The future will be nasty, brutish and long

The collapse of the Afghan security forces is pretty much complete. They opted not to fight, rendering the hundreds of billions that the US has spent on them over almost two decades worthless. “By, with, and through,” the Pentagon’s mantra for how it goes about security assistance, has amounted to naught.

The same cannot be said however of US civilian assistance. While no doubt pundits will be talking for years about how hopeless it was to think that Afghanistan could be made into a thriving democracy, significant social, economic, and political process was made. Until this week, Afghanistan was a relatively open society with lively and partly free media, education not only for men but also for women, vastly improved health conditions, sharply increased per capita income (which has stagnated for the past five years), and a government that owed its existence to not very fair or entirely free elections. Civil society in Afghanistan was robust. The country’s low scores on various governance and economic indices were due largely to the Taliban insurgency and corruption, which had reached dreadful levels.

Can any of the limited progress be preserved in a renewed Taliban regime?

Today’s Taliban are saying that girls and women will be able to go to school and work, which they weren’t permitted to do under the Taliban in the 1990s. The official Taliban line is amnesty for former government officials and troops. Their current hesitation in entering Kabul may cause some to hope that they will be more restrained than last time around.

But there are reports from some provinces that revenge killings and assassinations are already occurring, as are forced marriages. The Taliban have not renounced hudud punishments, which include cutting off hands and feet as well as stoning to death. The Taliban would be foolish to fight their way into Kabul, as that would cause a good deal of destruction and ruin their international bona fides. It will be far better for them to negotiate a handover of power that enables them to claim some sort of legitimacy other than by force of arms. The Taliban have definitely gotten savvier about their image in Western media.

But international attention won’t last, and they know it.

The Taliban are still totalitarians: they do not abide opposition, they do not respect human rights, and they won’t share power for long. If we can anticipate future performance from past behavior, there will be no parliament, only some sort of high council of religious leaders. Accountability and transparency will be minimal. Civil society will be squelched. Free media will be closed. Drug trafficking will be rife. Other economic activity will be marginal. Minorities will not only be discriminated against but abused and murdered.

There has been a good deal of concern about the thousands of Afghans who have worked with the US military, mainly as interpreters. But the numbers of Afghans at risk due to their cooperation with the Americans is much greater than that. It includes a couple of thousand who worked at the Embassy, many more thousands who have worked on US-funded development and governance projects, and still more thousands who took seriously the opportunity to organize civil society organizations to press for various causes that will no longer be permitted under the Taliban. If all of them were to leave Afghanistan, prospects would dim further. Those who stay–either because they can’t get out or because they have the courage not to–aren’t likely to last long.

I could be wrong about all of this. We’ll have to wait and see. But my guess is that the future will be nasty, brutish, and long.