The Taliban & Afghanistan

Image by Amber Clay from Pixabay

It has been a crazy week. Crazy crazy crazy. The Paradigm launched its android app this independence day!!! If I have learned one thing from the last few months, it is that creating stuff is hard. Very, very difficult. It often comes with tight deadlines, sleepless nights, 2 am debugging sessions with the team (for a tech product), and a shitload of anxiety. But when people tell you that they love what your team has created, and that it provides value to someone somewhere, it all feels worth it.

But its not that simple. In a collaborative world, where you're building for a politically instable world, the fall of an internationally recognized government at the hands of a militant group takes a toll on you. 15th August 2021 was a bit overwhelming.

Here we were in India, launching a product, and organizing a socio-political convention on the country's independence day. We were elated from all the great reviews the users were giving us, worried about bugs, talking to India's experts in public policy, entrepreneurs who have built and scaled big startups. It felt like a festival, really. It felt the same way Diwali used to feel back when I was 8 or 9 years old.

But out there in Afghanistan things were different. The night brought with it a news about Taliban's takeover of Kabul, without any violence. The militant group explicitly mentioned that a swift shift of power would ensure that there would be no violence. The Taliban even waited outside the capital's gates to ensure the said swift transfer of power. Videos of people clinging on to the US Air Force's planes during take off emerged the next day. People were desperately trying to leave the now Taliban controlled region.

Things were totally different for the Afghans, than they were for our team here. For every moment that we were jumping with joy, there was probably a lot of confusion & fear for the Afghans. I was following the news of the Taliban's rapid movement towards Kabul, but it also seemed in a way very sudden because of the kind of day we were having.

I read a Pew Research Center Study that says a very large majority of people in Afghanistan want the Sharia law to be the official law of their country. What made me think deeply about the situation is the collapse an internationally recognized government, with not much help from other democratic nations. I surely need to read more about it, to understand the situation better. But the collapse of internationally recognized democratic government seemed weird to me.

What remains to be seen is how different would be the Taliban rule now, compared to the 1996-2001 Taliban rule. Some visuals have been disturbing, but a few visuals from the local vloggers like Farhan Hotak show girls going to school, and the Taliban representatives talking to the women in healthcare about continuing their services during the pandemic.

If you want to understand about the issue, I would suggest you to mindfully consume information about from different sources. The most important part of being a better citizen of the world is not jumping to conclusions. It is to read, and understand about the issue more deeply, and not for the purpose of forming a black or white opinion in most cases. Time will tell how the situation in Afghanistan will turn out to be when the dust settles. Until then, we can only wait.

Peace,

Frodo Mercury

Lord of the strings