What Is at the Back of So Much Distrust?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

The longest—20 year-long—presence of an invading army on the Afghan soil came to an end on the stroke of mid-night, August 31, when the last of the US soldiers departed from Kabul airport with their bag and baggage.

The Afghan Taliban’s stunning victory triggered the American withdrawal from their soil. With this withdrawal the tortured Afghan history of the past forty-odd years takes a dramatic turn. It also presents to the world a new template of Afghanistan, one dominated and dictated by the Taliban’s own creed and format of governance.

It’s this typical Taliban template that has spawned—in the brief period since they stormed Kabul in a blitz to proclaim their total control of their country, last August 15—so much hostility around the world, but most prominently in almost every Western capital.

A concerted media and government propaganda offensive is unmistakably in evidence against the Taliban’s commitment to seek no revenge from those who served the Western invaders of Afghanistan over twenty long years. Little, or virtually no, credence is being accorded to the Taliban’s categorical affirmation that in addition to a general amnesty for all, including collaborators, the ancien regime that allowed no quarters to women’s education and their place in the social order will not be brought back.

Pundits of Afghan affairs have been gloating with their dire predictions of what may be in store for Afghan women, in particular, under a new Taliban rule. In commentaries and opinion pieces laced with toxic hyperboles, they are saying, in so many words: ‘let these so-called ‘new Taliban’ get into stride, on the heels of US and Nato withdrawal, then they would quickly bare their teeth. There’s a near-consensus of punditry that Taliban rule 2:0 would be as harsh and savage as rule 1:0 was.

Any impartial observer of the unfolding Afghan scenario should be constrained to question what’s at the back of this avalanche of anti-Taliban propaganda? Why is there such a huge load of distrust of the Taliban? Why their public pronouncements that their second-coming would be different from the first is being taken with a big chunk of salt?

Facts on ground don’t vouch in favor of this current anti-Taliban propaganda blitz in the Western news media. Up until now, the Taliban have delivered on their undertakings under the bilateral accord with the Americans, reached in February 2020, in Doha, Qatar.

The Trump administration, which had negotiated and concluded the deal with the Taliban had pledged itself to withdraw all the American troops from Afghanistan in 14-months. But the deadline of May 2021, was violated by the Biden team, unilaterally. But the Taliban made no big issue of the American breach of commitment and, with the world to witness it, allowed the Americans all the time they needed to get out of Afghanistan.

So, what explains the Western lack of trust in the Taliban’s word of assurance despite their having lived up to their obligations under the Doha Accord to its letter and spirit?

One explanation of this snide and vituperative Western campaign to belittle the Taliban promise of good behavior is the Western instinct of hegemony.

Afghanistan has remained in the Western crosshairs, not since the cataclysm of 9/11, but for at least two centuries. It was the pivot of the 19 th century Great Game between the then major hegemon powers: Imperial Britain and Imperial Russia. US took on the mantle of the Western hegemon in the wake of its national trauma of 9/11. It embarked on a mission to refashion a backward country like Afghanistan in its own colors. It has failed in that mission as miserably as the Brits in 19 th century, Russia, or Soviet Union, in the 20 th century.

But the US seems still intent on keeping itself very much at the center of Afghanistan. It clearly seeks to recoup what it lost on the battlefield.

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)