The fall of Kabul to the Taliban’s intense blitzkrieg marks the miserable dawn of hopeless absolutism for the Afghan people. Those who can are fleeing the incoming tyranny in whatever way they can; imagine just how evil you would have to be to convince your would-be-citizens that the likely chance of plummeting to your death is better than living a day under your rule. This Reconquista also marks the end of our two decade long campaign in the country. Nearly twenty years of effort, sacrifice and progress in one of the world’s most backwards societies has all been wiped away in a matter of weeks, and has left the United States and her allies in an extremely weak position.
 
The war in Afghanistan was never as controversial as the one in Iraq, and for understandable reasons. The vicious and depraved nature of radical Islamist totalitarianism is chilling to even its most cretinous apologists, and liberating anyone from such a desesperant situation should be the policy of most humanitarians. The persistent, sadistic violence of a Sharia-ruled state is incomparable to more static despotisms such as North Korea or Turkmenistan, and the Taliban have certainly helped pioneer that reputation. When the Taliban came to power in September 1996, they set about creating their terrestrial nightmare. The exile of president Burhanuddin Rabbini in scenes very dejà-vu of what we see in our newsfeeds today, made sure the Afghan Civil War was not concluded, and Rabbini along with Afghan national hero Ahmad Shah Massoud, led the oppositional Northern Alliance against the Taliban, fighting for some remanence of a civil society in the country. Indeed, in areas controlled by Massoud in the north-east, life as a woman was at least tolerable [1].
 
In 90% of the country, the change was to be much more macabre. The Talibanisation of Afghan society created an anti-civilisation of such absolute pointlessness, even hearing stories makes you feel distressingly claustrophobic. The first and most revolting character of the new regime was bringing a new meaning to misogyny. The Taliban thought they would show male chauvinists around the world how it should be done and what rights women had had under the Rabbini-Massoud government were wiped away like chalk. They banned women from education, from employment; they banned women from venturing out without a mahram or burqa; they banned women from colour, cosmetics, laughing too loudly. Essentially, they banned women from existence [2]. But even if you were lucky enough to be a man there wasn’t much improvement. Music, art, culture, sport, film, the internet, even choosing your own haircut and beard length, were all features of ordinary life prohibited by the Taliban. Life was the regime and the regime was all you had. They even banned the Afghans from practising their national pastime of kite flying [3]. How’s that for not respecting Afghan culture? At least the North Koreans pretend their regime has humanity. And all of this is just an hors-d’œurve of what’s in store for those Afghans who can’t flee, since like the good totalitarians they are, the Taliban are predictably implementing all the same things again [4].
 
Such a swift victory for the Taliban after nigh twenty years of US occupation, people are rightly asking: “what was it all fucking for?”. And as ardent the rage, the actual answer is far more dismal: “well, nothing really”. And this really is the sad reality of the long conflict in the Central Asian country. The war has cost 240,000 lives and 2.26 trillion dollars and all of this has been thrown away in a matter of weeks, along with the progress which had been made [5]. Women who have made great strides in a post-Taliban Afghanistan in politics, education and society [6] will now be shoved back in cages.

​What has annoyed me particularly is the attitude of the Anti-War movement. In a disgraceful article in Open Democracy, the author tries to lecture British feminists that it is not the Taliban's misogyny they should be opposing, but instead Western imperialism. The laziness of the article is astounding for someone who purports to support women's rights. Any feminist worth their salt knows that feminism is an internationalist cause and requires and internationalist fight, and spouting apologist nonsense like “the world will have to negotiate with the Taliban like they would with any other state” is how you capitulate to fascism in the first place. To say that the occupation of Afghanistan was not a good thing because “nearly 70,000 civilians were killed and injured in the US’s longest-running war – many of whom were women” [7] is naive, and denies the massive improvements made to women's lives in the country by the American presence, and that a better idea would be that “Western leaders could offer immediate asylum to people fleeing Afghanistan”. Yes, that's right. Reverse the progress we had made and create millions of refugees. It is Hong Kong all over again. Unfortunately, these Anti-War zealots have got what they wanted since 2001: the Taliban are in power in Afghanistan and it's as if we had never been. I'm sure all the women in Afghanistan will be queuing up to thank them for saving them from US imperialism.

***

Osama bin Laden’s global terror campaign reached its peak in 2001. In the preceding years, the Wahhabi-inspired Al-Qaeda had been behind several attacks, first being the unsuccessful bombing of the Yemen Hotel in 1992. By 1998, bin Laden was a wanted man by the FBI for the murder of 224 people in the 1998 attack on the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In Afghanistan, bin Laden had found a safe haven for him to operate his campaign against the West, and Al-Qaeda’s endorsement of the Taliban regime made the so-called Islamic Emirate the “world’s first terrorist-sponsored state” [8]. On September the 9th 2001, two Tunisian Al-Qaeda operatives assassinated the anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. The assassination of such a high profile Afghan oppositionist pushed the Bush Administration into agreeing on plan to oust the Taliban regime by presenting an ultimatum demanding that the Taliban hand over the Al-Qaeda founder. If they failed to do so, a three-phase plan would be implemented to ramp up the pressure on the regime, resulting in an eventual military overthrow if nothing was done. This three-phase plan was to take three years, and what happened twenty-four hours later shortened it to three weeks [9].
 
9/11 had an epiphanic impact on the United States and the West. In our post-Cold War complacency, we had been involved in other conflicts in Iraq and former Yugoslavia, but much of the European and American population had the feeling of immunity. Images of war, cruelty and humanitarian catastrophes were background blurs. When the planes hit the WTC in 2001, the attitude towards terrorism pivoted. The declaration of the War On Terror and the renewed US confidence to defeat global terror was the beginning of a new resolve against those actors who really wanted to destroy civilisation. This resolve was the realisation that organisations such as Al-Qaeda could harm innocence, justified by their ideology, and that they weren’t afraid. The change in attitude means that we, as liberal democrats, shouldn’t be afraid to enforce our world-view either. An important dimension of the war in Afghanistan was this counter-terrorist attitude and it separates the conflict between NATO forces and the Taliban from other imperialist adventures in the past. It was something entirely new: losing the war in Afghanistan to values such as those of the Taliban was never an option. Until the US started giving up.
 
Perhaps the most unfortunate result of the disaster of the Iraq War (besides the destruction it had) was the demoralisation which followed. This demoralisation has seeped into American society, and many Americans have given up on whether they want to be the world’s policemen or not. When the Obama campaign won in 2008, a key policy was ending the war in Iraq and bringing troops home. In Afghanistan there was a similar objective. When the Arab Spring broke out in 2010 and Islamic State became the dominant terrorist threat, the former president had to backtrack and pursue a half-in, half-out policy. By the end of Obama’s term, Donald Trump rode the wave of deep anti-war sentiment in the country and, despite the occasional action, largely kept to his base’s opposition to war. In February 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed the Doha agreement where the United States agreed to a conditional withdrawal from Afghanistan by May 2021 [10]. The Biden Administration altered the agreement, calling for a full withdrawal by August 2021.
 
In his speech defending the withdrawal, President Biden said something rather interesting. “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralised democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.” [11] Well well Mr President, who knew you were such a sectarian dove? His statement mirrors exactly what is wrong with the current American Anti-War consensus, and the results of what’s happened in Afghanistan is a grave reminder of the consequences. In an interview on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge, the former US Secretary of Defence James Mattis outlined the problems with the wars America had been involved in and why they had failed. The secret, according to Mattis, is to have clear objectives [12]. In Afghanistan we had such a clear objective and it was exactly the opposite of what the President stated they were.
 
The project to rebuild Afghanistan was always going to be a long process, and believing that it was going to be over in a matter of decades is irresponsible. We have not only abandoned our liberal and democratic allies in the region, but put in vain everything which has been achieved up until the last few weeks. The US has surrendered the region strategically to China – who had been in talks with the Taliban a few weeks previously [13] – and to Pakistan. We have allowed for a brand new base for international terrorism to regroup at and to increase the threat the US President boasted about destroying. We’re heading for a darker era for certain without a strong US or West to look to to defend our values as a society, and none will lose out more than those who have fought with us for a democratic and liberal Afghanistan who, shocked at both the US exodus and their own military’s weakness, are not left to “fend for themselves”. We’ve effectively alienated the trust of those who needed our help the most.
 
The Western intervention in Afghanistan has only been a failure because we made it fail. By pulling out so suddenly, we have reversed all the progress that was made during the occupation. Yes, it has cost civilian lives. That’s what you get when you postpone action against regimes whose grievances are seeing an unveiled female face or hearing a woman’s laugh. We did provoke them by saying they Afghans had a right to go to school, use the internet and fly their kites. We do upset them when we say we also have values of humanity, liberty and democracy, and that it upsets us to see them violated. These are the reasons why fighting these wars are so vital and necessary, because we now have irrefutable proof of what happens when we give up.

David Tait is the founding editor of the La Konfederisto and has contributed a number of articles to the magazine. This post was originally published on his blog The Young Mazzinian.

[1] https://kabultec.org/the-roqia-center/declaration/ (Accessed 16/08/2021)
[2] http://www.rawa.org/rules.htm (Accessed 15/08/2021)
[3] https://askinglot.com/what-is-the-significance-of-kite-flying-in-afghanistan (Accessed 17/08/2021)
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghans-tell-of-executions-forced-marriages-in-taliban-held-areas-11628780820 (Accessed 17/08/2021)
[5] https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2021/afghanistan-visualising-impact-of-war/index.html (Accessed 16/08/2021)
[6] https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/new-threat-to-afghan-women/ (Accessed 16/08/2021)
[7] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dont-use-girls-as-justification-for-bombing-afghanistan-again/ (Accessed 18/08/2021)
[8] https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/DIM-2017-U-016117-2Rev.pdf (Accessed 15/08/2021)
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/24/september11.usa2 (Accessed 15/08/2021)
[10] https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/e3bffac0-0a59-4101-baff-1f996b9eac50/note/7d0149f0-c9b7-4ed5-9344-1f16b9df91ec.pdf#page=1 (Accessed 14/08/2021)
[11] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/bidens-afghanistan-address-in-3-minutes/2021/08/16/e03e37ef-a69c-4f12-a40d-12c4bc23c1e2_video.html (Accessed 17/08/2021)
[12] https://youtu.be/tKIJKQRb53o 4:00 - 11:00 (Accessed 16/08/2010)
[13] https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/the-taliban-chinas-deal-with-the-devil-in-afghanistan/ (Accessed 16/08/2021)

As the hordes of the totalitarian possessed try to overturn the Western world, in the East a much more sinister shadow stirs. You may cringe at my platitudinous words, but in the cliché-ridden society we live in, it might be the only way for you to listen. Because we must listen, since if we don’t, the forces of evil will creep further and its cold, clenching grip will become even more difficult to prise. It is very easy nowadays to collapse into our lovely liberal lifestyles. We can regard the international scene as if nothing will ever touch us, but if the advent of the global pandemic has proven anything, it has proven that no society is immune. Yet even as we sit: our protests heard, pleasures attended and wants for nothing, we should be reminded of our commitment to democracy and to liberty and to humanity…

One year ago, the watchful people of Hong Kong staged massive protests against the introduction of the infamous Extradition Bill, which would have made political dissent to Beijing’s regime even more difficult. The Bill was a result of a murder in Taiwan the difficulty for the accused to be extradited to Hong Kong and charged with murder. Beijing naturally seized this opportunity to take another crack at squashing dissent inside the free city. The Umbrella Movement, born in 2014 from the unrest caused by the Mainland’s meddling in the SAR’s electoral form, unfurled its gamps once again and took to the streets.

After a mass protest outside the Government Headquarters in Admiralty, the standoff between the Hong Kong Police Force and demonstrators turned violent: rubber bullets and tear gas deployed by the police as civilians charged through barricades. These protests managed to stall the second reading of the bill in the Legislative Council, and the Five Demands from the Anti-Extradition movement were drawn up.

The most shocking event took place on the 31st of August. Distressing footage of police indiscriminately beating and pepper-spraying protesters inside of the Prince Edward MTR Station emerged on the Internet. The cries of pain from the spray, the confused violence, and the eerily calm tannoy ringing throughout the station gives the entire event a distinctly dystopian savour; the police’s brutality was relentless.

In the midst of the protests and the upcoming local elections in the November, members of the self-determinationist party Demosistō were disqualified from running, including Agnes Chow, who, having given up her British Citizenship to contest in the elections in 2018, found herself arrested and released on bail. Joshua Wong, the democracy activist student who is constantly in and out of jail (in the good sense) was also banned from running. Finally, after months of protests and civil disobedience, the unsettling bill was withdrawn by the Chief Executive Carrie Lam in the September. In the local elections, the pro-democracy camp slapped back at the pro-Beijing camp, winning 17 of the 18 district council seats.

This is not the first time that Beijing has tried to interfere in the city’s system. In 2003, the CCP tried to implement a national security law which was met again by mass demonstrations and subsequently rejected by the Chief Executive. But now the Communist regime is trying something far more insidious. With the twice failure of trying to implement such a law, the National People’s Congress on the 21st of May passed another national security law. Bypassing the normal legislative process, the Mainland’s government is strong-arming the people of Hong Kong into being subjugated to its authoritarianism by forcing it through the compliance of Article 23 of the Basic Law. This national security law if implemented would outlaw seditious and separatist expression, and allow the government to essentially crackdown on any criticism of the regime on the mainland.

This latest pernicious attempt from the People’s Republic to smother over those cherished civil rights the Hong Kongese so gratefully defend, the freedom of speech and expression which they are fortunate enough to enjoy, is yet another example for why the breakdown of the “one country, two systems” principle is a dark warning: that totalitarianism and democracy are incompatible with one another.

The Chinese Communist Party, and especially its current form led by the despotic Xi Jinping, has a long record of violating basic humanity. If you want an idea of how a CCP-led world would look, perceive no further than how it treats its own citizens. From its defeat of the Kuomintang in 1949 to today, the CCP has exercised its totalitarian brutality over the Chinese people. From The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, to the malevolent Big Brother slave-state we see today, no one has suffered more from the persistence of this regime than the Chinese people. The masterful combination of the prophecies laid out in both Orwell’s and Huxley’s respective pessimisms only shows us what is in store for the rest of the world: mass state surveillance, incessant consumerism, and suppression of religion. Naturally, this is nothing compared to the treatment already experienced by those who fall out of line:  the oppression of Tibet and the mass internment of the Uyghurs are just a taste. These are just some examples of the real civil rights violations we should be protesting against.

Like Hong Kong, the gallant island of Taiwan has suffered from the hands of mainland oppression. Under orders from the central government, the People’s Liberation Army is to occupy or annexed Taiwan by 2030. China’s utilisation of sharp power towards the ROC’s democratic and liberal society is evident in the disturbing monitoring of its communication, and interference in its politics. The most recent presidential election in January this year saw DPP president Tsai Ing-wen maintain office with 57% of the vote, defeating the KMT candidate Han Kuo-yu. Despite her defeat in the multi-question referendum in November 2018, the development in Hong Kong and China’s increased aggressiveness in the region has brought into question for many Taiwanese the continuation of the One-China Policy. The Taiwanese have weathered their oppression well, from international exclusion from organisations such as the WHO, and to the economic and diplomatic cut-off threats made by the PRC, the people of Taiwan still maintain and continue to encourage their democratic commitment, and also their belief in civil society.

Allowing the most recent Coronavirus to become a global pandemic is an indication of what this emerging superpower will bring to the world stage. The deceit, lies and threats towards whistle-blowers about the deadly nature of this virus have plunged the world into such social and economic disarray, only uncertainty rules the future; Beijing’s incompetence and cowardice make the crisis worthy to be held up as China’s Chernobyl moment, except, unless the international community act appropriately, it is naïve to think that this incident will result in any Sino-glasnost, as the CCP grip on the country is hardly at risk of relinquishment. In fact, the aggressive confidence of the regime will only increase from here.

The Free World has a lot of shame in this. For the interests in capital and global finance, we have allowed this tyranny to turn itself into a world power. Depriving our own working classes, and moving our manufacturing jobs to the Chinese market was a reckless decision, which has only made us more dependent. We didn’t mind the cheating in trade and currency manipulation if it benefitted us with a flood of cheap goods and products into our economies, but even this hasn’t been worth the poor quality we get back. The entire idea of globalisation, of trying to make luxuries into rights, has ultimately been more destructive than positive, not to mention the additional suffering inflicted on the Chinese people, working in extreme conditions. Furthermore, and another example of the West’s misguided sense of security, The PRC’s Belt and Road initiative is making headway in a leaderless West. The strong investment in African, Asian and European infrastructure is a way for Xi Jinping to buy his influence across the world. We have certainly missed a trick and losing global leadership because of it.
We are facing yet another new test, that is, the on-coming conflict between the Chinese Communist Party and our way of life. Like all the tests we’ve weather before it: Nazism, Stalinism and Islamism, it will again be critical in deciding if despair shall triumph or if duty shall prevail. The struggle of the people of Hong Kong should be a reminder that the battle against tyranny and totalitarian dictatorship is not just a condition which emerges every so often, but a part of the unrelenting commitment to the principles of democracy and liberty. We in the West have fostered and developed these sacred concepts. We live freely, say what we want, do as we please, and have our voices heard inside of a process where no one institution has total power. These facts of our lives are being steadily eroded, and if they were to disappear, then so would the last spark of esperance the world possesses.
​
This reminder, as we see the Hong Kongers and the Taiwanese struggle against oppressive bullying, should evoke a rekindled spirit of internationalism and solidarity to those who share our principles and aspirations for our way of life. We shouldn’t hide from the darkness, but join those who will face it head-on alongside us. The CCP has a vision for the world too and we can’t let it win. The West must stand up properly to China because sooner or later, we’ll have to anyway. Totalitarianism and democracy are incompatible, and we should take this to heart. Delaying the inevitable conflict will only result in a worse one down the line. It’s not responsible to believe that we can appease this time. It’s not moral for us to abandon those who deserve our support.  We need to take advantage of this crisis and recession to arm ourselves economically, militarily and spiritually for the storm which is coming.

David Tait is the founding editor of the La Konfederisto and has contributed a number of articles to the magazine. This post was originally published on his blog The Young Mazzinian