Five years in Afghanistan: a story of decolonization from liberation from occupation to state-building

Five years have passed since the Taliban entered Kabul and effectively ended the twenty-year American occupation of Afghanistan. We can now assess the meaning of the event of 15 August 2021 from a little farther away from the noise of the first days. Even then we said that it was, above all, an event of independence and liberation. After five years there is nothing that requires changing this verdict; on the contrary, the distance Afghanistan has covered makes the meaning of this verdict more visible.

When the US entered Afghanistan in 2001, it said it would eliminate the Taliban, eradicate terrorism and build a new Afghanistan in line with its own values. After twenty years, a war cost exceeding trillions of dollars and indescribable human costs, the regime it left behind collapsed within a few days. President Ashraf Ghani fled his country, the Taliban entered Kabul, and as the last American soldier left Afghanistan on 30 August 2021, the image of Afghans fleeing the Taliban by clinging to the wheels and wings of aircraft was etched into minds as the fruit of the American occupation.

Whatever one calls it, the world's greatest military power's having been forced to withdraw, without achieving its goals, from a country it had occupied for twenty years is not a simple defeat but a rout. For Afghans, despite all their problems, it is a victory of independence. The Afghans described it as a "Conquest" (Fath) and, after taking over the administration, pardoned everyone, including those who had earlier committed the gravest crimes against them, saying they were following as Sunnah the practice of our Prophet at the conquest of Mecca.

The words of Afghan Defense Minister Mawlawi Muhammad Yaqub Mujahid on the fifth anniversary, "Today neither our politics, nor our security and defense forces, nor our economy depends on anyone," are like a good summary of how the Taliban read their own experience today. Prime Minister Mullah Muhammad Hasan Akhund gives the same message: Afghanistan wants to live in peace, security and prosperity with other countries; it will not allow its territory to be used against other countries, but it will not accept interference and plots against itself either.

WHAT DID THE AFGHANS DO AFTER GAINING THEIR INDEPENDENCE?

The Afghanistan that the Taliban took over was not a normal country. It was a country that had been at war for about 45 years; that had lived through the Soviet occupation, the bloody clashes among mujahideen groups, the Taliban's first period and then the twenty-year American-NATO occupation. In such a country the first need, before ideological debates, is security.

Today in Afghanistan, despite all its shortcomings, there is a central authority operating across nearly the whole country. Many anti-Taliban armed formations are talked about, but none of them has been able to establish lasting territorial control. UN assessments also say that these groups have not been able to pose a serious challenge to the Taliban's control over the country. More importantly, Afghan society, weary from forty years of war, does not seem eager to be the human resource of a new civil war.

This is not an achievement to be belittled. In a country like Afghanistan, prone to constant fragmentation along ethnic, tribal and regional fault lines, the very fact that no new civil war has broken out for five years can itself be counted as one of the most important achievements of the Taliban administration.

The second important area is the fight against drugs. During the years of the American occupation, Afghanistan had remained one of the world's largest centers of opium production. The scale the drug economy reached under the presence of the forces that occupied the country with claims of "fighting terrorism," democracy and modernization deserves to be questioned in its own right. The Taliban administration, for its part, has made a tough fight against drug production and trade one of the basic policies of its rule. Today the government counts ensuring security, curbing corruption and fighting drugs among the basic achievements of its five-year balance sheet.

The third area is perhaps even more important:

THE TRANSITION FROM RESISTANCE TO RECONSTRUCTION

Despite international sanctions, the freezing of Afghan assets and serious financial isolation, roads, bridges, railways and irrigation projects are being built. It is reported that investments have been made in 600 dam projects to support farmers and make use of water resources.

To this we can now add the new industrial facilities whose foundations are laid every day, new telecommunications investments, the transit corridors being developed with China and Uzbekistan, and progress on the TAPI natural gas pipeline. Each of these alone may not be a huge economic achievement. But all together they show the change in Afghanistan's mind: the country that won its independence on the battlefield is now trying to build its economic independence.

Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Mullah Baradar calls for turning Afghanistan's geographic position into a transit and trade advantage without making trade hostage to political disputes. Afghanistan wants to stop being a transit route for constant wars in the middle of Asia and become a transit route for trade routes.

Perhaps this is precisely the most important transformation of the fifth year: the quest to move from jihad to reconstruction, from resistance to building, from a war economy to a production economy.

INTERNATIONAL ISOLATION IS NOT AS ABSOLUTE AS IT IS PORTRAYED

According to information given by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, Afghanistan today maintains relations with more than 40 diplomatic missions; visas are being issued, Afghan passports are accepted, delegations come and go, and economic contracts are signed.

The question Muttaqi asked on the fifth anniversary is in fact a question Western capitals should also ask themselves: "What have the countries that have not established relations with the Islamic Emirate gained in the past five years?"

For the Taliban's message today is not to close itself off from the world. On the contrary, what is said even to the US is this: you can come back to Afghanistan; but not with your soldiers, with your diplomats; not with your bombers, with your investments. You can invest in mines, roads and dams. Afghanistan wants relations with the world, but not as an occupied country, as an independent one.

The Taliban's great test is now no longer fighting but building a state. They must institutionalize law, spread education across the whole of society, develop shura (consultation) and social participation, bring the different Afghan elements into the system, and accelerate economic development.

For twenty years the Taliban fought the world's most powerful military alliance and in the end drove it out of their country. Now a harder struggle lies before them: making peace lasting, eliminating drugs, reducing poverty, reintegrating the millions of returning Afghans into society, and raising the country back up by building roads, dams, factories and trade corridors.

THE CELEBRATION of the 107TH YEAR of liberation from the British occupation and the fifth year of liberation from the American occupation on the same days is also extremely meaningful for Afghan memory. The unchanging message of Afghanistan's modern history is that great powers enter this country very sure of themselves and leave questioning why they entered.

Perhaps, before what the world will teach Afghanistan from now on, one needs to recall this simple lesson that Afghanistan's history has taught the world:

Afghanistan is a country that seems easy to occupy but cannot be made to submit.