Afghanistan: A Neoliberal Paradise

Afghanistan: A Neoliberal Paradise, The Republic in the Shadow of Imperialism

A Conversation with Atiq Arwand; Part One

Slinger’s Note:

In this conversation, Atiq Arwand, a researcher, political activist, and member of Afghanistan’s Pul-e Surkh Circle, speaks about the experience of the Republic under imperialist occupation in Afghanistan: how, instead of “freedom,” neoliberalism entered Afghanistan in the backpacks of NATO and U.S. soldiers and, through the Republic and NGOs, spread to the most remote corners of the country.

Arwand begins by drawing on historical evidence to respond to the claim that capitalism and neoliberalism cannot, and should not, be spoken of in the context of Afghanistan. Tracing the development of capitalism in the country, he explains how the Republic in the shadow of imperialism perpetuated class oppression and even gender oppression in Afghanistan.

Arwand discusses the sweeping privatization of virtually everything under the Afghan Republic, Afghanistan’s transformation into a laboratory rat for neoliberalism, and the deprivation of the majority of Afghans of education, healthcare, and the most basic necessities of life. He explains how Afghanistan’s neoliberal Republic led, on the one hand, to the mass migration of the working-class to neighboring countries and, on the other, to the strengthening of the Taliban’s social base.

Atiq Arwand also discusses the complicity of the middle-class with the occupying forces and the Republic, and the class interests of this same class, which stood in conflict with those of Afghanistan’s subaltern classes. He speaks of those who were the perennial winners of occupation, the Republic, and its collapse.

In this conversation, Atiq Arwand describes the kind of future for Iran that pro-war currents, in their various monarchist and republican forms wish for: a future whose tearing apart and destruction of everything, of absolutely everything, Afghanistan has already experienced.

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Slingers: Let’s start from here. When it comes to Iran, Afghanistan, and similar countries, some people, even some who are considered leftists, believe that talking about capitalism in these countries is completely beside the point, let alone talking about neoliberalism. In a number of your articles, as well as in your books and lectures, you’ve discussed the question of neoliberalism in Afghanistan.

I’d like to hear a little more about this. I mean, what does capitalism mean in Afghanistan, and what does neoliberalism mean there?

Atiq: The whole story goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Of course, Afghanistan itself was established in the late nineteenth century, from around 1880, during the reign of Abdul Rahman Khan, as a kind of client state that was financially and economically supported by British India. This continued into the early twentieth century, when Amanullah Shah, Abdul Rahman Khan’s grandson, emerged following the assassination of his father and took power in Afghanistan. It was then that, for the first time, we entered into a kind of workshop-based economy. The first people to establish this workshop economy were Indian specialists, Indian Muslim specialists who were in contact with Amanullah Shah because of the Pan-Islamist movement, as well as Amanullah Shah’s own dreams of creating an independent, anti-colonial, Islamist country.

This workshop economy lasted only ten or eleven years. Then came the internal rebellions and the uprising of Habibullah Kalakani, and the Amanullah government collapsed as well. There are, again, different views of that government. Leftists, for example, defend it against the Islamist right because Amanullah’s government was the first to recognize the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union recognized Afghanistan in return. Amanullah Shah even went and met Lenin in person.

At the same time, because Afghanistan’s economic situation was dire, Amanullah went on a six-month journey to the West, to Europe, and asked them for assistance as well. But Britain, which wanted to show Afghanistan the price it would have to pay for independence, provided no assistance. The British also, in one way or another, incited the internal rebellion and supported the rebel forces until the system eventually collapsed.

Then, nine months after the rebels lost power in Afghanistan, Nadir’s dictatorial government came to power in 1929–30. In place of the workshop economy, a new form of industrial economy emerged for the first time, based on the establishment of numerous factories engaged in semi-heavy industries and things of that sort. It was a model similar to what we see in Bangladesh: everything from the production of shoes, balls, tables, and chairs to ordinary tools, weapons, and so on. All of this was introduced into Afghanistan.

And the first team Nadir Khan invited to revive Afghanistan’s economy was a team educated in the Soviet Union; that is, Afghan economists who had been living in the Soviet Union. The head of this group was Majid Zabuli, who had studied there.

Contrary to the assumption among Afghan intellectuals that everything in Afghanistan’s history was somehow haphazard, that nothing ever took shape properly or rationally, when it came to capitalism, Zabuli actually understood very precisely what a monopoly economy was and how the economy could be taken out of the hands of the state and handed over to private companies.

In fact, the phenomenon for which the term khosulati (a hybrid of “private” and “state-owned”) has come into use in Iran already existed in Afghanistan in the early twentieth century. Zabuli was both Minister of Economy and the owner of several private companies. He would put all these economic enterprises out to tender, and his own companies would win the tenders. He controlled the entirety of Afghanistan’s exports and imports across seventeen cities around the world.

If you talk to intellectuals today, they imagine Afghanistan at that time as simply a backward country. But Afghanistan already had commercial branches in Vienna, Berlin, and London, and Afghan goods were being exported to Europe, as well as to India, Iran, and Arab countries. In this way, a kind of monopoly economy had been created.

And this isn’t something I’m making up. Leftists in the 1960s, for instance, the Sorkh-ha [the Reds] group, have a book called The Rise of the Bourgeoisie in Afghanistan, which goes back to the dawn of capitalism under Nadir Khan. In fact, everything begins in 1929–30. Society becomes poorer and poorer, while a new group emerges in Kabul and in Afghanistan’s major cities such as Mazar, Herat, Kandahar, and Nangarhar, a group we now recognize as the Afghan bourgeoisie of the first half of the twentieth century.

And all of this was completely intertwined with state policies and with a political economy that we essentially did not have in the nineteenth century. It was clearly thoroughly modern and based on economic policies that had already been tested in Europe, or in Turkey, Iran, and India. These policies were brought into Afghanistan.

Numerous journals and various publications appeared at the time explaining precisely what kind of economy “we” wanted. But it was also in the early twentieth century that the people of Afghanistan encountered something called austerity for the first time. Monopoly economy, capital accumulation; all of these things were already being conceptualized at the time.

So, this isn’t a matter of my present-day interpretation. If someone carefully goes through the publications of that period and studies government policies, they can see how an economic system was rationally and deliberately introduced into Afghanistan. The Minister of Economy even predicted that the industry they were bringing into Afghanistan would weaken the country’s agricultural sector. In other words, they themselves understood these things, and they weren’t leftists at all.

The dispossession of peasants from their livelihoods later meant that, in the subsequent period, under Hashim Khan, a huge mass of these unemployed people became a problem for the state itself.

So, these are fundamentally not questions that depend on our topology or on our own position. No. These are events that actually took place in Afghanistan’s history. Whatever our particular perspective might be, it is clear what happened and how primitive accumulation was accompanied by extreme violence and by the dispossession of peasants from their agricultural lands.

For example, look at what happened in northern Afghanistan. The cotton company project in the north quite clearly dispossessed several thousand peasants of their land and then turned them into day laborers. As Ghobar puts it in an article from 1923, a worker would work in the cotton factory and, instead of money, would be given bowls and plates, some of them even second-hand and cracked. The state didn’t even pay these workers money; it didn’t pay them wages. And these were things that were already perfectly clear at the time.

Or take what happened in Kabul. For example, why was Maywand, what we know today as Maywand Road widened? It was to create space for a new group of artisans who were settled there, while the old nineteenth-century crafts and trades were effectively wiped out. The state didn’t even compensate people for the land it took from them in that area. Again, this isn’t something I’m claiming after the fact. People’s protests over this were published at the time in the newspaper Eslah.

So, I genuinely don’t understand: when someone sees all this capitalist violence in the twentieth century, what exactly do they imagine capitalism to be? The only thing I can guess is that they’re confusing capitalism with modernity and think that capitalism has certain foundational and later stages that simply never reached Afghanistan.

The same thing has happened with neoliberalism. Someone like Ashraf Ghani wasn’t born with neoliberal ideas! He went to study at the American University of Beirut, where he met his future wife, and then went to the United States, where he came into contact with many of these second-generation figures of the Chicago School. Through those connections, he went on to work at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He has a book on Afghanistan’s economic history from 1880 to 1919 (I’ve forgotten the exact title now) and in it he openly attacks Marx. He attacks Marx from a Weberian perspective.

Ashraf Ghani also gave an interview, before he returned to Afghanistan in which he said that our fundamental question was no longer whether capital was good or bad; the question was what kind of capitalism was appropriate for Afghan society. In other words, as far as he was concerned, the world had already moved beyond the question of whether capitalism was good or bad!

What gets overlooked is precisely this kind of rationality that entered Afghanistan. And unlike the intellectual figure, ordinary people could see that healthcare was being turned into something you had to pay for. I mean, it was obvious. They could see how the quality of state schools was declining every day and how private schools were taking their place, at enormous cost.

Things even reached the point where Mr. Obama whom these friends of ours consider a leftist, was supposedly going to hand over part of NATO’s, and more broadly America’s, military operations to Blackwater. In other words, even the security sector was supposed to be privatized!

Ordinary people could see all of this much more clearly than the intellectuals could, because their everyday lives were directly entangled with these issues. They could see that the cost of operating a taxi in Kabul was three or four times the cost of buying a car. They could see how the state was shrinking day by day and how transnational institutions and international NGOs were taking its place, to the point that in many areas the state had even lost its decision-making power, and these institutions were the ones threatening the state.

The sustainable development program in Afghanistan was a coercive, top-down program. Even the Afghan government opposed it. It said that it was impossible to implement in Afghanistan. But the United Nations and the World Bank, and even the minister himself said: if you don’t comply, we won’t provide assistance.

These things are as clear as daylight, and they happened in Afghanistan. The way development density was being sold in Pul-e Surkh and Shahr-e Naw has nothing to do with the positions of the left. It was an everyday reality: parts of Kabul, Herat, and Balkh were becoming increasingly expensive. And this was something people didn’t really understand. We didn’t even have the terminology for it. We couldn’t name these things, but they were processes that were actually unfolding in Afghan society.

Today, we can call it a kind of Afghan neoliberalism. But the point is that a global prescription was being implemented in Afghanistan. You only need to look at a single century of Afghan history: three major wars with three major world powers. Afghanistan, in fact, has been at the center of major global developments. And in my view, those who want to portray Afghanistan as somehow entirely exceptional, as though we have nothing to do with the rest of the world and live in some traditional world of our own, have political interests in doing so. These ideas have helped them pursue ethnic domination and stake claims to their share of power internally. And they have contributed to internal colonialism in Afghanistan.

Otherwise, there is no reason for us to deny these realities; realities that had, in practice, turned Afghanistan into a laboratory rat for neoliberalism. And none of this has anything to do with our own position toward what happened in Afghanistan. This is the reality of Afghan society itself.

Slingers: In your book Madinat al-Eshq, you identify five main neoliberal processes in relation to Afghanistan and draw parallels between them and Latin America. Could you explain those five processes a little? Could you elaborate a bit more on privatization, the downsizing of the state, and so on?

Atiq: Let me first point out one difference. In my view, that difference was the question of land grabbing. In Afghanistan, the idea was to turn areas that were not economically productive into major economic zones, and this was consistent with the process that had begun in Afghanistan from 2001–2002 onward: the increasing concentration of the Afghan economy on investment in the housing sector.

That’s why land grabbing was so important. A lot of people were puzzled by these lands that jihadi commanders and “warlords” were seizing in different places. The land was worthless, it wasn’t worth much (say, 5,000 afghanis per jerib). So, people wondered: why does it matter so much that they go and seize these lands, even ruining their own reputations in the process?

But people didn’t really understand what was happening. These lands were actually meant to be turned into residential developments in the future. The units would then be sold, floor by floor, in dollars, and that money would subsequently flow into other sectors, for example, investment in the pharmaceutical monopoly in Afghanistan. To me, this was one point where the form taken by Afghan neoliberalism differed from what happened in Latin America.

Then, of course, we have all the similarities as well. I don’t know how far privatization went in Chile, for example, but in Afghanistan three major sectors that fundamentally should not have been revenue-generating were turned into highly profitable institutions for the state: healthcare, education, and security.

And that’s without even getting into the secondary sectors. Even things like sanitation and waste collection were handed over to private companies. Parks were privatized too. It happened in such a bizarre way that nobody could believe it. Someone who until yesterday could simply go to a park and relax would go there the next day and suddenly find the park fenced off, with a gate and a gatekeeper standing there, and you had to pay to get into the park.

In the housing sector, development density was being sold in Nangarhar, Balkh, Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar. Certain areas would suddenly become expensive neighborhoods without any real reason for it, and then these expensive areas would see uncontrolled construction that had absolutely nothing to do with the old architectural fabric of the city. Of course, this violated urban planning regulations, but you could easily get around that by paying. And once these areas were built up, inflated prices naturally became common there as well.

You could see the shrinking of the state across different sectors. Apart from the three sectors I mentioned, for example, we had an institution in Afghanistan called Asan Khedmat. It was an institution designed to redirect Afghanistan’s bureaucracy and turn it into a paid service. Say you submitted a petition to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: it might take one or two months for them to process it. But what Asan Khedmat did was resolve that two-month-long process in, say, three days, for a fee of around 170 afghanis. So, something the state was supposed to do for free was now being done by this institution, which charged people money for it!

This was something that the generation that had lived through Dr. Najib’s period simply couldn’t understand. We were accustomed to a socialist state with a mixed economy, and we simply couldn’t understand this new thing that had arrived. It was new to everyone.

Now, what does this have to do with corruption? The officials and all the employees in this sector would be introduced by an institution that would win a tender and then come in and take control of that body. So, one team would come in and replace another. And it was obvious that winning these tenders depended on under-the-table payments made beforehand, before the tender even took place, or on connections among Kabul’s oligarchs.

For example, you wouldn’t find the brother of a political leader, president, or vice president who didn’t own a residential development somewhere! They all had them! Some were in their own names, while others had mythological names like Rostam Township or this-or-that Township, scattered around different places. The only thing connecting all of them was this power of kinship networks directed from Kabul.

You could see this very clearly in the security sector too. You could see it in transportation, housing, and electricity. And this is something that might even surprise Chilean intellectuals: all of Afghanistan’s electricity was in the hands of a single company, Breshna. It had contracts with Iran, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. In effect, it was a private company in Afghanistan that was contracting with Iran, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan and deciding which parts of Afghanistan would have electricity and which parts would not!

People protested repeatedly in several Afghan cities against this electricity disaster and the enormous costs imposed on them. But, well, the company had influence; it gave the government its share. There was a whole spread laid out, and everyone got a share of it. Even today, with the Taliban in power, Breshna remains a private company.

Look at banking. Contrary to what these Islamist currents claimed, Afghanistan’s entire banking system was not only against people’s pockets but even contrary to Islamic values; that is, contrary to what they themselves claimed to uphold. These banks paid interest, generated returns, and operated across different sectors.

For people in Afghanistan, this was strange. They simply couldn’t understand this bizarre lending system that had emerged, with interest rates of thirty or forty percent, different kinds of loans, and so on. The state banking system had never been capable of anything like this. Private banking had arrived. And where do you see the result? In the corruption scandal at Kabul Bank! I think the government deliberately tried to discredit the state banking system so that people would move their capital into private banks such as AIB Bank, Azizi Bank, and so on.

Another example: within Afghanistan’s culture of pop psychology, the head of Azizi Bank, Mr. Azizi, became the symbol of the man who started from nothing and then became one of Dubai’s major shareholders! You only have to listen to the man himself. He says: “I started my business in Afghanistan in 2001 with 500 dollars!” How is it possible that someone starts with 500 dollars and becomes one of the biggest landgrabbers in Dubai’s Palm development? How is that possible?

I mean, if we look at this realistically, it’s obvious that the banking system was involved. And then you had the fact that he was one of President Ashraf Ghani’s vice presidents (his fourth deputy) and also was one of Afghanistan’s biggest bankers. It’s obvious how these people were reinforcing and supporting one another across politics and economics. We could see this in all sorts of sectors.

I think one area that expanded enormously in Afghanistan, although I’m not so sure about Latin America, was this whole policy of NGO-ism. It became an extremely lucrative field in Afghanistan. These organizations weren’t even accountable to the central government, yet they had influence in all sorts of places. They would even intervene in matters that fundamentally had nothing to do with their work.

For example, gas imports in Afghanistan were in the hands of organizations that weren’t even economic organizations in the first place. During Afghanistan’s harsh winters, the price of gas would suddenly quadruple even though its price in Iran had remained unchanged. So, when gas was imported into Afghanistan (and low-quality gas at that) its price would become four or five times higher. It was obvious what this monopoly was doing.

But the mistake some people make is to think that this was a minimal state. In other words, they think the state basically had no power anymore, so it couldn’t possibly fuel internal colonialism or exercise oppression over people, because it essentially no longer existed. No. That wasn’t the situation. At the same time as the state was shrinking, the economic profits available to the state in the sectors it had relinquished were actually substantial. What had emerged, though, was a kind of kinship-based economy. In reality, what we normally understand as a state structure no longer existed.

Look at the judicial sector. An American legal organization came in and took government employees who had been barely surviving on state salaries and recruited them, on dollar-denominated salaries, into a body called the Commission for Combating Administrative Corruption and Serious Crimes. They hired them there on salaries paid in dollars, and the state judicial sector as a whole was weakened and collapsed, even before the political system itself fell.

That’s why you saw people in Afghanistan’s peripheral regions, instead of trusting the bureaucracy of the Kabul government, actually placing their trust in the Taliban’s bureaucracy and those makeshift Taliban courts! The Taliban would deal with a person’s problem immediately, and in many cases, they would even ensure that whoever was in the right actually got their due. They weren’t at all like the corrupt Kabul government. And this helped the Taliban gain people’s trust throughout Afghanistan, outside Kabul itself.

And then our middle-class in Kabul would complain: Why are people like this? Why have we become so pro-Taliban? Why is popular support for the Taliban increasing? But the issue was precisely that entirely different things were happening in Kabul, things that had little to do with people’s actual lives. Take, for example, the “Where Is My Name?” campaign in Kabul, which sought to have mothers’ names recorded on identity documents. That campaign started. What’s interesting is that it’s both comedy and tragedy at the same time.

The campaign was taking place precisely when the Taliban were capturing Afghanistan’s provinces and advancing toward the center. It’s one of those bizarre, extraordinary episodes in history: by the time they were approaching Kabul, this campaign had also succeeded in getting women’s names added, at least to the government database used for issuing identity documents.

So, at exactly the same time that they were adding something to Afghan law, the Taliban were approaching the gates of Kabul. And that showed just how far our struggle in Kabul had become detached from the social conditions in the rest of the country where, according to the intellectuals themselves, 89 percent of the population lived. The way people lived, the very logic of their everyday lives, was different from the situation at the center.

And it was the same in every area. Water had been turned into a paid service! There was a company in Kabul whose job was to distribute water. All the social services that we used to understand in Afghanistan as public works had been handed over to the private sector. There was nowhere the private sector wasn’t present.

And when you talked to intellectuals, they would say: because Afghanistan’s private sector is weak, Afghanistan’s economy is weak. I mean, they had this really bizarre understanding of the Afghan economy. And that came from the same enormous blind spot: they fundamentally refused to recognize capitalism itself, and the presence of capitalism in Afghanistan.

Slingers: Where did these private-sector investors come from? Who were they?

Atiq: Rashid, the Pakistani author, has a book about the rise of neo-capitalism in Afghanistan, and Giustozzi has also written several books on the subject, including the well-known Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop, about the rise of neo-Talibanism in Afghanistan and its links to the drug economy.

I think there were various origins, but more specifically, you could say that one group of these traders, who were initially nouveaux riches, first became merchants through the drug trade and then turned into investors in the housing sector. Then, through the added value the housing sector generated for them, they tried, from Kabul, to take control of Afghanistan’s import and export monopolies.

So, there was a network of people who went from being large landowners and major landlords to becoming nouveaux riches. Another part of it, of course, was the symbolic capital possessed by former mujahideen, who had become major land grabbers and wielded influence everywhere. They had even created their own little fiefdoms in different parts of Afghanistan.

In fact, this was one of the reasons Afghan intellectuals believed that our capitalism wasn’t really capitalism. Why? Because these people were nouveaux riches who had nothing to do with the development of the bourgeoisie, the historical, traditional development of the bourgeoisie in the West. That was how they understood capitalism in Afghanistan.

But what they didn’t understand was that this economy of plunder existed in the West too. It existed alongside the traditional bourgeoisie; there’s nothing strange about that. In the early twentieth century, Lenin explains all of this in his writings on imperialism; how these things become interconnected. We had already experienced all of this in Afghanistan in the early twentieth century. There was nothing fundamentally new about it. Only its shape and form had changed: from a factory-based economy and import-export monopolies to investment in housing, privatization, and so on. Otherwise, it was the same thing. There was no fundamental difference.

But the reason they denied the existence of capitalism in Afghanistan was precisely the emergence of these nouveaux riches. They would say: how can you possibly equate a drug trafficker, for example, with the French bourgeoisie? That simply makes no sense.

And yet there was a clearly identifiable economic cycle. You could see how wealth was transformed into capital and then circulated through different sectors. You could see who, for example, had taken control of the monopoly over gold imports into Afghanistan, how prices were determined, and who determined them. It was clear how the whole thing circulated. Drug money, meanwhile, was being laundered through investment in things like gold and jewelry in Afghanistan.

Slingers: You mentioned that many of these resources and opportunities were allocated on the basis of kinship ties and so on. So, we’re talking about a kind of family-based rent-seeking and a form of corruption. The right could respond by saying: well, this isn’t capitalism; it isn’t even neoliberalism. The problem is corruption and rent-seeking. As you yourself said, this isn’t genuine privatization; it’s khosulati-ization, this hybrid private-state form. What would you say in response to that?

Atiq: I think we first need to look at what Ashraf Ghani was openly saying. He said: we are on the periphery of global capitalism. There is no path to Afghanistan’s development except integration into the global market. I genuinely can’t understand the people who deny this.

In Afghanistan’s Constitution (I think it was Article 15) the Afghan economy was explicitly defined and enshrined as a free-market economy. What’s interesting is that nothing like this had been written into the constitutions of previous governments and political systems. If you look at earlier constitutions, different governments said that they supported private-sector investment, but they didn’t say anything about a free-market economy. Under the republic, by contrast, this was written into the Constitution and formally codified in law.

Some of our friends seem to think that Afghanistan had two separate systems: one was Karzai’s presidency and the other was Ashraf Ghani’s presidency. They see the two as separate from one another. But Ashraf Ghani himself was Minister of Finance under Karzai. He formulated Afghanistan’s monetary policy and then advised the government on which sectors it could invest in. The pharmaceutical monopolies, and the monopolization of healthcare more generally, emerged under Karzai’s government. Ashraf Ghani was Minister of Finance at the time.

Then Ashraf Ghani, the great professor! resigned from the government, upset because Karzai was too traditional and wouldn’t submit to the logic of the global market. He complained that Karzai wouldn’t let them operate properly! It was like the discourse you hear from various Iranian presidents saying, for example, that the ruling establishment won’t allow the government to function.

So, he got angry, left, and became chancellor of Kabul University. Then the idea of establishing private universities occurred to him. I mean, he was everywhere. Later, of course, he came back and took power.

And it was obvious how he took power. It was ridiculous. Everyone knew the United States was backing him, and it was obvious to everyone that the 2014 election involved widespread fraud. Here was a man who had virtually no popular profile (people in Afghanistan’s villages basically didn’t know who he was, while in the cities he was known as an ethnonationalist figure). As ordinary Afghans put it, he was this Westernized ethnonationalist in a necktie who had come from the West.

And within a few months, he was transformed into the savior of Afghanistan’s economy, the man who supposedly knew how to turn Afghanistan into a developed country. In his own words, he wanted to turn it into a “little Europe.” He believed Afghanistan occupied an important strategic position and that, using modern methods, the country could become a major hub along the Silk Road. And we saw what a fucking mess he made of it!

In the economy, he destroyed agriculture. He caused mass peripheralization and the growth of informal settlements across different cities. And by generously handing over public services to the private sector, he destroyed overnight the entire set of traditional structures that had been built up in Afghanistan since the 1960s.

Unlike in some countries, where many of these policies are implemented by governments without ever being formally codified, in Afghanistan we actually had laws for them. Various departments and appendices were created within the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economy so that development policy itself, along with these multi-year plans, could be handed over to the private sector, and the private sector could then come in and plan Afghanistan’s development.

This was explicit. It was part of the state’s laws. And in my view, these friends who deny all this have political and economic interests in doing so. I don’t think they say these things out of ignorance. They’re part of this very system. They themselves are sitting at the table and have a share of the profits.

At the very least, Afghan intellectuals benefited from the establishment of private universities. Each of them seemed to be among the founders of one of these universities in Kabul or the provinces. In provinces where we had very few schools to begin with, someone would come along, open a university, and indiscriminately hand out degrees to people. The whole thing was ridiculous, from the university entrance examination all the way to the university’s administrative apparatus.

It was obvious that there were enormous economic profits behind this. And obviously, someone who had founded one of these universities welcomed the policy of handing different parts of the state over to the private sector. So, none of this came from ignorance. Ashraf Ghani himself used to say that he understood the essence of capitalism better than Afghanistan’s leftists did. In my view, they all understood it. It was obvious that they knew what they were doing.

But their hatred of Ashraf Ghani, because everyone hates Ashraf Ghani, regards him as the filth of history and as the person responsible for Afghanistan’s collapse; that goes back to the question of ethnicity. Economically speaking, he was actually their prophet.

Of course, I don’t mean that Afghanistan’s entire economy was in Ashraf Ghani’s hands or that he personally determined everything. Yes, there was the International Monetary Fund, there was the World Bank; all of these institutions directly influenced the circulation of money in Afghanistan. But there was someone who served as the executor of these policies inside Afghanistan. They know who he was, but at the same time they hate him because of his ethnic orientation. You can’t simply ignore these things.

Slingers: What do you mean when you say, “This destroyed Afghanistan’s agriculture”? Because in our societies, given the so-called Asiatic mode of production, the question of land, and so on, the rural population and the peasantry constitute a significant part of the population. I want to know what happened to this population during that period.

Atiq: Quite clearly, when Ashraf Ghani was Minister of Finance, he said that Afghanistan was not an agricultural country. We should allocate the largest share of the budget to the industrial sector. The budget allocated to agriculture was 2.1 percent under both governments, Karzai’s and Ashraf Ghani’s. Compare that with the military budget, which at its peak was 60.8 percent. There’s simply no comparison. It’s obvious that they had basically abandoned the agricultural sector altogether.

The entire cooperative system in Afghanistan, which had been inherited from the socialist government of that period, had been destroyed. I mean, there was hardly a village you could go to in Afghanistan without seeing this machinery sitting there under an inch of dust. The state had simply abandoned all of it.

Slingers: But what’s the problem with that? I mean, don’t you agree that Afghanistan wasn’t an agricultural country?

Atiq: I believe that, on the contrary, southern and western Afghanistan, which were irrigated by water from the Hindu Kush, the Baba Mountains, and these mountain ranges of the Iranian Plateau, could have been managed with the same amount of water and under the same drought conditions that Afghanistan faced. I mean, that proportion of the land which, according to the figures, 22 percent of Afghanistan’s territory is agricultural land; they could have managed that sector, because our domestic economy revolved around it. And the production and cultivation of opium poppies and the production of narcotics show just how important the agricultural sector actually was.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, they concentrated on urban development. And there was no such thing as an industrial economy in Afghanistan either. Where, for example, did you see major factories and heavy industry in Afghanistan, apart from a few steel mills, a few pharmaceutical factories, and the Coca-Cola company? There was basically nothing you could call heavy industry in Afghanistan.

But our friends say that Afghanistan had no industrial working class and therefore capitalism didn’t exist in Afghanistan. They simply ignore the diverse forms capitalism can take.

Where the state actually had a responsibility to do something, it allocated the smallest amount of funding. What did it do instead? It launched a project called National Solidarity, which, again, was Ashraf Ghani’s idea. They would go to each village and tell the villagers: choose one of these three options: the construction of a mosque, the construction of a school, or the construction of a public bathhouse. Some villages would choose the mosque, some the school, and others the bathhouse. And this project was then sold to people as rural development.

In other words, the whole question of agriculture and cultivation simply disappeared. It was completely erased from the agenda in Afghanistan, and this took its place.

They would go around to different places. There were villages, for example, that already had a school, but under the National Solidarity project they would come along and build another school there. And then you’d see that the proportion of people in that area who were going to school and leaving agriculture behind was, say, 11 percent of the local population. And there were two schools! So, in practice, one of the schools was sitting empty. This happened in many parts of Afghanistan, and yet this is one of those projects that the international community regards as one of Afghanistan’s successful projects. In fact, supposedly it was even one of the most successful projects in Afghanistan!

Slingers: When you talk about this abandonment of cultivation, did that include opium cultivation as well?

Atiq: No. In fact, in those sectors where the state no longer had any policy, like agriculture and cultivation, it was the people themselves who made the decisions.

Reports have come out today saying that American jets were spraying these cultivated fields. And the chemicals they sprayed on the poppy fields didn’t destroy the crop; rather, they turned it into a low-quality narcotic. They did this for twenty years without even the Afghan central government knowing about it. They would say these were reconnaissance aircraft, when in fact their job was spraying.

The people themselves managed this sector and received only a small share of the proceeds. According to a report published by Integrity Watch, the Afghan people’s share of global drug production and circulation was three percent. Most of it went to the drug traffickers themselves, who no longer had anything to do with Afghanistan. Once the drugs left Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran, they passed into the hands of international traffickers, and the Afghan people received the smallest share.

And yet even that tiny share constituted a major part of Afghanistan’s agricultural economy. That’s how bad people’s situation was. And what replaced it? Rural exodus.

What’s interesting is that the government had a program called the “Citizenship Project,” which I myself was involved in. The job of this Citizenship Project was to tell villagers: stay in the village, don’t leave the village; the village is such a lovely place, while urban life will corrupt you and the city is no good at all. That was the government’s policy in response to rural exodus.

So, people were leaving the villages precisely because of the way budgets were allocated and because of government policies toward agriculture. And then what happened to these people? They split into two groups: internal migrants, who became residents of the urban peripheries, and migrants who went to Iran and Pakistan and became migrant workers.

And then our government would ask those neighboring governments: please, be a little nicer to them, we’re so oppressed and helpless, and all that! That was the situation!

I mean, there’s a reason why Afghanistan was exporting close to six hundred thousand workers annually. Toward the end, they were even being flown on American Boeings to Qatar to work there. During the World Cup in Qatar, a large proportion of the workers came from South Asia, including Afghanistan, and they went there to work with the assistance of the government itself.

As one intellectual from Khost Province put it: Khost has emptied out; all the men of Khost are in the UAE and Qatar working there.

It was obvious what mechanism lay behind this. An agricultural sector that had constituted a major part of the economy even under Daoud Khan’s dictatorship had completely disintegrated under the neoliberal economy.

Until then, nobody in Afghanistan even understood the phenomenon of urban peripheralization. This kind of urban periphery simply hadn’t existed. We had urban poor, of course, but it wasn’t a situation where Kabul expanded horizontally and these settlements attached to Kabul consisted of shacks inhabited by rural migrants.

And then the “original” Kabulis would get upset and complain that these people didn’t know how to live in a city, that they were street vendors in Kabul and were destroying urban order as well.

So, nobody saw the mechanism behind it. Instead, they talked about why Afghanistan had no control over the export of labor to Pakistan and Iran and why Afghanistan had become a nuisance to its neighboring countries. That was what they examined, while they failed to see the underlying causes of how such a situation had come about.

And Mr. Hassan Rouhani himself, the former president of Iran, said of Afghan workers that they came to Iran because they were dissatisfied with the political conditions in Afghanistan. In other words, he wanted to portray them as somehow resisting NATO’s presence in Afghanistan. He was basically making a joke out of Afghan workers.

The real issue was something he didn’t want to see in Iran either: that a large part of Tehran’s population, for example, had come to Tehran from different cities in search of work. And the same thing was happening in Afghanistan.

Again, this is what I find strange. I think our intellectuals are afraid to see Afghanistan as part of broader global conditions and processes; to see that wherever the logic of capital has gone, it has done exactly the same things it did in Western countries. The production of urban peripheries, for example, something we simply hadn’t had in Afghanistan before.

I think they’re afraid to confront this reality. And there’s a perfectly understandable economic reason for that fear.

A situation had emerged in which, as one of these friends who had shifted from the left to the right put it, there had been an “influx of the working class into the middle class”; and he was actually happy that we had undergone a class shift! “In Afghanistan, a large part of the working class has become an urban middle class, and we should welcome this.”

They benefited from the situation that had emerged. Their own lives were very good. In Kabul, for example, there were concerts. There was Afghan Star. There were luxury restaurants. Bukhara Restaurant, for example, even had foreign employees.

Cultural institutions like IFA would come from France to Afghanistan and organize concerts, set up cinemas, and, I don’t know, bring Iranian intellectuals to Kabul to give talks about things like connecting Afghanistan to economic routes. All of this benefited them. In Kabul and Herat, a whole environment had been created for them, and they benefited from it both culturally and economically.

For example, 79 percent of Afghan women during that same period of the Republic (the period these friends now contrast with the Taliban by saying that the Taliban have deprived women of education) didn’t make it to the twelfth grade.

In other words, before they could even take the university entrance exam and go to university, they would either get married, be prevented from continuing their education, or their families simply wouldn’t have the economic means to send their daughters to a private university. Because there was no state university in their province. A family would have to send its daughter from Daikundi or, say, Paktika all the way to Kandahar to attend university. Nobody did that, in any province of Afghanistan.

These private universities were enormously profitable for them. In practice, wherever the state no longer had the capacity to provide services, they would move in and establish themselves.

Look at the clinics. There was an argument in Kabul over the word “clinic”! People were saying that we shouldn’t allow the government to introduce these English, Arabic, and Pashto words and replace darmangah with “clinic.” The argument was over the word itself, while in practice the entire economic sector of healthcare was being run through these very clinics.

They would go into different provinces and monopolize even the most remote areas of Afghanistan. They would establish clinics there and charge enormous amounts of money. And someone who was sick, and who couldn’t take their sick family member to Iran, Pakistan, or India, had no choice but to pay these clinics huge sums.

And in this way, there was work for the middle class. That’s why the middle class is so upset today that the system collapsed. Nobody is as upset as the middle class. And what’s interesting is that it was this same middle class that ultimately reaped the benefits.

Who got out of Afghanistan? What percentage of Afghanistan’s poor were able to leave? Who had been working with the international organizations?

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it took a section of this same middle class with it to Eastern Europe. This time, when NATO left, they once again took a section of this class with them. That’s how it has worked.

Then these friends go off and write books with titles like, say, Afghanistan’s Short-Lived Bourgeoisie, and lament the fact that people in Afghanistan don’t appreciate the middle class, that this middle class is constantly collapsing, re-emerging, collapsing again…

But if you look at the reality, they were still the main winners. They were the ones who managed to leave the country. And once they had left, they started writing complaints about how the people just don’t understand, how these people are somehow incompatible with democracy, how America spent so much money and yet the Afghan people are so ungrateful. These are all realities of our society.

Slingers: I think it’s time we summoned the working class too! You talked about the phenomenon of exported labor, and you also discussed it before in that lecture you gave. But if we want to talk about the working class within Afghanistan itself (because you mentioned earlier that, for example, the industrial sector in Afghanistan is very limited) what does the working class actually mean within Afghanistan?

Atiq: We have several categories; I mean, they’re divided into different strata. A huge proportion of Afghanistan’s workers are day laborers who genuinely have no rights whatsoever; from insurance and job security to all sorts of other things. These day laborers work in different sectors, but a large proportion of them work in housing and construction. According to government statistics, we had sixteen thousand industrial workers in Afghanistan.

The Afghan Constitution, in order to distinguish the working class from the “white-collar class,” separated white-collar employees from workers. The law specified that employees had one set of rights and workers another. It separated the two, even though a large part of Afghanistan’s working class consisted of employees working in NGOs and government offices.

As I said, government statistics put the number of industrial workers at sixteen thousand. They worked in the Kabul Industrial Park, at the Siraj textile factory, and in Herat’s industrial park, which had three phases. And toward the end, in the 2010s, saffron cultivation was added as well. A large proportion of the workers in Afghanistan’s saffron sector were women, who were counted as industrial workers. There was also the dried-fruit sector, where again a large proportion of the workforce consisted of women.

We also had trades in Afghanistan. There was a trade association as well, but the state appointed its leadership. Through those same local commanders in the different provinces, they were all connected to the provincial councils, and members of the provincial councils were effectively selected through those patronage networks, albeit under the name of elections. And through what we might call political patriarchy, these trade associations would encourage their members to vote for this or that person.

Afghanistan’s trade unions were basically hollow. They weren’t real, and they had nothing to do with Afghanistan’s workers. That was largely how they functioned. Of course, there were also unions in Kabul that even organized strikes, and in Herat, for example, there were two strikes. But generally speaking, there was a relationship between the trade associations and the provincial councils across the provinces.

Industrial workers, in practice, had no rights either. Their rights were specified in law, but in reality they had none. And then there was the large proportion of workers who had no official status in Afghanistan at all; the forgotten informal workforce, like day laborers.

We also have to bear in mind that many workers in Afghanistan worked in occupations that the state itself didn’t recognize. For example, we had children in Afghanistan who worked as callers, and there were several thousand of them. Their job was to shout out to attract customers to shops and taxis. They would get two to five afghanis from each taxi, but the state didn’t recognize this as an occupation at all.

Or take groups like restaurant staff, people working in restaurants, even cooks. They had no official status. The state didn’t recognize them as formally employed. So, a large proportion of day laborers included people like these as well.

The workers the state exported were usually people who already had connections with international organizations in Afghanistan or had worked in government offices. That’s why the government would say, “We export people to Qatar and the UAE who have CVs!” A worker doesn’t even know what a CV is!

Those government workers who had worked in state offices, or people who had worked for international organizations, as cleaners, plasterers, or cooks, for example, were registered and sent to Arab countries. Meanwhile, the day laborers were left behind.

And we had a labor law that covered only industrial workers. A huge proportion of workers simply had no legal protections, no rights, nothing of that sort. And I don’t understand what the government was trying to achieve, but it kept trying to separate the white-collar stratum from workers under the category of “employees,” insisting that these people weren’t workers.

And yet many of these journalists, bank employees, or employees of foreign organizations were subjected to all sorts of pressures but had no unions of their own. It was only toward the end, when the crisis in Afghanistan was intensifying, that they gradually realized there were ways of doing this and began organizing among themselves.

And one of the strangest developments was that a large number of people with disabilities in Afghanistan organized a major protest in Kabul. At one point they even gathered together and blocked a road. It was the first time that people with disabilities in Afghanistan had taken collective political action.

But in reality, until the late 2010s, the state basically didn’t recognize these sectors at all.

This is different from what we understand as the lumpenproletariat. A large proportion of people with drug addiction (we had three and a half million people with drug addiction in Afghanistan) and beggars, for whom the official government term was “panhandlers,” were simply not recognized by the state, and there was no legal framework for them.

During Zahir Shah’s period, we had institutions in Kabul for the protection of these groups, what has become fashionable among the Iranian right to call “vulnerable strata.” But during the Republic, those institutions were turned into checkpoints, security posts, and military installations. They had nothing to do with their original purpose anymore.

There was, for example, an intersection called Zayeshgah [Maternity Hospital], where there was supposed to be a facility for looking after widows. But in practice, that entire area was turned into a military zone and no longer had anything to do with those social groups.

Slingers: Despite everything you’ve described, someone looking at Afghanistan from the outside might still compare the period of the Republic with the Taliban period; or with the image of the Taliban presented outside Afghanistan: a period where everything is always dark, everything is terrible, the Buddha statues, the situation of women, executions in the football stadium, all those images and say: well, things were still better during the Republic, weren’t they? And perhaps this imperialist intervention for the “liberation” of Afghanistan was unavoidable; perhaps it had to happen.

Atiq: Yes, that’s completely understandable. Compare this position with the question of October 7 in Palestine. These friends like to see history as beginning on October 7. In other words, they don’t want to see what came before it.

With Afghanistan too, it’s obvious that the Taliban were far worse than the Republic. But fundamentally, before the Taliban, who spread political Islam in Afghanistan? Who financed and armed the mujahideen? Who helped the mujahideen bring down Afghanistan’s last quasi-socialist government? Or, as the U.S. ambassador in Peshawar put it, who helped “put the final full stop” on the Cold War? Who created these fronts? Who established committees in Peshawar to counter the committee that had been established in Mashhad? Who was funding those committees?

You see, before the mujahideen, political Islam in Afghanistan was an idea. It was supported, for example, by some Islamist students at Kabul University. It wasn’t yet something practical, objective, and serious. But the United States came into the region and funded these people.

Before that, people in Afghanistan didn’t know how to use an AK-47. We had mouse-killer rifles before that! Those old British rifles. Who was supplying these weapons? Where were they coming from? Why can’t I fund three people in Afghanistan myself?! Could these people somehow spontaneously get their hands on Stinger missiles? Who was equipping them with heat-seeking, helicopter-targeting missiles?

It was obvious where these weapons were coming from. They were being trained as well. There are videos. There’s a document that I myself translated for Radio Zamaneh showing Reagan saying that we have no choice but to provide comprehensive support to the Afghan mujahideen.

Yes, under the Taliban, conditions were far worse for everyone in Afghanistan. But who created this fate for Afghanistan, where we ended up having to prefer the Republic to the Taliban regime?

During this wonderful, rosy period, in 2016, when even Afghanistan’s inflation indicators had turned positive, let’s for once look at things from the perspective of Afghanistan’s subaltern classes, not from the perspective of what was happening in Kabul, where they would invite some Western economist to the Kabul Serena Hotel, feed him, and then have him come and talk about turning Afghanistan into a “little Europe” and all that!

Put all that aside and look at it from the perspective of ordinary people.

For example, in a report published by Harvard University on multidimensional poverty in Afghanistan (in both Persian and English) Afghanistan had a multidimensional poverty rate of 53 percent. This means poverty that isn’t simply financial or monetary, but also encompasses healthcare, the young labor force, literacy, security, and shocks; that is, sudden events in different areas that affect people’s economic conditions. So, 53 percent of Afghanistan’s population was deprived and living in multidimensional poverty.

I also compared that figure with monetary poverty: 51 percent of Afghanistan’s population was experiencing monetary poverty, meaning the household didn’t have enough money to know what it was going to eat the next day.

If you combine that 51 percent with the 53 percent, while also taking into account the economy of the Kuchis and all of these other factors, 33 percent of Afghan society was experiencing both monetary poverty and multidimensional poverty.

And all of this was during the Republic’s wonderful, rosy days, at its supposed high point; in 2016–17 when Ashraf Ghani was claiming that we should become a model for other countries!

Because, after all, the wheels of neoliberalism were turning, and Chile was supposedly a historical exception. In other words, he thought you could pursue the same thing democratically, because he imagined that, unlike in Chile, neoliberalism in Afghanistan had proceeded democratically.

And these are figures they themselves provided; figures published on Afghanistan’s economy by Integrity Watch, meaning the right-wingers themselves, not the left.

With the help of the private sector, they managed, for example, to reduce maternal mortality. Or in some provinces, representation in the university entrance examination was higher, including women’s representation; literacy conditions were better in some of these areas, women had access to education, and so on.

But overall, when you look at the household economy in Afghanistan, even according to the figures they themselves provide, the situation wasn’t good.

Of course, even these statistics weren’t accurate. Afghanistan’s population registration authority was itself basically a joke! All the statistics were arbitrary.

The UN in Afghanistan, during the Republic, also had a peace project called the “Peace Roadmap,” which gathered statistics on improvements in Afghanistan’s economic conditions. I spoke to an employee who worked there, and he told me: “Sometimes, when we see that the figures don’t come out right, we just put in a number ourselves!”

So even according to the arbitrary figures they themselves were producing, this was the situation: 53 percent of Afghanistan’s population faced multidimensional poverty, and 51 percent faced monetary poverty.

And there was basically nothing left for us except to become workers, except to become someone who had to sell their body and their labor power. We didn’t even have cultivators left in Afghanistan anymore. You basically couldn’t cultivate anything in Afghanistan anymore. All you could do was escape this enormous prison and look for a livelihood somewhere else.

And what’s interesting is that when this money then flowed back into Afghanistan, the Kabul government, the same government that had driven these people out of Afghanistan, would boast about the fact that a new circulation of money had emerged through the currency exchanges, that workers were injecting new money into the bloodstream of Afghanistan’s economy, and that workers’ money was being transferred back into Afghanistan!

That was also the claim made by Iranian fascists: they would say, “The worker doesn’t spend this money in Iran; he sends it back to Afghanistan.”

What they didn’t understand was that the Kabul government actually welcomed precisely this. On the other side of the border, it presented it as one of the achievements of the system: we’re exporting workers, and they’re injecting money into Afghanistan’s bloodstream.

Slingers: You’re suggesting that we shouldn’t start the story with the Taliban. I’ve deliberately kept trying, at least in this meeting and in this conversation, not to get into that subject. You describe an experience in Afghanistan as “quasi-socialist.” But now we’re partly forced to get into it.

If we don’t want to start with the Taliban, and if we accept that the Taliban are a bad starting point for comparison with the Republic, then we need to hear from you what this “quasi-socialist experience” you’re talking about; or at least what I understood you to be talking about, actually was. So, we’re going to have to talk about it a little.

Atiq: After the Saur 7 coup, when the People’s Democratic Party came to power in Afghanistan, the economic policy of the new government was a “mixed economy.” During Karmal’s period, the state sector was strong, and three sectors (healthcare, security, and education) were completely free.

Apart from that, there was an enormous emphasis on literacy, including extensive literacy campaigns in Afghanistan’s villages. And something that sounds ridiculous to today’s intellectuals is that they would even go around with loudspeakers, forcing people to allow their daughters to go to school. That was one of the main reasons behind the 24 Hoot uprising in Herat and people’s revolt against the policy: Why are you trying to force our daughters to go to school? Why are you separating them from our traditions? You’re leading society astray, and so on.

Alongside this, major reforms were also carried out regarding land, agricultural land, and so on, which became known in Afghanistan as land reform. There was also the well-known program inherited from the period of Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin. Under Karmal, although Karmal claimed that he didn’t share the violence and radicalism of Taraki and Amin and, in fact, represented the reformist current within the Taraki-Amin tendency, things were proceeding relatively well.

I mean, it was called a mixed economy, but in reality it was a state-run economy. People’s conditions were better than they had been under the monarchy, and compared with what came afterward, there was simply no comparison.

Unions had also become active. And not only trade unions: for the first time in Afghanistan, during Karmal’s period, we even had a writers’ union.

Then, under Dr. Najib, beginning in 1986–87, he introduced a number of adjustments; structural adjustments intended to prepare the country for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. He provided loans and credit to the private sector to allow it to become more active, and said that the aim of our mixed economy was integration into the global market.

Dr. Najib pursued this policy to a certain extent, but the state sector still remained stronger. So again, the situation was simply not comparable with what we later saw in Afghanistan.

And when I say “quasi-socialist,” what I mean is this: although we didn’t have popular councils, and although there was a socialist state ruling Afghanistan, with only one party governing and the activities of other parties prohibited, there had nevertheless been a structural transformation. The thousands-of-years-old landlord-peasant logic in Afghanistan had been destroyed. It was the surplus produced by the industrial working class that, precisely on the basis of Soviet policies in Afghanistan, meaning the establishment of heavy industries, was driving economic development. And these workers themselves were growing in number and had their own unions, although those unions were, of course, supported by the state.

In any case, this isn’t just my opinion. This is the image ordinary people have of that period. What ordinary Afghans themselves say, in their own words, is that up until Dr. Najib’s time, the state paid attention to us; it didn’t ignore us; we were part of the system. But after him, all of a sudden, people were simply left to fend for themselves and the state had other things to do. It had entirely different policies and concerns.

Again, this is what people themselves say. It isn’t something the right or the left says. Ordinary people themselves experienced it this way, and this was the general perception of the situation.

The coupon system we had in Afghanistan also meant that we had a form of urban cooperatives. A kind of outlet had been established where you could buy flour, salt, and everyday foodstuffs at prices far below what market logic would dictate. This helped the lower classes enormously in keeping themselves afloat.

But when the jihadis came, with the huge amounts of money the United States was giving them, what an ordinary worker earned on a daily basis simply couldn’t compete with what they could offer. In this way, they were able to attract workers by paying them in dollars and recruit armies from among ordinary Afghans.

At the same time, the system as a whole lacked legitimacy. It had been established through a foreign invasion of Afghanistan, and so, drawing on the sensibilities of political Islam, it was possible to mobilize people against such a system; a system that, economically and culturally, had in my view been successful.

Now, here’s what the right says. They say that from the 1960s through the 1980s, the greatest achievement of the Afghan left was the creation of various literary and cultural currents. All these novelists, poets, painters, thinkers; they all emerged from these currents.

In other words, an intellectual who wasn’t left-wing was almost certainly connected to the court and to the legacy of the court and monarchy, and those people were themselves dying out. That generation, people like Musa Shafiq and Maiwandwal was disappearing, while the dominant intellectual and literary currents were thoroughly left-wing. This is what today’s right itself claims.

But what that shows is that there was a certain economic logic and structure that fostered the growth of the middle class and helped expand it, while at the same time substantially narrowing the gap between the middle class and the working class.

The war-torn areas, however, gradually expanded and grew larger. And this, too, was because of U.S. financial assistance and the arming and financing of the mujahideen by the United States, which enabled them to attract and recruit large numbers of people.

So, in the end, in the years between 1986–91, the Kabul government effectively governed only Afghanistan’s cities, even after the withdrawal of Soviet forces, while the surrounding rural areas were largely in the hands of villagers who had by then become guerrillas and militiamen.

Slingers: You referred to the state-run economy as a positive phenomenon in Afghanistan, but we hear right-wing economists say that “a state-run economy means corruption,” and you yourself talked a lot about corruption during the Republic. Didn’t this corruption exist during the period of the state-run economy?

Atiq: Very little. Again, this is something the right themselves say. But they argue that the reason was that there wasn’t much money at the time; that is, there wasn’t much money circulating, and that’s why there was less corruption.

But in my view, rent-seeking was very weak, extremely weak. There was a certain ethos at the time that, by the period of the Republic, had become something people could only dream of. For example, a government employee felt committed to the work they were doing. Or profiteering among ordinary people and the middle class was generally very limited. Everyone wanted to do their job properly. None of this was remotely comparable to the kind of ethos that NGO-ism introduced into Afghanistan.

During the era of NGO-ism, if you said to someone, “Come to this demonstration in support of the victims of war,” they’d ask, “How much are you going to pay me to come to the demonstration?!” I mean, people’s whole ethos had changed.

Put aside all those things, people used to say about Afghans being honorable, hospitable, and so on. An entire moral regime had entered Afghanistan that was simply incomparable with what had existed before. In fact, this has itself become a kind of collective memory of a lost past, people know that something like this once existed, that people used to be a certain way, and that now it’s gone.

But the way people talked about it was simply: “The past was good, and today everything has gone to hell.” That was how they saw it. They didn’t see the political economy behind it. But administrative and financial corruption really was very limited. Everything went through the state and was under state supervision.

Of course, I’m not an advocate of that socialist state. But when you compare it with what happened afterward, you can see that there was a great deal of control over Afghanistan’s bureaucracy, and this helped generate popular satisfaction with and support for the state bureaucracy.

There’s an expression ordinary people themselves use: until Dr. Najib’s period, as an Afghan, you didn’t feel like you had no one looking out for you. There was someone there to look after you, someone watching over you. After him, that disappeared.

At first, under the mujahideen, there was the slogan of an “Islamic economy.” There was this whole discussion influenced by the way they looked at Iran, that we would create an Islamic economy centered on the downtrodden, the dispossessed, and so on. That was the first idea, and even that disappeared with the civil war.

Then the Taliban came. And when the new system arrived, it said that the fundamental deviation had been our excessive orientation toward the Eastern Bloc. That had been the mistake. Development lay in an entirely different direction, and we had to move the other way.

What’s interesting is that some of our leftists during this period who were themselves products of the earlier period, started saying that it had been completely wrong for us to conceive of the economy in terms of heavy industry and an industrial economy, and to talk about industrial workers! We should focus on the service sector and look at the workers in that sector; that was actually the correct approach! The proper way to understand capitalism was to critique these sectors instead.

That’s why, when discussions of the culture industry, the Frankfurt School, reading Arendt, and things like that entered Afghanistan, they were all influenced by the same discursive regime hidden behind this whole story.

All of a sudden, instead of people buying, say, Lenin’s works, you would see books like the collected works of some Eastern European writer (Havel, for example) suddenly becoming bestsellers in Afghanistan. Or Eichmann in Jerusalem and things like that!

Or novels by some repentant South American novelist, or someone like Yuval Noah Harari, the BBC intellectual, so to speak, would suddenly become the great thinker, while everyone else just disappeared overnight.

All of this goes back to that discursive regime, which had already brought in the economy and the logic of the market and then showed what kind of superstructure could be built on top of it.

Let me mention something else here. My father was a former mujahid, and I once asked him, “Why do you think this system won’t collapse?” Because everyone was optimistic that the system wouldn’t collapse. The previous system had collapsed because it had problems, they said.

So, I asked him: “Why do you think that, unlike the previous one, this system won’t collapse?”

My father said that one of the distinguishing features of the current system was that it didn’t interfere in people’s private lives, their personal beliefs, or their individual values. Unlike the previous system, which tried to force people to become Marxists, this system wasn’t like that. It said: young people, enjoy yourselves. And it was also compatible with Islam. It followed Islamic policies step by step, because, just like us, it didn’t interfere with individuals and didn’t try to impose an economic regime on them.

The problem with the previous system, this is what my father used to say, was that we understood, even while we were fighting the left, that what they were saying about justice was correct. Their strategy was wrong and their tactics were wrong, but what they said about justice was right. But this system wasn’t like that. It had helped create individualized ways of life.

And what lay behind what my father was saying was precisely this: an economic regime had arrived that had genuinely managed to present freedom as individual freedom, as exactly what you could see around you: a colorful world in which nothing ruled over anyone, in which there was supposedly no economic regime governing anyone at all. Nothing!

And that’s why, among Afghan writers, apart from the leftists, you can hardly find a writer who has written about the nature of the Republic’s political economy. That kind of work simply doesn’t exist in Afghanistan. And all of these people were connected to one another through this network of relationships.

Slingers: Now, as we gradually move toward the end of this part of our interview: what happened in Afghanistan happened, after all, through an imperialist intervention. My question is: what was the outcome of this imperialist intervention in people’s everyday lives, apart from replacing the Taliban with the Republic?

Because you mentioned that some of these economic policies, in addition to Ashraf Ghani and the current that came to power with him, were the result of policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, and so on. What instruments did they use to impose these policies?

Atiq: Funding Afghanistan’s budget. They financed a large part of Afghanistan’s budget.

Part of the budget came from black money generated through poppy cultivation and things like that. They also said that arms trafficking and so on played a role in Afghanistan’s economy. Afghan customs revenues played a role as well, for example, imports and exports. They said somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of Afghanistan’s economy came from this, because Afghanistan serves as a bridge between Central Asia and South Asia.

But the bulk of the budget was financed through the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. And that was how they were able to impose the fifteen-point Sustainable Development agenda on Afghanistan.

Take human trafficking, for example. Afghanistan introduced a law against human trafficking, and one of its important provisions was the prevention of child labor. And, absurdly, when you went to speak with a working-class family and told them, “You’re not allowed to send your children to work; they have to go to school,” they would say: “Fine, no problem at all. I’d also much rather have my son come home holding a pen and learning to read and write instead of coming home with his hands covered in mud! You cover my living expenses, and I won’t send my child to work.”

In other words, laws were being introduced that, in practice, had absolutely no means of enforcement in Afghanistan.

Of course, these weren’t the issues the middle class was fighting over. The middle class was fighting over the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the “Where Is My Name?” campaign, and laws like those, which didn’t have any means of enforcement either. But that was where the debate was directed.

The arguments were over the words daneshgah and pohantun [university], over “clinic” and darmangah [local health center], over words like “Afghan” and “Afghanistani,” and so on.

Yes, the reality was that the International Monetary Fund would bring these things to conferences held in the West and put them on the agenda; Bonn I, Bonn II, the Berlin Conference, the Vienna Conference, and so on. Funding was allocated to Afghanistan on the condition that it carry out these reforms: economic reforms, integration into the global market, reforms concerning imports (transit in particular was extremely important to them) and then the final part, which Britain insisted on, was that they should also monopolize Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation. And they did this in Helmand Province.

They said the reason was pharmaceutical: that they were using poppy cultivation to produce various medicines needed in Britain.

There was a kind of supply-and-demand relationship between the Kabul government and the global market, and because of that relationship, a great many things were imposed on Afghanistan. Afghanistan wasn’t a country that could say no.

Even Karzai, who toward the end had developed a kind of anti-Americanism which was itself rather ridiculous, well, the United States simply pushed him aside. And not only Karzai himself; Karzai’s entire team was removed from the machinery of the state.

Again, contrary to our intellectuals, and without this being some conspiracy theory, ordinary people would say: “He comes along, and he’s practically God himself!” America says, “From today onward, Karzai is no longer useful, he’s no good anymore, and so-and-so is the right person instead.”

I mean, when you talked to a street vendor, a taxi driver, a potato seller, or a shopkeeper, this was how they talked about elections: these things are decided from outside and from above. Democracy is just a pointless show, and even a mockery of democracy itself.

That was what was going on in Afghanistan, and that really was what it was. It was exactly that: a pointless show.

I think only someone with no conscience could have believed that something serious was actually happening. No, that really was all there was to it. It was a show. There was a puppet government, a client state, in Afghanistan.

Now, it’s true that people weren’t on the Taliban’s side. Rashid, again, had an article called “Neither Taliban nor NATO.” People had seen the horror of the Taliban’s five-year rule. But they didn’t want this either.

And that’s why the Taliban advanced the way they did. Contrary to the conspiracy theory you find among intellectuals that there was supposedly some hidden arrangement between Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban to keep power in Pashtun hands, that they were somehow cooperating, and that this explains how easily the provinces surrendered, the real issue was that people didn’t want their children to be sacrificed for such a corrupt system. Nobody wanted to defend this corrupt system.

Yes, they understood who was attacking them. It was like that scene in Bahram Beyzaie’s play The Death of Yazdgerd: the miller says, in effect, “We know who is coming. We can see this black army approaching. But we know you too. So, we simply stand and watch.” That was, in fact, the position people found themselves in in Afghanistan.

Slingers: One of the promises the right-wing opposition makes to us is that once the Islamic Republic is gone, foreign investors will come in and Iran will become a paradise! My question is: did foreign investors come to Afghanistan? And if they did, what was the outcome for the working class?

Atiq: They took control of some of these economic hubs, but there was no domestic circulation at all. I mean, the money they invested went into specific sectors that were at the heart of Afghanistan’s economy. They would take control of those sectors, use the money to pay their own employees, and then the money would leave the country. It never really entered Afghanistan’s own economic circulation.

There were specific hubs like this in Sheberghan, Herat, Nangarhar, and an inland hub in Kabul. They controlled these sectors in the name of reforming Afghanistan’s economic apparatus. They had invested in these sectors and taken control of them, and apart from the low-level employees, even the main staff were brought in from abroad by these organizations themselves. They had their own nightclubs, their own bars in Kabul; Afghans weren’t even allowed into these places.

If the right-wing opposition sees this as the flourishing economy of Iran’s future, well, it’s the same thing foreigners had already done in Abadan, where they built a little West of their own. That’s what happened in Afghanistan, only on a much larger scale. In Iran it was confined to Abadan; here it happened across Afghanistan’s economic hubs.

As for the tangible impact of this investment on the everyday lives of ordinary Afghans, these friends themselves will have to come and show us what it was. Because we certainly didn’t see anything. There was nothing in Afghanistan!

An Afghan worker still couldn’t afford the rent. Now these people are gone and we have the Taliban regime, and it’s still the same story. The lower classes haven’t moved an inch from where they were.

They themselves came to Afghanistan and created opportunities for themselves. They could take advantage of them. There was a kind of rent created for them through the NGOs, and under the pretext that, “If we give this to domestic companies, they’re corrupt and they’ll ruin the sector,” they took advantage of it themselves!

It was the same with the pyramid-like corporate structures they created in road construction. Take road-building in Afghanistan, for example: one body would determine the budget and announce the project, but the bidders were foreign companies. Afghan companies couldn’t compete with them; they simply couldn’t afford the costs involved.

So, the foreign companies themselves won the contracts. The subcontractors were their own people, the employees were their own people. The ordinary worker physically working on the road was Afghan, but the overall expenditure, the budget, and the salaries flowed back to them.

Again, this is something SIGAR itself said; I mean, the body that investigated corruption in Afghanistan and was funded by the Pentagon. It said that more than 60 percent of the money the United States and the West spent and invested in Afghanistan went back to the West!

So, when people come along and say, “More money was spent in Afghanistan than on World War II”, yes! But where was that money? Where was it spent? Where did it go?

Just look at the military bases they built in Afghanistan. Our Iranian friends shouldn’t imagine that these were merely military bases. No. They built cities. These were cities with every kind of service, staffed by their own personnel. As I said before, they even had their own cabarets and bars. They had them everywhere.

The biggest example was Bagram Air Base, which was a kind of megacity. They’re still fighting over it today. It wasn’t merely a military base. All the transactions took place among themselves, and exchanges were conducted in euros. They had their own currency system there, and it had nothing to do with the Afghan people.

If this is what they welcome for Iran, then yes! In my view, you can very easily see the consequences of it in Afghanistan.

What people in Afghanistan called the “transnational state” didn’t mean that the state was trying to turn itself into some kind of council-based administration. No! The reality was that this “transnational state” meant that the Afghan state existed alongside other states that were being created in parallel with it. There was the NGO state, the military-base state; these states that exercised control, cast their own spheres of influence, had their own compounds and settlements, and operated simultaneously with the Afghan state. We were dealing with multiple states.

Just look at the hospitals they established in Afghanistan. If you had some seriously powerful connections, you could get your sick relative transferred to one of those hospitals. You couldn’t just take anyone there. These hospitals had the most modern medical equipment in the world and the best electricity supply systems. I saw this with my own eyes in Herat Province. But, of course, these facilities were for them, for their own patients. In order to reduce the cost of transferring patients to Europe, they brought all these facilities to Afghanistan. And today they’re upset that they had to leave them behind in Afghanistan.

So, the issue isn’t just, “We left tanks and artillery behind in Afghanistan.” They left that entire infrastructure behind in Afghanistan, and it had cost an enormous amount of money. That was what the West had brought to Afghanistan.

Slingers: What did this have to do with deregulation? Because you also mention deregulation in your book. And what was the actual material manifestation of that deregulation?

Atiq: I think the main function of parliament and parliamentarism in Afghanistan was figuring out how to exempt rent-seekers from pre-existing regulations. These people were connected to members of parliament.

What’s interesting is that we had two major turning points in the parliamentary electoral system. In the first round, the people who entered the Afghan parliament were ethnic notables, elders, and people who were respected by their communities. They were much more locally rooted. Some of them didn’t even know how to sit in a parliamentary chair; they didn’t understand how the system worked, what separation of powers meant, they didn’t understand these things. That was the first round.

The second round is interesting: all of them were swept away and the capitalists came in. I mean, all these people who entered parliament would buy law degrees from private universities and overnight turn into lawyers and legal experts! Before that, someone might have controlled gas imports and spent enormous amounts on an election campaign.

When these people entered parliament, obviously they couldn’t have been doing it to live on an MP’s salary. A lot of people found it strange: someone with that level of income, why would he humiliate himself so much trying to get into parliament for a salary of 200,000 afghanis?

What they didn’t understand was that parliament was precisely the place for deregulation. You could establish connections with those rent-seekers and get money from them. That’s why several MPs effectively controlled all the foreign bidders involved in imports.

This is one way of looking at what our friends meant when they talked about “competition in the free market,” or when they claimed that “there was no capitalism in Afghanistan.” The very idea of competition was a joke. It was meaningless. It didn’t exist anywhere, except for what Integrity Watch described as competition between two shopkeepers in some village! Beyond that, competition simply had no meaning.

At the macro level, the question was, for example, which company would obtain the right to import COVID vaccines. The company owned by the speaker of the Afghan parliament controlled fuel imports for NATO tanks. Today, he is being pursued by the American authorities dealing with corruption and administrative crimes. The same speaker of the Afghan parliament who, only three or four years ago, was meeting with the head of the U.S. Senate is now under investigation.

His son was also an MP and controlled NATO contracts in Afghanistan. And he himself would proudly say, as someone whose story was always presented in precisely those terms, as someone who “started from zero” and, while still a young man of twenty-eight or thirty, had reached this position, that he controlled all the contracts for NATO’s fuel, supplies, provisions, all these expenditures and costs, transporting them into Afghanistan through ports and hubs like Karachi, Tashkent, and so on.

Or take various MPs in different provinces. Some of them would even assassinate people in order to win votes! They would have some other candidate killed whose vote share was close to theirs. It didn’t necessarily have to be a shooting; maybe the person would have an “accident” with a particular vehicle somewhere. Then the other candidate would win the votes. The field would be cleared, and they would win.

And this was common! Everybody understood it. The general perception was simply: that’s how it works. It’s normal. This is how it is in the West too, and now it has come to Afghanistan; the experts brought it here.

Even this idea of expertise; of “entrusting the job to those who know how to do it”, that really had happened! I don’t understand these intellectuals. The job really had been entrusted to the experts, and the experts knew perfectly well how a plunder economy worked and how it had to be run.

Why was Helmand important? They knew how poppy cultivation could be monopolized in Helmand. They understood that. And it was the same everywhere.

And all of this required deregulation. In other words, a force had to enter the Afghan parliament and use its power to impeach some minister who was becoming a pain in the neck. And then there was this perfectly rational, logical cycle between them.

Later, you would nominate your own minister for the cabinet. Several MPs would get together, bring in a particular person, and propose him to the government as a minister, or they would pay the government, and he would be appointed.

Slingers: And did this deregulation also extend to labor law and workers’ rights?

Atiq: In that area, because workers’ rights had never amounted to anything substantial in the first place, they didn’t have much to worry about.

What mattered more to them was how they could support monopolies and deregulation, and how they could push the state out of different sectors. They weren’t worried about labor.

The state had suppressed and internally weakened Afghanistan’s working class to such an extent that it was no longer considered a serious or dangerous force.

The only group the state was really afraid of was the “white-collar” stratum, the employees, because if there were a general strike, the state would be paralyzed, especially the Kabul government with its state bureaucracy.

But it wasn’t afraid of industrial workers, because it knew that all it had to do was cut off their funding for a week and they would completely collapse.

In fact, the main fear among MPs was their own rivals in parliament, the Economic Commission, for example, which had its own networks and connections. They were much more afraid of them. That’s why they would try, for example, to reduce criminal penalties for land grabbers, or reduce penalties for corruption at customs, and get people out of prison.

You could look at the economic offenders in government prisons, in a country that was basically a breeding ground for administrative corruption, and count them on your fingers. There weren’t even seven or eight of them. An MP could easily get them released from prison.

Slingers: Let me ask my final question. The Republic has now collapsed and the country has been handed over to the Taliban. The Taliban are no longer in the position you described earlier, meaning a force that exists within society but doesn’t govern and therefore doesn’t face the problem of actually exercising power. Now the question of governance directly confronts them. So, I want to know what the situation is today. From the perspective we’ve been discussing throughout this interview, what is Afghanistan like today under Taliban rule?

Atiq: Yes. The question a lot of people ask is: what political economy have the Taliban brought with them? And I’ve always said: the Taliban haven’t brought anything. What they inherited from the Republic is precisely what they’ve kept!

The entire system, the banking policy, the policy of strengthening the private sector, they’ve preserved all of it exactly as it was. They’ve even kept the same personnel in those sectors. The employees who were policymakers in the Ministry of Finance, they kept all of them in this area and told them, “Come back to work.” The same thing Khomeini did at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution when he said, “Come back to work.”

They brought them back, and these people are doing very well for themselves in these sectors. So, in reality, nothing has changed in this area.

Talibanism, which is known throughout the world for Islamic radicalism, has preserved private banking completely, exactly as it was. Why? Because they understand that it works and that it serves their interests.

Take interest, for example. You won’t find even one person among the Taliban who will come forward, put together a program, and answer this one simple question: is bank interest legitimate under Islam or not? They’ve preserved all of it. The private sector, private schools, they’ve kept them. They’ve only shut down girls’ schools. Boys’ schools, and universities in general, have remained as they were.

So, the “Islamization” has been carried out in such a way that the entire private sector has essentially been preserved exactly as it was. Not only has it been preserved, but the Taliban’s Minister of Economy, who is Persian-speaking, was himself a staunch supporter of privatization policies during the Republic. And now he’s the Taliban’s Minister of Economy. He’s the economic adviser to the Great Leader: the Amir al-Mu’minin! So, nothing has changed in this area.

They say, “When it comes to land grabbing, we came in and stopped land grabbing, and then we returned the Hindus’ lands to them.” That’s nothing more than media slogans.

In reality, when a landowner or land grabber fled, these people simply came and took his place. It’s not as though they distributed that land among the people. Nothing like that happened at all. In fact, population displacement from land has increased under the Taliban. People are being forcibly displaced from different areas, like what happened in Uruzgan, where they displaced the entire Hazara population and brought in other people and settled them there instead. Only the owners have changed. In practice, nothing has changed. (If you underestimate your enemy and assume he’s an idiot, you end up becoming trapped in the very image of him that you yourself created!)

The Taliban know exactly what they’re doing. They understand capitalism. They know what it is. And their insistence on gaining international legitimacy and recognition is fundamentally about one thing: integration into the global market. Otherwise, as their own head of government, the Taliban prime minister, said: “The world doesn’t recognize us, and we don’t recognize the world either!” A stupid declaration.

I mean, politically, that’s what they believe. But then why are they so insistent on recognition? Because of the economic branches and operations they could establish in different places, which they currently don’t have. So, the reason is precisely integration into the global market.

And these intellectual friends of ours who go on Afghanistan International and elsewhere giving speeches and saying, “We should support the reformist wing of the Taliban, because we need to support the eastern Afghanistan faction (the Nangarhar faction) against the Kandahar faction,” are actually supporting precisely the Taliban faction that is more insistent on borrowing from the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank and integrating into the global market.

They actually prefer the more modernized Taliban faction to the more traditional Taliban faction, which doesn’t agree with this and prefers a kind of economic isolation to integration into the global market, although I’m not even sure that the latter really hold such a position when it comes to the economy.

But these friends abroad either don’t realize that what they’re supporting is the same thing that later emerged in the Islamic Republic under Rafsanjani, or they simply don’t care. The misery and displacement of ordinary people just isn’t important.

In reality, they’re doing exactly what the Taliban’s reformist current is doing, and there are quite a lot of them: the Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Taliban Ministry of Finance, the Taliban Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. These are basically the Taliban reformists who have problems with Kandahar and with the Amir al-Mu’minin. Afghanistan International is also the mouthpiece of this same group.

But, for example, they also support girls going to school; the Kabul Taliban faction. You see how perfectly the pieces fit together. And they don’t want anything more than that either.

There was an investment forum organized in Europe to attract investment under the Taliban regime. Taliban representatives were there; they hadn’t been formally invited, but their representatives had come from the embassy.

And there, all these bureaucratic friends of ours who have now moved abroad were essentially presenting an image in which Afghanistan could still be modern even under the Taliban regime. That was the image being presented.

Unfortunately, in my view, our people are once again walking into another enormous pit, something like Iran. In other words: in the name of an Islamic economy, but in practice for the benefit of capitalism.