By Gyorgy Busztin, Visiting Research Professor, MEI-NUS

 

Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzadeh sent a telling message to the Afghan people and the world recently when he instructed the country’s judges to apply hudud laws and punishments unwaveringly. In doing so, he put paid to any illusions about Taliban 2.0 inching towards “moderation”.

The hudud punishments, such as flogging, amputation, stoning to death, and public execution, are meted out for a variety of offences seen as violating Quranic injunctions — such as adultery, apostasy, and alcohol consumption, among others — and are the most extreme form of Islamic justice. Only Iran applies them, and even there, they are used sparingly[1], although the country’s Supreme Judge, Mohseni Ejei, recently called on judges to apply the law mercilessly to punish demonstrators.

In the case of Afghanistan, some public floggings were hurriedly carried out to show the Taliban mean business. They did not stop there. For good measure, the mullahs also banned women from public parks altogether, after some spoke out against their mixing with men in such spaces.

The decision was the latest in a series of restrictive measures adopted against women since the Taliban returned to power last August, and earned the Islamic Emirate the dubious distinction of being the most misogynistic regime ever. Public education for girls beyond the 7th grade remains banned, depriving an entire generation of women of knowledge, while women are also effectively barred from work except for self-employment, and activities at home. Their movements also remain restricted.

While the Taliban is intent on rolling back the modest gains Afghanistan made over the last two decades in areas such as education, health care, civil society participation, and human rights, it has failed to cement the single achievement of its rule — an end to violence. Now, bomb attacks targeting minorities, revenge killings against former regime officials promised amnesty, and a general upsurge in terrorist activity by groups like ISIS-K are commonplace.

The country’s economic collapse and security meltdown have occurred amid a downturn in the Taliban’s relations with its two most important neighbours, Iran, and Pakistan. The fallout from events in Afghanistan has consistently affected Iran and Pakistan, and both have long sought to gain influence with whoever rules Kabul, with meagre returns.

Now, the three neighbours are each grappling with spiralling domestic problems. In Iran, an enduring wave of protests — sparked by the death of a woman while in custody of the morality police for wearing the hijab “improperly”, but which have grown to include other issues — has questioned the legitimacy of the system. In Pakistan, meanwhile, an acute political crisis has raised questions about the country’s future. The crisis hit while the country was still reeling from the worst natural calamity in its history, revealing starkly the decades-long failure of governance there.

The three polities, two Islamic republics and one Islamic emirate, have one thing in common: They place religion at the centre of their legitimacy, which inevitably restricts their toolkits in answering their multiple challenges. Their popular mandate is on shaky ground, as no free elections have been conducted. There is thus no compact between the rulers and the ruled, leaving regimes with little other than force with which to maintain their grip on power.

A typical problem is the three systems’ unwillingness to address their critics in any way other than violence. This is because, by hitching their legitimacy to a divinely-inspired mission,[2] they reflexively deem any public disagreement with their edicts as insubordination to God. The Taliban uses brutal force against peaceful demonstrations demanding women’s rights to education and work. A similar protest movement in Iran over the hijab – but more broadly, against the curtailing of women’s rights and civil liberties – has likewise been repressed with excessive violence, which only served to inflame protesters further, thus sparking a vicious circle of more unrest which is met by more violence. In Pakistan, shadowy forces allegedly linked to the army confronted their detractor, former Prime Minister Imran Khan, by attempting to kill him, a tactic not unknown to the army-ISI cabal that functions as a deep state running the country.

Violence to curb the aspirations of society in all these cases is justified by nebulous references to religious tenets, as the rulers of the three countries – two Sunni and one Shia – portray themselves as repositories of divine justice on Earth.

But the test of the pudding is eating. The ostentatious grandstanding of political leaders in the three countries runs into trouble when the basic needs of society are left unaddressed. The case of Afghanistan is the most dramatic, but is by no means exception to the rule. The mullahs cannot kickstart an economy paralysed after half the workforce – Afghanistan’s women – were put out of work and banished from the economy. Neither can the ruling clerical class in Iran extract the country from the abyss four decades of misrule has pushed it into. For Pakistan, the faltering civilian governments — never free of the control of the military and ISI strongmen — have repeatedly stirred up sectarian violence and manipulated society via rulings by ultra-conservative mullahs, who frequently use a notorious blasphemy law to channel popular rage against invented internal enemies.

In all three countries, enemies of the system are routinely labelled enemies of Islam – in the case of Iran, even the enemies of God (under the ominous term “mohareb”, or “one waging war against God”, a crime punishable by death). The arguments invented by the mullahs in defence of the system rest squarely on the proposition that “if God with us, who is against us?”. In Iran, and increasingly in Pakistan, people are refusing to buy it. In Afghanistan, the Taliban enforces loyalty from the barrel of a gun, and the population is thus quiet — for now.

Afghanistan’s problems are compounded by its economic meltdown. The Taliban is fully isolated — even its Islamic republic neighbours do not recognise it — and the prospect of a total collapse of its economy may claim the group as collateral damage. In the past, Iran and Pakistan alternated between being props for the regime, or acting as a check on it.

But Taliban 2.0 may make enemies out of erstwhile friends. Tehran is incensed by repeated terrorist attacks on the Shia of Afghanistan, particularly the Hazara minority. Islamabad, meanwhile, has tried to curtail armed Afghan incursions into its chronically unstable North by heavily fortifying its border, hardly a sign of good neighbourliness between two professedly Islamic states. After more trouble, it sent a high-level delegation headed by Khina Rabbani Khar, State Minister for Foreign Affairs — a woman, to the consternation of the Kabul mullahs – ostensibly to buy some moderation from its irksome neighbour.

How the difficult relationship between the three countries will play out is hard to foresee, but continued instability and unpredictability is the likely trajectory, further reinforcing negative trends in the region. Iran hosts a large Afghan migrant community which is growing because of a constant flow of new arrivals fleeing persecution or economic deprivation at home, putting added pressure on its reeling economy. Tragically, many end up in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) proxy militia of the Fatemiyoun Brigade, which is doing Iran’s bidding in Syria.

Pakistani Shia, meanwhile, are recruited by Iran into the Zainabiyoon outfit, which does much the same thing in Syria, that is, serving as cannon fodder. Iran’s Baluchistan province is under martial law, with bloody mass reprisals against protesters there. This feeds resentment in neighbouring Pakistan’s eponymous region. The chronic insecurity has prompted Islamabad to hold back on development in the area. Likewise, Pakistan’s Pashtun community remains a focus of controversy, as many Pakistanis see it as an extension of their Afghan brethren and a permanent security threat. Divided by the British-devised Durand Line, the Pashtuns refuse to accept their partition and strive to maintain their unity as one people, irrespective of the border dividing them. Drug and oil smuggling in lawless border areas further complicates matters[3].

In the end, the troubled relationship of the three neighbours may thwart attempts at realising energy and communication projects in the region, the likes of the long dormant TAPI gas pipeline project or Chabahar port and related infrastructure, which India pinned high hopes on realising. China, too, has economic interests in the area, and violence against its citizens in Pakistan, as well as other security threats emanating from Afghanistan, may force it to abandon its aloofness and wade into the quagmire, as chronic instability in the area remains fertile ground for extremism that should concern all the region’s stakeholders.

 

Image Caption: A private security guard standing at the entrance to the Bagh-e-Babur Garden in Kabul. The Taliban have banned Afghan women from entering the capital’s public parks and funfairs, just months after ordering access to be segregated by gender. Photo: Wakil Kohsar / AFP

 

About the Author

Dr Gyorgy Busztin is Visiting Research Professor at the Middle East Institute, NUS.

A career diplomat and an academic, he served, between 2001 and 2011, as Hungary’s ambassador to Indonesia and subsequently, Iran. In 2011, Dr Busztin was appointed deputy envoy of the United Nations in Iraq, responsible for the political, analytical, electoral and constitutional support components of the UN’s mission in Iraq. He served at the level of assistant secretary-general until October 2017.

Dr Busztin holds a degree in Arabic history from Damascus University, Syria and a Doctorate in Arabic language and Semitic philology from Lorand Eotvos University in Hungary. In addition to his native Hungarian, he speaks English, French, Arabic, Farsi/Dari (Persian), Malay (Indonesian) and Russian. He believes strongly in political and intercultural dialogue and has engaged leading politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders and representatives of civil society.

 

End Notes

[1] In a landmark case, an acid attacker was ordered to lose an eye based on the Qisas practice of the Hudud laws. The punishment was performed through a medical operation as were some cases of judicially ordered amputations. (Eye for an eye blinds acid attacker in Iran, the Guardian, 05.03.2015).

[2] Iran’s constitution defines the Islamic Republic’s mission, among others, as supporting the “downtrodden” (mustad’afun) against the “oppressors” (mustakbirun) in “every corner of the globe”. The Taliban constitution is the Quran, with mullahs interpreting it in their fatwas as they see best, but never short of inventiveness when pushing their missionary agenda (something they consistently deny) as proven by 9/11. Pakistan initially adopted a secular constitution but one that is based on the Quran and peppered with subsequent amendments that made Islam the state religion thus obligating matching policies from the civilian governments of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

[3] Iran’s Mass Protests are Impacting Lives in Pakistan, The Diplomat, Mariyam Suliman Anees, 15.11.2022