Why the Taliban fear the West – Slavoj Žižek

On 10 August, Hamad International Airport in Qatar was proclaimed the best in the world, beating Changi Airport in Singapore. But in recent weeks, news of luxury services at Hamad airport has been eclipsed by what was happening at Afghanistan’s Kabul airport: thousands of people were desperately trying to leave the country. Some clung to the taking off planes and then plummeted from the sky. As in a last tragic ironic variation of the old anti-colonial slogan “yankee go home”: go home yankee, and take me away with you!

The real enigma, however, is the speed with which the resistance of the Afghan army melted like snow in the sun, something that amazed the Taliban themselves. If thousands of people are desperately trying to take a flight to escape the country and are ready to risk their lives in flight, why haven’t they fought the Taliban instead? Why did they prefer certain death by falling from the sky to death on the battlefield? An easy answer might be that the crowds of Kabul airport are among the corrupt minority of people who have collaborated with the United States. But what about the thousands of women who stay home frightened? Are they also collaborators?

The fact is that the US occupation of Afghanistan has gradually created some form of secular civil society, with many women who are educated, who work and are aware of their rights, and it has also given birth to an important independent intellectual life. When sociologist Göran Therborn visited Kabul and Herat a couple of years ago to give lectures on Western Marxism, hundreds of people showed up, surprising the organizers themselves. True, the Taliban today are stronger than ever. Even more than twenty years ago, when the Western powers arrived in Afghanistan to rid the country of their presence, which clearly demonstrates the futility of the whole operation. But should we therefore ignore the (involuntary, at least partially) progressive consequences of their intervention?

Economist Yanis Varoufakis touched on this difficult topic in a tweet on August 15: “On the day when liberal and neoconservative imperialism was defeated once and for all, the thoughts of DiEM25 (the political movement founded by Varoufakis) go to women of Afghanistan. Our solidarity probably means little to them, but that’s all we can offer. For the moment. Hold on sisters! ”. How should we read the two parts of his tweet? Why was the defeat of liberal imperialism accompanied by the regression of women’s rights (and not only)? Do we (who see ourselves as the left-wing opponents of neo-colonial imperialism) have the right to ask Afghan women to sacrifice their rights in order for global liberal capitalism to suffer a serious defeat? When Varoufakis was accused of subordinating women’s liberation to the fight against imperialism, he responded with another tweet: “We had predicted that neo-conservative imperialism would strengthen misogynistic Islamic fundamentalism. And so it was! How do the conservatives react? They blame us for the triumph of fundamentalism. Cowards, as well as war criminals ”.

But blaming the neocons is complicated. Neocons can easily find a common language with the Taliban: let’s not forget that when he was president of the United States Donald Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David and made a pact with them that paved the way for American capitulation. And some conservatives see the fall of Kabul as the definitive defeat of the Enlightenment and Western individualistic hedonism.

No, it was not the neocons who strengthened Islamic fundamentalism: it grew in reaction to the influence of Western individualism and liberal secularism. Decades ago Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, wrote: “We are not afraid of sanctions. We are not afraid of military invasions. What scares us is the invasion of Western immorality ”. The fact that Khomeini speaks of fear should be taken literally: Islamic fundamentalists have no problem with the brutality of economic and military struggles, their enemy is not Western economic neo-colonialism or military aggression, but his “immoral culture” “.

In many African and Asian countries, the gay rights movement is also seen as an expression of the cultural impact of capitalist globalization that undermines traditional social and cultural forms. This is why the struggle against homosexuals appears as an aspect of the anti-colonial battle. Isn’t this the case, for example, for Boko Haram? For the Nigerian terrorist organization, women’s liberation is the most striking feature of the destructive cultural impact of capitalist modernization. To the point that Boko haram (a name that more or less means “Western education is forbidden”, especially that of women) can present itself as a barrier against the destructive impact of modernization, imposing a hierarchical regulation on the relations between the sexes .

The puzzle then is: why Muslims, who have undoubtedly been exposed to exploitation, domination and other humiliating aspects of colonialism, react by targeting the best part of the Western legacy, namely our egalitarianism and personal freedoms, including to times a healthy dose of irony and derision towards all the authorities? The obvious answer is that their target was carefully chosen. What makes the liberal West so unbearable in their eyes is not exploitation or violent domination but the fact that, adding insult to injury, it presents this brutal reality as if it were its opposite: freedom, equality and democracy.

We must therefore re-learn the fundamental lesson of Karl Marx: it is true, capitalism systematically violates its own rules (“human rights and freedoms”). Remember that, at the beginning of this era that celebrates human freedoms, capitalism had resurrected slavery in its colonies. At the same time, however, he provided parameters for measuring his own hypocrisy. And therefore we should not say “Since human rights are a mask that hides exploitation, we renounce human rights”, but: “We take human rights more seriously than those who created the ideology of human rights!”. This has been the meaning of socialism since its inception.

So what should the Americans have done? True, they screwed up, but after doing so they lost the right to simply get away from the chaos they created. They should have stayed and they should have started to act differently, but how?

I want to conclude with a reversal of the proverb which says to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is what racists do, when they realize that Western interventions – intended to spread freedom and human rights to poor “third world” countries – fail miserably: they prefer to remove the dirty water of third world inhabitants, not mature enough for secular democracy, and to keep only the child, pure and immaculate. Perhaps we should do the exact opposite: throw away the pure white child and be careful not to lose the dirty water of the poor and exploited of the third world. The latter truly deserve human rights, and not just our charity and compassion.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)