In “No silver bullet” (Books, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, October 26) Charles Clover reviews the memoir of the Afghan media mogul Saad Mohseni, recounting his battle to establish his TOLO TV channel as an independent voice in post-2001 Kabul.
Clover says Radio Free Afghanistan is perhaps the best of the memoirs of Afghanistan so far published, “simply for Mohseni’s perspective on the quixotic and ultimately failed American effort to bring democracy and rid the country of the Taliban”.
My assessment of the events that followed 9/11 is there was an urgent need for a power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan. But instead precious months were wasted as UN prevarication delayed the meeting between representatives from the main Afghan political groupings, the US and its key allies and some regional representatives that eventually took place in Bonn in late November 2001.
By this time the militia forces under the newly restored commanders of the Northern Alliance, the ground forces partnering the US air campaign to dismantle the Taliban regime and target al-Qaeda, had taken Kabul.
Such “facts on the ground” underpinned Northern Alliance’s demands for control of all key government ministries, including interior and defence. This led to the intensification of factional and ethnic divisions that contaminated appointments at local level, and prevented the development of national institutions acting in the interests of all Afghans. Moreover the organised criminal syndicates that ran the opium trade were protected by connections at the highest levels in government ministries.
The outcomes from the Bonn meeting, initially poorly understood by the US and its allies, set the trajectory for the eventual return to power of the Taliban while betraying Afghan hopes for actual political change.
The fact that TOLO’s female announcers survive, something Clover references at the end of his review, is really no more than a fig leaf for the Taliban. The crushing of girls’ rights to attend secondary and tertiary education and the denial of any role for Afghan women in public life, including now banning women from raising their voices in public, is back as the leitmotif of the Taliban’s brutal imposition of their social engineering project.
Barbara J Stapleton
Former Political Adviser; and Deputy to the EU Special Representative for Afghanistan, Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK
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