Michael Daxner: "Afghanistan: Gebrochene Versprechen - Broken promises - وعده های شکسته." - audio archiv

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.

(00:34):
Hello, the German-Austrian social scientist Michael Daxner has had connections to Afghanistan since the 1970s. century.
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, he returned there in 2003 as an advisor.
Until 2021, he was involved both in research on security issues in Afghanistan at the Free University

(01:01):
of Berlin and actively engaged on the ground.
This conversation was recorded before the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2021.
However, anyone wishing to assess the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan should bear
three points in mind. 1.
The foreign armies were only in the country for a short time.

(01:25):
They only facilitated modest democratic development in the cities.
By comparison, the US Army was in Germany for decades after the liberation of Germany from National Socialism.
Even to this day, the foreign armies in Germany are still a necessary reassurance of German democracy. 2.

(01:46):
How overwhelmed the German military was in Afghanistan can be illustrated by the following small story.
On behalf of the Kasai government, the Germans built the police headquarters in Kabul.
It was built not only from ruins at a site where the Taliban had previously tortured hundreds of people to death.
Additionally, the German military engineers were required to construct the police headquarters

(02:12):
along with several prison cells according to German building regulations.
And this, despite many building components being hardly available.
Thus, after an excessively long construction period, a high-security building was created, a
highly visible, heavily fortified police station according to German building law.
Today, it is just one of many police stations and prisons established by foreign armies that

(02:39):
the Taliban use to control people more efficiently than during their first dictatorship. 3.
Thousands of NGOs flooded into Afghanistan after the expulsion of the Taliban, many out of financial
necessity, self-interest, a thirst for adventure, and religious zeal.
The NGOs thus filled the void left by the missing educated Afghan elites who had been murdered

(03:03):
during the decades-long civil war or were living abroad.
Thus, the self-empowerment of Afghans, which the West aimed for, to steer civil development
themselves, has turned into a massive dependency of large parts of the educated urban population on Western aid organisations.
With the Western troops, these NGOs also fled the country in haste, leaving their Afghan employees

(03:29):
once again at the mercy of the Taliban.
Afghanistan today is the same country as before the invasion of allied troops in 2001, and the
Western democracies have returned to their old indifference towards Afghanistan due to the racist
expulsion policy of Afghan refugees.

(03:51):
Michael Daxner, before we begin our discussion about the perspectives of Afghanistan and the
impact of the intervention on the culture in both countries, how would you characterise the
situation in Afghanistan from a bird's eye view, so to speak?
From a bird's eye view, there are two Afghanistans.

(04:14):
The real Afghanistan, where about 30 million Afghan women and men live, where they seek their
future, where they search for a way between violence and hope.
And then there is Afghanistan from the perspective of the intervention forces.

(04:41):
This is partly a landscape of wishes and illusions, partly an artificially constructed country,
where one must constantly justify what one is actually doing there.

(05:02):
I would like to describe it that abstractly.
One could also say it more popularly.
There is an invented Afghanistan and there is a real Afghanistan.
And the tension between the two, of course, constitutes part of the politics here.
Germany in Afghanistan, as the title of your book suggests, and the impact of the intervention on both cultures.

(05:31):
What effects of the intervention on our culture here in Germany are already present?

(05:52):
Now to raise awareness of the situation in Afghanistan among the German population.
Now, as the German troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Now, as the international troops are being reduced to a minimum.
And now, for example, as the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation has set new guidelines

(06:20):
for the next ten years of this cooperation.
However, no one in the public is interested anymore.
People are satisfied that the troops are withdrawing.
And Ukraine and Syria suddenly seem much more important than Afghanistan.

(06:41):
But I would like to add that since 2001, if there has been a war in Afghanistan, it is a war
that has lasted longer than both world wars combined.
The longest war the USA has ever fought.

(07:03):
A war that has claimed relatively few victims since 2001, especially compared to Iraq, where
the USA has caused over 100,000 documented civilian casualties.

(07:25):
This is not the case in Afghanistan.
But on the other hand, we must of course ask ourselves, what kind of war was this?
Who was actually the enemy?
Who was the enemy of the Bundeswehr?
Who was the enemy of the Americans?
It cannot be true, the Taliban are insurgents against their government.

(07:48):
We intervened under partly extremely legitimate goals.
I would like to emphasise that.

(08:16):
But whether it was right to introduce a second level of military operations in the course of
this diffuse war on terror in Afghanistan, I dare to doubt.
The war on terror knows no boundaries.
It is global and is essentially at the mercy of the whims of a few decision-makers, primarily from the USA.

(08:45):
But by now we are almost in a situation where the same images of terrorism are also coming from other great powers.
So I really ask myself, what did we do there? What was the effect?
And here I come to a mixed conclusion.

(09:06):
It would be completely dishonest to say that everything is negative.
There is social stabilisation in a larger part of the country.
There is a modest economic upturn, which should not be overstated, otherwise the disappointment

(09:26):
next year will be too great. But it exists.
There are signs of self-organisation and there are signs of statehood from the central government.
Negatively, it must be stated very clearly that the mistakes made during the intervention are now showing their effects.

(09:51):
Negatively, it must be said that there are large areas where the conflict between the central
government and local power holders exists, and these are by no means only the Taliban, who have
taken over some villages and regions.
There is also the return of commanders from the jihad in part. There are other insurgents.

(10:17):
That all of this is destabilised, and we will certainly cause a significant economic threat
to the entire country simply by the fact of our withdrawal.
Hundreds of thousands have directly and indirectly worked with the international troops and

(10:40):
also with many governmental and non-governmental organisations, which are now being thinned out.
Development cooperation cannot simply absorb this.
The government is not yet strong, the central government.
The monopoly on violence is not established.

(11:01):
This automatically leads to significant upheavals in the security sector.
Here in the West, corruption is always seen as the root of all evil.
However, in reality, it is the result of an unfinished rule of law development, the result of

(11:23):
an unestablished legitimate state monopoly on violence.
But of course, at the moment, a painstakingly established continuity in state-building is breaking down again.
They have brought to light the perceptions of the Germans regarding this intervention and media

(11:47):
coverage in Germany in their book with other scholars.
They have examined terms for their ambiguity and conceptual change.
In a book, they speak of the homeland discourse, in the new book of returnee and veteran narratives
as a new genre of my Afghan experiences.

(12:11):
What initially sounds promising, the restoration of state sovereignty, leaves several questions unanswered.
Can you briefly explain to me what results your co-authors have reached regarding the aforementioned terms?
Most contributions in the book 'Germany in Afghanistan' fundamentally analyse the political,

(12:38):
social, and cultural relationships between Germany and Afghanistan, not only between the two
states but also between the two societies.
For example, it is extremely depressing for a scholar to find that anthropological and ethnological

(13:01):
research in Afghanistan was once much more extensive and differentiated.
It is now subordinated to politics in a way that leaves politics poorly advised.
We have had a fierce and very contentious discussion about the development of the Bundeswehr.

(13:27):
Without Afghanistan, on one hand, the reform of the Bundeswehr into an intervention army would not have progressed.
On the other hand, the role, but also the internal structure of an intervention army has not
yet been addressed at all.
This is also part of the underdeveloped veteran discussion about the fact that people are poorly trained and poorly equipped.

(13:58):
But one mainly hears that, fundamentally, they have learned on the job what they are supposed to do in Afghanistan.
This can also end fatally for soldiers.
And it sometimes does end fatally.
Now we have a paradox in the Federal Republic.
The Bundeswehr is indeed well regarded, and I believe it deserves that in comparison to other armies.

(14:24):
But the vast majority of the population is against the deployment in Afghanistan.
One will become wise from this.
In the book, for example, we have a nice comparison about learning processes in the British
Army, which has a colonial history, and in the Bundeswehr, which has no colonial history but

(14:45):
of course wants or is allowed to have as little to do with the German tradition as possible.
And what about the Empire?
The discussion about the First World War is indeed a significant problem, perhaps even less
in relation to Afghanistan than in relation to the Balkans, if you think of the Kosovo experience.

(15:09):
And of course, military tradition associations are re-emerging, which one had long thought were
outdated, like the Clausewitz Association and similar things.
So the whole thing is not solid at all.
What gives me a very positive feeling despite all the criticism is that the Bundeswehr is certainly

(15:34):
no longer the successor to the German militaristic tradition.
But we are documenting very precisely a, as I think, dangerous current.
One would actually like to have a proper army again.
And what bothers me about that is the word proper.

(15:54):
A Bundeswehr officer said a few years ago at a press conference, you see, the Taliban, they are proper warriors.
There we have a proper war.
Yes, do we want that?
Of course, today the ability to prevent combat operations with military means is a very, very important task.

(16:21):
However, the Bundeswehr came as an alleged stabilisation force for the new state to combat operations,
which it certainly did not expect in this form.
And here we come to a completely different point, namely that the wonderful, and I mean in the
completely unironical sense, wonderful time after 2001 was not utilised at all.

(16:47):
At that time, people were open-minded, future-oriented, and hopeful.
It does not simply begin a new state, but a new society.
And the intervention forces largely failed in that regard.
The time between 2001 and 2005 was not utilised.
We'll continue with the interview shortly.

(17:09):
Like us if you enjoy it.
Then they came, or were poorly utilised, then the Taliban came back.
Since then, there is only one word, namely security.
And all human rights and structural improvements are always subordinated to security.
And that is, of course, an unreasonably abbreviated concept.

(17:29):
Mr Dachsner, in our conversation we also want to address the question of what the future of
Afghanistan might look like under the focused perspective on the Islamist radical groups, particularly the Taliban.
They reject the term radical Islamic in relation to the ideology of the Taliban.
How do you characterise this movement today?

(17:52):
I think that the Taliban today are a very strongly traditionalist political group, where religion
is more of a legitimising element.

(18:13):
That is as faith-based as the Crusades in Christianity.
The Taliban experienced a severe humiliation and defeat in 2001.
They have been in government before.
The Taliban have maintained or regained a certain respect by not evidently representing certain

(18:42):
negative manifestations, which can be referred to as patronage, corruption, etc.
That does not at all mean that they are not violently corrupt and nepotistic.
But it always depends on how they are perceived.
I think that due to their military defeats, which there is nothing to interpret for them, they

(19:09):
have become somewhat more unpredictable and fragmented.
But their political leadership understands, on the other hand, to keep themselves ready if there
should actually be discussions about de-escalation.
Then I do think that the Taliban will be involved with a small number of representatives in

(19:37):
the government or in important functions.
And simply because they are a factor of power.
However, they are extraordinarily unpopular with the majority of the population, which is why
the rhetorical question of democracy or Taliban is completely nonsensical.

(19:58):
That is not how it works in Afghanistan.
Perhaps I can also add a cautious prediction here.
It will particularly depend on whether a government is able to articulate what a sovereign Afghan
state actually wants in its region and towards the international community.

(20:23):
So withdrawing to cement power internally may not be particularly wise.
Because Afghanistan is surrounded by precarious countries.
And of course, there are great power interests here, which, however, aim far less at natural

(20:45):
resources and strategic significance than have a very high symbolic value.
After all, it would be the fourth war of the Americans in a row that they have not won.
I do not believe that the withdrawal of international groups will, from the outset, lead to

(21:06):
a widespread intensification and increase of the potential for violence that is already present.
I also do not believe that an economic collapse will occur when it is being cushioned by the
intervention forces, as we anticipate.

(21:27):
But what is still missing is the societal restructuring that gives people the chance to articulate
how they actually want to live in the future.
I will give you an example.
Kabul today has millions of suburban residents who are internally displaced, who once belonged

(21:53):
to entirely different villages and landscapes, and who now lead a shadow existence there socially.
But these people are indeed there.
They do not belong to the new elites, they do not belong to the new middle class, they do not
belong to the organised rural proletariat, but rather they are marginal groups that can only

(22:20):
be reintegrated through a radical change in society and not in the state structure.
And this includes that the Afghans must regain their history, that they must also regain the
dignity of their own resistance, of their own self-awareness.

(22:43):
You must consider, 30 years of war means there is hardly anyone left in the country who knows what peace is.
In comparison to the situation 20 years ago, it actually looks quite good at the moment.
But how can this be stabilised if I do not know how it will go for my family in the next generation

(23:09):
or even in the generation after that?
Life expectancy is not very high, the majority of people are still poor.
And here I think that we in Germany have a very, very important mission in Afghanistan, and
that is not simply to apply the old-fashioned term development aid, but we must provide the

(23:34):
means to Afghanistan that allow the people there to understand how their own society is.
This is not identical to self-help, but it means first of all that Afghans must know, not should,
they must know how their society is structured.

(23:56):
We need, so to speak, a new generation of Afghan historians, historians, demographers, and sociologists.
We need social educators, we need social psychologists.
I believe we completely underestimate the collective traumatisation after 30 years of war.

(24:22):
I always advise my students to read Grimmelshausen, to see what it was like after the Thirty Years' War.
And all of this plays a role in the eyes of the international community.
Germany plays a significant role here.
I can only recommend to our government to be a little less influenced by the American War on Terror history.

(24:45):
We have a responsibility and also a certain liability for state-building.
And it is true that they always report on acts of violence and incidents and bomb attacks, but
they need to report more on civilian everyday life, so that our population also knows a bit

(25:08):
about why Afghanistan interests us. Afghanistan continues to suffer.
They have examined the situation of Afghan universities and spoken of under-capacities.
What contribution can Germany make in terms of education?
One wants to strengthen the civilian reconstruction of the country, and for that, it requires

(25:28):
young, well-educated people in the country who can take on responsibility.
There are two competing concepts.
The majority concept assumes, under the aspect of Afghan ownership, that all reforms are integrated into the existing institutions.

(25:49):
This has, of course, the advantage that one does not have to think about governance in the school and university sector. The Afghans do that.
On the other hand, one exposes every reform to an extremely corrupt access system, an even more

(26:11):
corrupt and violent examination system.
Moreover, universities are partly breeding grounds for political agitators, where a new generation
of radical youth is socialised through university lecturers.
The shortcut that some in our federal government advocate, to leave the universities out, as

(26:36):
they only produce academic proletariat, and to focus on vocational training, is really a shortcut;
vocational training is important, but who trains the teachers for this vocational training?
Who writes the curricula and who does what is called educational research?

(26:58):
Educational research is virtually non-existent in Afghanistan.
I represent a completely different position.
I believe that one must create model scientific institutions, universities, colleges that first
demonstrate that it is possible, regarding access and examinations, even without corruption.

(27:21):
It also concerns subjects that are not ranked according to their societal status, as a large
part of the corruption, I must add, relates to medicine, law, and engineering.
There are also other subjects that are important.
We need to introduce subjects that do not even exist yet.

(27:42):
There is no good sociology, political science, psychology, but why are these subjects so important?
Firstly, they are important for teacher training.
There is a demand for several hundred thousand well-trained teachers.
I must always say, it is also one of the areas where we can promote women in higher education.

(28:07):
The second thing is, I had suggested that we should establish autonomous higher education research
in Afghanistan, not as an end in itself, but because higher education research in the Federal
Republic explains to us very precisely and partially successfully the connection between higher

(28:33):
qualifications and future career paths. Social status.
But I cannot simply transfer that from here to Afghanistan.
This means that Afghanistan must respond to needs in a completely different way. A wonderful example.
It is still taken for granted by middle-class families and parts of the elite that the sons study and learn something.

(28:58):
It doesn't matter, the status, the qualification used to secure them positions in the public service.
That is no longer the case.
But families must also learn how a shift in status occurs.
However, this in turn means that I need not only completely different courses of study but also

(29:21):
a completely different educational and social embedding of universities, including now the young women equally.
If these research institutions do not exist, people will always depend solely on our assessments in the West.
This is indeed a not unjustified accusation of neo-colonial external definition.

(29:46):
Afghan society is defined by the large think tanks in the USA and here. That cannot be true.
On the other hand, someone says, yes, but what are you doing, Mr Dachsner, other than advising. I can tell you.
I try, of course, not to discuss with the people there how they can best adopt something that

(30:11):
we know, but how they can make tools from what we know and then possibly initiate developments
that we would never have approved of or that we do not necessarily consider wise.
But we cannot decide on the future of these people in a way that suggests there is a universal

(30:36):
sense of happiness as a formula of economic growth, security, and certain procedures.
This does not work in higher education.
We have identified at least 30 subjects that are much more important in Afghanistan than what is currently being offered.
One important reason for the Western community to publicly justify why they are in Afghanistan

(31:01):
was once the fight against terror.
A second reason, however, was the issue of women's rights.
That is to say, how women were treated there.
And this has particularly mobilised a large public in the USA.
I have the impression today that this is no longer so interesting for the Western public.
I fear you are right. There are two developments.

(31:24):
On the one hand, there are more and more women in the parliamentary sphere and among the political
and intellectual elites who also go public, who have their own agenda, which I would not necessarily
describe as feminist, but rather in a much broader emancipatory sense.

(31:45):
These women give cause for hope, but are hindered by a paradox, namely that for the international
interveners, the issue of human rights and thus women's rights becomes less and less important

(32:07):
as the withdrawal dates approach.
What is important is security, and instead of good governance, one has retreated to the level of barely acceptable governance.
Women suffer as a result.
The interview will continue shortly.

(32:29):
Like us if you enjoy it.
I also believe that violence against women, that quite terrible legal interpretations in criminal
law, and so on, will not disappear overnight.
To argue for women's rights as a primary justification, but conversely, democracy and a republican

(32:56):
reclaiming of one's own society naturally also leads to a debate on equality, in which not only
the rights of women but especially the role of men must be questioned.
I once rather boldly said that the war in Afghanistan is also the war of husbands for their privileges.

(33:20):
Peter Sperrack had indeed invited many Afghans, just not the Taliban.
But among the many representatives of the Afghan elite present there, there were also people
who had blood on their hands.
In this context, the term culture of impunity arose, which ultimately created a significant
distance between the government in Afghanistan and the people on the other side.

(33:45):
Could you briefly explain these two terms, intervention culture and culture of impunity?
Intervention culture actually means that the local existing culture of the intervened people
and the various cultures that come into the country through the interveners combine into a third, a new one.

(34:08):
Today in Afghanistan, we have a culture that is largely Afghan, but it is also German-American, whatever that may mean.
And there is no going back to the original culture.
In this respect, Afghanistan has also changed Germany, whether we like it or not. The aspect of impunity...

(34:30):
If I may briefly interject, because I would actually be talking about the civilian war victims
on the Afghan side in this context, when one thinks of this federal matter.
The culture of impunity is initially nothing Afghan at all, but the Tihadi, which is the summary

(34:50):
of all those who fought against the Soviet troops, were themselves defeated by the Taliban.
And when the Taliban were defeated, the Tihadi were back and more or less placed themselves
above the law for everything they committed after 1988. That is bad.

(35:15):
We have seen this in other cases as well.
We only need to look at the Balkans.
It is of course always a question of how many affected individuals there are in purely quantitative
terms, how many victims, how many perpetrators, and I believe that is a very intense reason

(35:41):
why the spread of the rule of law, which we already know that most people want in this country,
although not all, struggles so much.
One must differentiate here between the major war criminals, who are sometimes protected in

(36:03):
high and highest positions, even though everyone knows how much blood is on their hands, and
yet a very large number of people who were mixed up in many combat and violent actions, but
in situations where one must also say that they should be given the chance for a new beginning;

(36:27):
I personally know, without going into details, people who for example fought very actively for
one or another insurgent group at times and who have completely changed.
I think we must not generalise here, and secondly, we must focus our efforts on the rule of

(36:52):
law not only on such negotiations within the Afghan elite but also at the grassroots level of society.
And there again, I am sometimes immensely delighted by the clear ideas that people have about

(37:13):
justice and law, although they do not exactly align with our legal systems.
And I must allow myself a somewhat malicious remark here, when it is not about blood on hands,
but rather about blood money.
Many Afghans are very well aware of the corruption scandals in our society, as they know us

(37:40):
better than we know them.
This is still a significant learning process for Germany.
A quick question at the end.
How has your experience over these many years, during which you have been in Afghanistan, changed
your perspective on the people there?
I enjoyed it as if it were my own freedom, how happy the people were in 2003, 2004, 2005.

(38:06):
I could travel across the whole country and there was hope everywhere about what the future would be like.
These dreams have been destroyed, and we, the interveners, are also blamed for that.
I do not believe, and this distinguishes me from many critics of the intervention, that it lies

(38:28):
in the military deployment itself.
However, I believe that it is very difficult to make so many avoidable mistakes again, as the
intervention in Afghanistan has done.
You mentioned Kunduz, which is of course the German warning sign, but there was also what falls

(38:49):
under the name collateral, on all sides, and that is quite dreadful.
Thank you for being with us at Audioarchiv.
Follow us, so you won't miss an episode.
And don't forget the like button.
Until next week, your Audioarchiv team.

All Episodes

Michael Daxner: "Afghanistan: Gebrochene Versprechen - Broken promises - وعده های شکسته."

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

24/7 News: The Latest

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Michael Daxner: "Afghanistan: Gebrochene Versprechen - Broken promises - وعده های شکسته."