Could Afghanistan become Turkey? Never mind, could Turkey become Afghanistan?

Afghanistan, as a country and a geography, through the occupations and wars that have unfolded upon it, has played a very decisive role in world politics starting from the second quarter of the last century. Because the Taliban, with the images it represents and the constant images of civil war, is reflected as a perpetually problematic zone, this is hard to believe, but this difficult geography is a place that all powers have passed through in turn and from which all have withdrawn having learned their lessons. The end of the seventy-year-old Soviet Union, and thus of the cold war era the world was in, was determined on this stage. What investments anyone made in this country, or what alliances anyone formed with Afghan forces against whom and what double-dealing they engaged in, is of no importance at all. Those who engaged in double-dealing could not avoid hitting themselves with a boomerang effect in this geography either.

Of course it is impossible for Turkey to remain indifferent to such an important geography. Especially when the world balances that began and took shape here are in one way or another making their effect felt on Turkey. To say that the US was forced to withdraw after 20 years of intensive occupation and efforts to shape the country, or, from the other side of the coin, that the Taliban, despite all its primitive conditions and means, forced the US to withdraw, is in the end a summary of a situation.

In this summary account there is neither hatred or sympathy toward the US nor hatred or sympathy toward the Taliban. The same goes for saying with which characteristics, with which superior qualities the Taliban achieved this success. But this needs to be understood. As an occupying power, the US came to the end of its political, social or military engineering paradigm in the face of the Taliban's determined, patient, even obstinate resistance. US officials themselves say this. Every day the US was in Afghanistan, it had turned into a quagmire in which its losses multiplied still further. The Taliban, for its part, did not have much to lose. As much praise of the Taliban as can naturally come out of these observations, and no more.

Without doubt this new situation also requires us to get to know the Taliban a little better, provided of course that Afghanistan concerns us, or that Turkey's horizon is wide enough not to remain indifferent to a geography that has determined the last forty years of the world. If we say we understand how misleading it is to see the Taliban only as reflected by Western media or our own Islamophobic media, this surely does not mean that we see a new hero or a messianic virtue in the Taliban. Messianism is a characteristic of the left in Turkey, which plunges into revolutionary daydreams at every street movement, every disturbance; it is distant from us.

Otherwise, there is, in Turkey, an intellectual horizon and prudence serious enough to appreciate what the Taliban is and is not, what it can and cannot become.

Right after the Taliban's rise, there are circles in which Islamophobic ravings swell. One would think that whoever says the slightest positive word about them is demanding the same thing in Turkey too. It turns into such a phobia that from the moment you mention the name Taliban, it is as though your mouth can only be cleansed by pouring out insults at it. When you mention the Taliban for one reason or another, you can draw a reaction even when you do not add that you hate it.

Until now Afghanistan was under occupation, and the occupying forces killed perhaps fifty times as many people as the Taliban did, but there is not a word about the occupiers. As though Afghanistan had been a rose garden until the Taliban and has only now really been occupied. Yet the only thing that has happened now is that the US, in its position as occupier, has withdrawn.

What the Taliban will do from now on is of course a matter of curiosity for everyone. Serious concerns about the Taliban's past practices are, past a certain point, not at all unjustified. But these too need to be interpreted correctly. How much of those practices comes from Islam, how much from the Taliban's own particular interpretation of Islam, and how much from Afghanistan's sociological and traditional conditions?

I am not sure that those who make comparisons between Turkey and Afghanistan and carry models from there to here and from here to there know how to read and write. Above all, it is impossible not to be amazed at those who, looking at what is happening in Afghanistan, give thanks for Turkey's secularism, for Kemalism. What we have here is not a mind but a state of mind; we can put it down to that. We can analyze that too, of course, but for now let someone else do that.

But let us touch here on a few simple facts. The literacy rate in Afghanistan is only 30%. 42% of the population is between the ages of 0-14 and 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas. That is, the urbanization rate is only at the level of the 20 percents. Including those living in rural areas, tribalism is very decisive in the country's politics and social life. If the matter were not Afghanistan but some other African tribe, because of the sociological conditions we might encounter far more shocking images, but they would not have this much effect in the world media. In the civil war in Rwanda, in which a million people died in a week in the most savage manner, which religious interpretations were decisive, for example; does anyone remember anything about that now?

The Islamic interpretation on which the Taliban is said to rest, and which is reflected to the world, is based not so much on fiqh as on custom, especially Pashtun custom. For example, what imposes the burqa there is this very interpretation. The Taliban is not the founder of the traditional understanding that this interpretation forms but its product. The forces that have kept the country under occupation for 40 years, with the war they waged against this traditionalism, perhaps only caused the country to close in on itself more. That is why until now the burqa has expressed not only attachment to tradition but also a reaction and anger against the occupation.

As you can see, the historical, cultural and geographical distance from Turkey to Afghanistan is very long. But political hermeneutics covers the distances in a different way.