As the first anniversary of the Afghan Taliban comes in power, many people are debating whether Afghanistan is getting better or worse.
Of course, this cannot be judged in black and white.
But even the Western media, hostile to the Taliban, have to admit that the social environment in Afghanistan under Atta is significantly safer.
For example, the chart below is a BBC-related report on the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan between 2012 and 2022.
You can see that this year, compared to before, the contrast is very large.
Even though there are still occasional terrorist attacks and some kidnappings and robberies in Afghanistan, the current generally stable social environment is already quite difficult for the Afghan people who have suffered from war.
This can also be considered the greatest credit to the Afghan Taliban at present.
However, in an extremely complex domestic and international environment, whether the Taliban government can continue to maintain a long-term stable situation is still a difficult test.
After all, peace and stability are the primary prerequisites for a country's economic and social development.
But when it comes to the economic and social development of Afghanistan, this year has been quite bumpy.
So far, the Afghan Taliban regime has not been recognized by the international mainstream community, which has led to a severe reduction in the international aid it receives.
In the 20 years since the overthrow of the Taliban 1.0, the Us-led Afghan government has had an average of 80 percent of its revenue, relying on international aid and donations.
Foreign aid can account for 80%-90% of a country's fiscal revenue for a long time, and such a government is still talking about independence.
Moreover, most of this aid comes from the Western world, led by the United States.
In other words, since the end of 2001, the United States, with a group of Western brothers, has been "paying" for the Afghan government it has supported for 20 years to continue its life and equip the Afghan government army.
In 2016, under the flags of the United States and The United States, the men and women of the Afghan Air Force trained by the US military took a group photo
Unexpectedly, after the Americans spent 20 years and $2.26 trillion, the Afghan regime changed from the Taliban to the Taliban.
So the U.S. government immediately blackfaceed and directly froze the Afghan government's $9.5 billion in assets, saying that it had no psychological shadow — this is the money I used to play before.
This year, many parts of Afghanistan also suffered from a sustained drought, coupled with the large-scale wave of refugees fleeing at the time of regime change, which seriously affected agricultural production, which was already very weak.
In the early 20 years, thanks to foreign aid, Afghans were basically enough to eat.
Then, with food to eat or even to eat, coupled with religious influence and the traditional consciousness of agricultural society, Afghanistan's population production has always been particularly powerful, and in 20 years, it has almost doubled.
As a result, we see that the Taliban 2.0 will face great difficulties in coming to power – Afghanistan's actual production capacity is not much stronger than it was 20 years ago, and it coincides with natural and man-made disasters, and the population they desperately need to feed is almost double that of 20 years ago.
Obviously, it is the Taliban's obligation to get nearly 39 million Afghans to eat as quickly as possible.
After all, there are fewer explosions and terrorist attacks, and people do have a certain life safety guarantee, but if they can't eat, they will still die!
Then, according to the usual law, the first measure to eat a full meal is to liberate the productive forces and develop the productive forces.
An Afghan copper mine – one of the few industrial industries in Afghanistan
However, it has been seen that the Taliban have begun to restore the "sharia" in various fields and have tried to carry out various initiatives to govern the country by "sharia law".
Many career fields and secondary and higher education in Afghanistan today exclude women, and even women need to be accompanied by male guardians when they go out on the streets.
Such "retrogressive" behavior, internationally, has deepened the difficulty of establishing identification and goodwill with this regime;
In Afghanistan, such an operation seems illogical——— when you confine half of the labor resources and school-age adolescents at home, where do you talk about developing productive forces and social economy, and improving the education level and civic quality of all citizens?
What's more, the consumption power of women, especially working women, is of great significance to driving the national economy, especially the tertiary industry.
Such unmasked Afghan urban women who dare to demonstrate in the streets are a very small minority
Imagine if this policy continues, they will lose their ability to contact society and support themselves from generation to generation, and they will only be "traded" from their fathers and brothers to their husbands like commodities.
Afghanistan, as the only country in the world where women live longer than men, is indeed telling.
In addition, in accordance with the "Shariah", the requirement for men and women to dress when they go out, the suppression and exclusion of music and entertainment activities, and the mandatory regulations on men's beards.
Taliban's "no shaving order"
At the moment of the epidemic, do not wear a mask, and then grow a circle of beard, all kinds of transmission hidden dangers, can be imagined.
Moreover, after the beginning of the "rule of law according to the religion", women should wrap up their whole bodies, men's hair is not allowed to be fashionable, and beards are not allowed to be shaved, which makes the survival prospects of barbershops and other beauty industries really worrying.
There are other tertiary industries in a similar dilemma, such as fashion store owners, cartoonists, various music entertainment practitioners, and so on.
In addition, for various reasons, when the regime changed last year, a large number of afghan professionals and technicians fled in panic, resulting in a serious loss of domestic talent.
Obviously, this has exacerbated the dilemma of today's economic development in Afghanistan, which is stagnant.
In addition, so far, the Taliban have not yet built their own complete air force.
In addition to the problem of craftsmanship, there is a particular psychological obstacle for them to overcome – their proud beard and inability to wear a flying helmet.
For example, the oxygen mask matching the helmet must be close to the face to have a real effect.
The U.S. Army F-35 is equipped with a helmet and mask
In low-pressure, high-wind and cold flying environments, flying helmets are the key to maintaining life and combat effectiveness.
Former pilot of Afghan government forces
In fact, to say that the successful industrialization on the basis of a very backward and low foundation is not a delusion.
At that time, the Soviet Union and china were all made up of such hard work.
According to this law, if we want to develop The productive forces of Afghanistan, we must first bring Afghanistan into modern society.
And one of the great signs of entering modern society is secularization.
In fact, if you look at the map, you will find that the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, these 5 Stans, before "joining" the Soviet Union, their degree of secularization was not high.
During those years, the majority of Muslim women in Central Asia, from the beginning of their menarche, had to wear "Palenya" (a masked burqa, similar to the "buka" in the Middle East) and need to be accompanied by men in their homes, otherwise they would be accused of blasphemy, beatings and persecution, and even lose their sexual names.
In some areas, husbands even have the right to kill their un veiled wives and daughters with mullah's consent.
The Bride and groom, Marriage Registry in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1925. This was the first year that Ukraine joined the Soviet Union, and women had to go out in burqas and masks
Until the Soviet political workers were stationed all over Central Asia.
The Soviet Union launched a vigorous literacy campaign in Central Asia, and paid special attention to training farmers and herdsmen in vocational skills to meet the needs of industrialization.
In the process, the Soviet Union dominated the "veiling movement" of women in Central Asia.
Material determines consciousness, the economic base determines the superstructure, and Central Asian women, after having culture and work, finally burned the last piece of "Palenya" in the 1930s.
To this day, the female labor force participation rate in the Muslim countries of the former Soviet Union is much higher than that of other Muslim-majority countries.
Uzbekistan in 1969 – Everywhere in the Soviet Union went, ballet theaters and cultural palaces were built
So, let's look at Afghanistan.
The former "Red Prince" Daoud and later the Government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which was later supported by the Soviet Union, are also well aware that industrialization and secularization, which are mutually reinforcing, have tried to eliminate Afghan tribal chiefs and religious mullahs through land reform, and to completely transform Afghan society with the power of industrialization.
In Kabul in the 1970s, girls represented a small minority of urban groups, and rural women were still shackled
However, all their reforms failed, and their own fate was tragic - Daoud's entire family was wiped out; In 1996, after the Taliban 1.0 invaded Kabul, Najibra was tortured to death with extreme cruelty, and his body was hung for a week before being thrown into a stinky ditch.
In fact, Unlike the five "Stans" of Central Asia, Afghanistan does not have a dominant ethnic group in its territory, and the various ethnic groups are lined with mountains and look at each other very unpleasantly, and no one obeys the other.
In Afghanistan, the five larger groups are, in order of population, Pashtuns (around 40 percent, the main force of the Taliban), Tajiks (around 35 percent, with some Persian and Turkic ancestry), Asian Turkic communities (Turkmen, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyz), Hazaras (with Mongolian ancestry, the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan) and Baloch (with Persian and Kurdish ancestry).
In addition, the natural environment of Afghanistan's mountainous valleys has also severed the links between the various ethnic groups and tribes within its borders, which are independent and have a strong sense of small groups.
As a result, many Afghans, especially rural people, tend to have a greater tribal identity than a national identity.
In Afghanistan, the US military often falls into the dilemma of "looking at the mountain and running a dead horse" - a mountain with a straight line distance of five kilometers, and it has to walk for almost a day
In Afghanistan, with the exception of a few Westernized, fashionable metropolises, people in most regions still live in remote villages and towns that are not much different from those of hundreds of years ago, unable to even eat enough, illiterate or semi-illiterate, and have been taught from an early age that scriptures explain everything – in their eyes, only religion, tribes and elders.
These tribal leaders and religious elders have deep roots at the Afghan grassroots level and have always been firmly in control of rural resources and social consciousness.
As a result, whether it is the "Red Prince" Daoud or the Najibra who imitates the Soviet Union to engage in socialism, their "secularization" and industrialization reforms are seriously dissatisfied in Afghanistan.
Afghan women cadre in the Era of Najibra
For centuries, Islam has been like a huge curtain that envelops the spiritual world of the entire nation— the decree of state policy issued by Kabul, which many people in the lower and middle classes of Afghanistan simply do not understand or be interested in.
As mentioned earlier, in their eyes, there were only mullahs and tribal elders.
For example, in the 1980s, when Najibullah carried out land reform, it was resisted by Afghan farmers and herders, and even triggered local riots.
President Najibura of the people's democratic government of Afghanistan at the grassroots level is talking to farmers
In the general understanding that "God determines everything, and mullah can explain everything", poor people expressed their confusion and disgust at the "class struggle" propagated by political work cadres.
In their cognition, the landlord and I are in the same tribe, originally a kinship relationship, loyalty to the lord and elders is a matter of course, my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather is already like this, people's origins and riches, land and property, this is god according to their past life performance, has long been determined, why "revolution"?
Therefore, instead of feeling very lucky about the land reform and the rights they were given, they were very worried that they would be dragged down by the "sin" of the land reform and fall into hell after death.
In the 1980s, the Soviet propaganda poster of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was smashed by reactionary religious forces
There was also the propaganda of women's liberation, throwing away the buka, and going out of the house, which was also contrary to the Sharia Code, which they regarded as absolute authority, and was regarded as a blasphemous activity, and those who participated in the practice were possessed by the devil.
From the perspective of the backward and ignorant villagers, those "government teams" who went to the countryside are their enemies.
The streets of Kabul in the 1970s, in the era of secularism in Afghanistan, were also parallel to dress and burqas
It can be said that religion in Afghanistan has long been not only a set of belief systems, but also used as a source of education and law universally recognized by the people, with irreplaceable authority.
In the vast rural areas of Afghanistan, people learn prayers and scriptures from mullahs from an early age, and mullahs are often the only people here who can read and hyphenate – which subtly monopolizes people's cognition with religion, and purposefully guides and shapes people's values and ideologies.
In this context, Ethnic relations in Afghanistan are particularly complex, and there is a lack of a central government like the Soviet Union that clings to the barrel of a gun and has a strong ability to implement it.
Therefore, the many rounds of secular reforms in Afghanistan, whether with a "Soviet flavor" or an "American style", have not been able to achieve the decisive and thorough effect of the Soviet Union's transformation of Central Asia.
The flag of the various eras that Afghanistan has experienced over the past 100 years
In this way, to this day, the military leadership in Afghanistan is still semi-feudal warlord-style; Ideologically, religion holds absolute authority, and the sense of tribal identity is higher than the sense of national identity;
So that for so many years, in the absence of an overwhelmingly dominant majority of the nation to form a modern nation-state consciousness, tribal strife and scuffles became part of the Afghan social fabric – including the modern and the traditional, the national and the tribal, the secular law and the Sharia, the city and the countryside, the West and the East.
The U.S. military has also tried to find a breakthrough in the tribal elders, but it has taken a lot of effort, and it is still like a chicken talking to a duck
From the economic point of view, Afghanistan, which is in a pre-industrial society, has a very low level of urbanization, the rural population accounts for the vast majority, and most of the areas still remain in the small-scale peasant economic state of the feudal landlord class.
Therefore, the Taliban, with the rural religious masses as its main supporters, has a very strong rear force.
That is to say, Afghanistan's special geographical environment, backward productive forces and ethnic population diversity make it difficult to form a nation-state in the modern sense.
In this case, the most effective thing to unite them in the short term may be the appeal of religion.