The war in Afghanistan and the cultural "superiority" of the West

I have been closely following the news flows and the various analyses in the national and international press on the US defeat in the war in Afghanistan. I have been struck by the fact that a large percentage of the analyses and news approaches are structured from the perspective of Western cultural values' view of the Christian world. In most cases, they are structured from the perspective of the supposed cultural superiorities of the civilisations of the Western world vis-à-vis the civilisations of the Islamic world in the East.

Indeed, glaring errors are evident when examining the problems of a war in a Sunni Muslim-majority country like Afghanistan, whose territory has for millennia been a crossroads of civilisations, cultures and centres of imperial disputes in Central Asia with the West's vision.

A country with millennia-old conservative cultures, structured on the basis of complex tribal and clan networks, proud of their lineages and identity values dating back more than 3,000 years. These values are totally different from those of the cultures of the Western Christian world. A population whose strong identity values in their millennia-long struggles against the occupations of foreign forces have given them a mystique of warrior civilisation that has enabled them to militarily defeat the powerful forces of occupation from Alexander the Great to the present day with the forces of the United States and the major powers of Europe.

That's why they call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires: Macedonian, British, Soviet and American. In the 19th and 20th centuries the British and Russians fought over its rule, but the Afghans allied with the Russians and defeated the British. Then it was occupied by the Russians and they allied with the Americans and defeated them; both the British and the Americans have failed in their political pretensions to westernise a Sunni, millenarian, tribal, clannish, Sunni Muslim civilisation like Afghanistan with the values of western democracy.

It is a country where political parties are structured on the basis of tribal identity ties that shape the Sunni Muslim thought of Sufism and the Wahhabism of the mullahs, ulema and intellectuals. The Taliban are a synthesis of the traditional value systems of the Pashtun tribes, which have dozens of mosaic derivations that are difficult for a person with a Western culture to decipher at first glance.

It is not a matter of apologising for their fundamentalism, radicalism and methods of warfare, but of putting their political vision in context with other elements beyond the usual manipulation of information by the Western media and the frequent labelling of them as "barbaric", backward and uneducated peoples, because they do not think and act in accordance with our Western values of democracy.

Now the US withdrawal was a matter of negotiation with the Taliban to protect their strategic interests in Central Asia and in the process structure certain alliances to hinder the strategic interests in the region of the axis of Iran, Russia and China.

It is therefore interesting to know that the Taliban emerged from the mujahideen Koranic schools (madrasas) in Pakistan, funded by the US and its allies, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and Pakistan, to fight against the Soviet invasion. The Mujahideen were part of the US-allied forces fighting the Soviet occupation. After their withdrawal and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, they continued to fund and provide them with military and intelligence assistance through the CIA and the Pentagon in order to check the expansion of Russian and Iranian strategic interests in Central Asia and the Middle East. 

The US used its alliance with the Taliban to block Iranian and Russian pipeline construction in Central Asia. Its gamble was to pit Sunni fundamentalist groups against Shi'a groups in Iran's orbit. His policy towards the Taliban changed in 1997 when pressure from US feminist associations against policies that violated the rights of Afghan women emerged and the Taliban took Osama bin Laden, who had become a military priority for US policy, into their domain.

When the Taliban refused to cooperate in operations against bin Laden, the White House decided to declare war on them. In other words, the US does not have friends, but strategic media allies. One of its biggest blunders was to arm an army and police force, most of whose members were Pashtuns from the same tribe and clans as the Taliban.

José E. Mosquera, Colombian journalist, essayist, and writer.