Fintan O’Toole: The West had all the clocks but the Taliban had all the time

In December 1928, a new phenomenon arrived into the world: the first ever mass evacuation of civilians by aircraft. The purpose of this cutting edge operation was to airlift 600 foreigners, and a few Afghans, from Kabul to Peshawar in what was then British India.

The British had just occupied a splendid new legation in Kabul when an Islamist uprising, fuelled by rage at the westernising ways of King Amanullah, overthrew the regime with which they were allied.

In March that year, Amanullah and his queen, Souriya, had paid a state visit to London where they were greeted at Victoria station by King George, Queen Mary, the prime minister Stanley Baldwin and most of the cabinet.

Photographs of Souriya in a ballgown with her head and shoulders uncovered helped to spark the Islamist revolt that toppled the king. So did her reported plan to abolish the use of the burka by Afghan women.

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When the insurgency began, The Irish Times warned that "when the tribes are up in arms in Afghanistan, the term of the fighting and its issue are not easy to forecast". It was not wrong.

When the revolt succeeded, the Royal Air Force conducted 84 flights over the mountains, using its Vickers Victoria troop carriers to ferry out the members of the foreign community, along with the king and his harem.

For girls to go to school, for women to be free to travel and to work, for people to be able to sing and dance ... these are transformative possibilities

In 2008, the British ambassador in Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, hosted a grand party to mark the 80th anniversary of the operation. The Afghan defence minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak, made a speech “celebrating an exceptional moment in the history of the world’s first air force”.

Presumably, at that time, a party to celebrate the flight out of Kabul of refugees from an Islamist insurgency was a way of saying: this kind of thing is now safely in the past. It was not conceivable that it was also the future.

Time moves on

This is the hubris that has led to the terrible nemesis of the Taliban’s return: the belief, so deeply embedded in European and American culture, that time moves on, that the past is like Las Vegas: what happened there stays there.

In February 2006, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald Neumann, told his superiors in Washington in a classified diplomatic cable what a Taliban leader had said to him: “You have all the clocks, but we have all the time.”

Afghanistan, for westerners, plays tricks with time. In our world, time is linear. Our clocks mark the progress from one state to another, presumably better, one.

But Afghanistan makes time seem, not linear but circular. History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second and third and fourth times as tragedy too.

Progress itself is not an illusion. For girls to go to school, for women to be free to travel and to work, for people to be able to sing and dance, for life expectancy to get longer – these are transformative possibilities. To see them ripped away is to realise how precious they are.

Yet this idea of linear progress had to compete in Afghanistan with the Taliban’s certainty that time was on its side. It understands time as repetition. Regimes, native and foreign, come with their clocks and their notions of modernity. They are toppled and the true and timeless emirate of Islam is restored.

Temporary abberation

In this mindset – which now again occupies the position of power – nothing is ever over. No change has ever really happened. It is merely a temporary aberration that time will put right.

The Taliban has shown the fragility of the West's illusions, but its own will be no more durable

The disastrous defeat of the American and European mission in Afghanistan is, at heart, a failure to sustain the western idea of progress in the face of this challenge. That idea depends on the notion of incremental gains, of changes that once done cannot be undone.

Kill the bad guys and they are dead forever. Declare democracy and the country has entered a whole new epoch of its history. Banish the fascistic misogyny of an extremist cult and women are free for good.

This faith in permanent progress gradually gave way, over 20 years, to a gloomier concept of time – the so-called forever war. And the Taliban is comfortable with forever. Like all extremist movements, it sees itself in the light of eternity, as the guardian of truths that can never alter.

Yet this ideology is no less illusory than the western faith in the inevitability of progress. The very brutality with which it has to be imposed is a mark of its artificiality. The Taliban has shown the fragility of the West’s illusions, but its own will be no more durable. The politics of eternity are just as much at odds with reality. The same impermanence that the Taliban exploited will haunt it too.

Even if we accept that this history is circular, with modernisation and reaction endlessly following each other, its cycles will resume again. The desire for modernity will reassert itself because that too is part of the pattern of repetition.

If and when it does, it can succeed only if it belongs to the Afghan people. However history decides to repeat itself, it surely cannot be in the return of the fantasy that the West can reshape Afghanistan in its own image.