Afghans are now on their own

The West has condemned Afghanistan to slavery

The catastrophe that Afghan democrats have consistently predicted would befall their country as a consequence of an ignominious “peace talks” retreat is unfolding in precisely the way the NATO countries were warned it would, going back at least a decade. All their nightmares are becoming real.

And even so, the indignity endured by Canada’s dearest Afghan friends — made to stand in a fetid sewage canal at Hamid Karzai International Airport, their papers in hand, calling out over rolls of razor wire to Canadian soldiers who are powerless to help them — shocks the conscience. Still, like the Sunni-shia divides we’re always told about, the schism that pits the target audiences of CNN and Fox News against one another has rendered Americans entirely incapable of having an honest conversation among themselves about what they’ve done.

Their shouting emanates outward from Washington to Ottawa and London, and to Paris and Berlin, and drowns out everything else. Smiles curl on the faces of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hay’at Tahrir alsham. There’s laughter sneering from Belarus to Myanmar, and from Tehran to Beijing. And there is no way around it.

The Afghan people, nearly 38 million people, median age 19.5 years old, are now on their own. In the years following the rout of the savage Islamic Emirate in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, the long-running surveys run by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found Afghans to be the most optimistic people in the world. More recent surveys by the Asia Foundation show that nearly 90 per cent of Afghans have no sympathy at all for the Taliban. But it is to Taliban rule we have delivered them.

We are “war weary,” we want out of “forever wars” in the “graveyard of empires,” and other such pretexts and comforting lies we tell ourselves. And so the Afghan people have been sold into the slavery of the most bloody-minded and bloodthirsty sociopaths among the ruling elites of the longsuffering Pashtun tribes of the Afghan-pakistan borderlands.

There’s no way around it.

Dress them up however you like. Hamid Karzai, the deranged former president now sitting with the Taliban in Kabul hoping to cut himself in on the action, is partial to high-fashion silk robes and a lambskin hat. A turban and cotton leggings is the ensemble preferred by Khalilur-rahman Haqqani, the al-qaida lieutenant who still has a $5 million bounty on his head, now assigned to the post of Kabul’s security chief.

Karzai is chief of the Popolzai tribe. The Haqqanis, whose madrassas in Pakistan have graduated hundreds of suicide-bombers over the years with the connivance of Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence agency, comprise the most feared elites of the Zadran tribe. Beside Karzai, in pleasant conversation with the Taliban now in Kabul, sits Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the ISI’S “Butcher of Kabul” from the warlord fratricides of the post-soviet 1980s, a monster so uncontrollably vicious that the ISI elevated Mullah Omar’s Taliban in his place in the 1990s. Same tribe, though. Omar and Hekmatyar hail from the Pashtuns’ Noorzai and Ghilzai tribes.

This is not to say that Pashtun tribal leaders are always drunk on human blood. President Ashraf Ghani, the World Bank economist who fled Kabul only days ago, comes from the Ghilzai line. And this is not to say that Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, who comprise perhaps slightly more than a third of the country’s population, and have produced some of Afghanistan’s bravest liberal democrats, are all somehow content with the current state of affairs.

But go back as far as the Columbia University graduates of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the Stalinists who mounted a coup and invited the Russian invasion of 1979, and it’s the same crowd. When not cannibalizing itself, the PDPA produced three presidents, all Ghilzai tribe grandees.

After Mullah Omar’s death in 2013 or thereabouts, his successor was Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, from the Durrani tribal confederacy, which has run Afghanistan for most of the past two centuries. Mansour was killed in a drone strike in 2016. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who led the “peace talks” with Donald Trump’s administration, which laid the groundwork for U.S. president Joe Biden’s capitulation, hails from the Sadozais, a sub-tribe of Karzai’s Durrani Popolzais.

The Taliban’s supreme leader now is Hibatullah Akhundzada, a leading cleric of the Noorzai tribe. Akhundzada is remembered, among Afghans old enough to remember the Taliban years, as the head of the sharia courts from 1996 to 2001. He’s the judge who presided over the execution of women by firing squad in Kabul’s stadium. The head-chopper in chief.

And it is to these gargoyles the “west” has delivered the great people of Afghanistan. And that is why hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been streaming out of the country in the early stages of a refugee crisis that will rival the Syrian debacle. And that is why we have reduced Canada’s closest friends in Afghanistan to wading in latrine ditches outside Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul.