Isn't the Taliban the Pashtun reality of Afghanistan?
Author: Fayaz Bahraman Najimi, Regional and International Affairs Analyst, Member of the Sangar Advisory Council
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdullahian said during a question and answer session with students at the Faculty of Engineering of Tehran University: “The Taliban are not ISIS, and are part of Afghan society” [Taken from the BBC website].
The BBC report has the following headline: “In response to Amir Abdollahian, former Afghan officials compared the Taliban to the Mujahideen Khalq.”
At the same time, the BBC published the reaction of two Persian-speaking politicians, Rangin Dadfar Spanta and Mashkoor Kabuli, as well as the reaction of Rahmatullah Nabil from their X pages.
The BBC, in a short note, aimed one arrow at two targets: one - the majority of informed Persians who, day after day, believe in a paradigm shift based on the discourse of “the right to self-determination” and “separatism” and step by step separate their path from “service” of Afghans or Pashtuns in their ideas of an inclusive Afghanistan, Afghanness and Afghanism.
Another is to portray the Persians as true Afghans and oppose them to Iran.
For many years, deep in the soul of every Iranian, from the people to the elite, the word "Afghan" has been used to refer to a people whose language is similar to Persian, called Dari, which is separate from the ancient Persian culture and language. The reason is clear, for more than a century and a half, the most destroyers of the identity and culture of the Persians were the figures of the Persian peoples themselves.
The choice of the names Spanta and Mashkoor Kabuli is not accidental here, because one represents a man educated in the West and known as a technocrat, and the other is a seminary graduate and representative of the National Resistance Front.
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The Iran International website, another Arabic-English media outlet following British politics, quoted Abdullahian's words differently.
[The situation in Afghanistan is complex. First, Afghanistan can be on the path to stability and security if all ethnic groups participate in the country's governance. We have clearly told the Taliban officials that the Taliban and Pashtuns are part of Afghanistan and not the whole. ]
It is unclear what source and version of news those reacting used, but my understanding is that their message is to give the green light to both the West and the Pashtun Taliban against Iran.
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Now the waters have receded and the Afghans or Pashtuns and Afghanistan are not only a problem but a problem both within and beyond geography. Denial of this reality is ignorance or service and cooperation with the enemy or collaborationism. Don't the Taliban now have full legitimacy among real Afghans and Pashtuns?
When the question of legitimacy is raised through a popular vote, this Taliban gang will surely have a majority of the Afghan votes. The Deobandi-Pashtun ideology is the Taliban ideology, which is also joined by some Tajik and Uzbek jihadists.
For Persian speakers on the resistance fronts and other Western political forces and figures, playing on the field of Afghanism is political suicide for themselves and a stab in the back of their people!
It is worth highlighting the Afghan ethnic reality of the Taliban, to the creation of which the United States and its allies, also Russia and Iran, contributed at different times.
Everyone interprets Rumi's "The Story of the Elephant in the Dark" from their perspective.
- The Taliban are a purely Afghan or Pashtun ethnic group, isn’t it?
- In all the ranks of the Taliban there are only Pashtuns or Afghans, isn’t that right?
- Talib, Afghan, and Pashtun, all three words have become the name of one ethnic group and are equivalent, isn’t it?
- Pashtuns, that is, the Taliban, make up less than 40% of the “residents”, and not the “citizens” of the fake geography of Afghanistan, isn’t this true?
So what is this reaction?
Such reactions are nothing more than the commitment to Afghanism and the loss of one’s own identity!
Those who played important roles in games for power and competitions among Pashtun or Afghan ethnic groups could never come out of the shell of Afghanism.
Over the past half-century, most Persian politicians and religious leaders have fallen victim to the false theory of internationalism, which was rooted in an unfounded internationalist and multi-ethnic thesis.
If in the last two years the fronts, led by non-Afghans and predominantly Persian-speaking ones, had boldly marked the border between friend and enemy, then today, without a doubt, demand would have been formed to stand on its own feet and there would have been no gravitational pull towards the West.
Afghanism is the main reason for the ethnocide of the Persians and the change in their ethnic structure in the north, northwest, and center. Sooner or later, more Pashtun islands will be created in the Persian-speaking areas, inspired by the British strategy in the second half of the 19th century, initiated by Emir Abdurahman.
The reaction of the participants in the “Vienna meeting” to the words of the Iranian Foreign Minister, before it meets the interests of our people, is to send this kind of message to the United States and its allies, which will follow the condemnation and anti-Iranian positioning, and maybe tomorrow anti-Russian and anti-Tajik!
The West does not rely on the “political corpses” of the past, except to make propaganda tools out of them!
The Taliban is the best option for the West, especially Britain, which has both the experience of the first Big Game and a rich archive of countries in the region.
Let's assume that if there are no Taliban tomorrow, the ranks of Western-dependent Pashtuns for another alternative are long. With all your petty lobbying of America and Europe, no country will take you seriously!
We must learn from history!
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