In the mid-1990s, during the first "triumphal march" of the Taliban * across southern Afghanistan, one of the American experts, trying to determine the essence of the Taliban ideology, drew an interesting analogy: the same student body, Afghan students were carried away by Maoism in its Chinese version, which raised poverty and asceticism among the main moral virtues. When the communists came to power in Afghanistan in 1978, Marxism-Leninism as a doctrine quickly faded in the eyes of Afghan youth. Many turned to Islam, which remained the religion of the Afghan poor. The students found that the tenets of Maoism, such as serving the masses, fit very well with the tenets of Islam.and Mao Zedong's tactics of popular guerrilla war work perfectly against the Soviet invaders and their henchmen in Kabul ... They are fanatical revolutionaries of the same kind as the Chinese communists of the late 1940s. "
You can not agree with everything, but there is something to think about. However, in practice, this "romantic" period for the Taliban quickly ended when, having occupied large cities with an international population - first Herat, then Kabul - they faced not only the denial of their policy in the interethnic sphere, but also the reluctance of the urban population to accept neither the moral and behavioral attitudes introduced by the Taliban, nor the way of life based on that matrix, which was based on a kind of synthesis of a number of Sharia norms with the postulates of the traditional Pashtun tribal code known as Pashtunwali. This episode reveals one of the important and so far little discussed aspects of the ongoing conflict - the contradictions between the city and the countryside, between which historically serious contradictions have formed in the ideas of the "correct" way of life.and in the worldview as a whole.
The conflict in Afghanistan and especially its results represent an extreme radical form of the consequences of the accelerated development of modernization processes in Muslim society. In the 1990s, these were the consequences of the reforms of President Mohammad Daoud in the 1970s and the Soviet experience of forced modernization. The practice of modernizing Afghanistan during the period of the presence of the United States and NATO turned out to be even more negative than the Soviet one; as you know, the lessons of history are of little use to anyone. Any reconstruction or modernization based on financial support from the outside gives results exclusively in favor of an extremely narrow, very limited circle of the elite. Neither reconstruction nor modernization can create opportunities for the majority of the population.
The urban minority, which did not accept the attitudes of the early Taliban similar to Maoism, this urban minority still appeals to the so-called democratic values and human rights, in fact, to the model of both human behavior and state structure modeled in relation to the Western community. But the historically formed realities of Afghanistan exclude changes that entail the introduction of alien elements of the way of life and culture. Individual success, as a condition for the collapse of communal ties, in such a situation can and does reach only an insignificant part of the population, for which the cultural and civilizational model proposed by the Taliban becomes alien. For the rest, affected by the processes of modernization, but did not receive results from it and as a result, only irritated by innovations,it looks natural to turn to “lost” values. Thus, a social base is also formed for radical supporters of the restoration of lost traditionalist values, the idea of which is preserved in the memory of a significant part of society, and mainly in a positive way.
Today's fragmentation of Afghan society - and the Taliban in particular - is so high that there are no simple formulas not only to remove contradictions, but at least to reduce the overall level of conflict.
This applies to the greatest extent to such aspects as interethnic and interregional. Not being the only dominant contradiction in the development of Afghan society, the ethnic factor at the same time has always played and plays an extremely important role, especially in cases and during periods of general political crises, stimulated, as a rule, by the influence of external centers of power. The dynamics of changes in the ethnic structure of the population of Afghanistan has been and remains quite high for a century and a half. At the same time, the ethnopolitical balance of Afghan society, which began to form at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, was ensured by the use of the Pashtun domination model in combination with historically established, natural mechanisms of integration and assimilation.which created the conditions for the gradual overcoming of tribal and ethnic contradictions in the process of modernizing the Afghan state. This process was deformed by the events of the 1970s and 1990s, and the subsequent period is characterized by a constant growth of interethnic contradictions, evolving in public attitudes and preferences of ethnic political elites towards separatism.
The federalization of Afghanistan is not a new idea. A vivid supporter of the administrative-territorial division of Afghanistan with a simple copying of the Soviet model of a union state was Hafizullah Amin, who dreamed of creating union republics on a simple ethnic principle - Pashtun, Baluch, Tajik and so on. The creation of national autonomies in Afghanistan was considered at one time by the Soviet leadership as an option for resolving interethnic, ethnopolitical problems and stabilizing the situation in the country after the withdrawal of Soviet troops. In particular, the possibility of creating "within the framework of a single Afghanistan, Tajik autonomy based on the areas of residence of Tajiks, including the territories of the provinces of Badakhshan, Takhar, Baghlan, parts of Parvan and Kapisa",the issues of “representation of Tajiks in the highest authorities of the country and even ... of the regular troops of the Tajik autonomy with their inclusion in the RA Armed Forces” were discussed, as General of the Army V. Varennikov wrote about in his memoirs. The rejection of this idea was connected both with the understanding of the high level of conflict of this initiative, and with the awareness of the high dispersion of the settlement of ethnic groups and the obvious unreality of administration based on ethnic criteria.
The Taliban is a rather difficult phenomenon to study, also due to the fact that the movement does not have any program. One can judge about the intentions of the Taliban to reorganize the country only by fragmentary and often contradictory statements. Nevertheless, one can confidently assume that the Taliban are striving to establish a rigid unitary model with their own (Taliban, that is, overwhelmingly Pashtun) domination. This issue also has a serious, not intra-Afghan, but quite a geopolitical sound. It is noteworthy that an analysis of all the existing rhetoric on the line of interaction between the Taliban and China shows that such a model will be fully supported by Beijing. It is no coincidence that the Taliban speakers call China their main external partner, and for the Chinese side, the key concept for the entire Afghan situation is “stability”.It is easy to understand that Beijing sees the Taliban as a tool for creating conditions for the implementation of their cross-border projects, of which Islamabad has been designated as the moderator. There is nothing new in history: in the 1990s, the Taliban was created as a tool for creating conditions for the implementation of cross-border projects, which were based on the interests of the United States, Great Britain, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia ...
It was not possible then, and one can only note a radical change of priorities by the Taliban itself.
In general, Russia, Iran, and the countries of Central Asia would not object to the establishment of a rigid system of state administration in Afghanistan as an effective way of establishing peace and stability in the country.
How real it is is another matter.
The history of Afghanistan has developed in such a way that any domestic process contains a serious foreign policy content. Today, among the widest spectrum of Afghan political forces and politicians, there is no one who would reflect purely Afghan national interests and would not be associated with the interests of one or another external actor. At the same time, the list of external actors is very rich: this is the United States with its NATO allies and not only, this is the already mentioned China, together with Islamabad (and their interests may not always coincide in everything), these are Qatar, Turkey, India, these are Saudi Arabia with its allied Arab monarchies, finally, it is Russia, Iran, neighboring countries of Central Asia ...which will be embedded from the outside in the direct participants in the Afghan war. And even strange is the fact that no one has yet invested in support - even political, but not only in it - of the same resistance movement in Panjshir. However, everything is ahead.
It's time to recall the words of Friedrich Engels, now unfashionable, in his work with a simple title “Afghanistan”: “... Their indomitable hatred of state power and love of personal independence prevent them from becoming a powerful nation;
but it is precisely this spontaneity and inconstancy of behavior that turns them into dangerous neighbors, amenable to the influence of momentary moods and easily carried away by political intriguers who skillfully arouse their passions. "
* "Taliban" - the organization was recognized as terrorist by the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of February 14, 2003.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.