Lessons from Afghanistan – Realizing Better Outcomes
The Taliban have done horrible things in the past, when they had an opportunity to govern. The things that most stand out as signatures are their brutality, intolerance, misogyny, among other things.
They came in to restore order, and in the midst of institutional failure, delivered on some basic promises of stability and order.
Their vision however cannot create a flourishing, vital society – one that can grow beyond whatever traditional models of world-making they have in mind.
Yet, the models they offered, won against the alternatives that the Western countries had to offer – in Afghanistan as a whole, not just in the pockets of Kabul.
Why? Why did the institutions people abhorred, that created a vacuum into which the Taliban stepped, not create alternative institutions?
That is our learning #1.
The deeper archetypes that inform such structures remained latent and their corruption is also their weakness – they cannot even defend their own pathologies (I mean In Afghanistan. In North Korea, they have mastered that, and in a number of countries that are in between and soon becoming like their polar extremes above).
The Taliban will eventually die, and they will most likely take the society and nation down with them. Because, what they have to offer is not generative – nothing based on their ideology can be generative except in a medieval world.
Accelerating that inner breakdown is a priority for the world – for they cannot become exemplars of failing order elsewhere, but we must also have better alternatives to offer – Not just Visions, but practices for realizing better futures.
What kind of an attractor can the world create that Afghanistan and many others like them will find compelling. Clearly whatever we have is not working.