Three generations of Afghans look at Taleban’s return
KABUL: Seated on a rug in their Kabul living room, three generations of men from the same family sip tea as they discuss the political changes sweeping Afghanistan. The eldest among them fought the Taleban, the middle one grew up under the shadow of their brutal regime and the youngest has never known them. Now, all three fear the arc of history will place the hardline Islamists back in power.
On Saturday, the US and the Taleban signed a deal that would see US troops begin to quit Afghanistan in return for security guarantees from the insurgents. While the US has heralded the deal as a vital step towards peace, many Afghans are deeply skeptical about what comes next. “This is not the right time for the Americans to leave,” said family patriarch Abdul Salam, 68, a former mujahideen fighter who battled the
Taleban in the 1990s.
“Everything will be reversed and the country will go back to civil war like in the ‘90s. No one will be able to control it”, he added, as he displayed a photo of himself standing alongside iconic antiTaleban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. The US-Taleban deal will see thousands of American troops leave Afghanistan provided the insurgents stick to key pledges, such as opening talks with the Afghan government and not letting the country become a jihadist safe haven.
But many assume the Taleban will leverage the dwindling American presence and Washington’s political disengagement to fight for greater gains across Afghanistan, and eventually exert broad influence in Kabul. While raising his family in the capital in the 1990s, Salam heard the Taleban were torturing people from his home region of Panjshir, one of the few parts of Afghanistan that never fully fell to the insurgents. He decided to join the fight and moved his family to the mountainous region.
“There were no Taleban in my province,” he said, as he proudly showed pictures of comrades who lost their lives fighting the insurgents. But food in the besieged province was so scarce that the family faced starvation-eating grass at one point-and fled in 1999 to neighboring Pakistan. Two years later, AlQaeda, sheltered by the Taleban, conducted the September 11 attacks on America, prompting a US-led invasion and the collapse of the religious fundamentalists’ regime.