 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I am Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha and today we are going to discuss Afghanistan with me here from Kathmandu in Nepal. I have Anohita Bojumdar. She's a senior journalist who follows what is happening in Afghanistan. She's lived in Kabul and traveled across Afghanistan. She's lived there for around 8 years, around 8 years from the end of 2003 to early 2012. She's a former editor of Himalas South Asia, the magazine and the portal and she's following what's going on in Afghanistan. Anohita, what we are today witnessing and I'm going by reports in different media is scenes of chaos at Kabul Airport on Monday. On Sunday, India's Independence Day, the Taliban occupied Kabul, entered the capital of Afghanistan virtually unopposed. The president or the former president I should say perhaps, Ashraf Ghani, he left Afghanistan on Sunday ostensibly because he said he wanted to avoid bloodshed. Now, we've got amazing scenes happening. I mean, there are thousands of people on the runway on the tarmac of Kabul. We hear there have been over 100 Indians including personnel of the ITVP, the Indo-Tibetian border police who are in Afghanistan and the scenes are absolutely horrifying and crazy. But what we have as I'm talking to you a short while ago a statement that has come from the spokesperson of the Russian Embassy and it says that Ashraf Ghani left Kabul in a helicopter and four cars. I don't know how he could have been in cars and in a helicopter but apparently he was carrying huge amounts of cash. He was carrying so much cash that he had to leave some behind on the tarmac as it wouldn't all fit in. So this is a new development that we've seen happening on Monday evening as we record this program. As a senior journalist who watched very carefully from very close quarters what's happening in Afghanistan, could you for the benefit of our viewers quickly recap what has happened in recent times in recent weeks and to what extent was what we are seeing today expected? I think for enjoy the speed with which the provinces have fallen to the Taliban and now the capital Kabul that has taken everybody by surprise but that being said I think what is surprising is the short period of time in which they have been able to take over in the country. The fact that they have been able to take over is not a surprise to those who have been observing what has been happening in Afghanistan not just in recent weeks and months but actually over the period of years. In many parts of the country the Taliban were in control and the government had only nominal control in a large part of the country. In many areas there was also there were agreements which were broke brokered by the local tribal leaders basically persuading both the Taliban and the government to keep their forces at bay and not engage in fight so there was a kind of holding pattern in many areas. So I think the fact that they have now taken over after the American troops have led and the American troops have also despite what they may claim have not done a proper handover as you perhaps know. They left very steadily from Bagram the base outside Kabul which even shocked I think Afghans that they would leave in the middle of the night and leave the Bagram air base virtually unattended. So I think the speed with which they have left without a proper handover has also enabled this. On the political front I think the fact that the US went ahead and made a deal with the Taliban and that the Afghan government was not a part of the talks or the deal that had considerably weakened the Afghan government's authority and had strengthened the Taliban. I think in a place like Afghanistan apart from the we see now the discussion about the Afghan army the strength of the Afghan army and its equipment but I think morale has a big part to play and I think the US still unfortunately strengthened the morale of the Taliban and weakened that of the government. There are other factors which we can go into further in this. No, I want you to elaborate on one point to make. You are suggesting that there was some sort of an understanding covert or otherwise between the Americans and the Taliban. Now this is contrary to what a lot of people believe. At the same time there's also a lot of criticism of the Joe Biden administration literally as suddenly going away and after American forces and the forces of its allies in the NATO the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were entrenched there for 20 years suddenly as you said a little while ago the sheer speed, the sheer rapidity with which the Taliban has evidently acquired control of that entire landlocked mountainous country has really surprised quite a few people. So the deal I'm talking about actually Parunja is the one which is very public where there was an agreement on the part of the American forces to withdraw their troops in exchange for guarantees by the Taliban that the territory of Afghanistan will not be used by them to launch any attacks on the US or its allies. There were several other conditions in relating to violence by the Taliban etc but these were virtually ignored in terms of the implementation of the deal. The US government did not enforce anything on the Taliban and the limited purpose seems to have been to have some kind of a face savings gesture which allowed them to leave the country. When you talk about 20 years of the American and NATO presence I think that has also been a very different phases of it right at the beginning in 2001 when there was a suggestion that the NATO allies should be brought in Americans were very insistent that the footprint should remain confined to just American forces at that point if you remember they were trying to hunt for bin Laden and the Taliban and in the words of the then American President George W Bush smoke them out of the caves etc etc and they didn't really want anybody getting in the way. Subsequently NATO allies were brought in and the footprint of the forces was expanded but it has very much been an American led project which has been dictated by America's very narrow political agenda at all times and in the last phase which actually perhaps started even while I was there though that's quite some time ago there was this attempt to build up an Afghan army. Now in Afghanistan what has happened all along on various fronts but in this particular case I'm talking about the Afghan army there was a date and there was a number which was conjured up I'm not sure on the basis of what and and so called Afghan army was set up without adequate training without adequate command and control structures you cannot build an army foreign nation overnight at that scale and not have some problems and I think those problems were pointed out at that time but I think with Afghanistan the last 20 years have been more about ticking boxes on time rather than actually looking at the reality on the ground. Tell me Anohita do you see a continuity in American policy towards Afghanistan? George Bush senior George Bush junior Trump Obama before Trump Obama and now Biden I mean is it that there is not even I mean you don't make out even much of a nuance in the way in which successive American administrations over the last two decades have looked on Afghanistan maybe you can talk a little bit about that. I think there are different phases in the domestic policy of the US and so far as it has impacted on Afghanistan so I would say that the Bush administrations perhaps had more of a desire to get into Afghanistan and change the things whereas Obama himself wanted to curtail the number of troops and he didn't really you know do it to the extent that he had thought he would and Biden has followed in Obama's wing by raining in the number of troops and bringing it now down to zero. Now of course he is following you know policies which were put in place by his predecessor President Donald Trump but Biden has also been you know he has picked and chosen which of the policies of Trump he wants to follow through on and which ones he wants to disband. In this particular case I think there is no appetite for continuing in Afghanistan within the domestic sphere of US politics and he probably felt that he would lose a lot of goodwill which he had when he came into power if he allowed this to continue because at the time that he took office things were in quite a bad shape in Afghanistan and there was no easy way out. Would he have taken this step if he had known that it would result in the kind of scenes that you have just described? Would he have taken that step with the electricity if he had known exactly this? I don't know the fact that these scenes would would would come into place at some point was known but perhaps he thought that there would be enough of a gap so for the US administration to wash its hands off and blame it on the Afghans but right now clearly the Biden administration is being criticized from different quarters for having not being unable to anticipate what would happen. Okay there is a certain continuity and there's also certain changes and yes the domestic politics of the US also dictates the American government or the administration's the way it looks on Afghanistan but the question that is being asked by leaving a fairly substantial section of the Afghan population which was opposed to the Taliban virtually in the lurch and not being able to anticipate what would happen is seen as to be a major failure of the Biden administration. Would you agree? Not entirely Paranjoy. Like I said I think this could be foreseen and anybody who's following Afghanistan including American advisors, American policy experts they have anticipated this. The only thing not anticipated was how quickly it would happen and I'm sure the Biden administration thought that there would be a respectable amount of time say six months or so which it would take for the government in Kabul to fall at which point they could much more easily blame it on Afghan infighting you know the shortcomings of the Afghan government whereas right now it has come straight on the heels of the departure of the American forces and therefore it's more obviously and blatantly being linked to them. Okay the same criticism is now being leveled at New Delhi. Yes the process of evacuating Indians and persons of Indian origin from different parts of Afghanistan had become had started sometime back but sometime back but the very fact that you even today according to news reports have 200 odd Indians stationed in Afghanistan including I was told about 100 odd personnel of the Indo-Tibetan border police. Now the criticism is that the government of India should also have anticipated what would happen and evacuated these individuals and then these people earlier than it did. Would you go along with that criticism? I think the last few weeks have been unprecedented and I really don't think anybody was predicting that Kabul would fall quite so quickly so you know to give the Indian government the benefit of doubt but I do think that in the last few days as provinces were falling really quickly and the approach to Kabul after Ghazni felt it became clear that it would fall very quickly so I don't know the logistics of whether they could have moved out people in the last few days before Kabul fell but I would say that the rapidity has taken everybody by surprise. Okay Anujita what does recent developments tell you about India's policy towards Afghanistan? The Narendra Modi government over the last seven years its policies towards Afghanistan how would you evaluate these? Not just this government but overall India's strategy towards Afghanistan is also determined by its strategy towards Pakistan. There is perhaps not such a great reason for India's intense engagement the amount of aid it provides the number of consulates it has and the number of projects of course the official line is that this is you know country to country goodwill but India does not exhibit that kind of goodwill towards any other country so I think one must accept the fact that it is guided by the fact that of its Afghanistan's proximity to Pakistan and this narrow approach I think has not really had in India has failed to the Indian government I should say the Indian government has failed to really broaden its contacts with the people and has also failed to broaden its contacts within the Afghan leadership casting it very narrowly in terms of who might serve it better visa its policy towards Pakistan and for that reason also for the longest time I think India had relied on the US to use its leverage vis-a-vis Pakistan within Afghan policy rather than really embarking on its own and I think the fact that as a regional country I think India could have played a role in bringing a different kind of understanding you know whether it's about politics or development or other issues to Afghanistan but I think the entire project Afghan project of the last 20 years has been led by the US and that that is that is what we are seeing today is largely the result of that okay Anuita what impact do you think recent developments in Afghanistan will have on Pakistan and Imran Khan and the Imran Khan regime I don't really know what the impact will be because as of now it's very hard to say what this version of Taliban will look like I as we know that Taliban have in the past found very active support from the government of Pakistan over a period of time the support has wavered has waned has been provided by perhaps government groups which are not directly from the government but supported by the government Pakistan has its own problem with the Taliban within Pakistan and we really don't know what form or shape of governance the Taliban will undertake within Afghanistan now in their kind of second rendition so much will depend on that the Taliban's focus in the past has largely been within the country they have not been an exporter of terror like for example the Al Qaeda what happened in the last few years of the Taliban when they were earlier in power was very much at the behest of Al Qaeda for example the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas that happened in 2001 I'm going to come to that in a short while from now but I wanted to ask you the impact on Kashmir the militancy in the Kashmir Valley do you expect as some do that what has happened in Afghanistan would result in an escalation of tensions in the Kashmir Valley? I don't know Parunjai I have covered Kashmir in the past but I don't follow this issue very closely now so I wouldn't like to speculate on that when I was covering Kashmir there were all these stories of Afghan fighters coming in but I don't know how much of that was actual fact and you know I mean there are the Pashtun people on either side of the Durand line have similarities of culture of language so one doesn't know whether all of them were actually Afghans who were being sent there or not and also at that point like I said the Al Qaeda had a big influence within Afghanistan so it really depends on how the new governance of this Taliban shapes up. All right let me ask you let me go back in time Afghanistan in more ways than one is a unique part of the world we know it's landlocked we know it's largely mountainous we know it's you know it's like the intersection of Central Asia and South Asia is bordered on the east and the south by Pakistan Iran on the west Turkmenistan Uzbekistan Tajikistan on the north China and the northwest and if you look back in time it is often said that Afghanistan is unconquerable and in fact it is supposed to be the graveyard of empires. People talk about you know how Afghanistan was a buffer in the great game quote unquote great game between British India and the Russian Empire but you know from the days of Alexander the Great to the Mauryas to the Mughals to the Muslim Arabs to the Mongols to the British to the Soviets to the Americans all of them have failed to quote unquote conquer Afghanistan your views. Well I really hope that nobody can and ever will conquer Afghanistan because I think that's a historical term which should have been outdated long ago but phrases like graveyard of empires etc yeah sometimes also very lazy cliches that we journalists like to use because it's difficult to explain complex concepts but I think certainly they are a very independent minded people and I think the attempts to impose different kinds of projects and different kinds of you know different kinds of values have come up in Afghanistan but I would say this is this also happens within Afghanistan there are multiple cultures and I think the attempts to impose the culture of one part of the country on another has also met with resistance so the reason why I think the international intervention in 2001 was welcomed by a large part of the Afghan population was because they did not like the kind of culture which was being imposed on them and they were used to greater freedoms individual freedoms and they did not like this kind of an imposition so I think yes they are definitely very independent in wanting to determine their own path. Okay we all know that Afghanistan has very high levels of impoverishment education healthcare facilities are inadequate child malnutrition is prevalent corruption lot of the acquisition of arms has been on account of the opium trade and Afghanistan happens to be very much a part of that golden so-called golden triangle so we see here a country which is also as you mentioned earlier not a homogeneous country there are many ethnic groups many things and often they've been at war there's been civil strife civil war but just to put that with the socio-economic conditions that have been prevailing in Afghanistan for a fairly long period of time for several decades if not even more than that how do you reflect on these aspects of Afghanistan? I think Afghanistan has been in conflict now we're entering the fifth decade of conflict you know the Americans keep talking about the forever war and how they could not you know the conflict has they've been there for two decades but Afghans are in the fifth decade of conflict and that has had a real toll on the people and unfortunately I think efforts to revive the economy have been very ad hoc and they have not taken the health of the economy into account so again we have a very project led approach towards the Afghan economy and you probably India builds a dam India builds roads etc etc I think every country has had its own set of priorities and I think a lot of the development aid provided by a lot of the western countries for example followed the their military troop movement you know so they were spending money where their troops were rather than looking at the health of the entire country and Afghanistan is a primarily an agrarian country so efforts should have been made to you know to bring that back to where it could provide subsistence living rather than perhaps some fancier economic projects. Okay Anujita there is it's not just Afghanistan as a country but the Taliban has been negatively stereotyped I could argue in the international media including in India and then these have I mean these kind of stereotypes get reinforced you mentioned earlier in our conversation about the the Bamiyan Buddhhas that you know the the amazing sixth century carvings in the middle of I mean on a mountain side that was carved in which was blown up in March 2001. Now that's one part the other is a treatment of women and we I mean in the international media there's a surface of horror stories we would seek to tell you how terrible how aggressive how how how how fundamentalist the Taliban are your opinion. I think the women of Afghanistan have been used again and again as a tool for to pursue various political projects so again if we are looking at Afghanistan I think the culture of women throughout the country is extremely different Kabul was a city which was much more cosmopolitan than our capitals you know a century ago but in parts of the deep south in Afghanistan the culture is much more conservative and they would observe Pada which in their case would be the Burkha for you know anytime they stepped out of the house and some some women in some parts women don't go out without an escort but this is also part of the local culture. What the Taliban did was try to impose their version of having women not having women in the public space without escort and you know without the proper what they would consider the proper attire throughout the country which like I said was not acceptable to large parts of the country but I think in order to pursue a political project they have not really looked at the Taliban and I would argue that even if from a strategic point of view somebody is viewing the Taliban as an enemy I think it's important to be realistic about actually you know what the enemy is like and I think the rush to demonization has conflated women's rights with this picture of the Taliban which is it's much more nuanced so I'll give you two examples which might be surprising to most people. The Pashtun Wali Code which is the code of the law governing Pashtun tribes talks about Bad and Badal where you exchange women from two families or you give women in exchange for a certain transaction or a certain crime. Now the Taliban had actually put an end to both these practices because they said that this was against the Sharia. Similarly they have in the last few years in many areas where they have had control they have put an end to these exorbitant bride prizes that are prevalent in Afghanistan. So I think a more nuanced appreciation of their character and much of it is extremely regressive because they are imposing the culture as a state party on areas of Afghanistan where the culture is very different it needs to be considered but it's more nuanced than most people understand it to be. Okay we are almost at the end of our conversation on Avita. I have two last questions for you. I look back again and then I'll ask you to look ahead. Look back. I mean look there's a long history. I'm not an expert on the subject. 1919 the third Anglo-Afghan war. Monarchy. King Amanullah. Then Zahecha. For about half a century you had the monarchy and then we see gradually changes happening. Late 70s the Soviets come in 1978. 80s the fight with the Mujahidin. Then we see by the mid 90s most of much of Afghanistan has been captured by the Mujahidin. We know what happened to Najibullah and the terrible way he died. I mean I don't know. I mean I mean people are today contrasting of Ashraf Ghani's fleeing the his country with what happened to Najibullah. But the and then of course the U.S. invasion comes in 2001. When you look back how do you then contextualize what is happening today in the history in the history given the history that very troubled history and the checkered history of Afghanistan. And from here I'd ask you to reflect what is likely to happen in the near future. I think unfortunately Afghanistan has also not been allowed to pursue its own destiny by various countries. You know and Afghans are always blamed for the violence within their country but they have never really been left alone. You talked about how Afghanistan was a buffer between the Tsarist Russia and the British Empire. And I think all along it's been seen as a staging post for various ambitions in the region and outside the region as well. So if Afghans were given a chance we would you know things might be very different. Looking ahead it's very very difficult at this point of time to predict anything but I have been I have friends who are in Afghanistan and friends who are also not not all are trying to leave the country. You know they feel like it's their country and they are there to stay and and work for the country. So I think you know the hope must rest with people that the Afghan people get the kind of governance and the political leadership that they deserve. Thank you so much Anohita. Thank you. Your thoughts your views on what is happening in Afghanistan and as you rightly pointed out it's extremely difficult to predict where what will happen in the near future. And we all hope that the people of Afghanistan will have a greater say in shaping their destiny. Thank you once again for being with us and all of you who've been watching this program do keep watching Newscape.