Efforts by the people of Afghanistan to achieve modern living conditions that meet today’s life standards have always been doomed to failure.
The rise of the most radical segment of society, the successors of the lame mullah – a British spy who had become a Muslim cleric and preached in Kabul for forty years, waging the largest Pashtun uprising against then-King Amanullah Khan – and those who have stood up to these efforts for more than a century are the main cause of the crisis. The media, institutions and limited administrative facilities have been seized for the umpteenth time by a force that has no other mission but to destroy what has been built and to stop the progress that has taken place. They remove the signs of change and destroy the resources that underlie change.
The rise of the backward-looking forces could be an opportunity if the pro-government forces advance and those who see themselves as the heirs of the past fighters and freedom fighters do not give up and fight, do not deviate from their path and are not disbanded among the Taliban and the petrified. The dissolution of the development-oriented forces is the greatest danger of this crisis. This dissolution has happened several times during the course of history. We experienced it very recently in the 1990s with the outbreak of sectarian and ethnic wars and in what happened after the Bonn Conference in 2001. In the first case, many non-ethnic and non-partisan forces fell into the trap of fanatical regimes and plunged into political mire. After the Bonn Conference, when the “democratic regime” was supposed to be based on the delegation of power and resources to influential figures and the locomotive of this “transformation” was cash and foreign support, forward-looking factions and those who knew that ethnic prejudices could not establish a stable government. Indigenous forces did not try to introduce an alternative way and could not take their eyes off of the thriving market of lucrative projects and raise awareness by building institutions, organizations and parties based on the long tradition of national-democratic struggles and pave the way for a non-authoritarian, Independent, non-ethnic and non-religious government. They were many in number, but not mature in consciousness and fundamental efforts.
Today, when the Taliban group has re-seized power and resources the alarm bells are ringing in the conscience of every single Afghan successor of the development-oriented movement for education, freedom, human rights and democracy, and in the nearly one year, thousands of men and women must have stood up to fight the Taliban. The successors of freedom fighters and democrats are gradually lining up behind their ethnic and the Taliban group is embarking on a new round of destruction, murder, ethnic, and religious terrorism. The result of these factions is obvious. Many members of forward-looking groups, as well as educated, political and cultural figures who had fought alongside jihadist groups against each other, are still alive, and some of them have gained experience building institutions and using profitable projects. What have they achieve? Which group of those deceived human beings has been able to save their people, tribe, language, position and culture in these decades of prejudice and xenophobia?
The country’s development-oriented factions have been caught in the mire due to despair. They are no longer committed to progressive aspirations. They are humiliated and cannot look to new, hopeful perspectives. A force that loses hope is inevitably dissolved in its current state. Hope is the result of foresight. Hopeful human beings have the ability to see beyond the hedge. Therefore, they are trapped in everyday life and do not give in to Taliban and group rivalries. How can we give hope to the great body and perhaps millions of patriots who support the progress of light? How can tens of thousands of experts, intellectuals, writers, politicians and civil activists understand that the first principle of victory and resurrection is not to lose hope.