Since its independence in 1919, Afghanistan has been influenced by foreign forces, and the last 30 years of its existence have been characterized by particularly high levels of turmoil. Today, nearly a decade after the US invasion, the Taliban appears to be increasing its strength within Afghanistan as well as in neighboring Pakistan, and the future of the region is as uncertain as ever. The Majalla spoke to His Excellency Homayoun Tandar, Afghan Ambassador to the United Kingdom, about the regional difficulties his country is facing and on the possibilities of national reconciliation.
Born and raised in Kabul, Ambassador Homayoun Tandar received a scholarship to study archeology at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1981, he abandoned his PhD studies to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from Pakistan, and subsequently fought the Taliban through active diplomacy in the 1990s. In 2001, Ambassador Tandar was a member of the United Front delegation to the Rome negotiations and a signatory to the Bonn agreement on Afghanistan. Since then, he has served as an ambassador to Belgium and NATO, and has held posts as head of the Afghanistan Mission to the European Communities and as deputy national security adviser in Kabul. In short, Tandar knows the conflict in Afghanistan and the difficulties his country is facing from every which angle.
The Majalla: Last November, President Obama ordered an increase in troops of 30,000, bringing the total number of foreign forces in Afghanistan to about 100,000. During the Soviet invasion there were up to 116,000 troops. Do numbers matter, and how far can stability be achieved through military means?
I refuse to draw a parallel between the Soviet occupation and the current situation. Afghanistan is not occupied, and the Afghans cannot accept any sort of national occupation. I was part of the mujahideen [Muslim fighters], I fought the Taliban in the 1990s, and I am a high-ranking civil servant now. If ever I feel for one minute that the foreign troops now are occupying my country, I will be in the mountains of Afghanistan, not in my office here in London. The war, the bombs, the weapons were never a solution to a human problem. They are a human problem. However, my personal experience is that, unfortunately, sometimes these weapons are necessary for people to become free. Having said that, the increased number in troops alone is not the solution. If we use it very intelligently, with the other instruments at hand—economic, social, political instruments—they may be useful. Alone, never. Not in Afghanistan, not anywhere else. I only hope the decision to increase the number of troops was not made too late.
Q: After a decade of war, with a deadline set for the beginning of US withdrawal, do you think that the war has overshadowed the process of building a country?
Building a country is the responsibility of the Afghans, and I want to be a responsible man. What happens in Afghanistan and other countries like Afghanistan is not the duty of others. We Afghans need a vision, within which we must define our own presence, and decide if we believe in our own existence. If the international community can help us, we have to thank that community, but if they are unable or unwilling to do so, that does not constitute the end of our own responsibilities.
Q: Do you think the international community is still helping?
Yes. Fortunately for us, we have a historic chance, an opportunity to build our country and to go faster while the international community is present in Afghanistan. We have made many concrete achievements over the last 10 years: We have more than 6,000 miles of road throughout Afghanistan, compared to just 1,250 miles before the war. For the first time in history, we have $3 billion USD in monetary reserves and $3 billion USD in private banks. A number of regions now have access to electricity, whereas Kabul was without electricity a decade ago. We have more than 6.5 million Afghan children going to school. We have reduced infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy has increased, and polio has been eliminated during this most unstable period. Furthermore, we have institutional, political achievements. All of this is part of a process.
Q: How do we know that the presence and strategy of the coalition forces actually improves the situation over the long term?
I am a bit allergic to the use of the word “strategy.” Every year there are at least two different versions. I do not know what that words means. There is a risk that we are failing, but we cannot predict that before the time comes. If the strategy is just military it will surely fail, but there are also other aspects to it—governmental, economic, regional aspects. There are immediate improvements and improvements which will only become evident over time. We need time, and time is limited.
For now, we must be honest about what we are doing. Officially, foreign troops are in Afghanistan now because a group of individuals killed innocent people in New York in September 2001. The international forces are not there mainly for the Afghans. We have to be honest with the people about this. In terms of progress, if there is a withdrawal of troops before a real political situation, we are going to have a much greater economic crisis and far more instability in our region as a whole. No one knows how far this would spread. There would be problems in Pakistan, in Central Asia, certainly in Yemen and beyond. I neither can nor will forget what happened after the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and that was on a very small scale. Now, if no political solution is found, extremists and fanatics will do everything possible to expand their ideology and methodology.
Q: Do you think the Afghan people feel that foreign forces are there to create difficulties rather than solve them? Is their patience running out?
Some people in Western countries who have access to the international media say that we are imposing Western values on Afghanistan. This is supposedly a bad thing because Afghanistan is a tribal country, etc. My view is that we are at a state in human history where universal values are created, and Afghans are part of humanity. Those values are democracy, human rights, modern state, a better quality of life. In the past, the Islamic world was the human reference and we would transmit the human values to the rest of the world. Today, as part of a historical process over centuries, things have changed, but that does not make the values any less universal. We should accept that.
Mistakes have been made. The invasion happened to do justice to the innocents who were killed in 9/11, and then the coalition forces themselves did the same thing in Afghan villages. If the coalition had been more careful in their dealing with the people, I am sure the Taliban would have been defeated by now. Surely, if we do not see results quickly, if innocents continue to be killed, patience will run out. Furthermore, our task has been complicated by the US-Iraqi war. The decision to invade Iraq was a stain on democracy, just as the Taliban is a stain on Islam. There was no justification for that war. It was made in the name of democracy, and I cannot accept that. The effect on Afghanistan is one thing, but there are deeper effects in our minds and in our hearts, and the duty of democrats has been much complicated in our region.
Q: In your view, which is a greater obstacle to peace; the internal or the external tensions facing Afghanistan?
Sincerely, I do not see the deep and real reasons in Afghanistan for our war. I know that in Western intellectual circles there is this idea of ethnicity as a root of conflict in all poor countries. As a citizen of one of those poor countries, I am certain that this is a wrong perception. Diversity cannot be an element of war. There are deeper reasons, such as economics, geopolitics, history and foreign interventions. I have to recognize that in Afghanistan and some other countries we do have a structural weakness in the political sphere—but not in society as such. Politicians use the existing diversity for their own interests because of their own lack of vision for their nation. Having said that, I truly believe that there is no difference between a Pashtun farmer in Helmand and an Uzbek farmer in Jowzjan. They are in exactly the same situation.
The real obstacle to peace is to be found in our region. A few decades back, there were a number of crazy ideas of being big and powerful amongst a small group in Pakistan’s ISI, which grew stronger during the 1980s. The ISI claimed that they were the ones who had defeated the Soviets when it was really the Afghans. They put their own people in power to realize their aims, ideology and strategy. The ISI and the Pakistani military cut the democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people in half. The military coup d’etat was the beginning of the implementation of this strategy. A coalition of forces, military institutions and a fundamentalist movement in Pakistan crushed the space for any other form of political expression, which strengthened extremism further. State institutions then became political and strategic instruments of the military to extend this strategy in Afghanistan. We saw this in the creation of the Taliban.
Q: So is Afghanistan still an instrument to the ISI?
Brilliant people in the West say that the ISI has changed, and that the problem is with a small movement within the organization, not in the organization itself. I am not so sure. But they say that, and I hope that they continue to use all of their influence not only to reduce the influence of this group within the ISI but to eliminate it entirely. We have to fight the ISI for what they do in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. We must be behind the elected government of Pakistan and support the democratic process.
Q: Decades after its creation the Taliban remains somewhat of an enigma. Would you say it is a movement or an organization?
I am not in a think tank nor in an academic position, which enables me to draw that distinction. To me, the Taliban represents an ideology, which causes the death of Afghans and the destruction of Afghanistan. What matters is that the Taliban threatens my future and my achievements. I, as a citizen, as a father, as a friend, have to defend those achievements. I want to say to the Taliban, “please join me in doing this. You are Afghans, like me. You have your ideas, but please do not impose them on my country by killing people. Accept the game. Propose your solutions to the Afghan people if you have any, and allow the people to decide.” Extremist movements exist everywhere, but they should accept the rules of the game, that is a democracy. Unfortunately, that is exactly what they do not want to do.
The Taliban represents a very small minority in Afghanistan. Polls have shown that less than four percent of Afghans are in favor of the Taliban being in power. The Taliban is not a defender of Afghanistan. Some people are frustrated by a socio-economic and political situation. Some feel hopeless and in this situation, maybe some are proud to say that so-called Muslims would do what the Taliban does. It may make them feel more powerful, but this is a miscalculation. The Taliban killed Muslims during Friday prayers, and no Muslim is ready to do that. Their ideology is a great danger to Islam, and I say that as a Muslim. We have to see other ways. We have to show our force in terms of human progress, better life, better education, and better access to knowledge. Not through more killing.
Q: Are coalition forces meant to encourage negotiations with the Taliban or to fight them?
This is a decision for Afghans to make, not the coalition forces. My president has decided that we should start negotiations. This process has two different elements, one of which is reintegration, the other being reconciliation. We have already started reintegration and have had some success ending violence across various cities. The decision to start a process of reconciliation was made at the Kabul conference in June. Unfortunately, the response of the Taliban has been entirely negative. They have answered this peace initiative by killing innocents. But we want to be patient. The aim of our policy is so fantastic, and personally I am a little bit afraid. I fear that peace for the population of Afghanistan is not the ultimate aim of the Taliban. Recently in an interview, I think it was on the BBC, a spokesperson for the Taliban said, “for us, Islam is the first priority, Afghanistan comes second”—what they call Islam. There are many messages in this statement. I would be happy to be wrong on this, but I am not sure. These people think that they will go to the paradise of God by killing people, Afghans or not.
Q: Do you personally think that reconciliation is possible?
It is necessary. It is obligatory for all of us. But when I think about this question more deeply, “negotiation” means “speaking,” and I am not sure people are free to speak in Afghanistan. With our history, as a people, as a nation, as individuals, as a culture, we have become prisoners of our own situation. A large part of Afghans, and this is not just true for Afghans, suffer because we cannot express what we feel. To me, wherever there is a war, the ability to speak is imprisoned somewhere inside humans, and we have to rehabilitate that. We have to talk about our problems, about ourselves, about our culture, about our history, and about our future.
Q: So just the process of negotiations in itself is an important step in the right direction?
It is, and we have to show the Afghan people that the government is sincere. We have experienced a number of different regimes. We did monarchy, dictatorship, communism, theocracy. It doesn’t work. We have to at least try democracy.
Q: Is Afghanistan at another turning point? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Interview conducted by Eva Prag
