Haroun Rahimi
The tenure of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (IRA) signifies different things to different communities in Afghanistan. However, it is undeniable that historical strides were made in areas of political rights and democracy. For Shi’as of Afghanistan, the 2004 Constitution was the first ever to acknowledge their existence and their right to have their personal lives be governed by their own school of Islamic jurisprudence. Sikhs and Hindus of Afghanistan were allocated seats in the national legislature. Under the 2004 Constitution, women were guaranteed an equal right to study and work, were given a share in the national government and dedicated systems were set up to combat the endemic violence against them. By the regional standards, the era of the IRA was the golden age of free speech and free media. For the first time in their history, Afghans of all backgrounds got to vote in national elections for the presidency and legislature. The 2004 Constitution was arguably the most progressive constitution in the region.
If many communities achieved so much under the IRA, why didn’t we see many grassroots movements in support of the IRA?
During the two decades of IRA tenure, the most significant grassroots movements were arguably the People’s Peace Movement from the south and the Light Movement (Junbesh Rushanai) both of which had complicated relations with IRA—neither can be easily categorized as pro or anti IRA—but both could only emerge because of the relatively favourable political conditions under IRA. Both movements also objectively failed to achieve their intended goals. Afghanistan did not achieve a negotiated peace and Hazaras of Afghanistan did not move the government to change the direction of the electricity line that was bypassing their communities.
As the existential threat against the IRA grew, there were some grassroots movements in support of the IRA. There was some popular mobilization in Herat; there were people shouting Allah Akbar from rooftops to show solidarity with the national armed forces that were fighting the Taliban for the IRA’s survival. However, this is admittedly a very short list.
I believe the lack of popular mobilization in favor of the IRA despite significant gains made in areas of political rights and democracy was because these gains did not translate into material improvements in ordinary Afghans’ lives.
It can be objectively demonstrated that literacy rate and access to education reached unprecedented level, access to healthcare, life expectancy, maternal and child mortality were better than any time before. The country was more connected to the world than it had ever been. The economy was larger than ever. Access to telecom was the highest. Are not these material improvements in people’s lives? One might ask. First, what ensued after August 2021 raised serious questions about whether these gains were made in a sustainable manner. That is if they could be sustained without massive foreign aid. Even with this caveat, I think this line of argument poses a real complexity.
If we locate this connection properly, I think we would see that only those gains that made a difference in people’s lives can survive the Taliban.
In response to these legitimate points, I would argue ordinary Afghans did not attribute these advances to their newfound political rights and democratization. Conversely, it was a widely held sentiment that governance and service delivery could improve if Afghanistan was ruled by an enlightened absolutist. Frustrated with systematically corrupt elections that would frequently threaten the very foundation of the state, the corrupt influences of elected officials on public service delivery, and what the conserve majority would consider an “abuse of rights” by a progressive minority not fully aligned with their conversative values, a critical mass of Afghans saw democracy and political rights as a part of the problem.
Even increased role of the women in non-traditional public roles (e.g., parliamentarians, security officials and such) and commitment to distribution of power along ethnic lines were looked at with suspicion. The former can be attributed to the entrenched misogyny of Afghan society as well as the symbolic appointment of certain Afghan women in roles that they may not have been objectively qualified for –there were plenty of unqualified men having similar positions, but they were not equally scrutinized and hence the misogyny. The ethnic-based power distribution was the object of the following types of criticism: corrupt officials resist accountability by playing the ethnic card.
These anti-democratic sentiments were not only shared by the masses. I remember vividly interviewing a top republic official with a strong civil society pedigree about the alarming centralization of power under President Ghani and sidelining of the parliament, he got agitated with me and responded “you should let us do our work without the parliamentary interferences for a period. The parliament causes nothing but problems.” Many elites saw President Ghani as the enlightened absolutist and President Ghani acted like one.
There lies the main puzzle, do people want rights and democracy because they are good in themselves or because they lead to material improvements in people’s lives?
I think the Afghan case suggests that the latter is the case. Most Afghans did not attribute the admittedly limited improvements in the material conditions of their lives to advances in areas of political rights and democracy. Therefore, the prospect of fall of the IRA did not animate widespread popular movements trying to save the IRA. The Taliban’s return to power, rightly or wrongly, was primarily seen as a reversal in areas of political rights and democracy that could bring about an end to the ongoing brutal war in the country. This to a large swath of Afghan population, save for Afghan women arguably, was not perceived to be a too high of a price to pay for end of a brutal war.
The IRA was built on a brutal foreign military intervention, the infamous “war on terror”. This war caused disproportionate devastation to rural Pashtun communities, especially in the south, fueling an insurgency that became an existential threat to the IRA eventually bringing about its demise. Even though the military intervention in Afghanistan started off as a counterterrorism campaign, it soon grew into a nation-building mission before it contracted back to a narrower counterterrorism mission and the final withdrawal of foreign troops.
However, throughout the IRA’s tenure, whenever the two diverged, the democratic promise of self-rule—that was supposed to orient the actions of the state towards the needs of common Afghan citizens thus generating a democratic dividend for ordinary citizens—was made subordinate to the security interests of the NATO nations and the value-laden dictates of hundreds of foreign-based NGO boards. Abusive warlords were protected because they were thought to be effective in fighting the NATO’s enemies, the foreign diplomats interfered in elections to bring politicians into power with whom they could collaborate, and NGOs were using aid and assistance to challenge the conversative values of the Afghan society.
Compared to political rights and economy, social and economic rights—the right to work, the right to be live free from poverty—did not occupy the central stage in the human rights framework that animated the thinking of the boards of foreign-based NGOs and the pro-human rights constituencies of NATO countries. This elite bias towards political rights and democracy within the human rights discourse is not limited to Afghanistan and has received thorough criticism for ignoring what may be most important to the people of the global south.
The best and brightest of Afghanistan were recruited into either the NATO’s security mission or the NGOs’ ideological mission creating a class of economically privileged few who were deeply invested in the continued NATO and NGO mission against Afghan masses who were sinking deeper into poverty. This put the privileged class at odds with the Afghan masses that often saw the end of hostilities at any cost to political rights and democracy preferable to the status quo. This latter is crucial because leaders of any country are socialized into their role and the new leaders of new Afghanistan under IRA—the ones that were supposed to embody the new era of rights and democracy vis-à-vis the old guards of Afghanistan’s traditional politics—were being socialized into their role away from the ordinary Afghans who they were supposed to be serving.
Driven more by external metrics of donor countries than what Afghans needed or wanted, the IRA never managed to establish a justice system and a bureaucracy that would treat the ordinary Afghan with fairness and dignity according to a theory of justice that made sense to Afghans.
Having a constitution and laws that enshrine political rights and democracy matter far less for people if they are being killed with impunity by an army that they can’t hold to account. If the government leaders are closer and more accountable to donors and their outlooks than their citizens, and those in power (both traditional old guards and the new democratic leader) are indifferent to your deteriorating economic situation of the masses.
So much ink has been spelled on the failings of the IRA, I didn’t mean to pile on here but I think we need to understand the disconnect between what are held up as gains of the IRA in terms of rights and democracy and the people’s perception of how rights and democracy figures in their lives so we can start thinking about what can be saved and how.
If we locate this connection properly, I think we would see that only those gains that made a difference in people’s lives can survive the Taliban. With good reasons, ordinary Afghans did not credit democracy and political rights for limited material improvements in their lives, that is why, people the prospect of the fall of IRA did not animate mass movements in the name of political rights and democracy.
For a complicated set of reasons that merit separate investigations, women’s right to study and work did not emerge as the unifying cause for saving the IRA. Taliban’s strategically ambiguous messaging, the capture of the women’s cause by the IRA’s elites, limited grassroots political organization by Afghan women (which reflected the perversive incentive structure of civil society organization under IRA), and the misogyny endemic to Afghan society all played a role.
I believe an examination of grassroots resistance movements that have emerged under the Taliban substantiates the claims I advance here.
After the Taliban returned to power, two notable grassroots movements emerged: the flag movement and the women’s movement. The flag movement can be best thought of as an expression of nationalism. The flag movement did not sustain but it was not completely unsuccessful either. It made the Taliban warry of a nationalistic resistance arguably forcing them to slow down their pace of removing the symbols of the IRA and to adopt a more nationalistic tone, especially in relation to Pakistan. The flag continues to be a unifying symbol for those who saw the IRA as a symbol of a pluralistic and progressive Afghanistan, what they believe the Taliban’s vision for Afghanistan lacks. Therefore, it still has the potential to reassert itself. However, given that it did not attach to tangible gains in ordinary Afghans’ lives, it was not sustained. It was an expression of feeling of loss for the symbolism of IRA, a pluralistic and progressive Afghanistan, but that did not automatically attach to specific gains in ordinary Afghans’ lives.
The women’s movement is a grassroots movement for the rights of Afghan women that emerged in the face of the Taliban’s severely restrictive gender policies. The women’s movement is struggling under the weight of the Taliban’s suppression, but it is still alive, arguably, it is the most viable non-violent resistance against the Taliban. The success of the women’s movement in a highly patriarchal society, I believe, is because it made its central cause the demands for education and work for girls and women. The movement’s slogan of “bread, work, and freedom” signaled that the movement was marrying political rights with urgent economic needs that most Afghans—especially women as a support system for their families—were facing. These demands not only seem right and fair to an overwhelming majority of Afghans of different backgrounds including some within the Taliban, but they were also of the most real gains of the IRA felt by large segments of Afghan society.
The women’s rights movement has the hallmarks of popular rights movement that have succeeded in history. To just mention one example, the biggest march for rights in the US history where Martin Luther King gave his historical speech was called “March for Jobs and Freedom”. The labor unions have played decisive roles in democratic causes across the world. The women’s movement of Afghanistan has the potential to save the rights of women in the face of Taliban’s pressure by advancing the twin causes of political rights and democracy as well as common livelihood concerns of the masses.
From the analysis I presented here, one can conclude that what can survive the Taliban is what people believe made a tangible difference in their lives under the IRA. Unfortunately for Afghan democrats, with good reasons, this does not encompass many of the gains made in areas of rights and democracy because most Afghans do not believe that they made a positive difference in their lives. The onus is on the Afghan democrats and those who believe in the promise of political rights and democracy to change people’s lives for the better to make the case to the Afghan masses that these rights are indispensable to the people’s struggle to improve their lives. The initial step towards this direction would be to build the agenda for activism in Afghanistan around the needs of ordinary Afghans thinking about how political and democratic rights can be made relevant and useful to the daily struggles and priorities of ordinary Afghans.
Haround Rahimi is an assistant professor of law at the American University of Afghanistan.
