The return of the Islamic Emirate to Kabul on August 15 of this year, and what has been happening in Afghanistan since then, should draw attention to December 1996 when, with Pakistan’s full support, the Taliban first captured Kabul, established the Afghan Emirate under Mullah Omar and issued a five-point directive ordering the strict application of Islamic laws, the creation of a “religious police”, the keeping of women at home, the closing of all videos and private media; and even led people to pray on the highways. Mullah Omar was a close relative of Osama bin Laden, and Al Qaeda had a large base in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of September 11, the United States cracked down on Afghanistan, overthrew the Taliban government, and secured an elected Loya Jirga – the rough equivalent of a Constituent Assembly – to establish a transitional establishment under Hamid. Karzai in 2001 to work for the political freedom of Afghans based on Islam, democracy and social rights. A Constitution of Afghanistan approved by the Loya Jirga in 2004 provided that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was ruled by an elected president, and declared that “sovereignty rests with the people who exercise it through their elected officials.” Elections were to be held. also stand separately for the two chambers of parliament. The Islamic Republic even had a Supreme Court whose members were to be appointed by the President with the approval of the lower house. The Loya Jirga had brought together representatives of groups, regions and ethnicities on a single platform, and what is remarkable for a traditional society, also included women as elected officials. In the 2004 and 2009 presidential elections, Hamid Karzai emerged victorious in subsequent polls in 2014 and 2019 Mohammad Ashraf Ghani was elected Speaker of the Afghanistan House due to their ability to use violence and influence Media laws enacted in 2005 o stressed the importance of independent media and supported their activities to record freedom of thought and expression, but again, this freedom could not take root as expected because democracy itself did not progressed – despite a promising Constitution – due to sectarian divisions, a weak rule of law that has failed to control violence and the prevalence of corruption.

Afghanistan seemed to prove that democracy and national unity required a strong government that could establish the rule of law to ensure the safety of people from all forms of violence and prevent the rise of political interests based on ethnicity and religion. religion. people living in poverty have succumbed to the wishes and plans of the rich and powerful, and in the process have even taken the path of violence at their behest instead of asserting their political rights. The conflict of personal interests led Abdullah Abdullah not to accept Ashraf Ghani’s victory in the 2014 elections and in 2019 – when Ghani won again – forcing a power-sharing on behalf of the government of national unity. The unstable, conflict-ridden government has failed to promote democratic standards, allowing the Taliban to rise to power through activism. The sense of identity in Afghanistan comes from tribes such as the Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras, but that overwhelming distinction was that of religion and sects. The Shia-Sunni divide was a historical legacy, as was the Sunni split between the radicals – who were totally against the US-led West and in favor of the revival of Islam in the Four-Companion period. “From the prophet or the” Pious “. Caliphs’ – and the body of Islamists who advocated that an Islamic Republic, though rooted in Sharia law, was able to exist in ‘competition and not conflict’ with Western democracy. – the “war against terrorism” led by the Jehad launched by the main ulemas of the time – Al Tijani in Algeria, Abdul Wahab in Arabia and the disciple of Wahab Shah Waliullah in India – against the Western encroachment on “land Muslim ”in the mid-19th century. Jehad’s epicenter on the Indian subcontinent was in the Swat Valley of what is now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in Pakistan. This Jehad failed against the upper British power, but left the entire NWFP-Afghanistan belt highly radicalized, placing the Pashtuns at the head of the Islamic “revivalists”. golden period ”of the first 50 years after the Prophet, and that the Muslim world must return there to halt its political decline. The protagonists of the failed Jehad formed the Darul Uloom Deoband in 1868 to continue the apolitical mission of madrasas throughout the subcontinent to promote Puritan Islam. Years later, in Pakistan, the products of the Deobandi madrasas – known as the Taliban – were mobilized and sent to post-Soviet Afghanistan in 1993 by the government of Benazir Bhutto, for the political task of controlling a turbulent situation there created by the violent conflict between the nationalist warlords of the Northern Alliance on the one hand, and the Islamic forces supported by the Pak like Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba on the other hand. support of Pakistan, established the Afghan Emirate in Kabul in 1996. Pakistan has also obtained from its close allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to recognize the new regime – these are the only three countries to do so . Radical Islam views the US-led West as its first enemy, opposes US “clients” in the Muslim world, and attacks Shiites because of the historical memory of ” Kharijite revolt ”against Caliph Ali in which Sunnism was born.

During the Cold War era, another Islamic current had emerged with the implicit endorsement of the US-led West – in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt and the Jamaat-e-Islami in South and Southeast Asia – to oppose the Soviet Union. the friendly regimes of Hafiz Assad, President Nasser, India and Indonesia. These fundamentalist organizations were seen by the West as practitioners of “moderate” Islam who subscribed to an Islamic Republic believing in “the sovereignty of Allah” and the supremacy of the Shariat, but who positioned themselves politically on the side of the West against the world of communism. Pakistan remained an ally of the United States even after supporting the Taliban Emirate which had allowed Afghanistan to be used as the race until September 11 and played a role of duplicity in the “war on the terrorism “which the United States subsequently launched in Afghanistan. Despite Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan openly declaring that it was Pakistan’s mistake to support the United States in this” war “and endorsing the rise of T aliban in Afghanistan, the Pentagon, maintaining its old relationship with the Pakistani military, trusted Pakistan to mediate between the United States and the Taliban to seek an agreement that would facilitate the withdrawal of American troops from the Afghan battlefield messy. The United States has also placed its hopes on its former “ally” by ensuring that the Taliban does not break its Doha promise not to allow any terrorist activity to be planned against America from Afghan soil. The Emirate, for its part, is starting to apply its radical program again. The big question in Afghanistan from the American perspective is whether the Taliban Emirate would be willing to descend to become an Islamic Republic of the type that existed under Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, accommodating women in positions of political power and enabled the functioning of independent media.

Although the United States faces recalcitrant Taliban seeking to impose socio-religious restrictions on the emirate, it does not sufficiently take into account Pakistan’s collusion with the Taliban which was supposed to provide “strategic depth” to Pakistan. in Afghanistan – mainly against India. Americans also fail to see through Pakistan’s geopolitical strategy of building its larger image as a land that housed all shades of the Islamic spectrum within the Ummah. US President Joe Biden appears to underestimate the strategic importance of the alignment of the Wahabis with Marxist China – a result of the Sino-Pakistani axis – due to their ideological and common political animosity towards the West-led West. United States.

This widens the grip of China in its quest to become the second superpower.

Presumably, the huge “give and take” between China and Pakistan included ceding territory to the PoK to China for CPEC and ensuring approval of Chinese movements in Xinjiang. All of this has exposed India to new security threats, even though the US has given the impression that it enjoys a certain “comfort of distance” when it comes to Afghanistan. India is handling the whole situation quite well. The policy of building up the military force to deal with any Chinese aggression on the LAC and punish Pakistan for any other wrongdoing by all of the LoC is firmly in place. On Afghanistan, regional cooperation with the Central Asian Republics (CAR) bordering this country as well as with Iran, triggered at the summit by the extremely successful NSA conference convened by the NSA Ajit Doval in Delhi on 10 November, works for the national interests of India and exerts international pressure on the emirate of Kabul to democratize its regime in Afghanistan. Russia attended the Delhi conference to meet even though China and Pakistan had stepped aside, as might be expected. Although the CAR are predominantly Muslim countries, they favor a nationalist regime over a fundamentalist regime and are in step with the Russian approach to Afghanistan which disapproves of “radicalization” – this creates much needed policy convergence between Russia and India. India has taken care that Indo-Russian relations do not hamper India’s strategic partnership with the United States. Russia’s relationship with China in the context of US-Chinese antagonism is something India can keep under scrutiny. the call for the unity of the democratic world against this global threat, from all international forums.

Coming back to Afghanistan, the challenge is to get the Taliban to give in to an inclusive system that includes women and minorities and to abandon the politics of violence.

Furthermore, India rightly carries the voice of economic and other assistance to the Afghan people – India’s development assistance to Afghanistan had already made a deep impression and strengthened the interpersonal friendship between the Afghan people. two countries. The selective authorization of United States humanitarian aid to Afghanistan is a step in the right direction because it makes the case for a pro-people relief. The fact remains that the conflict in Afghanistan is between the idea of ​​an emirate and an acceptable form of Islamic Republic – the latter promising to have democratic content even if it did not put minorities on the same footing. than Muslims. It is likely that the Taliban emirate would not change its revivalist extremism and commitment to Jehad as an instrument of political progress. India will have to beware of the added threat of Islamic terror from the Pak-Afghan belt. In the new emerging geopolitics, India and the United States – the two largest democracies – will have to jointly defend the democratic order against the global threat of Marxist dictatorships and the world of radical Islam. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has, in an insightful approach, actively joined Quad, which opposes China’s aggressive designs in the Indo-Pacific on the one hand, and promotes convergence between the main democratic powers on global commons on the other hand.