Interview: Reflections on the rise of the taliban, peace, conflict and forced displacement.

On Friday August 13, 2021, an interview was conducted with Australian citizen ‘R’ whose family migrated from Afghanistan to Australia via Pakistan. Here, ‘R’ explores the realities of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, living in Pakistan and a personal response to the current peace and conflict issues in these countries.

Interviewer: If you want to start by explaining to us your ethnicity, your culture, how you came to Australia and how old you were.

R: I don't know if I should tell you the true side of the story.

Interviewer: As this is confidential, we want to hear the raw truth.

R: My Parents Fled Afghanistan in the mid 1990’s during the first Taliban Uprising. I come from a Hazara Ethnicity which is a Shia minority in Afghanistan. When the Taliban gained power they proclaimed, “Uzbek’s to Uzbekistan, Tajiks to Tajikistan and Hazaras to the Cemetery”. The Taliban strongly believe that the Shia sect of Islam (Especially Hazaras) are infidels and murdering a Shia will grant them passage to heaven.

My family comes from a mountainous province of Jaghori and are from a small village known as Shilbinag.

In the Early 80’s my grandfather, whom was a religious leader, started a project where he opened small education centers for children and teens. Over the course of years, he manages to expand and start several schools in the province and was a well known and respected member of the community. My father, being the eldest son, carried on my grandfathers Legacy and became a teacher at these schools. When the Taliban gained power and control over several large cities, they made their intentions known. They wanted to oppress women, murder all ethnic minorities and govern the country under Extreme Islamic Khalifat.

Talibs wanted to close all the schools, hospitals, businesses, and offices. They were set out to imprison and murder all government officials, doctors, political members, wealthy members of the country, schoolteachers, and anyone else they deemed a threat to their movement. The Talibs understood at very early stages that the greatest threat to their existence is education and knowledge.

My Grandfather and Father was notified that Taliban forces were gaining power over the Hazara villages and the Talib’s were aware that my family was providing education to children. With this knowledge and threat, my family swiftly organised an overnight escape out of the village to a remote refugee town in Quetta known as Brewery.

My Family left Pakistan in 1999 on a journey of hope for a better life in Australia. My father spent his entire life savings, with one suitcase that stored our belongings and the clothes we had on, we started our journey. My father managed to secure a spot for my family using all his money on a small, torn up fishing boat along with over 100 other Afghan Migrants where we were all crammed in like a can of sardine. My family endured the rough seas, where on multiple occasions we came face to face with death. We were left with barely any food and miraculously made it to the Australian Shores. The risk of contacting people smugglers, losing all our money, and possibly dying in the ocean far outweighs the risk of remaining in Afghanistan, being imprisoned or publicly murdered in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

Interviewer: How would you describe life in Afghanistan prior to the rise of Taliban?

R: Afghanistan has been subject to war and destruction for over 100 years. Afghanistan is the neighbor of 6 major countries which makes it a very tactical ground for any powerful country to control. The Russians and the US are the most recently countries which tried to occupy the country for their advantage. Their attempts left the country crippled. The country is war-torn beyond repair. Prior to the 80’s, Afghanistan was becoming a somewhat progressive country where women were publicly seem wearing skirts, short sleeve shirts and no headscarves. After the Talib uprising, women were subject to the worst violation of human rights. Women aged 9 years or older were forced to be brides, women were not to be seen in public without male escorts. Women were forced to wear Burkas and were forbidden from any means of education, employment and etc.

Interviewer: Why is education such a great threat to Taliban forces?

R: Eliminating education is a long term strategy adopted by not only the Taliban but other extremist groups like ISIS. The strongest tool in the world is education. We can solve a lot of problems in the world if the majority were educated. The problem is that Afghanistan is war-torn and poverty stricken, highly uneducated country which makes it a breeding ground for these extremist groups. They promise things like, ‘you get 72 virgins in heaven’ and people go crazy for it. It’s similar to what they’re doing now telling the young men ‘Come join the group, you will kill infidels, you will get your share of people’s homes, you will get as many women as you want’. Fame and glory are things that a young man craves in a country with no security, opportunity or certain future. These young men who join the Taliban forces truly believe that they will be regarded as heroes and that they are serving their country and their religion. Taliban fighters/suicide bombers are treated as martyrs by the organisation and are often given grand funerals. This encourages and motivates the rest of the younger Talibs.

Talib’s primary goal is to stop education for the next generation. It wasn’t just a short-term thing. What a lot of people don't realise is that the Taliban, ISIS and groups like that, though they seem like a very simple and uneducated organisation with just a bunch of aggressive people joined together for violence, these people plan for 100 years ahead. It's not as simple as ‘we are going to grab a bunch of people together and cause as much trouble as we can’. Their ultimate goals are to create a khalifate, an Islamic State. To do that, you must eliminate everyone around you that don’t align with that goal. Anyone and everyone that may be even the slightest threat to this vision will be killed. 

The way these organisations work isn’t short term. They will not stop in Afghanistan; their goal is to dominate and infiltrate the west and spread their plagued ideology and to eventually destroy the west.

Interviewer: So your family escaped Afghanistan and took temporary refuge in Pakistan. Do you have many memories in Pakistan?

R: Yes, I’ve got quite a few.

Interviewer: What was your experience?

R: It was shit hole. It’s a mix between a desert, mountains, and a poor village. I don't know what it's like now. I haven’t been back in over 21 years but back when I was there, the houses were made out of mud and hay which is a common construction with resources being low and especially being a refugee, you just deal with what they have. It wasn’t the safest place to live. As kids we would experience a lot of horrific things.

Our family was forced to leave everything behind and were forced to have a new beginning in a foreign country where the Afghan refugees were treated as third class citizens. To make ends meet, my father sold cigarettes, chewing gum and other small items from a small basket. The money he would earn from that barely fed his family for the night. My family experienced extreme poverty and hardship. My father would also sell fruits and other smaller items on the back of a bicycle which he would rent. Eventually he was juggling 3 different jobs a day working 18 – 20 hours a day just to bring enough money for his family to survive. He would come home, have a quick meal, rest for few short hours then head back.

During these times, Quetta wasn’t safe. There are many Taliban Sympathizers and active members in Pakistan who routinely and regularly target the Hazara refugee town of Brewery. The Talib forces most common form of attack was planting bombs in a car or motorcycle amongst a busy marketplace. Each attack would take 10’s of lives. My father knew that he and his family were not safe and once again he was forced to look for refuge and safety for his family.

Pakistan itself has always funded and supported Taliban and recently, the head of Pakistani Intelligence openly and publicly admitted to support and funding the Taliban.

I still have family members who also fled Afghanistan and are currently residing in Quetta. I fear for their lives, their safety and livelihood. After experiencing so many attacks and deaths, my family in Pakistan just see it as a way of life now. My parents recently called my family in Pakistan to see how they are going, and they laughed and said “well at least there hasn’t been a bombing in the markets this week, so pretty good”. It seems that the freedom, peace, and safety that we take for granted every day are things that people in Afghanistan and Quetta dream of. It is so shocking that death and terror are a way of life. No one in the world deserves to live like that.

Interviewer: It's sad that that’s a norm and it's not a shock.

R: Losing life, experiencing terror attacks, bombings and losing loved ones is all my people have known. It's really sad.

Imagine us going to a shopping centre with a 50/50 chance of being blown up. The thought of not getting back home because we might get bombed. To my people in Afghanistan, that’s reality not just a horrible dream. I am so proud of my people and will forever admire their courage and strength. Even with all the terror, death, and destruction, they refuse to stop their livelihood.

Interviewer: In one way, it’s sad that that's the reality, the security risk, but in another way it's good that the Taliban aren’t getting the fear which is one of the main elements of what they want.

R: That's exactly what they want.

Interviewer: As you know in 2001, the troops came in and decades later, Trump started the withdrawal of troops and now Biden has finished the withdrawal. With the withdrawal of troops has also come a lot of the aid organisations which had a big impact from what I have seen. What is your opinion of the situation?

R: I think it's a repeat of what happened in the 90’s. This is the exact same thing that happened when the Russians came in and tried to conquer the country. They destabilised the country and left a power vacuum which ultimately gave birth to Taliban.

America came in with the excuse that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist but there were a lot of gaps in that theory. There’s never one consistent answer, there’s ties of Osama Bin Laden with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia is in the pocket of America. End of the day, whoever owns Afghanistan has good control over Iran, Pakistan, India and China and other neighbouring countries. Afghanistan is also filled with natural rare minerals. Even before the Russians came in, the countries were trying to get conquered for years because of these resources. Everyone wants a piece of land, but people of Afghanistan are extremely stubborn and very patriotic, they won't give it up.  

After the American arrival in 2001, Taliban had already grown out of control and coupling that with funding from various countries they had grown very powerful. With corrupt government after corrupt government, Afghanistan never recovered from the war. These corrupt leaders were placed in power with the assistance of the US. Taliban was never defeated and instead they were growing larger in numbers. I don’t know if US was desperate or naïve in thinking they could make a deal with the Devil (Taliban). What in the world gave America the confidence that the Taliban has changed? Or that they could integrate with the government? Now 1000’s of American, Australian, UK soldiers and Hundreds of Thousands of innocent Afghan men, women and children died for nothing. They have left Afghanistan in worse condition than when they first came in.

Interviewer: Before they left, the US and the Taliban made a peace agreement which some people have been questioning. Part of the agreement was about upholding women’s rights, for example the 2009 EVAW gender rights laws for violence against women. The Taliban have said yes we will uphold these laws to address violence against women. To follow up, there was an open letter written by the Taliban to America reiterating their promise to act within the realm of the peace agreement. Many people are now questioning if that is ignorance of America or if it's just a formality from the US that needs to be done. From a behavioural perspective, there’s nothing to suggest, women’s rights will be upheld by the Taliban. What's your opinion of the peace agreement?

R: I think it's an absolute load of shit. The whole thing is a gimmick. This is just my opinion, it's not a fact. Even if it was a fact, I don't think America would admit to it. America has been hit extremely hard from COVID-19. America is the kind of country that wants to be the puppet master and control every country.

In its own way, America wants its own Kalifate. The only difference is they’re not openly going out of television and beheading people, they’re just killing people with drones and bombs that no one sees. They’re not broadcasting it but they’re killing a lot more people than the Taliban has. That's the reality. With them coming up with this deal, what I think is happening is that America is in Trillions of dollars of deficit right now. They already were but now it's getting worse because they have no way of paying it back. There's only so much fake money they can print before they owe the world more resources than the world has and can replenish. While in Afghanistan, they had troops in Syria, they had troops in Jordan, troops in Gaza, and had them in Yemen. In these examples, they overthrew two governments within the past few years, they’ve orchestrated all these other different attacks, they sided with Jerusalem pretty much massacring the Palestinians. The problem is they’ve got their hands in too many cookie jars and now they’ve been caught. How they’ve dealt with it is ‘we do not have enough resources to continue what we're doing because we're not getting the resources we want in return’. They ultimately wanted power and control, coming into Afghanistan as the nice guy with the army to ‘help your country’ and once that happens people think their whole country is the way it is because of the help of America. So then the government will have allegiance with America and say 'since we're allies, I want to build all my military bases in Afghanistan’. If they succeeded with that, this would be a massive danger to Iran and Russia because they have a direct line of attack. That didn’t work out. They were continuously losing money, soldiers, resources and the faith of their own people. The problem was their own people not believing they were doing anything productive in Afghanistan as peace wasn’t happening.

I think America got to a point where America had no choice but to have something to justify why they were there for the past twenty years and that was through a peace agreement where they could state ‘we finally got the Taliban to agree to be part of the people, they’re good people now’. A year ago the Taliban leader was getting death threats on Joe Biden’s life, saying ‘I'm going to come kill you’. This was only a year ago. It's not like it was ten years ago and those leaders have left and the old group is gone with the younger generation who are educated and different. No, they’re the same people that they want to kill. How do you take the same people that you claim to be evil and put them in power? There could have been so many other agreements that America could have come up with but it was the absolute worst deal they could do. Now the Taliban, what they have tried to do in the past twenty years, they have achieved in the past few weeks. They’ve got the license to do what they want now, they are the government. The main government is a part of their group. People don't understand that. They say Ashraf Ghani is the leader but he openly supports the Taliban. Look where that got him, he himself fled the country and left his country in the hands of the Talib forces like the coward that he always was.

To make matters worse, Talib are getting funding after funding from Pakistan. I’m not educated in politics but these are the things I've witnessed growing up. In the western counties they deny these kinds of things. When you go to Pakistan, they proudly say they support the Taliban, they just don't say it in the media. Even the head of Secret Intelligence of Pakistan after he retired said they have been supporting the Taliban. He didn’t care, he pretty much said ‘so what, what’s anyone going to do, we’ve been supporting them all along’. My opinion on this peace deal is that it's an atrocity on human rights. It's like telling Hitler ‘I know you were a bad guy, let's just call it quits but you can stay in power just don't kill too many people’. Letting the Taliban stay in power is no different, and worse for the state of Afghanistan. It's as though they’re allowing the Taliban to run the country by promising not to do these certain things on paper. Do you really believe women's rights are going to be preserved? That's the first thing they’re going to destroy. The first thing they’re going to do is target any women who have any type of education, subject women to every basic human rights violations you can think of. They are going to treat them like animals or worse. They flog women on the street. I have a mother, I have sisters and just the thought of that makes me want to cry. This is a violation of human rights, a straight violation by America.

Interviewer: It makes you wonder about the people who have been silenced along the way.

R: It is one of the most corrupt countries in the world where power is the ultimate force. If anyone goes up against them, they can just get the soldier out, the machine guns out and silence them and no one would hear a word of it. They own the media so who’s going to speak up? You might get someone Facebook live it and Facebook itself will block that due to agreements. Two people die in the west and there’s news coverage bombarding every channel for weeks but 100’s of thousands die in Afghanistan and we only hear about it from someone’s Instagram story.  Imagine losing a whole city overnight. These are human lives. These are human people…my people. If I was there, I would be a casualty, that's all I would be. To know that if I was living in that country right now and I didn’t have any of the human rights that I have now. No one would even know of my death and that’s the reality of people living there. That's why it angers us so much; These people aren’t being remembered because people don’t care. Next week if no one did or said anything, these people will just vanish off the face of the earth and no one would notice. These people have families too, they have happiness, they breathe exactly how you and I do. That's the sad reality. They are getting wiped like flies and we haven’t heard anything about it. The only thing I've heard is just what people share among each other, the articles they find. People have to dig to find a small portion of an article because pictures and videos get blocked. If it wasn’t, we would have heard it everywhere. We get COVID-19 updates every few minutes but we can't get an update of overseas matters? People are dying overseas from COVID-19 and we get updated but what about international matters? What about the bombings, massacres, beheadings and women getting publicly mistreated. How can you treat anyone like that, let alone a woman who is potentially a mother? How do they desensitise to believe that a type of human is a subhuman that you can just abolish from the face of the earth with no regard at all. This is what America has done. They have given these people, the Taliban, power. I promise you, women are the first targets, their rights will be violated first. They have struggled the most from this, they were targeted from the beginning and no one is going to hear about it. America has committed a human rights violation. Following on from this will be the ethnic minorities. This event will forever be known as the day my country was burned to the ground and the world watched and did nothing.

Note: The interview is based on personal experience and opinion.