September 03, 2021
Whither Afghanistan
On Monday August 30 th, the last US plane departed from Hamid Karzai International Airport and a 20-year involvement of the United States with a small country on the literal other side of the world came to an ignominious end. It carried the final contingent of about 120,000 Afghans that were evacuated from the country, along with all but a few hundred US citizens. The remaining Americans in Afghanistan are mostly dual nationals that are choosing to stay in the country for now.
What is the meaning of this defeat for the US, and what does the future hold for Afghanistan? For the US, it represents a humiliation, one from which many critics of the US draw satisfaction. But in the larger scheme, the presence of a small contingent of US forces represented little more than a distraction to American foreign policy, which is currently focused on the competition with China and to a lesser extent, containing the ambitions of Russia and Iran.
The excessive fears of terrorisms arising from the ambitions of political Islam have faded with time. The idea of a transnational Jihad that will defeat Israel and the US while politically uniting the Muslim world in a giant Caliphate is just a fantasy of a few remaining religious zealots. But most of the Muslim world has been embittered by political Islam. Egypt overthrew its Muslim Brotherhood President, while in Iraq much of the country is disgusted by the political use of religion. The people of Iran have also been soured on religion after 40 years of the Ayatollahs.
For the US, this defeat is an embarrassment, but will have little long-term impact. The Afghan situation will now become the concern of Pakistan and the other regional states.
For the Taliban, they must now convert their military victory into a political victory. They have subdued almost the entire country, more so than they held in 2001 just before 9/11. Back then the Northern Alliance still held out, and they provided the militias that ousted the Taliban with the help of US air strikes.
They also have inherited a state with a real administrative and infrastructure backbone. The government has a full set of ministries. There are airports, including Hamid Karzai International. There are TV stations and cell phone systems, and roads and hospitals that did not exist in 2001. There is something on which to build.
But the Taliban are going to face major challenges. First is simply funding the government. The budget needs 6 billion dollars per year, and Afghanistan has little or no tax base. Much of that budget was paid for with US aid dollars, which are now gone. How will the Taliban pay government salaries or provide services that people have grown to expect? Second, Afghanistan doesn’t have much of an actual economy. There is very little production that goes on inside Afghanistan, other than basic agricultural goods and some opium. The Taliban have already announced they are going to ban opium, which is going to hit the poorest farmers rather hard. But because Afghanistan produces almost nothing desired by the outside world, it has very little exports. So where will it earn the dollars to pay for its imports? Last year Afghanistan imported 9 billion dollars worth of goods, the dollars were obtained from foreign donors and the US government. All of that has dried up. Meanwhile, the foreign exchange reserves of the Afghan Central Bank (about 8 billion dollars) are currently frozen by the US government as they were held in New York. The Taliban will not be able to get to them.
The Taliban believe that they will receive dollars from Pakistan and China. This is a pipe dream. Pakistan does not have billions to spare for the Taliban. China has the money, but China is not going to simply send the Taliban billions every year as a gift. The Chinese may in theory be interested in some projects such as mining or building a highway to carry goods from Pakistan to Central Asia. But these projects will employ a few thousand Afghans as the Chinese tend to use their own labor, and they will take years to design and implement. The amount of Chinese money coming into Afghanistan over the next few years will be minimal at best.
The Taliban also face another huge hurdle. Running a modern nation requires large numbers of well-educated people. People who can run government bureaucracies, staff hospitals and universities, operate TV and radio and cell phone systems, run power plants and keep the electric power grid operating, and manage banks. These are the exact people that were flying out of Afghanistan by the thousands over the last few weeks. This massive brain drain exiting West will cripple the ability of the Taliban to get Afghanistan running again.
The Taliban will also be divided among themselves now that they are in power. Some will be pragmatic and want to work with international institutions like the IMF and World Bank and UN. Others will be focused on creating their “Islamic Emirate” and cutting off Afghanistan from the rest of the world. They will also be facing an Afghan society, especially in Kabul and other cities, that has had extensive contact with the outside world and will be less likely to accept extreme measures like the Taliban imposed 20 years ago.
Some Taliban figures have claimed they will allow women to work and girls to go to school as long as they wear hijab as in Iran or Saudi Arabia. But other Taliban have made different pronouncements. Where they end up on this question will have a huge impact on whether the international community will grant diplomatic recognition to the Taliban. For now, expect the US and most of the rest of the world to hold off for a very long time. Pakistan will try to finesse the issue but in the end will recognize the Taliban, and perhaps China will too. Beyond that it is hard to say. It is not clear that even the Saudis will recognize the Taliban, as they did 20 years ago.
As of now, the banks in Afghanistan are providing limited services. Karzai Airport is closed as it has no air traffic controllers and lacks ability to handle normal civilian traffic. Free speech is already being clamped down. But the Taliban have not made any real major decisions on how to run the country. They seem almost paralyzed by their victory and unsure of what to do next. Soon however, they will have to show their hand and the world will see whether the Taliban can rule effectively or not.
