Why does no one support the taliban’s opponents?
By Nurullah Walizada, analyst (Afghanistan), especially for Sangar
One of the reasons why regional and global powers show little interest in supporting the opponents of the Taliban is the ambiguity of their narrative—or, more precisely, the lack of clarity regarding the motives and objectives behind their struggle against the Taliban.
The Taliban regime has based its domestic policy on repression, confrontation, conflict, and tension, while in foreign affairs it relies on blackmail, hostage-taking, and the exploitation of the vulnerabilities of countries in the region and beyond. However, the Taliban’s policy of internal repression and confrontation has very specific victims. Not all ethnic groups suffer equally under the Taliban’s repressive rule.
Tajiks stand at the top of the list of communities against whom the Taliban are pursuing a systematic policy of exclusion and suppression. In other words, the Taliban’s war inside Afghanistan has a distinctly ethnic and identity-based character.
Given this reality, the struggle against the Taliban from the perspective of anti-Taliban forces should likewise possess an identity-based dimension, and the narrative of resistance should be constructed around the identities of the communities subjected to oppression. Yet this is precisely what the anti-Taliban military fronts have failed to do.
As a result, strategists in regional and global powers perceive the anti-Taliban struggle as lacking a coherent strategic narrative, making support for it appear neither meaningful nor strategically significant.
The arguments advanced by anti-Taliban fronts to distance themselves from a clear ethnic and identity-based narrative are largely moral in nature and rooted in a form of romantic and politically immature nationalism. Under normal circumstances, such arguments might be acceptable. However, in today’s Afghanistan and under the conditions created by the Taliban, approaches grounded in realism and an objective assessment of reality are required.
Under such circumstances, politics cannot be conducted through moral sermons and nostalgic sentiments. Just as the Taliban’s religious preaching is today widely perceived as hypocritical and has largely lost its persuasive power, the moral appeals of its opponents—rooted in a hollow and intellectually weak form of nationalism—may likewise be viewed as naïve or misleading, and therefore lack both appeal and effectiveness.
One often hears opponents of the Taliban argue that the Taliban oppress all communities, including the Pashtuns themselves. From this insufficiently examined premise, a misleading conclusion is then drawn: if that is the case, the Taliban cannot be regarded as an ethnic movement, and therefore it is impossible to wage a struggle against them based on an ethnic or identity-based narrative.
In reality, this reflects a misunderstanding of the very concepts of oppression and injustice. Those who believe that Taliban repression affects everyone equally fail to examine the nature of oppression in sufficient depth.
There are two forms of oppression. The first is general oppression, in which a political authority imposes policies on society as a whole, affecting citizens as individuals regardless of their ethnic background. Examples include depriving girls of access to education or imposing the wearing of beards and turbans on the population at large.
However, there is another form of oppression—one based on ethnic discrimination. In this case, the victim is identified in advance. A particular ethnic community becomes the target of repression precisely because of its ethnic identity.
Oppression in this sense can also be divided into two forms: individual and collective.
At the individual level, a Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, or member of another ethnic community may face discrimination simply because of the ethnic identity recorded in official documents and may be deprived of certain rights and opportunities. For example, a Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, or representative of another non-Pashtun group may be barred from holding positions such as Minister of Defense or Minister of Interior.
At the collective level, ethnic oppression means that specific communities are exposed to the threat of genocide, forced displacement, land confiscation, and the destruction of their cultural and identity-based heritage, including intangible cultural assets.
It can be argued that this is the most serious form of oppression. Owing to its scale, severity, and systematic nature, it is recognized as a crime under international law, and those responsible should be prosecuted before international judicial bodies.
This is precisely the type of oppression that the Taliban imposes upon Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks. Pashtuns, by contrast, do not face comparable forms of collective pressure from the Taliban. This helps explain why Pashtun opposition to the Taliban is often more restrained and less intense. The Pashtun population does not experience the same scale of repression under Taliban rule. The harm inflicted upon them by the regime is perceived as less severe and more bearable.
As a result, a genuine common understanding rarely emerges between Pashtun and non-Pashtun opponents of the Taliban. Their experiences of suffering are different, and consequently, their perceptions of events and their political assessments differ as well.
In a situation where non-Pashtun communities find themselves facing such conditions, there are essentially only two possible options.
The first is that international institutions of justice come to their aid. Yet this is not happening. The world is far from being so just that one can reasonably expect the suffering of oppressed peoples in one corner of the globe to be remedied by champions of justice located in another.
The second option is for the oppressed communities to defend themselves. In the author's view, nonviolent self-defense is likewise unlikely to produce the desired outcome. Therefore, forces that claim to be fighting the Taliban must position themselves as defenders of the oppressed in an ethnic and identity-based sense. Without such a framework, it is impossible to mobilize the victims of injustice in the struggle for their rights. And what could be more effective than the direct participation of the oppressed themselves in a justice movement?
Ultimately, one question remains unanswered: do you, as a political force opposed to the Taliban, truly understand the nature of oppression in its ethnic dimension? Do you regard yourself as part of the communities subjected to discrimination and persecution? Do you feel their pain as your own? If such understanding and solidarity are absent, it is difficult to expect a genuine commitment to an ethnic and identity-based narrative of resistance against the Taliban.
