What happened in Afghanistan?

 

I'm not an Afghan, nor an American. But today I can't help but write this article about what happened in Afghanistan. The picture above shows a British soldier holding a baby handled over by a desperate Afghan mum in Kabul airport. The baby is throwing over the razor-sharp wires at the airport compound as many families desperately seek to leave the country as the Taliban approached. After the Taliban took over the country, they had blocked Afghans from leaving the country. By then, there were already 18,000 Afghans left with the U.S. troops in loaded military planes. The plane can't take any more Afghans, and some have decided to brace themselves outside the plane, which led to the tragedy that humans fell off the airplane we see today in social media. The Muslim critics used this picture to criticize the U.S., claiming that the U.S. dropped bombs in Afghanistan in 2001; in 2021, they dropped humans. 

One question the world asked today is why Afghans desperately seek to leave the country? Aren't they believe in their own people or their Muslim brothers who took back the country from the U.S.? Why on earth they chose to leave instead with the so-called Westerners who are barely Muslim? If you look for answers from the Muslim community, many will tell you that these Afghans were brainwashed for over 20 years by the western media who constantly tells lies that portrayed the Taliban as terrorists, e.g., women will lose their basics rights to work, to go to school and quality of education, lives will plunge when the Taliban took over again. Many of my Muslim friends in Malaysia try hard to convince me that the "Taliban are lovely people who fear Allah more, instead of conducting terrorism, they try to implement a theocracy country," etc. However, these people have never been to Afghanistan, nor have they experienced terrorism or a civil war before. They merely talked from the Islam perspective on how the Muslim media portrayed the Taliban and what they heard from the Ustazs in the mosque. To make it worse, many of them derived information from Tiktok and Instagram, which barely provide a total picture or truth, which were often used to mislead the crowd. Very few of them read from the newspaper, met, or ever talked to anyone from the Middle East before.

In Malaysia, some of the politicians, for instance, the PAS party state assemblyman Muhammad Khalil Abdul Hadi, openly congratulates the Taliban for taking control over Afghanistan. This upsets many peoples, including some of the conservative Sunni Muslims who are peace-orientated. While we lament the ongoing tragedy and oppression in Afghanistan, we have to be self-aware that a similar problem occurred in our country as Malaysians. Malaysia is a self-proclaimed Islam country in which the majority of people, ~70% of the total population made up of Malay ethnic. This majority of Malay, aka. Bumiputera, who are also Muslims, enjoy different privileges in the country. For example, The Malay people enjoy getting a loan with a lower interest rate, to enroll in an investment scheme with a higher dividend or return; Malay enjoys a quota of 80% in the public university, quota to work in the government sector, and different sort of funds and scholarships.

 

Malays are also protected under different policies, for example, policy in real estate purchases in which Bumipetera lands cannot be traded or sold to a non-Bumiputera without a release from the state authority. Even after being sold, retransfer requires the same procedure in which cannot be done most of the time. In Malaysia, the seat of Prime Minister is reserved for Malay ethnic only. To note, Bumiputera here refers to Malay and indigenous people in Malaysia only. Chinese or Indian Malaysians were born and grew up here, who is also the majority ethnic groups in Malaysia, are not considered Bumiputera and will not enjoy these privileges mentioned above. If this is not the worst, I have to mention that these policies cannot be changed or challenged since they are Constitutional laws protected under the Bumiputera special right. Some universities, for example, MARA and UiTM, wouldn't accept non-Malay or Bumiputera students since their establishments. You would see a protest from the university students whenever the university trying to take in the non-Bumiputera. Even if they're Muslim, there is no compromise.

Imagine if this happened in the U.S. or U.K., that the law says only white can be the president or prime minister. Aren't we are going to call this racism? In certain countries that exercised protection policies against a certain group of people, it normally targets the minorities such as Aboriginal people in Australia and the Natives living inside the Amazon forest. They are protected by laws such as the right to own certain scales of the land property passed down from their ancestors. Ironically, the Malay ethnic made up the majority of the population, and there is no reason that such policies can be justified. One thing we have to admit is, Chinese and Indians are systematically marginalized in Malaysia.

Today, a racist man called Sabri Ismail is sworn in as the 13th Prime Minister of Malaysia, not through a general election but in favor of Agong (King) and politicians in the parliament. The same man has called for a boycott of Chinese Malaysian business in 2015 but never apologizes. Sabri insisted he did that to protect the Malay special right. Due to immense racism, injustice, and corruption scandals in the UMNO party, a new government was elected in 2018 before it collapsed on its own due to a chronic interior fight for power between the leaders. Today, the old government (UMNO), a party made up purely of Malay ethnic, is back to power, without a general election due to the excuse of the current covid situation in Malaysia. For your information, Malaysia is hit with ~23k of covid cases daily this week.

It took the U.S. twenty years, 3 Presidents, and trillions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. Similarly, it took Malaysia three years, 2 Prime Ministers, and trillions of ringgit to replace UMNO with UMNO.

Just like Afghanistan, democracy in Malaysia is gone with the stepping down of Dr. Mahathir. Today, Malaysia is practicing what is seemingly known as Communism by electing two prime ministers and cabinets without a general election. Malaysians have now lost every right to condemn China for practicing Communism because this is how it works in Malaysia too. 

The only difference is China is rich and effective, Malaysia is not.

Back to the story of Afghanistan, to obtain authentic information and testimonies from natives on why Afghans fear the Taliban so much, I have conducted online surveys and interviewed hundreds of Afghan men and women, including the Taliban themselves. I have also discovered an ugly truth that most Muslim men, even non-Taliban supporters, do not really care about women's rights in Afghanistan. They would love to dictate how a woman should wear and behave in society. Many professing Afghans who are Pakistani who barely speak Pashto and Dari (official languages of Afghanistan) have come to me, trying to convince me that the Taliban made no killing. There was no public execution in Afghanistan since they entered Kabul. They are trying to convince me that they felt safer with the Taliban as their government as there was no theft or corruption reported since the Taliban took over. They told me everything is in order and the airport will be back to work like usual in weeks. 

However, women expressed desperation to leave the countries and how upset they are towards men who think they are heads for the women. With or without the Taliban, the social stigma favors men over women in the Middle East. For example, we can see the military plane of the U.S. loaded with men rather than the weaker women (below). We may ask, where are the women? Aren't the sexes in the plane is a little disproportionate? With the Taliban, the lives of women are made worse than ever. In fact, there are few informants, who are Afghan men who tried to inform me with simple English on what happened in Afghanistan today. This contrasted with what the mainstream Muslim media portrayed. They revealed how Pakistani have worked behind the scene since 1998 to support the Taliban movement. They preferred their Muslim counterpart despite the terrors they did in the Middle East. They preferred to have Afghanistan rules by the Taliban over the country sandwiched between two pro-U.S. powers, India and the U.S. colonized Afghanistan.

Promising not to seek retribution, more than 30 confirmed killings occurred in Afghans in public, including journalists and government officials.  Taliban militants fired on a crowd in the eastern city of Asadabad, a witness said. Several people were killed instantly. Peaceful protestors on the street, including women, were beaten, dragged around on the street. Haji Mullah Achakzai, who served in the Afghan Armed Forces, was employed as the police chief of the Badghis province near the city of Herat when he was captured by the Taliban and shot several times. His body was left lying in the sand (picture below). According to the informant, there is a long list of names of those who helped and worked with the U.S. government before the Taliban is now hunting from house to house. The Taliban never disclosed the number of their killings before they were confronted by NATO for their hypocrisies. 

The world desperately needs a change today. Many Muslim countries seek to revive the Islamic State or Empire once demonstrated by Turkey Uthmaniyah through violence and oppression against minorities. This is also what happened in Malaysia as well when Kelantan and Terengganu appealed to implement Hudud laws. This has been warned by our Tunku Abdul Rahman, our 1st Prime Minister in Malaysia, in 1958. He mentioned the Islamic States notion is merely a dream in the modern era. We can't dismiss basic human rights and our newly found balance of democracy in this modern world and go back to a monarchy, which is often practiced in countries claiming to practice theocracy. You can't blend politics and religions together. This is also why we limit the power of the Sultan to religious matters only in Malaysia today. We dissolved the power of kings and implemented democracy due to the failure of the monarchy. If you want to argue about disrespect towards the king or "derhaka," we had done it in 1957. The so-called theocracy or monarchy is too idealistic in the 21st century. It can only be applied when peoples are largely uneducated and desperate for a sovereign, mighty leader as their idol. In other words, under-educated people may seek monarchy, or so-called theocracy, because they wanted the powers to be limited to males only. 

They are insecure when women are equally educated, and they have to compete with them in the market. They are insecure when they have to compete with non-Muslim who may score better in the science subjects.

We can't change an animal to a gentleman. Lee Kuan Yew in 2009 (in 34:12 in the video) expressed he is not a believer in having one nation conduct nation-building activities in another. When he spoke to Rose, he was already skeptical that the U.S. cannot stay the course in Afghanistan for the long haul. Due to the covid situation in the U.S. and the reallocation of the budget, U.S. is no longer able to support the long haul of military supplies to another country. By the time, the Taliban has a whopping $US1.6 billion war chest to fund its fight in Afghanistan, with millions coming in from drugs, donations through Pakistan, and real estate. The Taliban would always take over as soon as the U.S. pulled out—whether today, in one year, or in five. If 20 years and $2 trillion couldn’t buy self-sustaining stability, no amount of additional time would. Due to the newly hit covid situation, U.S. has to pull out now. They couldn't afford to support a non-sustainable investment overseas which is not their priority from the beginning. Politically, this is the right move for the U.S., but this would change how the world looked at them since after. 

So what's next for the Taliban? Probably Afghanistan will be back to how it was in the year 1996. Before the U.S. took over Afghanistan in 2001, women are not allowed to go out without wearing a burqa (fully covered clothing) and without the company of a husband. Sometimes, they were chained in hand, walking by their husband like a dog. It could be worse than a dog as the dog is not a tool of sex for men, but women in Afghanistan were. The picture below shows a Taliban religious teacher beating an Afghan woman in Kabul on August 26, 2001. Back then, women are not allowed to go to school, work or attend any social activity outside the house. After the invasion, the Taliban promised that women will be allowed to work hand to hand with men and will be allowed to school in the context of Islam. It was such good news to the world, but recently, we have received plenty of contradicting news. For example, a female reporter of Kabul-based Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) said the Taliban refused to let her work. The Taliban told her "the regime has changed" and to "Go home." Now, we can roughly perceive that nothing much is going to change compared to 1996. 

The Taliban is still going to be Taliban. 

So what's next for Islamic State supporters? If we run the country based on race and religion's first policies, it may soon shun our economy and potential future as the smart one wouldn't discover their true potential, and the imbeciles do not have to compete or progress to make their livings. This is why Malaysia's GDP, as a larger nation, with plenty of natural resources, is only as large as the peanut size Singapore. We shared the same climates, languages, and races, with numerous advantages; why are we falling behind? What then?

If Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban couldn't progress further from its policies, I can't foresee how Malaysia will further progress  due to unsolvable "race and religion first policies."

Lastly, those who support the Taliban, especially women, would you hand over your babies to the Taliban? Would you like your daughters to receive only an Islam education and declined to work by the or possibly be trafficked as sex objects by the authority like what happened in 1998?

Let me know what do you think?

Till then!