Will the Taliban who came to Ankara also pave the way for Assad?

In the new era in Afghanistan, in which the Taliban have taken over administration across the whole country, the first official contacts with Türkiye were established with the visit to Ankara of a 7-person high-level delegation, which included Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi. Seeing under what kind of pressure these contacts took place in Türkiye, rather than in world media, is a subject that can be dwelt on at length, as a lesson, under the heading of Türkiye's diplomatic difficulties.

Because of our historical, cultural and conjunctural ties with Afghanistan, Türkiye is in fact a country that should, and could, establish contact at the strongest level.

Yet the siege of perceptions about the Taliban aims to keep Türkiye from establishing these contacts in a more proactive way. It serves nothing other than an eagerness to squander the advantages Türkiye has in the field by virtue of its history, its stance and its identity.

In the Afghan field, everyone needs to bear in mind this reality: the Taliban have now acquired the character of the only administration in the country's history of more than 40 years to have secured control at the widest level across the whole country. No earlier Afghan, Soviet or US administration was able to secure control at this level.

Whether you like the Taliban or not, because of this power of control you have to accept that it is the country's most important reality. If you do not accept it, you cannot be part of any calculation or policy regarding Afghanistan.

RECOGNIZING THE TALIBAN DOES NOT REQUIRE ADOPTING ITS UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION AND POLITICS

Accepting the Taliban as a reality does not have to mean adopting its understanding of religion, its understanding of governance, or its approach to this or that matter. While it is certain that the Taliban's Islamic interpretation and practices are harsh, one also needs to see that this interpretation is rather related to, and limited to, the country's culture and sociology, and has no aspect that can be exported elsewhere.

A perception of threat to the whole world can be produced from this cultural specificity only through the fear industry, whose power-producing side is no longer a secret. Of course, one cost to itself of waging a 20-year war of independence against the US, the central power of the unipolar world, is that these perceptions get ahead of its own reality. Now we are in a new era, and in this era even the US, which it forced to fight and withdraw, is on the way to normalizing its relations with the Taliban.

DOES TALKING TO THE TALIBAN OPEN THE WAY TO TALKING TO ASSAD TOO?

There is a segment that is excited in a different way by these contacts of Türkiye, which in my view are late. On a news channel an international relations expert, a professor, beaming from ear to ear, was saying these words: "By talking to the Taliban, it has with its own hand canceled all the justifications it has put forward until now for not talking to Assad."

It is impossible to understand what this gentleman, or similar gentlemen, who have evidently adopted as is the terrorist label pinned on the Taliban by the occupiers, are rejoicing about. Is it that easy to identify the Taliban with Assad? In what respects, through what actions, can the Taliban and Assad be compared? Other than having long been put on the terror list by the US and having been fought for that reason, what feature does the Taliban have?

Is the reason for our break with Assad supposedly that Assad is on a terror list? That our worldviews differ? That his Islamic interpretation is very different from ours and does not suit the understanding of the age either? What is his understanding of Islam, his regime, his internal affairs to us? Every step the man takes in his internal affairs leads to thousands of deaths, massacres, human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and he knows no limit in this. Did the Taliban fight against us? Did they, or do they, use disproportionate force against their own people and carry out massacres? What logic is this, what kind of comparison?

THE US'S DEFINITIONS OF TERROR LOST THEIR CREDIBILITY LONG AGO

By the way, there is in fact no need to go as far as the Taliban for this. We have never been obliged to put on our terror list everything the US has put on its own terror list so far, because in this matter we are already a country that objects to the logic of terror classification of the US and of the so-called modern world. For example, they put Hamas on the terror list; we categorically reject this.

Let us put all the objective definitions concerning terror on the table, let them put forward their data too and let us discuss; our claim is this: Israel is far closer to the definition of terrorist. Hamas, on the other hand, is the utterly rightful resistance organization of a people whose country is occupied. It has not used violence for any purpose other than defending itself. Yet within the current balances of power Israel has long exceeded the need for self-defense, but constantly, out of the blue, it carries out the most merciless air attacks on the people of Gaza, unarmed, defenseless, besieged from all sides, by air and land, applies the most disproportionate violence, and each time causes the deaths of dozens, hundreds of civilians. On our not accepting Hamas as terrorist we have things to tell the US, and not a word to hear from it.

On the Taliban, perhaps because it fought the US directly, we may have stood in the same place as an ally, but this does not require us to accept its terrorist definitions as they are. Moreover, the US itself began talking, ten years ago, with the Taliban that it deemed terrorist, and has ultimately come to an agreement with it on a line on Afghanistan's future.

The Taliban, for their part, during their resistance to the 20-year US occupation, committed in no way any of the crimes that Assad committed. They did not massacre their own people, they did not kill women and children en masse by carrying out aerial bombardment against their own people. Those who rush forward saying, by equating the Taliban with Assad, "since you talked to that one, then talk to this one too," what other purpose could they have than voluntary aid and abetting of the murderer Assad?

Truly, that such a criminal has meddlesome advocates living among us should seriously disturb both our country and the innocent people living in it.