If These Were My Last Remarks

 The following are the remarks I made at the conclusion of the Renaissance Weekend on September 6, 2021 in Monterey. California, on the topic of "If These Were My Last Remarks".

On the topic of "If These Were My Last Remarks", if these were my last remarks, they would be "Wake up!"

This Summer, we have seen horrific events occur in a distant land and thanks to the book The Afghanistan Papers, we have come to learn that the horrific events we have witnessed have come at the end of twenty years of duplicity -- of lying -- by our political and military leaders.  Wake up!

For the past twenty years, the United States has had a military ally -- Pakistan -- which, for twenty years has aided, abetted, and sheltered the ones who we have called our enemy.  Wake up!

For over thirty years, Saudi Arabia has founded and funded madrasas -- Muslim religious schools -- in which the Wahhabi brand of Islam is propagated around the world.  The Wahhabi brand of Islam gave us Osama Bin Laden, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, and has greatly influenced such groups as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIL, ISIS, Boko Haram, and Abu Sayyaf.  Saudi Arabia is considered to be our friend.  Why then is Saudi Arabia giving birth to so many groups whose members hate us?  Wake up!

To all who can hear my voice, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our country, for the sake of our world -- for heaven's sake -- please Wake Up!

Hidden Figures of the Muslim Diaspora

 The following is the opening segment of a presentation I prepared for the September 4, 2021, sessions of the Renaissance Weekend held in Monterey, California.  Due to time constraints, this opening segment was all that I was able to give and to discuss.

Good Morning,

I do not have a lot of time.  Only one hour.  So I will need to make this presentation as fast as I can.

I originally planned on taking you on a leisurely stroll through some of the more notable people from the Muslim Diaspora especially focusing on those associated with Afghanistan.  I wanted to tell you about the marvelous Jamal al-Din Rumi, the great Sufi poet of the thirteenth century whose expressions of Divine Love helped to heal the divisions in the fractured Muslim world.  And then there is Gowhar Shad, the fifteenth century wife of the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh.  Gowhar Shad, is known for building many beautiful mosques and madrasas in Herat, as well as being the de facto ruler of the Timurid empire for a decade after the death of her husband. 

But Jamal al-Din Rumi and Gowhar Shad were just two of the hidden figures that I wanted to talk about in relation to Afghanistan.  There are also those of the Afghan diaspora such as Khaled Hosseini, the noted author of three bestselling novels including The Kite Runner; or Abdullah Jaffa Bey Khan, the Afghan American who went by the name of Robert Joffrey and who founded the Joffrey Ballet; or the four star general Stephen J. Townsend who has been the commander of the United States Africa Command since July 2019; or maybe we could have talked about Shaesta Waiz, the youngest women to fly around the world solo in a single engine aircraft, whose record is being challenged by a 19 year old Belgian woman as we speak.

However, instead of providing such historical insights, instead I begin by quoting a warning that seems to reverberate throughout time: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."  This statement is generally attributed to the writer and philosopher George Santayana.  But whoever may have said it, the statement seemed to me to have taken on more relevance this past month with the events in Afghanistan.  As I watched the rapid collapse of the Afghan army, I was reminded of how the Taliban came to power in the 1990s.  When you leave here, I invite you to read the New York Times bestseller entitled Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid.  The book is from the year 2000, the year before 9/11, when the Taliban was a relative new player on the international stage.  In that book, Mr. Rashid describes a similar capitulation of the Afghan army to the Taliban in the 1990s and notes that the key to the Taliban's success then was the role Pakistan and Saudi Arabia played in bribing the Afghan army leaders who essentially found it in their financial interest to sell out the Afghan people. I am just an amateur historian, but it seems to me that much of what happened a few weeks ago could have been foreseen by simply reading Mr. Rashid's book from twenty years ago.  But hey, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."  I leave it to your own assessment as to whether that saying applies to the events of today.

Based on what I have seen, there are many pundits who are willing to provide various answers as to what has happened, and what will happen, in Afghanistan. For the sake of my own sanity, I will not attempt to do so here. Instead, I hope to focus on my specialty which is writing about historical personalities -- especially hidden historical figures -- and, in a few moments, I shall discuss some of the personalities associated with the Muslim Diaspora -- the spread of Muslims around the world.  However, before doing so, there are some hidden numerical figures that I feel compelled to share.

I believe that it bears reminding everyone that the United States is in Afghanistan because of what occurred some twenty years ago during the terrorist attacks that occurred on 9/11.

2,996 people died during the events we know as 9/11.  This number includes the 19 individuals who seized the four planes used in the terrorist attacks.  

15 of the 19 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, 2 from the United Arab Emirates, 1 from Egypt and 1 from Lebanon.  None were from Afghanistan.  None were from Iraq.

Some 3,000 children also lost a parent on 9/11.

The coordinated series of attacks of 9/11 were attributed to the Wahhabi terrorist group known as al-Qaeda and its enigmatic leader Osama Bin Laden.  Osama bin Laden had been a fighter with many of the Taliban leaders during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. He also was a long-time financial benefactor of the Afghan insurgents during the war and afterwards.  At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden was being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In response to the terrorist attacks, and in an endeavor to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice, the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan.  The superior military force employed by the Allied Nations led to the capitulation of the Taliban government and, for the next twenty years, the Allied Nations occupied the country.

These facts most people know, but the hidden figures that people do not know are these: 

The last time the Taliban seized Afghanistan was in the 1990s.  As a consequence of the Taliban gaining control of the country, millions of Afghans fled the country.  Some 4 million Afghan refugees wound up in Pakistan, and close to 2 million went to Iran.  After the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, some 4.5 million of the Afghan refugees returned, but some 1.5 million refugees remained in Pakistan and Iran.  How many Afghan refugees will there be now that the Taliban are back in power, and where will they go?

In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Afghan people supported, in part, by the United States fought a guerrilla war against the Soviets that lasted nine years.  It is estimated that as many as 2,000,000 Afghans died in this conflict and millions became refugees primarily in Iran and Pakistan.  Many of the Afghan refugees who went to Iran (some 780,000) are still in Iran today as refugees.  It has been over forty years.

After the Soviets departed in 1989, Afghanistan descended into the first of three civil wars.   Thousands of Afghans were killed in these civil wars, millions of Afghans were displaced, and millions became refugees,  The second of these civil wars gave birth to a new militant group called the Taliban and in the third civil war the Taliban caused the collapse of the Afghan government and the emergence of the Taliban as the dominant political force in Afghanistan.  Santayana says that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Does the Taliban victory over the United States and its allies portend the descent into another series of Afghan civil wars?

Now, the United States involvement in Afghanistan appears to be coming to an end.  It has cost the American people some 2,400 military casualties, some 1,800 American civilian casualties, and tens of thousands of physically and mentally wounded warriors. It has also cost some 2.4 trillion dollars.  For the Afghan people, it has cost some 70,000 Afghan military casualties, some 50,000 Taliban casualties, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, millions of physically and mentally wounded people, and potentially millions of new Afghan refugees. The wounds of war are likely to take a long time to heal in Afghanistan.  Will the leaders of the new Afghanistan be able to set aside their resentments from the last twenty years or will they seek retribution beyond what has already been achieved?

Since the September 11 attacks, the United States government has carried out drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.  In Afghanistan alone, there have been some 13,072 drone strikes.  It is estimated that some 10,000 people were killed in these drone strikes.  It is also estimated that 900 of those killed were civilians and that 184 children were among those who were killed.  Thus, when President Biden assures everyone that those involved with the bombing at the Kabul Airport will be hunted down, it is likely that he means that a drone will be used to extract retribution irrespective of the collateral civilian casualties that it may cause ... much like what we have witnessed just this week.  A rather tragic act that sadly may be so emblematic of what went wrong with the Allied occupation of Afghanistan.

On a more positive note, the Allied occupation of Afghanistan did lead to some progressive changes that found acceptance in the West.  During the occupation, a constitution was adopted for the country.  Under the post-Taliban constitution of 2004, Afghan women were granted all kinds of rights, and the post-Taliban political dispensation brought social and economic growth that significantly improved their socio-economic condition.  From a collapsed health care system with essentially no medical services available to women during the Taliban years, the post-Taliban regime constructed 3,135 functional health facilities by 2018, giving 87 percent of the Afghan people access to a medical facility within two hours distance -- at least in theory, because subsequent Taliban, militia and criminal violence made travel on roads increasingly unsafe ... especially for women.

In 2003, fewer than ten percent of girls were enrolled in primary schools.  By 2017, that number had grown to 33 percent.  Female education in secondary education grew from six percent in 2003 to 39 percent in 2017.  Thus, by 2017, some 3.5 million Afghan girls were in school with some 100,000 Afghan women studying in universities.

The life expectancy grew from 56 years in 2001 to 66 in 2017, and the mortality during childbirth declined from 1,100 per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 396 per 100,000 in 2015.  

By last year, 2020, 21 percent of Afghan civil servants were women (compared to almost none during the Taliban years), with sixteen percent of them in senior management levels, and 27 percent of Afghan members of parliament were women.  This great progress is directly attributable to the Allied occupation and its financial support.  

However, this progressive social progress was not universal.  The progress occurred far more abundantly for women in the urban areas.  For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life was not changed much from the Taliban era.  Rural women were still fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care, attend schools, and work.  Many Afghan men remained deeply conservative.  Typically, families allowed their girls to have a primary or secondary education only to have their "educated" daughters married away in arranged marriages. Even if, by chance, the educated daughter is allowed to complete her university education, her father or husband might not permit her to work after graduation.  And even without Taliban oversight, most Afghan women in rural areas continued to wear the burqa. 

Indeed, despite the economic, social, and political empowerment that came with the Allied occupation, Afghan women in rural areas -- where an estimated 76 percent of the country's women live -- mostly experience the devastation of bloody and endless fighting between the Taliban, the Afghan and Allied forces, and the local militias.  Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generated not only psychological trauma for them, it also fundamentally jeopardized their economic survival and ability to go about every day life.  In a culture where a woman should not venture out in public unless accompanied by a man, a widow and her children are highly vulnerable to a whole variety of threats and disruptions due to the loss of the  husband and father.  For the rural women, for the 76 percent of Afghan women, ending the war was the highest priority, not the advancement of women's rights. 

In the discussions that arise over the next months and years, I hope that these hidden figures are kept in the front of your mind.  After over 40 years of conflict, millions of deaths, and millions of people having to flee to foreign lands, I, for one, find it disconcerting to say that the Afghan people have not been willing to fight for their country.  It seems to me that for over 40 years fighting for their country is the one thing that the Afghan people have done, it is just that the country they have been fighting for happens to be different from the one that appears on the map... or the one that we here in America envisioned it would be.