Afghanistan in Review with Malalai Farooqi Ramadan and Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
Nearly three years ago now, the recently elected US President Joe Biden brought the United States’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan to an abrupt and in most views chaotic end, leaving the Taliban to culminate its long guerrilla war with a complete take-over of the country. US forces were withdrawn to the background of frantic scenes at Kabul’s airport, where many who had worked for the United States, its allies and NGOs and others who simply feared life under the Taliban sought to flee the country. Three years later, Afghanistan has largely slipped from the headlines, displaced by the situation in Ukraine, the Israeli genocide in Gaza, or the indicted sex-offender Donald Trump’s courtroom antics. This Memorial Weekend, as America celebrates its warriors fallen in a succession of imperial wars, from the Philippines to Iraq, we consider the situation now in Afghanistan, a nation devastated not only by US’s post-9/11 occupation, but by its prior engagement there in the wake of the Soviet invasion in 1979 in support of the then ruling communist government. US funded and armed mujahidin—welcomed to the White House as freedom fighters by then President Reagan--brought about the civil war in which the Taliban ultimately triumphed in the 1990s.
The Taliban’s victory and seizure of power after the US withdrawal in 2021 may have brought a period of constant warfare and US drone warfare and bombing mostly to an end, bringing relative peace back to the war-torn nation, but it has also restored a notoriously conservative and repressive regime, whose impact on political freedoms and especially the freedoms of women has been deep and devastating to Afghan civil society that historically had not been known for such repressive attitudes. The return of the Taliban has also meant the withdrawal or suppression of international NGOs, not least those engaged with the furtherance of women’s rights, but also those aid organizations concerned with the day-to-day survival of the population. To compound the drastic situation for Afghan society, Taliban rule coincided with a long-lasting drought that has destroyed much of the country’s agriculture and to which climate change has made the country especially vulnerable. In recent weeks, the drought has been punctuated by no less destructive flooding that has also affected its neighbor Pakistan. Meanwhile, the US and its allies continue to sequester Afghan treasure on the pretext of reserving it to compensate victims of the attacks of 9/11 for which the Afghan people were not in any way responsible and for which they have paid so intolerable a price for two decades.
Having arrived in the United States as a refugee in the early 90s, Malalai Farooqi Ramadan has an intimate understanding of the dire situation in Afghanistan that is currently plaguing her country. Today, Malalai can be found in the courtroom working as a Partner in the Law offices of Michael Scafiddi, one of Southern California’s largest criminal defense firms. She is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine and received her Juris Doctorate from the University of La Verne College of Law. You can find and follow Malalai on Instagram. She has published on the issue of Afghan children and you can find her article, “The Collateral Imprisonment of Afghan Children: An Obstacle To Building The Afghan State,” in the La Verne Law Review.
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is Professor of History at James Madison University where he teaches courses on the Middle East and South Asia. His publications have addressed subjects including colonial political economy, the Pashto language, photography, cartography, animal and environmental studies, and Orientalism in Afghanistan. Professor Hanifi’s research has been supported by the American Historical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Asian Development Bank, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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