Pedro González
Journalist
Three years have passed since the chaotic withdrawal of the United States and its allies, including Spain, from Afganistán. The evacuation of the last troops was scheduled to take place on 31 August 2021, but the advance of the Taliban rebels, with hardly any resistance from President Ashraf Ghani’s Afghan army, precipitated events.
The world was astonished to witness not only the inability of the powerful US forces to organise that retreat with a minimum of order and planning, but also the desperate scattering of thousands of Afghans scrambling to get on the last plane to take them out of the hell they logically assumed the country would become once the Taliban were back in power.
A dramatic and tragic scene that immediately brought to mind the take-off of the last American helicopter from Saigon, when the Vietcong militiamen had already seized power in the whole of South Vietnam.
More than twenty years of US military activity in inhospitable Afghanistan made that war the longest war fought by American troops in its history.
While they were there, a good part of the country recovered many shreds of its lost rights, especially women, who were able to return to the classroom, work in offices and even open their own businesses, essentially related to beauty and women’s fashion.
Donald Trump, then president, endorsed the agreement signed in 2020 in Doha between the Taliban and representatives of the Ghani government. An agreement by which the Afghan fundamentalists undertook to respect human rights and the social gains made by women.
With Trump replaced by Joe Biden in the White House, it fell to Biden to implement its implementation, the decisive point of which was the total withdrawal of foreign troops by the last day of 2021 at the latest.
Three years later, the Taliban government in Kabul is recognised by virtually no state. Everything they signed up to has become a dead letter, so that the most rigorous and radical interpretation of Islam has taken over the country.
The suffering of women is even more brutal, all the more so because for some years they had enjoyed the freedom to leave the house, to talk to neighbours and friends, to go back to school and even to university and take up jobs, to earn a living for themselves and their children, and even to fill the financial gaps of husbands unable to work and provide for themselves and their families.
Now they have returned to their former status as invisible beings, imprisoned in those suffocating prisons called burqas, their compulsory clothing. They cannot study, train or work, even in the absolute poverty that comes with having a disabled husband. They cannot leave the house unless accompanied by a male member of the family, and they are once again branded as inferior beings who have no right to speak unless specifically asked.
Threats, arrests, torture and public floggings are back. So are capital executions and mutilations, mostly involving men, who are considered to be transgressors of the dictates of Islam. Of course, like any totalitarian regime, the Taliban’s regime prevents the activity of humanitarian organisations, always uncomfortable witnesses for those who know the injustice and evil of their own actions.
The country, which has a population of 41 million, has at least 24 million people living in absolute poverty, according to the United Nations. Before the new Taliban regime closed its borders, more than 120,000 people managed to leave, almost all of them likely to have been executed by the regime for having collaborated with foreign forces, either as translators and interpreters or as domestic servants. Ninety per cent of these refugees are living as best they can in Pakistan and Iran. The rest are mainly in Europe and North America. In Spain, 3,721 people are trying to rebuild their lives, according to figures from the UN Agency for Afghan Refugees.
The ephemeris of that chaotic withdrawal has hardly had any international echo, and certainly almost none among supposedly feminist organisations in the Western world, the same ones that shout and express themselves with uncontainable rage when they demand rights, already obtained and fortunately consolidated, and anathematise heteropatriarchies that have been happily defunct for several decades now.
For the ‘caviar’ left and the extreme left, Afghanistan, as an extreme example, and others of similar tendency do not seem to exist or have simply fallen into an ominous oblivion, perhaps because it highlights too much what many representatives of the ‘woke’ movement have turned into a fruitful business and placement office, recipient of lucrative subsidies.
