WHEN TRADE INTERESTS PUSH TERROR THREAT
Next month, it will be 24 years since 9/11 occurred in the United States and shook the world. The “global war on terrorism” followed. This year, largely driven by President Donald Trump’s policies, most nations which supported that campaign are having to guard their economic interests threatened by his trade and tariff war.
As yesterday’s supposed promoters of terrorism are wooed over lunch at the White House, and a new US-versus-China geopolitical battle is unleashed, is the world having to take its eyes off terrorism?
As India and Pakistan celebrated their respective 79th Independence Days, the Taliban also marked the fourth anniversary of their return to power in Afghanistan, celebrating their ‘victory’ after the United States’ departure. It marked the failure of that “global war”.
Sadly, it also abandoned a people, once considered fiercely independent, who threw out the British, the Russians and the Americans, to an uncertain fate. Located on the confluence of Asia’s ancient civilisations and billed as “Heart of Asia”, Afghanistan, currently “Islamic Emirate”, is God-forsaken. The last five decades have witnessed a moderate monarch deposed, three of its presidents brutally killed, one of them flying out to safety and one living in virtual house arrest.
Its Taliban rulers had attracted world criticism after the 9/11 events as they insisted on hosting Osama bin Laden. They sat out for 19 years till the United States quit, leaving the same Taliban to re-capture power.
No country wants refugees from Afghanistan. Europeans are tightening asylum rules. The United States and Britain, who had pledged to admit those who had worked for them and were in danger of being killed, have reneged, at least partially. The neighbouring Iran and Pakistan have pushed out a million Afghans, many after decades of asylum, with children who have never seen Afghanistan. India hosts a significant number of Afghan refugees, with estimates ranging from 15,000 to 49,000.
The latest is that nutritious food intended to feed 30,000 starving children in Afghanistan and vaccines worth billions stored in Belgium will be destroyed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s closure of the United States’ aid agency (USAID).
At the victory celebrations, flowers were showered from helicopters at rallies. In keeping with their interpretation of Islam, the rulers banned women from participating. Not that they had anything to celebrate. They protested behind closed doors in the northeastern city of Takhar.
Members of the “United Afghan Women’s Movement for Freedom” called that day “an open wound of history, a wound that has not yet healed. The fall of Afghanistan was not the fall of our will. We stand, even in the darkness.” They chided the world for ignoring their plight.
Women cannot work independently, and girls are confined to religious schools. Besides conditions on the ground, their plight can be assessed by their falling numbers. They form only 42 per cent of Afghanistan’s population of 42.6 million. The man-woman ratio is the worst in the world.
Initial protests by women were violently dispersed. The Ministry that looked after their welfare in the past is renamed the Vice and Virtue Ministry. Its inspectors require women to wear a chador, a full-body cloak covering the head, while a law announced a year ago ordered women not to sing or recite poetry in public and for their voices and bodies to be “concealed” outside the home.
Last month, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban supremo Hibatullah Akhundzada and the chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, accusing them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls.
The Taliban dismiss this as “baseless propaganda.” Instead, Akhundzada claimed on August 15 that their religious impositions had “saved citizens from corruption, oppression, usurpation, drugs, theft, robbery and plunder”.
A humanitarian crisis grips Afghanistan, worsened by the climate crisis and a sharp drop in donor funding. Rights groups, foreign governments and the UN have condemned the Taliban for their treatment of women and girls and exclusion of ethnic and religious minorities. The world community has not done much beyond that.
Facing no credible opposition within, the Taliban have sat out their isolation, and now that is paying off. Some 40-plus countries, while not formally recognising it, are doing business. Although poor and landlocked, Afghanistan is rich in resources. There are contracts to be won and minerals to be explored, excavated and exported.
Russia became the first country to officially recognise the Taliban administration in early July. China welcomed its ambassador earlier, and this week’s Kabul visit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi signals a geopolitical breakthrough with likely economic benefits. Beijing is keen to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan and is working to bridge the Pak-Afghan mainly caused by Kabul hosting and arming Islamabad’s biggest security threat, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
To rival it, the US also wants to return and is relaxing sanctions on leaders it had earlier listed as terrorists. This explains Trump’s lunch with Pakistani army chief Munir.
India has ancient ties and enjoys considerable goodwill among the people. It had invested $ three billion earlier, including in a river dam, a hospital and the Afghan parliament complex. It is now working to provide medicine and vaccines and has offered to resume projects that remained incomplete before 2021.
But the terror threat remains. Those who are dealing with the Taliban do not seem to have a clear answer. All Eurasian nations, from Russia to India, are worried that Afghanistan remains a hub of Islamist terror, thanks to the rise of the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP). Experts say it covers India, where the Jihadi outfit’s objective is to destroy existing governments and establish an Islamic Caliphate.
Weapons are travelling to Jammu and Kashmir via Pakistan. The Indian security forces find that the militant killed in anti-terror operations in Kashmir carried American M-4 carbines left behind in large numbers by the US. Even Pakistan, which facilitated the Taliban’s return to power, now complains that Kabul provides American arms to the TTP, which operates across the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Afghanistan has once again become the playground for rival geopolitical interests. Its impoverished citizens have to wait.
(The author is a veteran journalist)
