AS AMERICA FLEES Afghanistan under the Taliban gun, I am wondering how far west Asian Muslim societies are from ridding themselves of Western hegemony. At an intellectual level, the global Muslim struggle against Western hegemony began in Afghanistan in the 1860s with Jamaluddin al-Afghani prodding King Dost Muhammad to oppose the British colonial power. By Western hegemony, I mean invasion and occupation by Western powers and their domination through their vassals and subordinate regimes.
President Ashraf Ghani was a typical American vassal whose power structure began crumbling as the United States announced it was going to pull out its troops from Afghanistan by Aug. 31. America is the mightiest military and economic power the world has ever known. Yet its – and the West’s – stranglehold on Muslim societies is very fragile. That fragility was demonstrated spectacularly by the Biden administration’s quick compliance with the Taliban’s ultimatum to pull out all American forces from Afghanistan by the Aug. 31 deadline.
President Biden had been under intense domestic and international pressure to extend that deadline so the NATO countries had enough time to evacuate all their troops and collaborators from Afghanistan. In desperation, Biden rushed his CIA director, William Burns, to Kabul, obviously to ask the Taliban leadership to allow an extension of the deadline. But the guerrilla leaders said no, and Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen warned that the Aug. 31 deadline was their “red line,” and a U.S. failure to comply with it would have “consequences.” Without delay, Biden announced that his regime would indeed stick with the deadline. Which meant U.S. allies in Afghanistan would follow suit.
America’s humiliation at the hands of an impoverished and backward Muslim militia sent shivers of rage through America. Congressman Michael McCaul called it an “unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.” His fellow Texas Republican, Senator John Cornyn, exploded: “Letting the Taliban dictate our military strategy is an absolute disgrace.” And so on.
I have been writing all along that the Pashtun tribes, represented by the Taliban, would one day stamp out the American tutelage and that Americans were wasting their time trying to restructure Afghan society and politics in their image. Last week I told friends, however, the Taliban leaders would heed the CIA director’s pleas. They didn’t, and Medea Benjamin, the founder-president of the radically progressive Code Pink organization, explained why.
Taliban leaders wanted to “show that they have conquered Afghanistan” from the Americans, who had occupied it for 20 years, she tweeted. Well, “reconquered” would probably have been a more appropriate word.
All this reminded me of my October 1989 foray into a small gathering of Afghan Mujahedeen, freedom fighters, in Quetta, Pakistan. They were returning home after the Pushtun-led Mujahedeen had defeated the Soviet military juggernaut, the world’s largest conventional military force, and sent the cowering Communists running home into their mothers’ and wives’ arms. The Taliban group of about 20 I came across in Quetta was from Malaysia, India and three or four Arab countries.
“The Palestinians may have to wait until the Americans retreat from our region,” said a man, apparently in his early 30s, standing with his back against the wall of the lounge of the hotel in which I was staying. “The Jews would have been nice and humble without the American Crusaders behind them.”
The man apparently was answering a question, which I had not heard as I had just lumbered into the meeting spot with my friend Jamil Ahmed, a Pakistani businessman.
“Do you mean the Americans will retreat on their own?” asked a younger man, sitting on his hunches on the carpeted floor. “Won’t they have to be thrown out like those [Soviet] Communists?” The questioner, Ehtesham Wakil from the Indian city of Surat, told me later that he believed that the Americans would be “easier to defeat [than the Soviets] because they can only throw bombs from the sky” and weren’t good at fighting guerrillas with guns. Tajik and Uzbek tribal fighters, the Pashtun’s traditional rivals, had done most of the fighting for the American invasion, he added. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post would write later that CIA operatives bribed Tajik and Uzbek warlords with briefcases stuffed with $100 bills.
I was on a visit to Pakistan and several Arab countries to research the political fallout of the rout of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. I had a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center. The Soviet debacle had left many Pakistanis and other Muslims talking about the longevity of U.S. domination of Muslim lands.
Asrar Ahmed, my old journalist friend in Islamabad, said the United States was “pushing us around because most Muslims lack pollical consciousness.” Khurshid Ahmad, the deputy leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami party in Pakistan, said European colonial rule over non-Western countries did not last because “liberalism is incompatible with colonialism,” and that Americans “can’t make good warriors” and won’t be able to sustain their hegemony over Muslim societies because of that. In Amman, Jordan, Nihad al-Amr, a writer, told me that the Palestinians would be freed from Israeli suppression “when the American power weakens.” And ultimately, the American domination of Muslim countries would be ended “by our children or maybe grandchildren.”
The Taliban belong to Amr’s children’s generation. And their breathtaking victory over America will, I believe, help stir up other Muslim struggles against Western hegemony in the region. The most conspicuous ones of those struggles are being waged by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah against the Israeli colonization of Palestine, facilitated by America and Europe. The systematic repression of Arab Muslims by their monarchies and dictatorships is also being abetted or condoned by the West. In many ways, the regimes are America’s underlings.
In 1992 Earnest Gellner, one of my favorite anthropologists, wrote about a “revolution in the Muslim world … [brewing] for a century and a half.” In 2011 when Arab youths from Tunisia to Syria rose up to throw out their repressive autocracies, I thought that was the finale of that revolution. I was deeply disappointed when Arab tyrants quashed that liberation struggle. Obviously, Gellner’s Muslim revolutionary journey has some ways to go. I hope the Taliban triumph over America marks the beginning of the last 385 yards of the marathon.
~ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator, living in Sylhet, Bangladesh. He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.‘
