-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Fwd: Taliban rule from a planner’s viewpoint
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2021 14:58:15 +0000
From: Fahriye Sancar <Fahriye.Sancar@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Caglar Guven <cguven@xxxxxxxxxxx>
okumaya deger.
Begin forwarded message:
*From: *Pietro Calogero <pietro@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pietro@xxxxxxxxxxx>>
*Subject: **Taliban rule from a planner’s viewpoint*
*Date: *19 August 2021 6:54:07 PM GMT-6
*To: *planetnew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:planetnew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Reply-To: *planetnew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:planetnew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I was first invited to work in the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in the fall of 2002, through the California Chapter of the Society of Afghan Engineers. I was introduced to Minister Yousuf Pashtun on the day I first arrived in Kabul in late May 2003, and worked (that first visit) as a volunteer with Ministry staff engineers, surveying living conditions across the city. I have some Greek ancestry so I look like one of the (many) ethnic groups in Kabul, which made it possible for me to travel around the city openly in 2003, 2006, and 2007. This peculiar entree into Kabul meant that I worked for the Islamic Republic: either the Ministry, or teaching planning at Kabul University or Kabul Polytechnic, through 2018. I did not work for the U.S. government, nor did I remain within American security perimeters, until I did a brief contract for the University of Chicago in 2019 when the security situation had already deteriorated very badly.
I have stated my experience first, because I need to make some difficult arguments: the Islamic Republic failed very badly, and the Taliban’s re-established Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan may do far better. Furthermore, we should support them to help the poorest of Afghan households.
“Better” does not mean that I regard the Taliban as wonderful sweethearts who believe in the total equality of men and women. Most of the Taliban alive today have only lived with warfare-levels of violence, and they are committed to a strict interpretation of Sharia law. For urban planners, the Hanafi school of Shari’a jurisprudence in Afghanistan has far stronger provisions for protecting the rights of people to live securely in their housing, in contrast to the endemic evictions permitted under the laissez-faire free-market system enforced by the Bush Administration and the Karzai government the U.S. established in Kabul. I worked for that Islamic Republic, so I am reporting as a first-person witness to this slow-rolling disaster.
Half of Kabul was a permanent refugee camp by the time I first worked there in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of households had been pressured by Pakistan and Iran to return to Afghanistan, which meant (1) those households lost their UNHCR recognition as protected refugees, and (2) since they had not rural places to return to (land mines, desertification, seizure of their lands), they ended up as “internally displaced persons” (IDPs) living in informal urban settlements. We have a historical parallel in the U.S.: the Great Migration of African-Americans as “internally displaced persons” from the terrorist violence of the Jim Crow south, circa 1920-1965.
And, like the Americans who created the regime, the Islamic Republic denied tenure-security to these poorest of households for years.
Ashraf Ghani tried, when he became president in 2014. He did issue certificates of right-to-stay, but corrupt rank-and-file staffers resisted efforts to formalize and legalize the permanent right-to-inhabit, because they were extracting bribes and extortionate rents even from households in informal neighborhoods. I worked for months with a Ministry team to develop the policy for incorporating informal neighborhoods into the planned/recognized parts of the city. When we completed our draft in the spring of 2018, one of the Deputy Ministers said he would take control of finalizing the policy. My colleagues thought he wanted to take credit for our work. But my worst fear was realized: he took it over to shut it down. We never heard about the formalization policy again.
I have kept quiet about this until now, but the government I was trying to support no longer exists. And it collapsed for good reason: it was so corrupt, so extortionate, that it failed to serve the Afghan people and earn their loyalty. I am only criticizing a few (the richest 1% of) Afghans here. The vast majority of the people I worked with were deeply principled, devoted, and willing to work without pay for months at a time. But the Islamic Republic had been set up by the Bush Administration at the Bonn Conference in November/December 2001, in which he brought back all the extremely corrupt commanders whom the Taliban had thrown out of power in 1996. As early as 2003, a Hazara colleague noted that “At least the Taliban were not corrupt.” Considering how brutal the Taliban had been to the Hazara from 1996-2001, I was shocked at this and many other expressions of deep resentment towards the Western-friendly government the Americans had established to ‘save’ them in 2001.
I appeal to you, as planners, to carefully reconsider the chorus of voices we are reading and hearing from NYT, BBC, NPR, and social media. The prevailing Western consensus we are hearing is that the Taliban cannot possibly have changed, that they will be terrible, that they will oppress women. Lata Mani and Gyatri Spivak studied the way that Brits reacted to the practice of sati (self-immolation of widows) in Bengal in the early 19^th century. Like Afghanistan today, that was also a complex story. But it had some specific outcomes: Brits justified themselves as ‘civilized’ in their opposition to sati, and thereby rationalized allowing the East India Company to colonize, with incredibly violent consequences. Westerners, now, are justifying Liberal Empire as they collectively condemn the Taliban and the re-establishment of the Emirate. ‘How terrible! They are requiring women to wear hijab!’ The Islamic Republic also required this. And hijab is very different from chaduri (burqas). The U.S. has many other close allies who also impose the same or stricter restrictions on women (and men, who must also abide by modesty-protocols).
I expect great difficulty getting any of these arguments published. But I beg you not to categorically dismiss an anti-colonial armed struggle. I am sure they will be very problematic. But I also study how Anglo-Americans continue to treat African-Americans in California right now, and frankly, we have no right to categorically condemn any other government until we implement equal treatment under the law here. Furthermore, the Taliban are not all Afghans—though they represent much more of the population than the elites who took pallet-loads of US dollars and have now fled.
We need to use planner’s metrics to evaluate this new government. Do they promote the right to housing? Do they lower mortality rates and increase literacy? Do they implement Shari’a law consistently so that the rights of all Afghans are protected? Do they build urban infrastructure? The fallen Islamic Republic did badly on most of these measures.
My greatest worry: Will we hurt the poorest Afghan families out of spite through sanctions, because the Taliban defeated our Western-friendly government?
Pietro Calogero
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