Tobias Ellwood, conservative MP in Britain, has faced heavy criticism for posting positive comments regarding the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. After a visit to the country, Ellwood claimed that a sense of calm has returned to the war-ravaged nation, and that corruption has been significantly curtailed by the Taliban authorities. The drug trade has also been suppressed under Taliban rule.
In August 2021, the Taliban returned to power after American and NATO forces abandoned Kabul in a humiliating defeat. Ellwood urged the British and western governments to reengage with the Taliban, stating that shouting demands from afar is a failed approach. After making these comments, Ellwood backtracked, and removed the posts from his social media footprint. He has faced calls from within his own party to stand down from the defence committee of which he is the chair.
His comments regarding engagement with the Taliban may be outrageous, but they are not outside the mainstream line of thinking. Only a few weeks prior to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, no less a figure than Britain’s army chief General Nick Carter advised his colleagues that we must give the incoming Taliban a chance. General Carter opined that we may find the Taliban militia more reasonable in their outlook, and effective in government. So Ellwood’s call for engagement was not out of the ordinary.
Ellwood ignored the deplorable treatment of women under Taliban rule, the growing restrictions on women’s freedom of movement, employment and education. There is another cause of the plight of Afghani women, a cause which is within Ellwood’s power to address. The US and Britain have imposed economically crippling sanctions against the country since the August 2021 assumption of power by the Taliban.
Afghanistan relied heavily on overseas sources of revenue to keep its public services, education and infrastructure going. Those millions in overseas holdings have been frozen since the US imposed sanctions as collective punishment on the Afghan people. For instance, after NATO forces pulled out of Kabul, the US not only froze $9.5 billion worth of the Afghan Central Bank’s assets, but also pushed the IMF to stop funding for Covid relief.
There is an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe inside Afghanistan; thousands of women teachers, health care workers, public servants, cannot be paid their salaries. The health care system is breaking down, impacting millions of Afghani women and children. So, if Western feminists want to help Afghan women, they could start by demanding the end of sanctions against Afghanistan.
Farrah Haseen, writing in Counterpunch, notes that the Afghani people do not bear any legal or ethical responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. She points out that the families of the 9/11 victims, have written to the US President denouncing the freezing of funds belonging to Afghanistan. The last thing they want is to take money away from starving Afghans.
Binoy Kampmark wrote, in February 2022, that nothing could be more counterproductive than hitting Afghanistan with sanctions, in an act of collective revenge for the defeat of US military forces in that nation. In fact, by imposing sanctions, thus producing a humanitarian disaster Afghanistan, the US is ensuring that the nation becomes a failed state. I seem to remember American scholars talking about how failed states are conducive to producing recruits for terrorist groups?….the very outcome the Washington beltway pundits claim to oppose…..
If Ellwood’s suggestion to reengage with the Taliban was outrageous – and it was – he was not the first to pursue such a course of action. In the mid-1990s, when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, their cooperation was actively courted – by the United States. A bevy of conservative oil tycoons and US politicians sought out the Taliban government, in order to construct transnational oil pipelines across Afghan territory.
Why is that important? Have a look at a map of Afghanistan. It straddles Central Asia, whose former Soviet republics contain profitable mineral reserves of oil and natural gas. However, they are landlocked – and constructing pipelines across miles of territory requires the cooperation of friendly governments. In the early 1990s, the newly independent Central Asian republics wanted the investments of oil and energy multinational companies.
The Taliban, after taking power in 1996, were visited by US officials and businesspeople from Unocal, the Union Oil Company of California, now owned by Chevron. Taliban officials were flown to the US in 1997, where they enjoyed the hospitality of their American hosts. One of the go-between for this burgeoning engagement with the Taliban was conservative politician and US policy strategist Zalmay Khalilzad.
Khalilzad, a cunning political operator, wrote an extensive opinion piece at the time, explicitly calling for engagement with the Taliban government in Afghanistan. His article, published in the Washington Post, admitted that while the Taliban were….a little bit on the ultra conservative, misogynistic and Pashtun-centric side of the spectrum, this did not mean that they could not be effective partners. They would be similar in theocratic policies like our other friends, Saudi Arabia.
He was very enthusiastic about the upcoming extraction of mineral resources from Central Asia, with a little help from our Afghan Taliban allies. After all, the US and its subcontractor allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, spent millions of dollars on fundamentalist Islamist groups in Afghanistan for their covert war against the Soviets. Now it was time for a return on investment.
Sadly for Khalilzad and the oil barons, these plans were interrupted. In August 1998, Al Qaeda militants attacked two US embassies, in Kenya and Tanzania. Killing over 200 people with these suicide bombings, the Taliban had provided refuge for Al Qaeda. In the immediate aftermath, the Taliban were transformed in the corporate media from reasonable business partners to monsters incarnate.
The suggestion by Tobias Ellwood to reengage with the Taliban was not his idea alone. He is travelling down a well-trodden footpath of US-British policy. Once the shooting war has stopped and the dust settles, the US and Britain do not hesitate to cozy up to fanatical groups in pursuit of geopolitical and economic interests.