History says the Taliban can’t rule Afghanistan!

The world reads current reports from Afghanistan with revulsion: the Taliban’s revenge against supporters of the former government and Western forces, bloody chaos at the Kabul airport, and renewed repression of women.
Yet it is also plain that the victorious extremists themselves are daunted by the challenge of assuming administrative responsibility for a nation that is bankrupt without Western financial support, shorn of most of its competent officials, and threatened with breakdown of its public services and utilities. Chatham House warns: “The Afghan economy is being brought to its knees by the closure of banks and offices receiving remittances, a collapse in the value of the currency, shortages of food and fuel in the cities, price inflation, the disruption of trade, and the inability to pay wages.”
History shows that one of the worst fates that can befall a modern country is to fall into the hands of rebels whose claim on power is merely that they have successfully fought for it. The skills that enable a guerrilla to use an AK-47 automatic rifle, to lay an improvised explosive that blows up foreign soldiers, to set an ambush to destroy a few Humvees, to endure privation and risk death — all become irrelevant once there is instead a country to be run.
Warriors struggle as the challenges become paying government servants, keeping the electricity working, securing water supplies, administering schools. As the Financial Times reports, officials at Afghanistan’s central bank last month “had to explain to a group of Talibs that the country’s $9 billion in foreign reserves was unavailable for inspection because it is held with the Federal Reserve Bank in New York — and anyway had been frozen by the US government.”
Attending to such necessities is especially hard when most of those who lately fulfilled these tasks have fled, in terror of death at the hands of the new masters, for the crime of having served as instruments of the fallen regime.
These are issues that have beset conquerors throughout history. Rome was among the few empires of ancient times that could claim to improve the material condition of peoples it defeated.
A legendary moment in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” comes when Reg (aka John Cleese), hero of the People’s Front of Judea, demands to know what the Romans have “ever given us?” After a chorus of grudging admissions, he concludes “apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health.” His interlocutor adds, “Brought peace,” causing Reg to say: “Oh. Peace? Shut up!”
It is unlikely that the Afghan people will find as much to applaud about the Taliban’s performance in government. A more relevant cinematic analogy is likely the scene in David Lean’s epic “Lawrence of Arabia,” after the guerrilla army that has fought its way to Damascus in 1918 takes control. The city lapses into a chaos of factional feuding that leaves hospitals drowning in squalor, crowded with untended casualties whom the British Army is obliged care for.
What baffles many Westerners is not only why the people of ancient nation— and for that matter Britain, Gaul and much of the Mediterranean littoral — proved so ungrateful for Roman civilisation, but
how so many in today’s Afghanistan and Iraq could spurn the colossal material benefits of US intervention and “nation-building.”
A large part of the answer is that many peoples, both now and forever, value
their own culture, together with freedom from perceived foreign servitude, above what the West calls civilisation.
This was certainly the case with Vietnam half a century ago, a situation
I covered at the time as a correspondent and more recently in a book. A fundamental cause of the defeat of the Saigon regime was its corruption, together with the unashamed bondage of its officers and public servants to the US.
Following the North Vietnamese victory in 1975, the country paid a terrible price for the imposition of communism. Tens of thousands of army officers and government servants were dispatched to re-education camps in which they languished for years, too often perishing of starvation or untreated disease.
Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fled the country as “boat people.” Vietnam, once the rice bowl of Southeast Asia, faced famines brought about by the institutionalised madnesses of Hanoi’s rulers and their apparatchiks.
None of this made America’s wars in the region seem well-advised, but it emphasized the unfitness of the victors to govern. By a historic irony, Hanoi discovered that once it had triumphed on the battlefield, its Soviet and Chinese sponsors largely lost interest in supporting their country, and in the latter case went to war against it in 1979.
In neighbouring Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, who also became victors in 1975 with backing from Beijing, embarked on a genocide more terrible than anything the North Vietnamese did.

—Bloomberg

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the BBC and newspapers, editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, and editor of the London Evening Standard. He is the author of 28 books, the most recent of which are “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” and “Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943”