Western view of Taliban blinded

The western world watched this past August as the Middle East’s most recent democratic pilot project, Afghanistan, went to the polls to exercise their right to vote. Unfortunately, watching was all they really did.

Widespread allegations of blatant election fraud stained the vote, and a review by the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission determined a run-off election was indeed necessary to obtain the majority to win. Now, numerous world leaders sided vocally with the ECC in calling for another election. But incumbent Hamid Karzai’s closest competitor, Abdullah Abdullah, was unconvinced the run-off would be conducted fairly and dropped out of the race.

Despite NATO’s declared goal of establishing an independent, flourishing democracy in the country, the reluctance to put Karzai’s seemingly criminal re-election under the microscope just adds to the list of blunders that could very well cause the democracy’s collapse, just after its rocky beginning.

Just consider British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s recent charge that Afghanistan’s parliament should include “high-level [Taliban] commanders that can be persuaded to renounce al-Qaeda and pursue their goals peacefully.” The world must stop affording the Taliban respect it doesn’t deserve. Its fighters want a restored regime of merciless oppression of women and non-Muslims, along with brutally upheld moral and cultural standards that ban art, music, and computers, among many other equally preposterous constraints. Are these the goals that the Taliban should be allowed to work towards “peacefully”?

Karzai’s previous administration was marred by allegations of corruption, a detriment the president has vowed to rectify in his next five years. But this promise seems laughable, given how he came to “earn” his second term. Legitimacy of the government’s authority is critical, and an election won by fraud takes that away. Karzai, too, has promised to reach out to the Taliban to gain support for his government.

By talking to these people at all, Karzai is playing a dangerous game of appeasement. It still gives back a sliver of a claim to the power they never should have held in the first place. Afghanistan is after all made of diverse ethnic groups, and should strive for a government that fairly represents a wide range of interests. The Taliban doesn’t represent anything that could be remotely attributed to a healthy democracy.

It should only take a brief perusal of the regime’s history to convince anyone that the actions the Taliban have inflicted upon the Afghan people are atrocious, but it would seem that some in the international community need convincing of why the Taliban shouldn’t be considered an interest group, much less an organization allowed any real power. True, they have a considerable amount of support and control, but that support comes from a fearful minority who believe the Taliban’s dogmatic, backward rules are legitimized by divine right.

Though the overly ambiguous western term of “terrorist” is applied to Taliban combatants, the greatest enemy of Afghanistan’s struggling democracy is still ideological. Limiting technology and the educational potential of half its citizens, can’t be the goals of anyone hoping to establish a country that can provide for its people and compete on the international stage.

In the interest of peace and stability, Miliband effectively invites to government the same people that threatened cutting off the fingers, noses, and ears of Afghans lining up to cast their vote and for their representative in that government.

The western world must ultimately admit that reassurances of limited power and influence within a parliamentary system do nothing to detract from how things would be, or have been, run when a fundamentalist group has run things entirely their own way.