“Are you seriously blaming the victims right now?” someone asked me a few days ago on Twitter. The question came in response to a thread I wrote, which aimed to point out that the dramatic and apparently horrifying takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan was in fact, primarily the fault of Afghan citizens living in the country. Predictably, a lot of what I said did not go down well with many who felt that I was either courting controversy unduly or being “cruel” to the victims of one of the world’s most notorious Islamic terror groups.
I could go into all the reasons why I completely beg to disagree with the prevailing narrative that casts Afghans as helpless victims, as against self-aware protagonists in their own story. I could write pages upon pages about how this narrative is yet another extension in the never-ending global franchise that typecasts the Global North and its governments as actors, and the Global South and its citizens as mere objects to be acted on. The time for writing many words however, is over. The most impactful way I can think of to make my point is to offer a simple comparison between Afghanistan and a region 11,500KM away from Kabul in West Africa. Then it is up to the reader to draw any conclusions.
Igboland vs Afghanistan: An unlikely comparison?
On the surface, any comparison between the arid, geographically disadvantaged area now called Afghanistan and the wet, forested West African area we know as southeastern Nigeria, looks extremely tenuous. While Afghanistan has spent the entire 21st century labouring along with a foreign aid-dependent economy whose most important export is a crop used to make illegal drugs, the five states that make up southeastern Nigeria have a fearsome reputation for trade, commerce, industry and manufacturing.
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While the word “Afghan” conjures up little more than images of war, terrorism, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in the popular imagination, the word “Igbo” evokes an entire gamut of everyday economic and cultural importance. Yet if you put the clock back 52 or 53 years ago, the situation was completely different. Afghanistan was a rapidly modernising country led by a secular government that made full use of the Cold War to extract vast amounts of aid and assistance from both East and West. Afghan Prime Minister Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal was a progressive-minded politician under whose tenure Afghan society became less militarised and violent. Diplomatic relations with neighbouring Pakistan were eased and internal strife such as intermittent student protests were resolved.
Halfway around the world in southeast Nigeria, the story was the opposite. Through no fault of its own, Igboland in 1967 found itself in the grip of one of the most furious and fearsomely destructive ethnic genocides of the 20th century. Overnight, Nigeria’s most economically active population found itself physically barricaded into the geographical space south of the Niger River and ruthlessly butchered, raped and bombed for 3 long years. While it is often fashionable to talk about “Biafra” as a short-lived sovereign state – which it technically was – the on-ground reality for most Biafrans was permanent grinding hunger, malnutrition, and constantly facing death from air raids. It suffered innumerable war crimes including wanton rape and mass murder of civilians by Nigerian soldiers, and certain death for all able-bodied men who fell into Nigerian hands.
While Kabul boomed and prospered to the point of becoming known as the “Paris of Central Asia,” Igboland was mercilessly and ruthlessly pummelled into the stone age. Nigerian army commander Benjamin Adekunle famously said in a wartime interview with ‘The Economist’ that his remit was to wipe out the Igbo ethnic group, regardless of whether they are men, women or children, and to ensure gratuitous destruction of all Biafran infrastructure or relief supplies so that “no Ibo should have even a piece to eat.”
For the Igbos who were unfortunate enough to be trapped in Nigeria and outside of Biafra during that period, there were door-to-door massacres that accounted for them in Lagos, Abeokuta, Benin, Kano and virtually the whole of northern Nigeria. How does this miserable story tie in with my lack of sympathy for Afghanistan’s current state?
From nothing to everything in 20 years
The picture below was taken in Kabul in 1970. At the same time this picture was taken, Nigeria’s Igbo population was just stepping out of its 3-year nightmare and looking for ways to move forward. This was by far easier said than done. There was the economic loss to contend with – their overnight relegation from the forefront of Nigeria’s economic and political elite meant that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Igbo property scattered across Nigeria was forfeited. Already an in-group minority before the genocidal “war,” those of them who kept money in the Nigerian banking system found their deposits seized, with the paltry compensation of £20 offered across board – regardless of how much money they had saved.
Even more damaging was the fact that the estimated 3 million lives lost during the genocide included a very large chunk of the highly skilled and able-bodied men and women who could power reconstruction. The Igbos effectively lost an entire generation of skills, talents and manpower to an externally-imposed war fought against innocent civilians by a heavily armed army fighting with the genuinely frightening goal of exterminating a quarter of Nigeria’s entire population. Yakubu Gowon might have mouthed “No victor, no vanquished,” but everyone knew who the victors and the vanquished were – there was no doubt about it. What happened next is the crux of my argument.
The Igbos – bedraggled, humiliated, decimated and traumatised as they were – made a conscious set of decisions as a group. While Enugu, Onitsha, Asaba, Owerri and Aba lay in ruins with the federal government spending Nigeria’s newfound oil windfall on literally everything except reconstructing the southeast that it had bombed to smithereens, the Igbo apprenticeship system quietly emerged to become by some distance the most successful indigenous poverty alleviation scheme ever devised in modern African history.
As the unspoken victors of the war quibbled, fought and couped their way through 2 oil windfalls across 20 years, the unspoken vanquished quietly set about rebuilding their homes and reclaiming their dignity via the most aggressive entrepreneurship promotion program ever devised in Africa. The result was that in just 20 years from the end of the war, the vanquished Igbos had once again clambered their way back into the 2-horse race between southeast and southwest for who dominates the Nigerian economy.
In just one generation, an entire culture that found itself bombed into the stone age; stripped of its wealth and assets; deprived of its most important human talent; ritually humiliated; and brutally decimated by a military-led genocide, went from hunger and £20 to sprawling business interests and control over vast swathes of the Nigerian and West African economy. While all this was happening, Afghanistan was going through its own upheaval, but the reaction of Afghans was markedly different to that of their Igbo contemporaries. Where the Igbo culture remained doggedly committed to progressive social ideals and economic growth, the Afghans reacted to perceived adversity by turning to a destructive, nihilistic, dangerous option – religious extremism.
At this point, it must be emphasised that nothing Afghanistan went through over 4 decades – from Soviet invasion to American invasion – holds a candle to what southeastern Nigeria went through in just 3 years. Unlike the Igbos, the Afghans never suffered a brutal genocide from external enemies. They also never had their main cities bombed into nothingness, only to be left to their own devices – at every point in time in Afghanistan’s modern history, there have been vast amounts of American or Russian aid to fund development or reconstruction. Indeed the picture of Kabul below, taken in 2019, illustrates the extent to which foreign money flows freely into Afghanistan – the Igbo culture never at any point received the benefit of such external benevolence.
Unlike the Igbos, whose entire post-war existence morphed into a travelling culture dominated by Diaspora entrepreneurs remitting money home, the vast majority of Afghans have never been physically evicted from Afghanistan by hunger and poverty.
Entire cultures make decisions – Good and bad
The point is that, unlike the popular Western narrative, which infantilizes Afghans and removes the blame from them for turning to the Taliban – the worst possible option there is – the postwar experience of Nigeria’s Igbo population shows that an entire culture facing existential jeopardy can choose to make sound, rational decisions instead of bone-headed, emotional ones like turning to the Taliban. The Taliban, lest we forget, is a relatively small group of hardened fighters who on their own, could not possibly take over a country of 30 million+ people. The people themselves in fact, have consistently over the past 30 years decided that they do not want to go through the difficult process of nation building, but rather want the fantastical, escapist, utopian alternative called Sharia Law.
A Pew Research survey from 2013 – eight years ago – showed that 99 percent of Afghans favoured introduction of Sharia Law instead of secular law with separation of church and state, and women’s rights. 96 percent of Afghans also believed that converting others to Islam is a duty. 94 percent of them believed that a wife is always obligated to obey her husband. 85 percent of them indicated support for death by stoning as the punishment for adultery. 79 percent of them approved of execution as a punishment for apostasy (leaving Islam), and 39 percent of them indicated that suicide bombing is justified. Against this backdrop, the rapid advance of the Taliban without as much as a shot being fired over the past week takes on a whole new significance.
The problem is that orthodox reasoning simply does not allow for large groups of people to be questioned, interrogated and judged for making the choices that individuals would be judged for making. If a single individual expressed support for the abhorrent views in the Pew Research poll above, that individual would rightly be judged as a delusional religious bigot who is a danger to himself and to the world. If 38 million Afghans express these views, suddenly you cannot call a spade a spade, and you must prevaricate while blaming everyone from George Bush to Joe Biden to Donald Trump to the Dutch Embassy – everyone except the Afghans themselves. Why is that?
The example of the postwar Igbo culture shows us clearly that when facing crisis or upheaval, it is entirely possible – and desirable – for cultures to make sensible, forward-looking choices. When they instead choose to make stupid, reductionist, unrealistic, impractical and emotional decisions with huge negative consequences, it is dishonest to present them as simple, unaware, helpless victims and spectators. If the postwar Igbo culture did not turn to violent insurgency and rabid intolerance as a way of life – even though it had more justification to do so than Afghanistan – then there is no excuse for cultures and nations that choose to commit group suicide via foolish shared decisions. In one generation, the Igbos went from bedraggled nobodies to economic big hitters using nothing but hard work, innovation and a strong sense of positive cultural purpose.
If they could do it, so can the Afghans. So can any group of people in fact.
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