Bin Laden Is the Past; Afghanistan Refuses War

Thirty years ago, in a small building in the Department of Foreign Languages at Nanjing University, I first heard on the radio the exciting news on Voice of America that the mujahedeen ambushed a Soviet tank. At that time, the word “mujahedeen” was a neologism that had not yet been included in the Oxford dictionary. Now, after 30 years, however, I hear the Western world and U.S. media enthusiastically cheer about the death of bin Laden, the leader of a mujahedeen organization. The vicissitude of the situation is hardly predictable.

Bin Laden has become history; nevertheless, al-Qaida’s admonishment of revenge and the U.S. government’s oath of a complete eradication of the mujahedeen are thrilling. Afghans have undergone a 20-year humanitarian catastrophe under the Soviet Red Army’s cruelty and Western armies’ missiles. Considering those torn souls and bombarded villages and fields in today’s Afghanistan, no one should gain the legitimacy to continue the war. It is no exaggeration to say that those who are willing to continue the war should be sued for war crimes and sent to the Hague U.N. International Tribunal for judging.

After bin Laden’s death, all the sympathetic people in this world, along with Afghans, are expecting a new page in Afghanistan’s history. They hope that the world will focus on a larger image, rather than a particular terrorist. This larger image will disengage from any killings; instead, its motifs are the resurgence of Afghanistan’s peace, the reconciliation of ethnic conflicts and the reconstruction of the nation.

Most Afghans and Pakistanis believe that the Taliban and its Pashtun supporters will never accept any reconciliation if the U.S. and the Western world don’t withdraw their troops from Afghanistan. Therefore, they hope that bin Laden’s death will herald the withdrawal of U.S. and Western armies. Only with the withdrawal of the troops will the political parties and native armed forces in Afghanistan be willing to peacefully discuss at the negotiating table the reconciliation in terms of ethnicity, reconstruction and economic cooperation. Only by transcending the awareness of partisanship will such negotiation be able to unite people in Afghanistan. The strategy of eliminating a particular type of partisanship and its followers will not eradicate terrorism, but accelerate the dissemination of terrorism.

If the international community, especially the Western countries and the United States, hadn’t sent troops to Afghanistan to wantonly bomb the country, but rather had provided food and helped build houses in Afghanistan’s rural areas, the situation would have been significantly better. There are 10 children in the average Afghan family. Since most families cannot afford to raise all these kids, some of these children are sent to religious schools. In other words, these kids are doomed to embrace the Taliban or the mujahedeen. If the United States had spent 10 percent of its military expenditure in Afghanistan on the nation’s rural education, Afghanistan would have experienced revolutionary alterations.

Today, the Taliban’s power has gone underground, but its guerrilla power has been strengthened gradually. The Taliban’s allies consider Westerners as heretics. Since the Taliban is the Muslim Brotherhood’s friend, any countries declaring war with the Taliban will be treated as enemies of the Taliban’s allies. The United States has been urging Pakistan to fight against its domestic Taliban; however, has the U.S. government ever realized that the exertion of military force in Pakistan against the Taliban will only exacerbate Pakistan’s ethnic and religious conflicts and lead the Pashtuns (16 percent of Pakistan’s population) to join Afghanistan’s Taliban?

Having fought fiercely with Muslims for 10 years, the United States and other Western countries are facing an immense difficulty in public relationships. Western countries receive zero credibility from people in the Muslim world. Facing Afghanistan’s future after bin Laden’s death, Western countries don’t have any other choice but to withdraw the troops, terminate the war and ameliorate their relationship with the Muslim world, especially with Afghans and Pakistanis.

Xiguang Li is the director of Center of International Communication Studies in Tsinghua University.