[War & Business] The Other Side of the Taliban

Members of the Taliban armed group in Afghanistan
[Image source=AFP·Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] As the U.S. Biden administration announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the "Taliban" has once again become a headline after disappearing from international news for some time. In particular, Afghan human rights organizations are deeply concerned about the oppression of women and the regression of democracy. In the U.S., there are even criticisms that the $2 trillion (about 2,200 trillion won) poured in over 20 years has all gone up in smoke, amid self-deprecating expressions calling it the "Second Vietnam War."

The name Taliban originally means "students" who learn the Quran in traditional Islamic mosques and started as a charity organization caring for orphans who lost their parents and siblings during the 1979 war between the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Although it was ostensibly a charity, behind it were very extreme Islamic fundamentalists within the Afghan Mujahideen, an armed group fighting the Soviet Union. It was later revealed that they trained a group of child soldiers under the pretext of protecting orphans.

In the early 1990s, Taliban was a minor organization acting as a subordinate to the Mujahideen, but as the Mujahideen fought among themselves and mutually destroyed each other, Taliban rapidly grew into the largest warlord organization in Afghanistan, which had become a power vacuum. They captured Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, in 1996 and saved Afghanistan from the quagmire of civil war. Up to this point, they received support from the Afghan people and the international community.

However, after taking power, the Taliban revealed their true colors and lost public support due to their anachronistic religious policies. Their extreme Islamic fundamentalist policies even alienated Saudi Arabia, the Sunni leader country, which declared the Taliban heretical and completely cut off the annual financial and military support it had been sending together with the U.S. Isolated internationally, the Taliban received money from the international terrorist organization Al-Qaeda and provided shelter to build bases, which became the root cause of the 20-year war with the U.S.

The 20-year war was brutal, but ironically, it was this war that helped people forget the poverty and unemployment that were even more dreadful than the war itself. Of the up to 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan at one time, more than 80,000 were local Afghan mercenaries, and thanks to mercenaries hired by the Taliban, Afghan government forces, and U.S. troops, Afghan residents were able to escape from starvation.

The warlords currently forming the Afghan government mainly consist of the Northern Alliance forces who turned to the U.S. after the Taliban strictly banned opium, notorious for opium trafficking in northern Afghanistan even before the Soviet invasion. This country, which has no technology, industry, or even oil like other Middle Eastern countries, had opium as its only source of income. Although the 20-year war has ended, there are concerns that much more terrifying unemployment and poverty will now weigh heavily on the Afghan people.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.