1991, actually, there's a project to be done on that. I think so. Anybody wants to write a thesis on that. I think that be fascinating.
But thank you, Kanan, but actually really interesting to look at it as a rentier state. Nobody really thinks of Afghanistan in those terms, but for all the reasons you set out, as you said, one one completely on steroids and where we move on, that is going to be very interesting. OK, well, thank you to you both. We now move into the question and answer session. I'd like to begin myself with a question mainly aimed at a cape, but also Ibrahim wants to weigh in on.
This was was to what extent do you think the Taliban understood this rentier state and that they would have problems? In other words, what happens if you win? Is there any sort of sense of what their political economy or even economy would look like? And are there any hints from their first period in power in the late 90s, early 2000s?
Or is that just such a different situation that there's going to be no parallels and there were lessons to be drawn that I'm convinced they didn't know because they were told repeatedly by the Americans and others. I, someone I know who was who was at Doha, said, You know, if you go for military victory, you will be like North Korea. You will be really isolated. I just don't think they understood the scale of the money coming into the country.
And I think actually probably Afghans didn't understand it either. They didn't ask why their schooling was free or my wife health clinics were free when they weren't really paying taxes and there wasn't this connexion at all. I think it's been a huge shock to them, and they expected the Treasury to be fuller, and they're really annoyed that, you know, they can't get their hands on the on the reserves so that, you know, they're actually in a honeymoon period at the moment with the donors.
They're trying to persuade everyone that they're they're nice and, you know, they should all come back and actually access is much better. You know, it's the difficult areas, the country, obviously, because it's not a war going on and the Taliban trying to kidnap foreigners for ransom. So in that sense, it's a bit easier. They they haven't made any concessions into confidence building measures that they may well be doing a bit somehow.
So, for example, on customs before there was a three way split, there was Taliban. There was the government taxing and then there were pro-government actors who were taking bribes. That's consolidated now. So it's just taxing the traders down, but possibly more risk. More money is actually coming into the Treasury because it's not being split three ways.
And the Taliban, for all their faults, are less corrupt than the, you know, the horrors of the of the the Karzai and the Valley administrations, which shocked Afghans in the early years of two of the early 2000s. The Taliban didn't have a political programme. They didn't have an economic programme. They are a military organisation dedicated to jihad. And we saw that in the areas under their control, they would appoint commanders to civilian roles, with very few exceptions.
I mean, the judges would be an exception where they had clauses rather than, but they might also be commanders as well. But they, you know, they had some sort of specialism in the nineties. You had the same situation where you know, you'd go to the Ministry of Education or Health and the command that the minister was also a front line battle commander. He'd be at the frontline as part time ministry, and we see the same things now.
Of course, poor Taliban, they don't have a war to fight anymore. They've got to like govern this country and. Mainly mullahs, with very few exceptions, we've got one of them, you know, one of the negotiators in Doha is now in charge of mining. We had someone in. A higher education. The allegations were that he was a literal I don't know if that's correct or not, but it's that sort of, you know, disconnect between what they're doing.
It was the same in 2001. But the problem now is a lot of the technocrats left because of the mass evacuation that the West decided to embark on in August has taken away a lot of a lot of expertise from the country. Thank you, Ibrahim, did you want to add anything on that? I do. I want to take this opportunity to ask my own question to Kate. You are talking about the various ministries of education and you mentioned corruption.
An issue I'm looking at in Iraq and I've been wondering about this in Afghanistan is the various ministries dealing with environmental issues, water resources and wondering how the Taliban emergence would affect those various ministries, particularly the delivery of governance, the delivery of water management of water. How how would climate change affect Afghanistan? That these are kind of long term issues are concerned about? Well, we're in the middle of a severe drought last year.
Predictions are for this year. Afghanistan's always sort of regular droughts. Maybe every 20 30 years has been a bad one. The predictions are that by the end of this decade, there will be annual. So and one of the problems, of course, now that there are soldiers in Yemen, this there's ways of getting the water from the aquifers now that mean there's overuse of certainly the aquifers in Kabul, but also they're being used for opium production, for example, in the South.
There's been a greening of the desert that is not sustainable given the precipitation. Glaciers are melting, and they're really important for having a steady flow of irrigation water in the springtime. It's horrible. It's really horrible. And you know, one of the desperate things I actually went to the central area on to look at drought conditions two years ago, and on the last day when one of the people I've worked with, his cousin is a glacier expert and there's various other people.
We asked one of the local up environmental engineers to just gather a group of people together on our last night and in this room in the middle of nowhere, you know, Bamiyan is in the middle of it's all right little city, but it's really in the middle of nowhere. Everyone at the table had a Ph.D. offer from Germany or Japan or outside, and they all have their feet in the soil.
They were sons of farmers, so they had land. Or they understood there was soil experts, water experts, environmental experts, glacier experts. And they all came not only with sort of academic expertise, but technical expertise. What can we do? And I asked them, You know, this is what? What are you the worst affected in the country? And I'm expecting them to say yes, yes, we're really poorly off. Good Lord. No, we've got the watershed of the main peaks running through the middle of Afghanistan.
We can do things. We have solutions, but we do need help to sort of to do it. So the, you know, the solutions are there. At that point, there wasn't very much interest in funding anti-global warming measures. And now of course, it's off the table because it's not humanitarian. So goodness knows what. And I don't even know actually follow up what's happened to those people or those people who were, you know?
Amazing experts in the field. And as for the Taliban, they are replacing the experts with mullahs. They've replaced the directors of departments with mullahs. Some of the old old directors were corrupt, but others were young, technically able people. They may be in a kept on as advisers, but that but the political parties going back to the going back to the Taliban.
Thank you. When members of questions coming in from you in the audience and I encourage you, if you do have a question or comment, please do puts it in the Q&A box and we're happy to will relay it to our speakers. So we have a question coming in from Anton Deborah. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, Anton. And Anton's question is, what did the Americans expect? And that's in in capital letters from Doha?
And to what extent did it appear? The Taliban negotiators had conflicting intentions. He wants to have a go at that, says, do you want to go first? No, OK. I defer to you. Yeah, we have this fantasy peace process in Doha. Goodness knows what the Americans were thinking. I mean, look at the Soviets. I mean, they spent years before they withdrew. Building up the Dr. Najib government to withstand the mujahideen.
What the Americans do, they legitimise the Taliban? They undermined the Kabul government and the Afghan armed forces. They came, you know, they they they decided to talk to the Taliban independently and to the exclusion of the Afghan government. They came up with this deal that gave the Taliban pretty well everything they wanted, which was the the withdrawal of their main most dangerous enemy from the battlefield, which was the American. Special forces, an air force then.
But worse than that, they did things like they promised that the Afghan government would release 5000 prisoners and they they. They force them to do that. The old Mike Pompei, the old secretary of state, said we will will will withhold $1 billion of aid if you don't release them. The last year, they insisted that the Afghan forces have a defensive mode, so they weren't actually fighting.
Some Taliban were busy consolidating areas, taking territory the whole last year, and then they left unconditionally and that the deal hadn't even, you know, made the Taliban, if not things like Al Qaeda core. What would you think of as core U.S. interests, al Qaeda and the other foreign jihadist groups? The weakest, the weakest of concessions? The Taliban made it look like the Americans were cutting and running. That's what the Taliban assumed they were doing. That's what they were doing.
Both Trump and Biden did that, and they absolutely undermined the Republic. It was not inevitable that it fell. I know it looks like that now, but it wasn't inevitable. There were really serious undermining by the Americans, also bad leadership by Ashraf Ghani and this unwillingness to look reality in the face, including on things like the rent coming in that might be disappearing. So I mean, the Americans had a fantasy project that they got everyone involved with.
All our governments just joined in. Various research institutes were making doing research on the post piece as they called it, i.e. when the Taliban and the Afghan government was supposedly going to make peace. Meanwhile, we were asking the time I was asking the Americans, What's your plan B? What are you going to do if the Taliban are being deceitful and actually want to go for military victory?
Nothing. No answer. There was no Plan B, and it was pretty clear from what you know what we were hearing from the Taliban on the ground and in Pakistan, where the leadership was based, the negotiations with their Plan B and military victory was their plan, which is what turned out to be the case. So I mean, I think there's blame on all sides the Taliban for choosing war in a drought year in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, the suffering they inflicted has been horrible.
The Ashraf Ghani government has being weak and feckless and and undermining itself and the Americans. So you can tell that I'm still quite worked up about this. Back to you, Michael. Thank you. No question. Everything you do want to mention, you didn't want to comment on that particularly. OK. Next question comes from Iftikhar Malik and Iftikhar us retrospectively. Can we say that the US led alliance chose a wrong enemy in 2001 and persisted with it?
I'm pointing at an alienated and targeted Pashtun populace, a populace that happened to be land based peasantry. Both these factors largely anchored the Taliban. I did raises areas in and study even before the Doha talks, and Iftikhar apologised for plugging it. No problem at all, but we're happy to plug that as well. So any of you like to take that question?
I'll start with the mate. If there was again going back to history, if there were two pivots, in other words, was the rise of the Taliban inevitable? It's kind of a historian I always have to argue, were the key pivots that would have made a difference. No one would be the US. Lots of interest in Afghanistan after 1989. The international community has lots of interest in terms of the interest in Afghanistan was getting the Soviets to withdraw.
The minute that happened in terms of reconstruction and political settlements, there was no interest whatsoever. And it's in that vacuum in which the Afghan civil war began and which the Taliban was able to emerge. The other key was in 2001, I think, in the sense of Victor's justice. The failure to engage the defeated elements of the Taliban in a post 2001 order.
It was the same mistake made in Iraq the failure to engage at least some elements of the bomb, not necessarily the higher elements, but these kind of lustration, if you will, this broad swath of thing, anyone affiliated with the Taliban or anyone affiliated with the Pashtun majority affiliated with the Taliban in the same way with Iraq, anyone affiliated with the Baath, but eventually became this large Arabs in the past, it led to disasters in both states.
And I think that if the that that gives you an answer with right immediately after 2001, when the Taliban were defeated, when they had more or less been disbanded militarily in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I think both the defeated saw no future in the American system and thus took up arms. And I think those are the two key junctures in both states. Could I add to that? I mean, the extraordinary thing about 2001 was it was basically a welcome intervention.
And this was the Taliban. It was a it was a sea change. The Taliban were not just defeated militarily, but psychologically. No one had come to their aid. Apart from a few Pakistanis that collapsed. People welcomed the foreigners, and that was partly because they'd had, you know, this was this marked the end of the Civil War. The Taliban went home in peace. Some of them slipped across the border. Some of them reached out to people in the in the new regime to try and get security guarantees,
which is typical for what you do at the end of an Afghan war. They were double crossed. You know, you had people turning up to meetings and the CIA would swoop down and arrest them. You had the people who took power. After after 2001, they used the Americans, they use a new position to persecute their enemies, and often this was on a tribal or factional basis, often in the Pashtun south, it was often tribal and factional.
The new the first governor of Kandahar, for example, he put his enemies in prison. He confiscated land. He murdered people. There was torture and the Americans were willing allies. They, you know, they had this practise of giving money for intelligence, and then they also had a fantasy. They talked about hunting down the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda. That did not exist. This was the thing the Taliban did not exist as a fighting force. The insurgency came later.
And by carrying out mass arbitrary arrests, using torture, stripping men in public in front of their families, using dogs in people's houses know trampling on people's dignity. Sending, you know, 200 Afghans off to Guantanamo. More in Bagram. Who knows how many forward forward bases they sparked the insurgency? And we see that again and again, you look at the map of Afghanistan, where the insurgency took off.
People didn't want a new jihad. You know, there were a few Taliban who came round trying to get jihad and people say, Well, just go away. We want this to work. We try and make this work. But there was persecution. There was corruption. And there was sort of the people who took power behaved very, very badly, so for example, one district and just to the south west of Kabul. People told me, look, we really tried, we kept sending delegations to Kabul seekers like we want a different place.
Is looting our shops. He's looting our houses. Please get rid of him. Nothing happened. Five years later, the Taliban came and they piggybacked off what was actually originally popular resistance. And. Then, of course, the Americans started dealing with an actual insurgency, and they did really badly. They set up an army that I won't go into it, but this was not inevitable. It was bad behaviour by the Americans, bad behaviour by the various Afghans who'd won power.
And, you know, shame on our governments, our government, Michael and me, that we went along with that because how could we go along with a, you know, a system that was sending people to Guantanamo and torturing people in black sites? How did the British government go along with that? It's a question that I don't think London has answered, but certainly the Nordic countries have come back saying What on earth? What are we doing in that? And we see that, you know, we see the fruits of that now.
The one thing I would say is that the Taliban are not doing much better. And traditionally in Afghanistan, if you want a peaceful end to a conflict, you treat the vanquished with dignity. They come and they give you, you know, they they they'll give you loyalty, you give them back their weapons, even. That's how you did. That's the proper way you do with the end of a war. You don't go and kill them or try and take the land. So, you know, the Americans.
And again, as in as with the peace treaty, it was a fantasy war. They started fighting that turned into an actual war. Thank you, Kate. We have time for one last question, and that comes from Brent Spelman Brent asks, What do you think might have been an effective Plan B, whether realistic alternatives offering more competence and less corruption than the Ghani government? Was there ever truly possibility of balancing the Taliban in a broader coalition government?
And what level of continued foreign support would it be necessary to prevent state collapse? And how might Western or Arab governments have been persuaded to fund it? Go ahead. Yes, so yes, of course, of course, there were alternatives. It's a pretty sick, dysfunctional system that was set up. And the state theory makes sense of why it was so difficult to get democratic elections or anti-corruption or sought out the government.
There were absolutely honourable brave people within the government trying to sort it out, trying to clean up. They came into death threats they were know from for the people making money. They weren't supported, but obviously they weren't supported by Karzai because he was up to his neck in corruption. Certainly, there was a lot of corruption around him as well.
He did not give political leadership or protection to people, and the donors were, you know, they knew what was going on and they funded anyway. So they I think they were also culpable. And on the ground, there were a lot of people on the ground who wanted peace, including amongst the Taliban.
But this top down approach that the Americans took when they thought again, they like working with strongmen as they did in 2001, they wanted to work with the Taliban leadership, the men who were most closely allied with Pakistan and Pakistani intelligence, the people with the least skin in the game. And there are, you know, there are sort of there were of people amongst the Taliban on the ground who wanted that jihad to win.
They wanted victory in Kabul. There were many, particularly old ones who thought, Oh, it's a disaster. You know, we have to live here, and their fear, I think, was not so much military victories as ongoing civil war, but there's definitely grounds for doing local peace deals. And, you know, the Americans didn't want them. And it's a subject that I think will come up more in the future. There were earlier peace deals on the ground in Helmand and elsewhere that the Americans sabotaged.
So remember the eat? Remember the aid in 2018? Maybe people don't remember it. It'll filter. There was a three day ceasefire. Unbelievable. People went home to their villages for the first time from the cities. They hadn't been able to go for years because of the war. Taliban came into the cities. They sat down with the governors. They sat down with the Afghan army. You know, there's pictures of Taliban eating ice cream, looking amazed, looking at the city.
This was the this was the the the strength of the Afghan people, both Taliban and government people. That was just not. It was just not leveraged by anyone. And we have this fantasy peace process that ended in a Taliban victory in the defeat to the Republic. Thank you, Ibrahim, did you want to add anything? Yes. OK, thank you. It's a very powerful, powerful words to end now.
Yes. I mean, I think my cupcakes would be it's going forward that you would have, you know, better commanders in control who can work with local people and get the girls schools open, for example. What's happening in small ways? But you have to come back. I think you have to come back to the resilient, not resilient as horrible word, but the strengths that are there in in communities in Afghanistan. Thank you very much, Kate, and thank you both to you and Ibrahim.
I've watched a lot of coverage and read a lot of things about what's happened in Afghanistan since August, but in the last hour, quite honestly, I think I've spent way more and understand things a bit better than having watched all the coverage on television, all the various things I've read in the newspaper. I'm sure that same for everybody else, but thank you very much indeed for taking time to join us at the Davids seminar and also blinking into the Middle East.
You said, Ibrahim, you illustrated how much it is very much linked to the Middle East Eastern, part of the Middle East, in all sorts of all sorts of ways. And thank you to Kate for just showing how rapey the economics. I should probably add, but many, many moons ago, both Kate and I study political economy of a Middle East that Exeter University. And you can see which of us obviously learnt was about the better student of that from today's presentation.
But thank you very much for both of you, and thank you all of you for joining us and pleased to join us again on our next webinar. But thank you very much, Ibrahim. Thank you very much, Kate. Goodnight, pleasure. Thank you.