Five years into renewed Taliban rule, Afghanistan’s future remains uncertain. What went wrong with two decades of peacebuilding – and what can be done now?

My first experience of Afghanistan was enchanting, as a backpacking student on the hippy trail nearly six decades ago – with that memory sustained in my closet for years by an irredeemably smelly, yellow-dyed sheepskin jacket. Looking back at its tormented history since, my own subsequent engagement with the country and its people, and at the state of play now with the horrific consequences for women and girls of the resumption of Taliban rule, it is with a rather tumultuous mix of emotions: curiosity, fascination, delight in its people, disgust with all too many of its leaders, sometimes optimism, but more often despair. It’s hard to be confident about the country’s future.

I watched from afar as, ten years after my first visit, a communist coup in 1978 established a socialist state, subsequent infighting prompted the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in 1979, and the US-backed mujahideen forced its withdrawal ten years later. My watch then became much closer as the Islamists fought amongst themselves in the government with which I came to deal directly after becoming Foreign Minister in 1988.

One encounter in that role I particularly remember was with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen leader who came to Canberra to drum up some support from us at a time when he was enjoying some favourable attention as a Western as well as Pakistan ally. There is no one I have ever met, with the possible exception only of a couple of my interlocutors from the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian peace process in which I was engaged around that time, who struck me as more comprehensively evil. Perhaps not surprising when one learned, as I later did, that he began his activist career throwing acid at unveiled women on the Kabul University campus.

Infinitely more pleasurable than that encounter was the many I had, both as a government minister, and later in the mid-1990s during my short period in Opposition based in Dandenong as the Member for Holt, with the many wonderful Afghan men, women and children who came to Australia from the 1980s onward as refugees or migrants, and who quickly started making a major contribution to our economy, and socially and culturally enriching our society.

The Taliban had come to control most of the country by the time I and the Keating Government lost office in 1996, but I again came to seriously engage with Afghanistan after it was overthrown in the 2001 US intervention, defensible after 9/11 – and I had overcome my relevance deprivation syndrome by moving to Brussels to head the International Crisis Group, which I did for the next ten years. We soon had representatives on the ground in Kabul, analysing and advocating the peacebuilding steps that would be necessary to create a viable and sustainable human rights-respecting and terrorism-opposing democracy. I visited the country several times during that period, meeting most of the key military and political players, trying to advance that agenda.

The story after 2001 is sadly all too well-known. The US, after a highly problematic period of peacebuilding stewardship, finally withdrew all its military forces from the country in 2021, in a chaotically botched enterprise, leaving the Taliban to return to power after capturing Kabul and overthrowing the US-installed government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The Taliban’s government was made up entirely of its own members, determined to re-establish an extreme Islamist regime, in which dissent would be completely suppressed and the total subordination of women and girls........

© Pearls and Irritations