As the Taliban regime 2.0 began in Afghanistan, a halfa-century-old black-andwhite photo of some Afghan women, strolling through Kabul in miniskirts, dated back to 1972, became viral on social media. Certainly, it’s difficult to know whether this was in fact what life was like for a very small part of the elite around Kabul during that time. In any case, this is in sharp contrast to the Taliban’s notorious international image due to their misogyny and violence against women, for sure.

Let’s look at the history of women’s rights in Afghanistan. Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Bengali classic ‘Deshe Bideshe’ provides a perception that Pashtun or Pathan women, although burqa-clad, are traditionally independent-minded. “Until the conflict of the 1970s, the 20th century had seen relatively steady progression for women’s rights in the country,” according to Amnesty International.

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Afghan women got the right to vote in 1919. In comparison, women in the UK were given voting rights just one year before that, and American women gained the right to vote only in 1920 – even after Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Purdah (gendered separation) was abolished in the 1950s and political participation of women was allowed in the 1960s. However, “during coups and Soviet occupation in the 1970s, through civil conflict between Mujahideen groups and government forces in the 80s and 90s, and then under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan had their rights increasingly rolled back,” as per the report from Amnesty International.

As America’s 20-year sojourn in Afghanistan ended in horror and images of chaos and desperation beamed in from Kabul, President Joe Biden, amid sharp international criticisms, had to “stand squarely” behind his decision. “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building,” Biden asserted. Well, the American Presidents need to remind themselves of this time and again, for reasons they might know better. Earlier, in 2017, then President Trump emphasised the US would not be “nation-building” again, but “killing terrorists”.

Still, America spent two decades in Afghanistan – ten years even after the death of Osama Bin Laden. In fact, there may not be many issues where the Republicans and Democrats agree in the US. Yet Afghanistan is one such rare issue. To be fair, like the ravaging pandemic, Afghanistan was a crisis that Biden inherited. But, by deciding to close the book on Afghanistan, he might have taken a big political gamble. “The buck stops with me,” Biden knows. He, however, lashed out at the former Afghan government and military commanders who were put in place, organized, and supported by Washington over the last 20 years to the extent of $88.3bn but offered little resistance to the Taliban invasion.

With only 80,000 troops, the Taliban could capture the country from the Afghan government having a nominal 300,699 troops. What really happened to the nominally well-equipped Afghan troops? Were they poorly led and riddled with corruption? Did the Taliban have a strong grip inside the Afghan military as well? “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We could not provide them the will to fight for that future,” Biden said, maybe in despair. In an article in the New York Times, columnist Thomas L. Friedman, however, lashed out at the ageold mentality of the US officials to describe America’s mission in Afghanistan as being there to train the Afghan army to fight for their own government.

How could Afghans not know how to fight when they fought against the British, the Soviets, and now the might of the Americans, Friedman wondered. In fact, Biden’s pull-out from Afghanistan is based almost entirely on a plan set in motion by his predecessor, Donald Trump. During his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump called for a military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then, in August 2017, President Trump decided to recommit American troops and resources to the war in Afghanistan. Interestingly, the now-viral 1972 photo of women in miniskirts walking in Kabul had swayed him.

In a desperate bid to motivate him, his national security advisor H.R. McMaster showed Trump this particular photo. The idea was to show him “western norms had existed there before and could return” and that Afghanistan was “not a hopeless place”. A photo from 1972 might have convinced Trump to remain in Afghanistan, but it failed to inspire him to seek a course of action that would take into account the condition of women there in 2017. And Trump was never consistent with his goals.

In February 2020, the US and the Taliban had signed an “agreement for bringing peace” in Doha where the US and Nato allies had agreed to withdraw all troops within 14 months. Reaching a peace deal with the Taliban was possibly easier than Nancy Pelosi for Trump. And, for Biden, withdrawing guns from Afghanistan was far easier than imposing a strict gun control rule on American soil. The only way to “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghanistan people was to give them economic security in a way that allowed them to maintain their traditional culture.

This, however, was possibly never attempted. As Biden backs his own decision of the pull-out saying “it’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people,” he certainly confines himself to being the leader of America alone and ensures America also loses the leadership of the world. And, sadly, it’s a repetition of the history of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s. Of course, technologically, it’s a changed world. And today’s Afghanistan is also much different from the first Taliban regime that ended in 2001.

Smartphones and internet and social media dominate today’s world, and Afghanistan too. From Tahrir Square to Hong Kong, it is clear that the power of social media is immense. Of course, the Taliban may shut it all down. At least, they can try to. “Today, there are millions [of girls in school], and tens of thousands of women attending university, studying everything from medicine to miniature painting,” according to a Time magazine report on Afghanistan in July.

Well, the Taliban might pull the country to a medieval era further by closing them too. While there is little doubt that the US has seduced and dumped the Afghans, as they did in Cambodia in 1975, it’s also true that democracy and social liberalisation needs to be earned rather than be bestowed. There are educated Afghans – indispensable to run the country. What if they get haunted by some immensely powerful half-a-century-old blackand-white photographs?

What if together they put pressure on the Taliban? Maybe their “will to fight for that future” might become the driving force someday. And, as Friedman wrote in his New York Times article: “Maybe on the morning after the morning after, the Taliban will …encounter pushback from wives and daughters that they’ve never encountered before – precisely because of the social, educational and technological seeds of change planted by the United States over the last 20 years. I don’t know.”

Certainly, nobody knows. All that we know is that the resistance and the revolt should come from within the society itself. At least in the present scenario. That certainly may not happen tomorrow, for sure. But, on the morning after the morning after. Maybe. Now that the world has dumped them, Afghanistan needs to control and recreate its own destiny.

(The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata)