The situation in Afghanistan after the occupation

KABUL

I am watching cricket matches played by children and young people, forming different groups, at many different points of a very large park in Afghanistan, now under Taliban administration that has taken over the government again after 45 years of war and occupation. It is a thoroughly festive atmosphere. The sight of people absorbed in the game that you could see in any leisure and entertainment place in the world. The game is a world of language that takes the player in and sidelines the one who plays it as a subject.

We will soon go to Friday prayer, and even my own expectation is that almost everyone will empty the streets completely and be forced into the mosque by Taliban soldiers. No one shows any such haste. The Blue Mosque in the center of the city stands right in the middle of the bazaar, and while it is full to the outside, outside the mosque the bazaar is also full of people who are not praying during the prayer. No one interferes and no one forces anyone into the mosque. As soon as I open my mouth to ask the Afghan who is hosting me throughout the trip, an ironic smile spreads across his face:

"We really can't understand," he says, "how these rumors spread. Look, there is everything on the street, bearded and beardless, those who pray and those who don't; nobody is in a position to force anybody in this matter. Of course there is guidance, there is making people love prayer and encouraging it, but you cannot make anyone devout by force."

He reacts, saying how do these rumors spread, but there is no approach showing that he cares much. This is probably the most obvious trait of the Taliban. They do not care at all about those who despise them and distort their reality by creating different images and clichés about them. Perceptions are the problem of those who perceive; they do not bother getting into complexes to correct them. It is possible to say that there is an extremity in this respect too.

The Afghan people are devout enough as it is. People think that the Taliban imposes its own understanding of religion on people by force, whereas the traditional religiosity of the Afghan people has a flow that determines power from the bottom up.

Afghanistan's religious or cultural power, like modern power orders in fact, is fed not only by the Sharia but often by custom and tradition, and many violations of human rights and women's rights, as contradictory to the Sharia as they are, rest on these understandings. In this case the socially accepted authority of the Taliban steps in at the point of protecting rights to perform precisely the function that Şerif Mardin attributed to the Sharia in the Ottoman Empire.

In one case, for example, the brother-in-law of a woman whose husband has died wants to take her into his own marriage as an inheritance through a unilateral practice, but the woman does not want it. The family says the woman has no such right, but the woman, in a way not customary in tradition, applies to the court run by the Taliban. The Taliban hear both sides and rule that the woman cannot be forced into any marriage to which she does not consent. The brother-in-law has difficulty understanding this, the family talks of how the woman disgraced them by applying to the court, but there is nothing they can do against the Taliban's authority. Thus the Sharia, as interpreted and applied by the Taliban, plays an entirely different role in Afghanistan against the customs of jahiliyya that grant the woman no rights and entirely disregard her will and personality. Such practices can be multiplied in great numbers with a good-faith eye.

In Afghanistan, run by the Taliban for two and a half years, there is a level of peace and stability not seen for 45 years. The pride of having defeated the world's largest armies, expelled them from the country and freed their homeland from the occupiers can be seen in every Afghan.

Afghan officials tell us that they have never forgotten how much the enemies of Afghanistan and of Islam rejoiced at the chaos that arose when the Russians withdrew earlier. They remind us how glad those enemies were that their prophecies, made with great arrogance and an occupier's consolation, that "they will fall upon one another anyway, they cannot govern the country" came true. The first Taliban administration that came afterwards in fact gave its first great answer to these prophecies. But that first experience had entirely different problems. Energy Minister Abdullatif Mansur tells us that they see very well that the same expectation has formed now that they have expelled the occupier US and its friends from the country: he says that "the victory they won after the Jihad they waged against the US for 20 years is directly and explicitly the victory of Islam," that "therefore the great responsibility that falls to them is to think of the dignity, health and honor of this jihad, to act in accordance with it and to raise its name even higher," and he continues:

"That is, the founding will of today's Afghanistan is directly Islam, and we are trying to understand how this Islam can be applied most successfully to the administration of a state and to do so. We have no debt to anyone, nor any obligation or concern to prove ourselves. The US set our occupied country back by 20 years. The only thing it left us in those years is tens of thousands of our people stuck in the swamp of drugs. Now we are trying to make up for those years it stole. We are trying to win back our people who became drug addicts by treating them again."

The picture after the occupation, with the occupiers and drugs issue put forward by Mansur and by many Taliban officials we met, is an area in which we can see very clearly all the disgusting hypocrisy of the US and the entire civilized world. During the occupation Afghanistan had become a complete center of drug production, and its cultivation, harvest and trade were carried out by US officials themselves. Part of this, of course, was used in financing the costs of the occupation. In this way the cost of the occupation to the US was lightened. But at the same time, the young people made dependent on drugs were also made dependent on the US military or espionage network. Among an estimated 4 million people accustomed to drugs this way, at least half have been treated within two and a half years. After the occupiers were expelled, the drug economy was also dried up at its root.

Now the US administration, which carried all the darkness of the drug sector into the country it occupied and poisoned people, can brand as terrorists the Afghan people who resisted it, and the Taliban, their own children, whose first act after expelling it was to dry up this sector. Yet the Taliban have no activity in any country other than Afghanistan.

We also asked the Afghan officials we met what measures they might have to prevent the irregular migration or human trafficking that constantly flows from Afghanistan to other countries.

Undoubtedly migrants

are always first-hand carriers of negative perceptions about the countries they have torn themselves away from and require special attention. Let us continue this subject later.