Afghanistan was not always Afghan, not in the lousy sense that is now associated with the term. Several factors, some domestic and some external, paved the way for this state of affairs. But the most consequential of them was the military coup. That was what let the genie out of the bottle, opening the door to foreign occupations, the dismantlement of the state, waves of millions of refugees, and death from violence, destitution, and pain.
When King Zahir Shah was in power, things were moving forward at a reasonable but calm pace in Afghanistan: slow and steady modernization programs, gradual improvements to the status of women that avoided provocation of Afghanistan society, with its tribal composition and values, a neutral position in the Cold War as the country sought the Western and Soviet support for development and infrastructure projects, and an inclination toward peaceful solutions for the “Pashtun question” with neighboring Pakistan.
Everything changed with the 1973 coup launched by Daoud Khan, the king's cousin, at the height of the Cold War. From this military coup came the declaration of a republic, alignment with Moscow in the Cold War, and the invocation of a hardline Pashtun nationalist bent. Communists were then appointed to government - a decision that Afghanistan's traditional society, and Western countries, were deeply hostile to.
The rest of the Afghan story is well known: Communist officers ousted Daoud and killed him in 1978, and then a conflict began between the two Communist parties: the People’s (Khalq) Party, which was more radical, and the Banner (Parsham) Party. Their split and their weak governance led to the Soviet invasion of 1979, which Moscow launched a few months after the Iranian revolution amid fears of this Islamic revolution having an influence on its Muslims in Central Asia. The occupying forces killed the president that the Soviets had themselves put in place. The "Mujahideen" war launched against the Soviets and communists, garnering broad Western and Islamic support, eventually ended with the Soviets withdrawing their forces between 1988 and 1989 under the new policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. However, what began was worse: the rise of the "Mujahideen" regime was accompanied by a devastating and long civil war between their leaders and ethnic groups, which led to the Taliban’s rise to power and the seizure of Kabul in 1996. Their guest in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, who had volunteered to take part in its “Jihad” against the Soviets, carried out the crime of September 11, 2001, leading to the American war that overthrew the Taliban and then killed the founder of Al-Qaeda. However, after having gulped up most of the Afghan countryside, the Taliban regained control of the capital when the US withdrew two years ago.
Over the course of this long and bloody journey, one and a half million had been killed by 1992, most of them victims of Russia's scorched earth policy. The infighting between the "Mujahideen" cost hundreds of thousands of lives and thousands of prisoners executed; tens of thousands were subsequently killed during and after the US war. Hunger and disease killed tens of thousands during this period, and far far more were killed or seriously injured by landmines.
As a result of indiscriminate Russian strikes, which were especially devastating in 1982, mass displacement began, with 2.8 million Afghans seeking refuge in Pakistan and 1.5 million fleeing to Iran. By the late 1980s, over six million Afghans had sought refuge in foreign countries. Then, with the US withdrawal, another 1.6 million sought refuge abroad, raising the number of refugees and displaced persons whose homes and areas have been destroyed to 8.2 million, out of 40 million Afghans. This figure will probably increase under the weight of economic decline and ideological dogma, which is pushing many Afghans, especially young people, the educated, and women, to leave the country.
Before the US pulled out its forces, Afghanistan had a GDP per capita of $368, but this figure has decreased by 20 percent since then. This is one of many reasons to be skeptical about the efficacy of the ban on opium cultivation that the state announced in April 2022. Reports indicate that opium cultivation is expanding, especially amid a decline in revenue from traditional agricultural cultivation, Afghanistan's increasingly deteriorating infrastructure, and the state's weak control over several regions across the country.
Thus, opium smuggling to and through Pakistan and Iran is increasing. It seems that the Taliban border guards and some of the top brass are not innocent in this regard. Moreover, it is estimated that around 90 percent of the world's opium comes from Afghanistan today, and the number of Afghans now consuming it, in light of broad unemployment, despair, and other similar factors, has now risen to four million.
Some of the headlines we see coming from Afghanistan undoubtedly differ from the current headlines about the life and politics of the Arab Levant. However, there is no doubt that many headlines are common to both, while Afghanistan draws a picture of where we could be headed that is difficult to overlook or ignore. A political system founded on cruelty, broken civic ties, foreign occupations, economic collapse, the erasure of national borders, bursts of uncontrolled waves of asylum and displacement, and opium - Captagon in our case... All of this warns that the worst is yet to come, and it is probably coming to us at rising speed.
