Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the Bonn Agreement, which laid the foundation for what Afghanistan experienced for two decades. The legacy of Bonn and the constitutional order it helped build is at best very mixed. A fair amount has been written about the flaws and shortfalls of post-2001 Afghanistan. From the impunity for past crimes and continued lack of justice to the corrosive effects of corruption, from a monarchical centralized presidential system to the perpetual violence, from the strategic miscalculations in Washington to the collapse of regional consensus around Afghanistan, many have investigated the failures.
In this series looking back at the legacy of Bonn, we have asked a group of young intellectuals, activists, and writers to reflect on the past two decades with an eye to the future. What aspects and elements of post-2001 Afghanistan are resilient enough, they write, to survive the Taliban rule. In a distant or near time horizon when the country has another opportunity to deliberate about charting a just, democratic, and pluralist future, what could be there as a foundation to build on? In this latter sense, we think about the past two decades not in isolation, but on a continuum from what happened before that.
There is a tendency to see through a monolithic lens the 2021 political crisis that brought the Taliban to power. Most of us take it as a complete and colossal loss, which in many ways it was. Such an understanding implies that Afghanistan became overnight a different country, one that has no resemblance to the one we lived in before the Taliban’s ascend. But in reality, no societal transformation happens that quickly. The Taliban might have been able to project a façade of an Emirate according to their dogmatic ideologies, but much of the society is what it has been for many years. That is to say that it was not a country as commendable as some of us would have liked to project it before 2021. And, it is certainly not one the Taliban tries to show, in which the people despise foreigners, measure the acceptability of every socio-political practice according to a narrow understanding of their religious beliefs, and consider women inferior to men and subject them to home imprisonment.
In the wake of a multifaceted crisis under the Taliban, it is rather easy to dismiss the Bonn process as anything substantive and substantial, particularly given the failures in institution-building during the last two decades. However, if considered against the backdrop of a tumultuous political history in which collective bargaining efforts have often failed to materialize, it was one of the few accords that was implemented. Moreover, the socio-political dispensation that it laid the foundation for, lasted two decades despite many challenges. In a country with a short history of only 140 years as a modern state, no period of socio-political and economic advancement has lasted that long. Compared to the Amani reforms in the 1920s or the constitutional decade of the 1960s, the post-2001 constitutional order stands out in its robustness, longevity, and pluralism.
During the last two decades, Afghanistan made unprecedented strides in human development, economic prosperity, and pluralist politics. These changes are apparent across Afghanistan, even in areas where violence shattered the very social fabric of life or the remote highlands among communities stricken with poverty. Of course, urban centers were the more vibrant hosts of these collective experiments than rural areas as is the case in every society. But the wider Afghanistan did make progress even as one of the authors argues, people did not see a direct impact of political rights on their material well-being. Tens of thousands of young men and women who lived in the residence halls of Kabul University came from remote villages. The Helmand Peace March rose from the midst of violence and attracted thousands wherever they went. The Enlightening Movement that peaked in 2016 was perhaps the most significant of all, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to demand justice, equality and accountability. Both of these movements had elements that defied the simplistic characterization of that society as one where accountable and pluralistic participatory politics were deemed foreign concepts. None of these movements had any major traditional political figure leading them, yet they both mobilized people from the masses in large numbers.
The Taliban might have been able to project a façade of an Emirate according to their dogmatic ideologies, but much of the society is what it has been for many years.
In recent days, thousands of Hazaras in the western Herat province have taken to the streets to demand security and justice from a regime that rules by force and has excluded the community from the government. That speaks to a level of buy-in to accountable politics and popular legitimacy as the basis of governance that we often overlook. In other domains, many of Afghanistan’s media have continued their work from exile despite the crackdown on their staff inside the country. In other cases, perhaps contrary to the Taliban’s assumption, public support for women’s education and employment remains robust across the country. Reports growingly show that one of the key incentives for many to leave Afghanistan is the lack of access to education for women. The women’s political movement and their protest for rights and livelihood in the face of Taliban brutality not only offer a glimmer of hope, as one of the essays explains but also speak to the degree that such values enjoy indigenous buy-in. This movement, led by those on the ground and often disconnected from the diplomatic and NGO world outside, has shown a remarkable degree of resilience that could offer insight into grassroots political activity for the future.
However, the Taliban’s rule does present an existential threat to the idea of a democratic and pluralist Afghanistan. How much will they succeed in redefining the country in their image will depend on how long their uncontested rule will last and, on the counter-weight the society will present. As we think about the future, we need to remind ourselves that the Taliban will not be the only force shaping it. They might be controlling political authority and the physical means of coercion, but Afghanistan’s future will inevitably be shaped by the interaction between the Taliban and the society it attempts to control and govern. Fears about the Taliban’s attempts to completely rewire the sociopolitical architecture of Afghanistan often overlook the exchange that will happen between the group’s thinking and practices and the rest of the society as communities and individuals with a sense of agency. Such overlooking blinds as to the need to focus on what can and should be preserved from our past for a future after the Taliban but with them.
The Taliban might have been able to project a façade of an Emirate according to their dogmatic ideologies, but much of the society is what it has been for many years.
The thinking behind this series rests on two main takeaways from the post-2001, that many of the failures were rooted in a lack of understanding of the country’s past and a lack of vision for its future. For the country to break the repetitive cycle of institutional disintegration, we have to not only critically understand our past but also have clarity about the country we want in the future. Afghanistan’s history is nothing, in one sense, but a collection of ruptures, disruptions, disintegrations, and displacement. In understanding such a tumultuous past, we often focus on the beginnings and ends, ignoring the threads that might be running throughout our historical existence. That means in every new period, we feel an emptiness and the need to build everything from scratch, losing sight of what might have survived from our past. It also means that we tend to ignore the common or identical sources of fragility that have doomed these experiments. After all, why can’t we build sustainable and functioning institutions?
Much like the Taliban trying to completely recreate the socio-political character of Afghanistan, the foremen of the post-2001 Afghanistan project also assumed that it was possible and indeed, needed, to build every aspect of our collective life from scratch. Those who shaped the post-2001 order, its own leaders as much as foreign stakeholders, erroneously assumed that the society was a clean slate on which they could run any experiment they deemed useful. Or perhaps even worse, that no aspect of its previous historical existence was acceptable in building a future that was different from its past. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the promotion of women’s rights and liberties. Ignoring indigenous social practices that gave them a voice and past political experiences in which women had enjoyed agency and power, the post-2001 narrative assumed them as a voiceless collective to be saved. In most instances, these investments not only failed to advance the cause of women’s rights, but they even backfired by positioning women activists as those at the behest of foreign donors rather than agents of organic societal change.
Many of the failures were rooted in a lack of understanding of the country’s past and a lack of vision for its future
The architects of post-2001 Afghanistan also did not know what country they wanted to build. Major foundational steps such as the 2004 constitutional process were taken in as much haste as the talks in Bonn. They in many ways lacked the imaginative clarity about the direction the country should have headed because of those efforts. Foreign stakeholders carried more weight in deliberations that were in essence supposed to be democratic and introspective. The United States in particular had an outsized role in defining the broader contours of what a post-2001 Afghanistan should look like. The adoption of a centralized presidential system, for example, was rooted in the American preference to have a coherent and easy-to-manage government in Kabul offering an ideal degree of instrumentality in its war on terror. Those who participated in such deliberations on behalf of the people of Afghanistan not only lacked the vision and courage to imagine a democratic and pluralist country but were also overwhelmingly influenced by Western thinking at the time. The Mujahideen leaders, perhaps better in touch with the realities on the ground, lacked the technical capacity to articulate a vision for the country. More importantly, they carried records of past atrocities and rights violations and had a vested interest in protecting their powers as the de facto authorities who filled the vacuum left by the Taliban’s disintegration. The educated members of the diaspora had been away for many decades and thus were out of sync with society. They compensated for that with their language skills and academic credentials which made them favorable for the so-called international community.
Building on these takeaways, the reflections in this series attempt to think of the future while taking the past into account. In other words, they are efforts to read the past in light of what the vision for the future should be. As such, they are neither definitive nor conclusive. The underlying hope is to trigger forward-looking thinking now that the shock of the collapse of the republic and the Taliban’s return has settled in. It is also a reminder that how much Afghanistan’s current rulers will eventually be able to shape the country according to their ideological dogmas will essentially depend not only on the resilience of our values and past achievements but also on the robustness of our future collective efforts to counter their impact on our socio-political culture.
Sayed Madadi is the editor and curator of the special series on the legacy of the Bonn Agreement for a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
