In Pakistan we cultivated the Taliban, then turned on them. Now we can only hope they forgive us
Not too long ago, Pakistan and Afghanistan were called Af-Pak: two countries joined at the hip, doomed to live and die together. You didn’t get to choose your neighbours, we were told. Geography, we were taught, was our destiny.
There was a lot of talk about geostrategic significance – which was the Pakistan military’s way of saying there were great advantages to be derived from our unfortunate neighbours.
More than four decades ago, our leaders insisted we had to help the Afghan mujahideen fight the Soviets because that would help us ward off communism in our own country. Having lived most of my life in Pakistan, I have probably come across half a dozen communists – and even they never agreed with each other.
That first jihad made generations of Afghans homeless but it also made some people in Pakistan very rich. The Soviet-Afghan war also sustained our brutal military dictatorship, brought us abundant supplies of cheap and high-quality heroin, and introduced something called “Kalashnikov culture”, which made it easier to settle political and personal disputes by killing each other.
Pakistan won that war. Our generals and seasoned defence experts still can’t stop boasting that not only did we defeat the Soviet Union but we also brought about the end of communism. The United States and the rest of the free world surely owed us. But they upped and left. This was when we learned what the rest of the world already knew: America had no shame.
But when the victorious mujahideen finally took power in Kabul, a few years after the Soviets left, they turned out to be the wrong sort for Pakistan. After all the years we spent training and hosting them, they still didn’t really like us much. So another war had to be started to get rid of our mujahideen.
Taliban fighters, taught in our madrasas and sometimes armed by us, marched to Kabul and took care of those bad mujahideen. Finally there was peace. We envied the Taliban’s rustic justice and yearned for our own caliphate. But after a few years, we realised once again that they didn’t really like us and our way of life, even though we were one of the only three countries in the world to recognise their Islamic Emirate. When a Pakistani football team went to play a match in Afghanistan – wearing what footballers wear, shorts and shirts – the Taliban shaved their heads and sent them back.
We were still wondering what to do with these tricky Taliban when the World Trade Center fell – and the world let us know that we had accidentally got into bed with the bad guys. Apparently our Taliban were harbouring world-class terrorists like Osama bin
Laden. Are you with us or with them, we were asked: choose wisely or you’ll be bombed back to the stone age. And who knows, if you side with us, you might get some money.
Don’t get us wrong, we still loved the Taliban – and we believed in our hearts that they were better Muslims than us. But we loved our country more, and our new military dictatorship had some cashflow issues. We turned on the Taliban. We pretended that we were only being responsible members of the world community by doing so. We hoped the Taliban would understand. We handed over the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan to the US; we gave the Americans our airbases to bomb the Taliban, who we then packed off to Guantánamo Bay.
We collected the bounty money but we also tried to shield some of the Taliban. We nourished them with one hand and stabbed them with the other. And while doing all this, we kept whispering in their ear that it was all for their own good. It was a clever strategy, we were told by our strategists.
Consider the story of Mullah Baradar, one of the founders and leaders of the Taliban. We supported him when he was part of the Taliban government, and then we left him alone for a bit while he and some of his Taliban friends lived for a while in Quetta, just on our side of the border. Unfortunately, in 2010 we had to arrest him again. But then we released him eight years later. Now it turns out he’s the new king – or perhaps just the kingmaker – in Kabul. But we live in hope that he’ll remember our hospitality.
Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency and one of the many self-appointed ideologues of Afghan jihad, once said that we defeated the Soviet Union with the help of America, and one day the world will say that we defeated America with the help of America.
Now many Pakistanis are gloating, while others are warning about the future. We are doing a victory dance, but there is dread in our hearts. We do talk about stuff like women and children and free media and the international consensus, but we are hoping that the Taliban will remember the good times we had together. We hope they will not remember their suffering too much.
We hope they’ll remember our suffering too. Last time we betrayed the Taliban, their Pakistani cousins brought the Taliban-style fight to our streets, mosques and schools. For many years, we told ourselves that there were good Taliban (mainly in Afghanistan) and bad Taliban (mainly in Pakistan). While trying to uphold that distinction, more than 70,000 Pakistanis were killed – including 132 in an army-run school, murdered in a few hours. The American military lost more than 2,300 lives in 20 years.
We already have a third generation of Afghans growing up in refugee camps, and now a new generation of Taliban taking over Kabul. We have always hoped that the Afghan Taliban will somehow rein in the Pakistani Taliban and turn them into civil society workers. For now, they have set them free from Afghan jails.
We were told not to celebrate the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. But some of us couldn’t help ourselves. Our prime minister, Imran Khan, who gets on very well with many of our old friends, took a moment during an announcement about a new educational curriculum to declare that Afghans had finally broken the shackles of mental slavery. Images of American military dogs being bundled into aeroplanes as Afghans cling to taxiing US aircraft prove again what most of us learned three decades ago: that America has no shame.
Yet although we have won in Afghanistan, many of us fear that a new, even more deadly war might be starting any time now.
Mohammed Hanif is a Karachibased author. His latest novel is Red Birds
people of greater Vernon got the order to evacuate, and all 66,000 of us tried to move out at once.
Later that day, the cultural centre across the street decided to go ahead with its live outdoor concert. Like passengers on the Titanic, we sat on our ashy front steps and listened to the music. To our delight, the first rainstorm in weeks blew in to rescue us, and we jumped up to dance in the raindrops, accompanied by the happy whoops of the musicians over the loudspeakers.
As a result of the rain, the evacuation alert was rescinded, at least for most of Vernon. However, the west side remained evacuated, with dozens of homes burned to the ground. I joined many other community members in volunteering to help with the registration of several thousand evacuees and their referral to emergency services.
It’s good that the BC government looks after people’s basic needs: shelter, food, clothing, incidentals, but this doesn’t alleviate their misery. These were emotionally exhausted people: an elderly woman who longed for her home and garden; a man who had put his back out with the effort of moving house; a family who, in rescuing their grandmother with her oxygen tank, were forced to jettison most of their belongings. Saddest of all was a young family who broke down telling us about the mother dog with puppies that they had to abandon to the flames when fleeing the fire.
In the cadet barracks on the south side of town, 250 soldiers were brought in to help us, and a camp was set up on the north side for 330 firefighters. A small group of locals have gathered at a spot on the highway to cheer them home each evening.
My son, a 21-year-old firefighter, called. Since he was new to this, we had hoped they would put him to work digging ditches, but he was sent straight to the front, where he said it was like a war zone: helicopters buzzing, smoke thick, trees suddenly candling.
My brother called. A fire researcher, he’s been making predictive models from satellite imagery for the firefighters. He was feeling anxious for us, as he could see that a second heatwave was on its way, to be followed by gusting winds that might stir up our fire again.
Once again, we have been thrust into a period of uncertainty. What will happen to us and to other endangered communities to the north and east of our fire?
A federal election has just been called in Canada. We desperately hope our region’s voters, given all that we have gone through, will send a strong protest vote to Ottawa, saying they must take the climate crisis seriously. The land around us is burning, the air is unbreathable, people in our community have become climate refugees. This is an existential threat. If not now, when?
Mary Stockdale is an adjunct professor in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia
that Brexit stops them processing turkeys, Johnson will accuse Brussels of stealing the Great British Christmas.
Opinion polls show that Britain still split more or less down the middle on the wisdom of having quit the EU, but the large bloc of Brexit-sceptics belies reluctance to relitigate the point, even among former remainers. Regret for the way things have turned out can nest comfortably in English politics alongside fatalistic resignation to the status quo.
That does not mean the prime minister is invulnerable on Europe. The Tory party will always demand pugnacity at a pitch that is incompatible with grown-up diplomacy. The method so far has been to capitulate to the EU on substance, covering the retreat with incendiary rhetoric. But that game becomes increasingly dangerous when the dispute is over the Northern Ireland protocol. Brussels might get a portion of the blame, but if the Good Friday agreement goes up in flames on Johnson’s watch, and he somehow dodges the charge of arson, he is still on the hook for negligence.
Even if the prime minister is unmoved by a sense of duty to the peace process, there is a risk to his authority in stoking anti-EU grievance. Reminding his core constituency of leavers why they supported him in the first place – to get Brexit done – risks advertising the dishonesty of having previously claimed victory.
Happily for the Tories, there is no pressure from the opposition. Keir Starmer wants to woo back voters who abandoned his party because they felt it had stopped listening to them on the whole suite of issues relating to the referendum, from immigration control to the democratic principle of honouring the result once the votes had been counted. That relationship will not be fixed with lectures on the enduring folly of Brexit. Labour sees no route back to power treading the European side in arguments that Johnson can frame in terms of national dignity.
British politics still has remainers and leavers, but those labels tend to describe emotional attachments, not policy prescriptions. Pro-Europeans are not interested in fixing Johnson’s deal, which they see as irredeemable; and leavers cannot concede that their fundamental premise was flawed. Neither side is yet ready to work with the banal reality that Brexit is an unspectacular failure: neither triumph, nor apocalypse. It is the damp smell in British politics that can be endured, but not quite ignored. The longer it is left untreated, the more expensive it will be to fix.
But there is no realistic conversation about the relationship Britain should have with the rest of Europe, if not the one it has now; and the relationship it has now is the product of avoiding realistic debate for decades. As a result, the government – and perversely the opposition too – is committed to the task of finding a purpose in something that will keep proving itself pointless.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
approaching the complexity, difficulty and importance of figuring out how to educate 50 million public school students during a global pandemic. The ever-changing conditions of the pandemic have challenged the most wellfunded and expert-laden government bodies, from the CDC to the IRS, let alone the part-time school board members who often hold other full-time jobs.
The high transmissibility of the Delta variant has complicated what many had hoped would be a return to relatively normal schooling. Amid rising case numbers, several states have reintroduced indoor mask mandates, and numerousrecentpolls show that a majority of parents support mask mandates in schools.
Most of the school board protests are being organized by parents who oppose such rules, but there has been some pro-mask activism and protest.
In Mishawka, Wisconsin, about 50 parents held a protest after the local school board voted to make masks optional. And in Fort Worth, Texas, pro-mask parents held a mock funeral procession to the home of the president of the school board, where they protested against her decision not to hold a vote on a mask mandate. (In one case this month, a few dozen parents and activists formed a picket line in front of a Wisconsin high school in order to show support of their school board, which was being criticized over diversity issues. “We’re not here to be angry, but to be supportive,” said Matthew Sauer, a local pastor.)
Rather than being viewed as a simple precaution, however, the question of masks for children has become a partisan political issue, absorbed into a broader culture war between liberals and conservatives over everything from how schools should teach the history of slavery to the admissions policies of selective schools and whether transgender children should be allowed to play sports and go to the bathroom.
The anti-mask school board protests in August follow a wave of protests and heated debates about “critical race theory” (CRT) that consumed state legislatures and local school board meetings in May and June. (Critical race theory is a legal theory examining the ways racism is embedded in US law; it is not taught in secondary schools, but its name has been co-opted by opponents of progressive education reforms and diversity training.) Anti-mask and antiCRT messages frequently intermingle at the protests, and some groups, such as Moms for Liberty, are organizing on both fronts.
Those anti-CRT protests are largely a continuation of previous disputes about how America’s history should be taught in public schools, from concerted efforts by the Ku Klux Klan to take over school boards in the 1920s to a 2018 decision by a Wisconsin school board to ban discussions of “white privilege” after parents complained about a Martin Luther King Day assembly, according to Laats.
“The history of school board politics is a great way to chart the career of all culture war issues,” said Laats. “School boards made perfect battlefields.”
Throughout the 20th century, local school board fights turned into national focal points. “National pundits could jump into local cases to make their own points,” said Laats. “Out-of-towners would flock to local school disputes, then small-circulation rightwing magazines would try to blow up the coverage.”
The school board fights of today follow a similar pattern, but thanks to the pandemic and the internet, they are occurring simultaneously at dozens of boards across the country, rather than just one.
National political leaders and conservative institutions have played an active role in stoking the surge in school board activism, with groups such as the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute promoting the false idea that CRT is taught in public schools, and former Trump administration officials establishing new organizations to fund school board campaigns.In June, the rightwing Christian group FRC Action (an offshoot of the Family Research Council, which is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to its extreme anti-LGBTQ+ positions) held a “boot camp” to train volunteers for “doing battle on the frontlines” of school board politics.
“Every parent should show up to their school board meetings and raise hell if their kids are being taught Critical Race Theory or are forced to wear masks,” tweeted Charlie Kirk, the head of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA, in May. (Kirk, 27, attended a school board meeting in Chandler, Arizona, in June and delivered a brief public comment against CRT, then posted the video on YouTube with the title “Charlie Kirk DESTROYS Critical Race Theory at School Board Meeting”, where it attracted just 40,000 views.)
To Laats, the conservative movement’s preoccupation with particular education issues speaks to its dislike of social, demographic and cultural change. As young people grow and adopt new ideas and attitudes, schools become a “collecting point for grievances”. “Right now it’s mask mandates and CRT,” he said. “In different decades it would be subversive socialism and Elvis Presley.
“Schools become the only thing that people can see to blame.”