Afghanistan’s moral dilemma

Afghanistan’s new Law on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a codification of the existing rules, marks a continuation of the increasing miseries of the Afghan people.

Yet, the legislation hardly comes as a surprise. Immediately after taking over in 2021, the Afghan Taliban had announced that they would rule the country according to their version of Shariah. And it is well-known how retrogressive the Taliban’s interpretation of the Shariah, on either side of the border, is. Those who believed the Afghan Taliban would learn from the past and tone down their approach lived in a fools’ paradise.

The salient features of the new law, which comprises 35 articles, are: The Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue shall promote ‘good’ and forbid ‘evil.’ Men and women have different codes of permissible conduct or lifestyle. Men shall offer the obligatory prayers, keep fasts, and grow beards.

Women shall cover their bodies and faces. They aren’t supposed to commute unless accompanied by a male guardian. Nor shall they sing, recite poetry or speak loud in public. The media shall not broadcast or print images of living beings or carry content that violates the Shariah or insults Muslims.

The penalties for violation range from advice, warning and confiscation of property to detention and ‘any other punishment deemed appropriate’. The fate of the people who remain undeterred notwithstanding these penalties will be decided by the courts, which means, they should be ready to receive harsher sentences. For sure, the Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue will become the busiest arm of the Taliban regime.

Ever since they took over Kabul three years ago, the Taliban have been enforcing their brand of Shariah, like they did during their earlier stint in power (1996-2001), as the foremost matter of state policy. Women in particular have borne the brunt of this. They have already been forbidden to receive education beyond the primary level. Only a small number of occupations are open to them, subject to severe limitations.

The Taliban leadership sprang up in seminaries located in Pakistan, mainly in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). The seminaries were run by a particular school of religious thought. The Afghan war of the 1980s added strong doses of militancy to that interpretation. In this worldview, no compromise, no mutual understanding between the adversaries is possible.

A secondary assumption is that anti-Muslim elements – governments, multinational enterprises, international NGOs – are bent upon obliterating Islamic culture and values in the name of freedom of expression, human rights and fundamental liberties. The ideology makes it obligatory upon every Muslim to fight such evil forces. It also provides for repudiation of ‘alien’ doctrines, rituals and moral standards. Hence, those who profess a different creed or practise a different moral standard are looked upon as wicked or impious. Such people have to be reformed – by preaching or by force – or eliminated.

The Afghan Taliban are believed to have achieved the first goal of establishing an ‘Islamic’ polity. Now they are striving to achieve the second goal of putting in place an ‘Islamic’ society. The morality law in question is a step towards attaining this goal.

The Taliban are guided by the deterrence view of punishment: that the sole purpose of punishment is to deter others from doing a wrong act. Hence, the punishment awarding authorities should make an example of the offender. This view of punishment leads to two conclusions both of which are difficult to accept.

The first is that if the only purpose of punishment is deterrence, it does not really matter whether the convict is guilty or innocent and thus there is no need for a fair trial. All that’s needed is to create fear in society. The second conclusion is that since the degree of deterrence depends on the severity of punishment, it does not matter whether punishment for an offence is too severe.

The Afghan Taliban have a lot of sympathizers in Pakistan, including mainstream political parties, who argue that the former student militia is doing what Pakistan should have done a long time ago. Such people, however, are oblivious of the long shadow that the Afghan Taliban’s policies are casting on the country’s economy.

War-torn Afghanistan is one of the most impoverished societies in the world. With a GDP of $14.5 billion, it’s also one of the smallest economies on the globe. For the last three years, the Afghan economy has contracted back-to-back: 2.1 per cent in 2021, 20.7 per cent in 2022 and 6.2 per cent in 2023 (Asian Development Bank data). Per capita income, which was $512 in 2020, came down to $356 in 2021.

Shorn of agricultural resources and industrial infrastructure, Afghanistan has to import most of the commodities and products it consumes or uses, thus running a big trade deficit, reaching $2.7 billion in 2023 (imports $4.3 billion, exports $1.6 billion). Imports make up a whopping 45.6 per cent of the economy. Being a least developed country (LDC), Afghanistan’s exports are entitled to duty free access in almost all the major economies. However, because of the severe supply-side constraints, the country is unable to take a significant advantage of such trade preferences.

According to a UNDP report (‘Afghanistan Socio-economic Outlook 2023’), more than 84 per cent of the Afghan population lives below the poverty line. Over three quarters of the population borrows food or money to buy food. The report adds that Afghanistan has the highest number of fatalities caused by natural disasters in the last 40 years among low-income countries ‘and is ranked fifth among the most climate at-risk countries worldwide.’

Governments, like individuals, perpetually face a choice of where to allocate their scarce resources to. Should a country spend too much on military build-up, as North Korea does, it will do so at the cost of production of civilian goods and services. Thus every choice and every decision has an opportunity cost. In view of the dismal socio-economic indicators of Afghanistan, the Taliban regime’s priority should have been to shape up the economy, build institutions of economic governance, and raise the standard of living of the people. However, their priority is making people ‘good’ Muslims. The opportunity cost of such a choice is disregard of even the basic needs of the citizens.

Not only that, international humanitarian assistance, upon which the Afghan economy largely draws, is linked to human rights, particularly of women, in the country. Retrogressive legislation and policies, such as the morality law, will only worsen the human rights situation and result in diminution of the international aid, which in turn will aggravate the people’s plight.

Already, Kabul’s abetment to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) – both professing the same ideology – has ruptured its relations with Islamabad. Being a landlocked country, Afghanistan is partly dependent on Pakistan for its overseas trade. In fact, Pakistan provides the shortest land route to and from Afghanistan to the world’s major economies. The smooth flow of the Afghan transit trade through Pakistan is in Kabul’s interest, which necessitates withdrawing its support – overt or covert – to the TTP.

The writer is an Islamabad-based columnist. He tweets/posts @hussainhzaidi and can be reached at: hussainhzaidi@gmail.com