During his electoral campaign in 2008, Barack Obama said repeatedly that if he was elected president of the United States of America, he would talk to the Taliban.
At the time, Obama’s rival, Ms. Hillary Clinton described Obama’s wish as “naïve and irresponsible”.
Now she is Obama’s Secretary of State and has to obey her boss.
But is it really possible to appease the Taliban?
First of all, the Taliban is a heterogeneous group of radical Muslims. Each group has got its own warlord, and rules a state within a state. But all of them want to impose the Shari’a law, a stone-age law, which is anti-women, against modernity, and anti-non-Muslims.
The Taliban finances its local “empires” and weapons through drugs, force Afghans to pay Zakat (a kind of taxes), and blackmail development projects through “protection money”.
Muhsen, an Afghan engineer (who does not want to be identified by his last name) and who works for the GTZ (a German development organization), told me during his last trip to Germany, where his parents live under an asylum status:
Afghanistan is still in ruins after 20 years of war and destruction. In order for us to work on the project, a water plant for Kandahar, the GTZ pays protection money to the local Taliban war-lord, Abdulqader Mohammadi. We have never seen the man. He monthly sends his men to cash the money, about $ 20,000 a month. For working 12 hours a day, I get only $ 5,000 a month. In addition, Mohammadi forces workers in the project to pay him $2 from the $5 each of them earns a day from hard work under tough conditions.
Thus far, the Taliban has violated all agreement reached with the NATO forces in Afghanistan. The latest was with the British. After promising not to attack a girls' school in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban did assault the school and killed 12 students and three English language teachers.
In 2007, an inmate in Guantanamo with number 008 and called Abdulrasul was released. Back in southern Afghanistan, he rejoined the Talibans and is coordinating insurgence against the Afghan army, police, and Western forces.
The Taliban has no interest whatsoever in negotiating with the West and to live in peace. A peace agreement would mean an end to them and the flow of money.
A young German soldier with the German troops in Afghanistan and neighbor of mine told me over a short visit to his parents here in Germany, “The Taliban are not only terrorizing their own people, they are also terrorizing the armed allied troops. We (3,500 German soldiers) are scared. We dare not leave our camps when we are off duty. When we come back safe from protecting construction works, we utter a sigh of relief and thank God we are still alive. The foreign troops in Afghanistan are not acting they are rather re-acting. We need more troops. But who listens?”
Most of Afghanistan experts assert that Afghanistan is ruled by a motley alliance of former warlords, former Mujahedeens, old communists, and royalists. Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, called the great “accommodator” by Western observers, is tolerated as long as he does not jeopardize the interests of members of this alliance. Karzai hardly has any power. He is only able to leave his compound by helicopter.
The alliance comprises:
- Former warlord and Karzai’s current chief of staff General Dostam.
- Ex-Governor Ismail Khan, known as the “Lion of Herat” during the anti-Soviet resistance and is currently the Minister of Energy.
- Former Minister of Defense and former head of the Northern Alliance’ secret service Marshal Fahim.
- Retired General Olumi who was the infamous Najibullah’s chief in Kandahar.
- Yunus Qanuni, currently Speaker of Parliament and a former Mujahedeen member.
- Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy, a former communist lieutenant who toppled the regime of Daud in 1978.
- Prince Mustafa, the grandson of King Mohammad Zahir.
- Burahanuddin Rabbani, the President of Afghanistan under the Mujahedeen and Taliban, who is a radical Islamist and opponent of democracy.
The Afghan alliance is a gathering of men who were bitter enemies and accused of a number of serious human rights atrocities. During the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, men like Rabbani and Dostam turned Kabul into a pile of rubble, and killed thousands of civilians.
Ayman El Amir, an Afghan expert who has just toured Afghanistan, told Al Ahram Weekly (July 23, 2008), “If these people were living in the Balkans, they would most likely be sitting in a cell at the International Tribunal in the Hague today.”
Rabbani and Dostam issued a joint manifesto calling for abolishing the presidential system and replace it with a “governor” one. The aim is nothing less than weakening Karzai and establishing a tribal-chief system and provincial warlords which would locally have all the say. The Afghan Times said in an editorial (July 15, 2008), “De facto, warlords have all the say all over Afghanistan.”
In an interview with the German Radio, WDR5, (July 2) Prince Mustafa from former Afghan monarchy said, “Corruption under Karzai has become worse. Billions of dollars of international aid have disappeared in private pockets.”
Both the USA and Europe are looking at Afghanistan with deep concern. The country – torn by 20 years of civil war and Taliban rule and now occupied by US-led troops – appears to is spiraling out of control. The Taliban is omnipresent and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is only capable of reacting, rather than acting. Peter Scholl-Latour, a veteran German international reporter, who recently toured Afghanistan said in his latest WDR TV report on June 5, 2008 “The country is edging closer to the abyss.”
The German newspaper, Die Welt writes (July 19, 2008) “It is illusionary to think that 54,000 ISAF soldiers are enough to appease a huge rocky tribal country (647,500 km). International security experts point out that more than 300,000 would be needed to bring the level of violence there up to that in Kosovo. The recent visit by the German Foreign Minister, Frank Walter Steinmeier to Herat in western Afghanistan to inaugurate a water plant can be described as symbolic, at best.”
Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General, once said about Afghanistan, “You cannot have development without security, and you cannot have security without development.”
We should add that national security is also an integral part of international security. The Scandinavian countries and Germany, for instance, have realized that national security is only possible through social security. Social security is capitalism plus a fair tax system which primarily takes from the haves, from the strong and gives the have not, the weak in society. Therefore, the violence and crime rate in these countries is the lowest in the world.
Security and development in Afghanistan go hand in hand and are an indispensable investment in terms of international security, for all, for the USA, Europe and for the world at large. Without these peace pillars, Afghanistan will never see peace and will continue breeding and exporting terrorism.
Dr. Sami Alrabaa, an ex-Muslim, is a professor of Sociology and an Arab/Muslim culture specialist. Before moving to Germany he taught at Kuwait University, King Saud University, and Michigan State University. Dr. Sami Alrabaa can be reached at samialrabaa@yahoo.com
