Afghanistan: A Complex Climate
Will Kobos ’24 interviewed Sara, an Afghan-American student at the College of William and Mary, Rick Olson, a retired diplomat and former US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Rani Mullen, a government professor at the College whose research has focused on South Asian democracy and state-building in an exploration of the events which transpired in Afghanistan this past summer and their effects from personal, political, and academic angles.
Note from the Editor: Sara’s name has been changed in the interest of her safety and that of her family.
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Before the upheaval of the past summer, Sara used to talk on the phone with her extended family in Kabul almost every weekend.
“It’s a two-hour-long phone call where the phone gets passed around, and we talk to everyone,” she said as she sat across from me at a picnic table.
But she has not called home as often in the last few months.
“It’s just way more personal now,” she said. “And it’s just really, really, really bad there right now. The economy is failing, people don’t have enough food to eat, and everyone’s unemployed. Anyone who was associated with the government is now in hiding.”
Sara, a student at the College of William and Mary, grew up in Alexandria, VA and is the daughter of two Afghan immigrants. “I would say I’m still very close to my culture and my roots,” she said. “I can still speak the languages, and I’d say I’m still very aware of the culture and traditions.”
Sara last visited her family in Kabul when she was eight years old.
“I was there about a month,” she recalled. “I got to see the city and experience life there, and I got to meet a lot of my extended family members. I remember it’s always been dangerous, but it wasn’t that dangerous. And I remember women did have more freedom than they do now.”
Most Americans were blissfully unaware of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan until the Taliban overran the country in the course of just a few weeks, entering Kabul on August 15th 2021 without firing a shot. For a few weeks, the world focused in on the dramatic collapse of the Western-backed government and the rapid evacuation of the United States’ and coalition personnel from the Kabul airport. For Sara and her family, the situation was much more personal.
“I would say that my family didn’t really leave the house for two weeks,” Sara said. “I think a lot of us were just watching the news constantly, trying to get our family out during those two weeks. Everyone was trying to get in touch with anyone they knew here so that they could get out, especially since almost everyone there is affiliated with the United States in one way or another, which puts them in danger automatically. I know people who would go to the airports every single day and wait in the lines and risk their lives every single day just to leave.”
The United States’ evacuation of Afghanistan ended August 30th, with the last plane lifting off just before midnight with the last of the over 120,000 evacuees, a number which includes around 65,000 Afghans. However, a State Department official later told NBC that a majority of the population of evacuation-eligible Afghans are likely still in the country.
Rick Olson, a retired diplomat and former US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that although the airlift has long since ended, the United States has still taken steps to keep the door open for Afghans who had close ties with the United States and want to leave the country.
“We’ve put more resources into the Special Immigrant Visa programme, which is a programme for Afghans who actually worked for the US government in one capacity or another,” Olson explained. “Another step has been the creation of a new visa category, called P-2, which is broader in its categorisation. And a number of people have come in through other programmes, including humanitarian parole.”
Still, Olson explained that leaving the country becomes much harder if Afghans are in hiding or otherwise cannot obtain the proper paperwork.
“For people who don’t have any kind of documentation, that’s a real challenge,” Olson noted. “Many people have been traveling overland. There is a refugee crisis of sorts developing, since people are going overland either to Pakistan or to Iran.”
Sara has luckily been able to stay in contact with most of her family members who have stayed in Afghanistan.
“It might be spotty at times, but it’s really simple to contact them,” she said. “But I would say I do have some family in the rural areas where I don’t even know how you would reach them.”
Afghans in the country face an uncertain future.
“Afghanistan is going into winter, and much of Afghanistan is above 5,000 feet,” Olson said. “And so the winters are long, hard, and cold, and there simply is not going to be enough food to keep people going through the winter.”
The country’s issues are compounded by the new Taliban government’s status as a pariah regime. While the Taliban have established political control over Afghanistan, they have largely been frozen out of the global financial system and are unable to access the billions of dollars the previous government had stored overseas, which has led to a widespread cash shortage.
“Afghanistan is right now in what economists call a liquidity trap, which means they simply don’t have enough cash,” Olson said. “The currency is called the Afghani, and there are not enough Afghanis around to actually conduct business and import the necessary food.”
The country’s isolation also jeopardises the flow of foreign aid that Afghanistan has depended on since the United States’ invasion.
“The basic situation for Afghanistan is that since the middle of the 19th century, it has been very dependent on foreign assistance of one kind or another,” Olson explained. “This was true during the period of the British Empire, then it continued to be true during the Cold War. And the only time that it wasn’t totally dependent on foreign assistance was perhaps during the previous Taliban period of governance.”
With the Taliban takeover, that foreign assistance is likely to dry up, to the detriment of basic services and institutions.
“I think very few external donors, that is to say, Western countries, are going to be actively funding a Taliban government or even the civil servants, the teachers and nurses, and people like that,” Olson said.
Since the Taliban currently seem unlikely to make any serious concessions in terms of moderating their positions or forming an inclusive government, the country’s isolation from international institutions is not likely to end soon, and neither will the hardships for ordinary Afghans that such isolation creates.
“If the Taliban moderates and attempts to create a genuinely new political compact in Afghanistan, I suppose that would be the best possible outcome,” Olson said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s terribly likely.”
For many Afghans, the position and role of the Taliban is more ambiguous and complicated than most Westerners perceive it to be. While highly unpopular themselves, the democratic government they have displaced was resented in many quarters for its corruption. While exceptional in their brutality, the Taliban have imposed a kind of calm in a country scarred by conflict.
“Even at the point when we had the surge and we had up to 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, these troops largely protected urban areas,” explained Rani Mullen, a Government professor at the College whose research has focused on Afghanistan. “It was the interests of the urban, educated, more Western elite that were represented in the government, in a sense that the government’s writ extended to protecting people. And who were they protecting? They were largely protecting urban Afghans who lived in cities. Rural Afghans, who tended to be more conservative, had less access to the state and all that that meant, from schools to health centers to physical infrastructure.”
“It depends on where people are in the country,” said Sara. “Some areas are really, really calm — they’re safer than they’ve ever been, which is really funny. It just depends on what someone’s background is because if they were never associated with the government, then they’re fine, I would say. I mean, you go on with life like normal.”
“I think that the Taliban succeeded when they came to power on August 15[th] in establishing a greater degree of stability and security, if you want to characterise it that way, than has been the case in Afghanistan since 2005,” Olson said. “That is to say, they established a monopoly of violence pretty quickly.”
Sara thinks the situation on the ground level differs from how it is commonly perceived in popular discourse in the United States.
“I would say there’s no right answer to the question of whether the Taliban is good or bad,” Sara said. “It’s something that’s really hard to understand if you’re not from there. And when you say that, ‘Oh, you’re supporting terrorists,’ that’s not what it is at all. It’s just that their ideologies and their goals differ in different areas of the country. So in Kabul, I’d say they’re very strict, but in rural areas where I have some family, all they’re doing is keeping people safe, honestly.”
The relationship between the Afghan people and the new regime does not appear to be a simple question of support or opposition. Professor Mullen warned particularly against making too much of the notion of “two Afghanistans” clashing over the country’s identity.
“The Asia foundation has done polls for the last 15 years or so, and they showed that the Taliban, whether in rural areas or urban areas, were not popular,” she said.
Olson agreed that the Taliban are broadly disliked by the Afghan public, saying that the acquiescence of many Afghans to the new regime comes from desperation for order and stability amidst chaos.
“If you look at the annual survey of public opinion — I think it more or less uses standard polling techniques, and the methodology is broadly okay — it’s suggested that the Taliban were very unpopular politically, and that the idea of a democracy and elections in Afghanistan was broadly very popular,” Olson said. “But I think that this is ultimately kind of a Hobbesian question. The Taliban did succeed in bringing an end to a civil war that had been raging in Afghanistan, off and on, and mostly on, since 1978. And so I think that for many people, anything is probably preferable to the ongoing civil war. There’s probably a broad acceptance of them for providing security and a measure of justice, even if they’re not politically popular.”
Sara explained that Americans, and more generally, the West, have trouble understanding this attitude towards the new government due in part to the fundamental differences between Afghan and American culture.
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“Society there is just not as individualistic as it is here,” Sara said. “It’s a more collectivistic society, so all many people really want is just to have the ability to live their lives, be with their families, and maintain the culture and the religion that they’ve grown up in.”
Despite this, Sara voiced her strong disapproval of the Taliban and its methods.
“They’re still a terrorist group, and they harm people in the name of Islam,” she said. “They think they’re acting in a religious way when they’re not, and they’re misrepresenting the religion itself.”
Olson said that while much has been made of the shortcomings of the United States-backed government, many of the positive changes that happened on its watch are now under threat of being wiped away. “By and large, even in the countryside, there has been greater access to health and education, especially for women and girls, across the board,” Olson noted. “I’d say much of that is at risk in the current situation. There’s a real risk of backsliding on all of the progress that has been made over the last 20 years.”
One common talking point over the past few months is whether the modern Taliban will reinstate the kind of draconian rule that they had imposed when they were last in power in the 1990s or if they will moderate and rule in a way more palatable to foreign powers.
Mullen says that the push to market the Taliban as “reformed” and to project that image to the West is largely a top-down effort on the part of the wealthy leaders of the group who crave international recognition and who stand to gain the most from it.
“Many of the elite within the Taliban are the ones who were negotiating in Doha, who have their mansions in Dubai, who want their kids to go to Ivy League schools in the US, who have their opium money in bank accounts in the Caucasus,” Mullen explained.
However, she says that the central leadership will likely struggle to corral its more ideologically radical fighters and may even end up at odds with them.
“Very rich Taliban elites . . . live a very different life from the common soldier, and those differences are going to be more visual now that they are going to be in government. So the Taliban might have said that women will be safe in the country, but then you have these incidents of women being beaten up and even shot by the footsoldiers.”
Sara agreed that the Taliban’s changes are cosmetic rather than genuine.
“I don’t think that they’re actually any different — I think they’re the same people but they’ve become smarter at how to go about things in a way in which they might be given international recognition as a form of government, because that’s all they want at the end of the day, to have money and power. If you talk to people who lived through the Taliban, they would say that what they’re doing right now is the same exact thing that they did 20 years ago,” she said. “They gave everyone hope that they would still be able to exercise their rights and be able to go to school. But in the end, they just fooled everyone.”
Mullen agreed with the historical parallels to the Taliban’s last takeover. “This is kind of like a film of the 1990s on extreme fast forward,” she said, “because it happened in a matter of months rather than years.”
Mullen has been involved with NGOs trying to help vulnerable Afghans get out of the country and has been exposed to firsthand accounts of the brutality of the new regime.
“I still get emails and heartbreaking stories where women are being persecuted by the Taliban just for having been elected to office or having worked on divorce cases.”
Mullen shared her experience of scrambling with her colleagues at different NGOs to find a way to help a young Afghan woman in Kandahar whose house had been surrounded by Taliban threatening to come after her two brothers who had worked with government security forces. The woman was streaming on Facebook Live asking for help.
“By that evening, the Taliban went into their house, beat up both the brothers, took out the older brother, and shot him. He was 21, I think.”
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She said that such acts of violence are widespread in the new Afghanistan.
“These kinds of stories are happening in the thousands across Afghanistan, and so you can see why many of the women I’m in touch with are in hiding, because they were already threatened by the Taliban before for the kind of work they did. And they worry for their lives.”
Sara said that since August’s storm of headlines, the fate of the country has dropped off of most people’s radars.
“I think people here are just generally very unaware of things that are happening abroad,” she said.
Mullen also commented on this. “What leads it to come back up to the front is if there’s a suicide bombing or if there is a larger protest or something going on, but the sort of everyday hardship under a Taliban regime is no longer front page news,” she explained. Sara said the jarring disconnect between the realities faced by her family in Afghanistan and the calm and isolation of Williamsburg made returning to campus in September frustrating.
“I’d say it was really hard the first couple of weeks here, because I didn’t even know if I was ready to come back,” she said. “It’s really hard to see everyone just moving on. It was such a main story in the news, and now no one talks about it. It’s just so hard because there are people who have been impacted so directly by this, and I think we’re just so desensitised to everything going on in the news. These are actual people — it was my family that was involved. It was really hard to come back and see everyone just going about their day like usual. And it really hit me all of a sudden the amount of privilege I have, and the amount of privilege I’ve been given in my life just to be able to grow up here and go to a school like William and Mary, which attracts people from generations and generations of privilege.”
Mullen said that many Americans’ forgetfulness of the crisis that has unfolded in Afghanistan stems in part from a guilty conscience over the ultimate failure of the nation-building project.
“I think a lot of us feel quite bad about the way things ended up, and we don’t want to be confronted with the disaster we left behind over there, where we essentially left Afghanistan to the Taliban.”
For her part, Sara says that she’s allowed herself to be swept up in the avalanche of trivialities that is the life of a busy college student. “I haven’t talked to my family in a while,” she explained. “I feel like being at William and Mary really detaches me from the reality of everything. I feel like we live in such a bubble here — no one is really interested or aware of anything going on outside of William and Mary just because we’re all so busy with schoolwork and everything. You just get caught up in the motion; there’s so much to do here. You kind of forget about everything else going on. At least that’s what happens for me.”
Sara says she does not know what the future holds for Afghanistan.
“The whole thing’s so complicated, I’d say, that no one really understands it. I’d say even Afghans don’t understand it.”
Still, she thinks the country will calm down enough to make it safe to visit her family soon.
“I don’t know when that might be, but hopefully even in a year or so, I think it’s possible. Under Taliban control it’s really dangerous, but if you go about it the right way, you can get out of there.
“It’s really easy to be American there right now,” Sara said with a laugh. “I mean, if you’re a white person there right now, it’s really funny — the Taliban just lets you go past checkpoints. Just say that you’re a journalist.”
Still, she says that ordinary Afghans face a bleak future.
“History is just repeating itself over and over and over again, and it’s just a matter of time until there’s serious terrorist activity there and the US decides to intervene one way or another or send more drone strikes. There are grandparents right now who didn’t get to send their daughters to school who are watching their granddaughters go through the same exact thing right now. It’s just generational pain; it’s a never-ending cycle. It’s so sad — people have just gotten so used to pain and sadness there.”
At the end of my conversation with Sara, I asked her what she wished other students could understand about what Afghans have experienced. She paused for a while.
“Probably just the fact that the Afghans have gone through generations of pain, and all that they really want right now is a chance to live,” she said. “Aside from freedoms, the right to live is more important than anything else right now.”
As I was putting away my things, Sara said she was curious why I was writing a story about Afghanistan now, simply because it had faded so completely from everyday conversation.
“Right now, it’s almost like everyone’s forgotten,” she said.
It was not the response I gave her at the time, but since then I have realised that perhaps the most important statement a piece like this can make is that everyone has a story. Sara is a student at the College, and like everyone else we pass on the sidewalk without a second thought, she carries around her own hopes and anxieties that are invisible to passersby. Sara generously shared part of her unique story with us, but most of the time, we will never know the things, good and bad, that people carry with them. When Sara and I finished talking and went our separate ways, it was just before 3pm on a cool, sunny October Williamsburg afternoon, and campus was covered in newly fallen leaves. Afghan time is eight and a half hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time, so at that exact moment, it was approaching midnight in Kabul.
Sources
The New Yorker: Trapped in Afghanistan
The New Yorker: The Other Afghan Women