May you come to the attention of powerful people
May you live in interesting times
May all your wishes come true
- Ancient* Chinese** Curse
“In our ministry, there’s little work for me to do. Therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter. We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.”
The Afghanistan Analysts Network published an intriguing piece of research last week. Researcher Sabawoon Samim interviewed 5 former Taleban fighters who had gotten jobs with the new regime in Kabul. They were county boys (literally teenagers) when they joined the Taleban. They are now men whose young families live back in the rural provinces where they came from.
These stories are noteworthy for a number of reasons. Obviously, as with any first-person account, they are not entirely to be trusted. People will always paint the best picture of themselves that they can at that moment. However a few themes shine through:
Mostly, they had never been to Kabul before and they were surprised by what they found. Not everyone was an evil sinner. The city actually provides a level of anonymity and privacy that the intrusive neighbourly coveillance of the village does not.
Cities are expensive and they cannot afford to bring their families to live with them. Same everywhere. Cities cost you.
They miss the camaraderie and autonomy of their insurgent groups. Yes, they were under daily threat of death from US drones and government soldiers. But they were feted by their communities as noble religious warriors. They could go where they wanted. They felt part of something bigger.
And now they were in offices, working from 8am to 4pm and getting their pay docked if they turned up late. And we are probably using “working” in the loosest possible sense. It’s good to know that presentism is as, er, present in revolutionary theocracies as it is in our day-to-day lives.
Rather than honouring them, people were expecting them to do things and fix things. And were scathing of them when this did not happen. They had to manage rather than just fight - and it turns out that managing can be harder than fighting.
Most worryingly of all, it seems that the Taleban are now getting addicted to Twitter - perhaps satisfying their lust for conflict with a digital substitute. It does seem like Elon Musk and the Taleban are made for each other. Or perhaps Elon took over Twitter under secret instructions from the CIA (via his mate Peter Thiel’s Palantir connections) in order to bring down the Taleban with social media. One day the truth will come to light. But probably not on Twitter.
Obviously underpinning all this are some uncomfortable truths about American brutality and incompetence in Afghanistan, the corruption of the previous regime, and the horrendous human rights record of the Taleban themselves. No one comes out of this looking good.
But, for me, the deeper story here is what happens when you win your revolution. Fighting an “evil” oppressor is exciting. And all oppressors are evil, otherwise you wouldn’t be fighting them, just don’t look too closely in the mirror regarding your own oppress-, er, purifying activities. Fighting is especially exciting for young men. Indeed history has shown that having a surfeit of young men is never great for social stability. But, of course, if you win, you have to start doing other things than fighting. And lets face it, most of those things - refuse collection, fresh water provision, curriculum development - are extremely tedious for a 22 year old dude compared to pulling the trigger on an AK47 to whoops of encouragement from your mates.
Government is boring in the best possible way.
*Not actually ancient
**Not actually Chinese
Source: Vice and James Dellow
Source: Stable Diffusion
You’re on fire. Reminds me of one of my favourite pratchett quotes - “build a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.” Building things is always harder than tearing them down. You can learn this in the building industry where a 20 tonne excavator can completely remove any sign that a house was ever there in about 4 hours if you’re not too picky about how your wrecked timber and glass is commingled with your wrecked masonry. Then it takes 3 to 6 months to build anything that someone wants to live in. There’s probably a useful ratio that can be extrapolated from that anecdote to figure out how long and hard the road the Taliban have ahead of them is. Every half day of destruction requires 3 months of building, how much time did they spend destroying things?