The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan revealed the extent of Western arrogance | Polly Toynbee

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Here ends the strange illusion of the West that it might use its military might to transform Afghanistan into a stable democracy, and a bright path to moderate Islam. In the shadow of the burning New York Twin Towers, you’re drifting on the tide of “Something Must Be Done,” the drums of war to stop terror and free the oppressed. We have learned a bitter lesson.

How deceptively easy the 2001 victory was, Taliban fighters fled to once again melt among their population, grumbling, “You have hours, we have time.” They just turned back the clock on a lost 20 years.

A year after that empty “victory,” I was in Afghanistan, looking for signs of cultural shifts and social progress. But it was already clear that the West had neither the political will, nor the financial generosity, nor the scope of interest to match the tumultuous rhetoric that we were so happy about.

Remember how loud that speech was. Tony Blair said at the Labor Party conference in October 2001: “This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle down again. Before they do that, let’s rearrange the world around us…only moral force. For a world that behaves as a society is capable of doing so. Thanks to our common endeavour, we achieve more together than we can achieve alone.” It was a powerfully poignant vision – but seriously wrong. I doubt anyone will ever talk again about “rearranging the world around us”, except for the jihadists. No more Christian soldiers. Here the American century finally ends (although the worst may follow).

According to Blair’s doctrine — articulated in his 1999 Chicago speech, to persuade Bill Clinton and NATO to step up their attempts to stop the mass expulsions of Albanians from Kosovo — there was a moral obligation to intervene. Do the right thing where you can. But Afghanistan failed on two criteria of his creed: Action must be “cautious.” [undertaken]And only if one was willing to put up with ‘the long run’. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was not ‘prudent’ and there was not enough political and financial investment to ‘endure’.

Joe Biden’s 20-year “eternal war” seemed to be a long endurance, a sentiment backed by the force of US polls. But even the lives of a trillion dollars and 4,200 Americans weren’t enough. What the late American right-wing guru Charles Krauthammer once called a “uniquely benign imperialist,” along with other NATO contributors, left first a budget to President Hamid Karzai when I was there with only $460 million for its residents, then $22.6 million. This was closer to the budget of an English local authority than anything that could create a new Afghanistan

So we forget the “rearrangement” of what the World Bank called “the most miserable country in the world,” spoiled by its geography among belligerents and cursed with a war-torn history. How eager Western politicians were to be misled by the smooth-talking and educated leaders of the West in Kabul, who promise the impossible, to root out corruption and spread good governance, even as they handed over the army to warlords and the money for the security forces disappeared. Such was the folly, arrogant, wishful thinking about culture and society that they thought outsiders could “reorganize”.

The conquest brought not only a clash of culture, but a clash of wealth. NGOs and foreigners flocked to rising rents for the only remaining decent housing in Kabul; They were competing to do good, and each country brought its own women’s project. The angry Minister of Public Works, who earns $35 a month, asked me to look at the cars of foreign officials and NGOs: “Stand by my window and you’ll see 200 white Land Cruisers pass by in an hour! They spend our money.” One local aid worker summed up the clash between the rich and the poor: “They expect Pringles wherever they go.”

Any little hope for Afghanistan vanished in Iraq. A year after the invasion, not only the army, but the NGOs and all the carpet bag dealers in the war zones were already packing up to move on. “Next year in Baghdad,” some old journalists and NGO employees were cheerfully calling, as US news networks collapsed, as the story went cold. “Don’t go,” the Afghan leaders begged. The Minister of Women’s Affairs, a returning law professor, warned me of the fragility of the new women’s rights. “If you leave us, the fundamentalists will rise again.” This fear was strong on my next visit eight years later: the Afghan people saw that Western leaders wanted out – and so did the patient Taliban.

The Taliban and their pathological misogyny did not emerge out of nowhere – the patriarchal structure of Afghan society was evident. The women were still shrouded in burqas with nets blocking the view. Men still treated these invisible things as troublesome, and kept them out of the way on the sidewalks. Save the Women was the reason so many of us supported the conquest – and so many improved in their work and lives, most of them educated. There was nothing more exciting than watching hundreds of excited girls crammed into benches in a dusty tent chanting messages off a board in three-hour shifts. This is something learned, a lesson has not been lost, and its effects will last for life on those who benefited from it. But what now? Two girls’ schools were bombed in the week before I got there, and earlier this year, 85 girls in a school were bombed. Only a third of women still read. Now listen to the voices of female journalists suffering from terrorism, no matter what Taliban officials tell the world this week.

What will you show for 20 years? Afghanistan entered 2021 with 18.4 million people in humanitarian need. Life expectancy has gone up – but only at the same rate as before. GDP has barely risen compared to other low-income countries.

But the World Bank figures do not include its dominant export, opium. The United Nations says the amount of land granted for its cultivation increased by 37% last year. The relentless “war on drugs”, with the United States bombing heroin labs, has barely affected the trade of opium growers – Afghanistan is the source of 95% of opiates on Europe’s streets. This is how the Taliban and warlords derive their financial power. Here their power and the country’s endemic corruption could have been dealt a fatal blow by legitimizing that global trade.

Ending the failed drug ban, which exploits the children of Britain’s “county lines” and breeds corruption in poor countries, is a powerful measure the West can adopt. Combined with the urgent duty to take in Afghan refugees, this is a real “re-arrangement” that we must make as the country’s final testament. The other is to learn the lesson of bitter realpolitik from Blair’s creed: Without will and ability, his idea of ​​”moral force” begs for disaster.

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