by Rajan Philips

On September 1, the people of Afghanistan woke up for the first time in 44 years without a foreign power on their soil. Two days earlier the people of Sri Lanka found themselves under a “surreptitiously declared” (as it has been aptly called) Emergency Rule – yet again in more than 70 years after independence. I am not drawing any far fetched comparisons between the American withdrawal in Afghanistan and the imposition of emergency rule in Sri Lanka, except to make two points.

One, the imposition of emergency rule on August 30 under the pretext of dealing with the emerging food scarcity situation, is once again a reminder that governments and rulers have no qualms about restricting or putting on hold civil liberties in their countries for their own authoritarian reasons. They not necessarily require a foreign military or agency for it. I am not sure if one should be surprised or not by the government’s decision to impose emergency rule now after steadfastly rejecting calls for emergency measures last year during the first wave of Covid-19.

As many others have pointed out, the imposition of emergency rule as a food emergency measure is quite unnecessary and an obvious overreach. It could also be argued that the government has committed another characteristic blunder and done itself a huge disservice just weeks before its biannual tryst in Geneva. Professor GL Pieris (or PGLP, as he has been delightfully abbreviated) will have his work cut out in arguing his government’s case before UNHRC while the country has been placed under emergency rule by the selfsame government.

Second, there is a critical lesson for Sri Lanka from the experience of Afghanistan over the last 20 years. That experience is also the world’s most spectacular failure of a massive development initiative backed by an equally massive military deployment. Put another way, blind investments in infrastructure development do not automatically produce economic growth and social benefits. When misapplied, they can in fact turn out to be counterproductive. Equally, the efficiency and security benefits often predicated on military deployment are ultimately unsustainable. Either they disappear as soon as the military is withdrawn, or they will degenerate if the military overstays its initial purpose.

American Withdrawal

These failures have not been quite identified as inherent to the whole American project in Afghanistan. Rather, they have been noted mostly for their symptoms. Corruption was pervasive from top to bottom in the American-backed and now deposed Afghan government. Not to mention the profits and kickbacks that would obviously have figured in the network of public-private American contracts in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, which became an essential part of the Cheney-Rumsfeld military forays. Infrastructure investments were remarkable for their mis-allocation and inappropriateness. Palatial houses and buildings were constucted without roads, water supply, or power supply. Those who were close to power in Kabul benefited conspicuously, while the majority of the population outside Kabul were deprived equally conspicuously. The Afghan economy was virtually propped by the US dollar, and it is now estimated that since 2001, the US spent a total of $ 8 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan, or a third of US GDP.

There was nothing organic about the whole exercise and the vast majority of Afghans creatively responded by siding with both the government in Kabul and the Taliban in hinterland. The division of labour was made easy by kinship and extended family networks, and this is part of the reason for the swift collapse of the official army, who knew their Taliban kinsmen more than they knew the government in Kabul. In the end, the threat to women’s rights and freedoms under the Taliban was left to be the only justification for the American project and the main west-stream criticism of its abrupt termination.

Women’s rights were not the reason why Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prodded their Commander in Chief, President Bush, the younger, to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq. On the morrow of the invasion of Afghanistan, First Lady Laura Bush, no less, touted women’s rights as justification for taking on the Taliban. In Iraq, there was no gender reason because under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women were among the freest in the public realm in the Middle East. The private sphere might be a different story but that is so in many societies. Women were and are oppressed in Middle Eastern countries that are traditional allies of America. No one in Washington will think of invading Saudi Arabia to liberate its women. Admittedly, the Taliban went to barbaric extents in ruling Afghanistan after driving out the Soviet army. But who helped the Taliban to drive out the Soviets and seize power?

Historically, there have been significant improvements in women’s rights in Afghanistan from the 1950s, and gender equality was written into the 1964 constitution. After their incursion in 1978, the Soviets pushed hard on women’s equality to the point that the Taliban made it a mobilizing call to defend Islamic traditions against Soviet infidels. The US backed the Taliban to fight the Soviets, directly and through Pakistan, even giving US dollars to buy arms from China. So, it is rather rich for the Americans to claim that they went after the Taliban ten years later to restore women’s rights in Afghanistan. All of this is now water under the bridge.

The Taliban is now saying both publicly and in diplomatic channels that it will allow women and ethnic minorities to continue to work, that senior government positions will be filled on merit, but, however, “in the top posts, in the cabinet, there may not be women.” It will not be easy for the ‘new’ Taliban to house-arrest women as it did in its first coming. Women’s education and employment have risen to impressive levels, with nearly half of government jobs being filled by women. They cannot be easily dispensed with. Additionally, the western governments have considerable economic leverage over the Taliban, and they have made it quite clear that they will use it to hold the Taliban to its word. As well, while the Taliban will increasingly turn to Russia and China for countervailing support, neither country will likely countenance the oppression of women in the name, mistakenly of course, of Sharia law.

On Tuesday, August 31, as the Taliban celebrated the American military’s final flight out of Kabul, President Biden addressed the media and the country from his White House pulpit in Washington. While defiantly defending his pullout decision, the President also stressed that the “era of major military operations to remake other countries” has ended. Some have noted that no previous president has ever said such words before. But the statement in itself is not indicative of any significant change in direction. And after Trump, the world knows that America can become mercurial and unreliable without any warning after a mere electoral college vote count. While there is cross-party public support for not committing American troops to ground wars, Washington can always use other means, such as drones, to wage wars. It is not only the Taliban that has to live up to its word, but also the US government that has to demonstrate that after Afghanistan there could be a different America.

There was in fact a different diplomatic demonstration in Southeast Asia even as the US was airlifting itself out of Afghanistan. In late August, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Singapore and Vietnam capping off a flurry of visits by senior Biden Administration officials to ASEAN countries in recent months. Defense, digital trade and Covid-19, and not Afghanistan, figured prominently in the bilateral discussions in the two countries. In Vietnam, President Nguyen Xuan Phuc was effusive about the growing US-Vietnamese co-operation, which he said was “in line with the wishes of the peoples of the two countries, and the wish the late President Hồ Chí Minh had conveyed in his letter to US President Harry Truman 75 years ago.” Truman of course ignored the now famous letter and its plea for American support to end French colonial rule in Vietnam. America is now fully courting Vietnam while the EU and France are reconsidering their total reliability on the US for their security.

Emergency Rule

In Sri Lanka, the TNA is calling on the government “to present a solution” to the problems faced by the Tamil people in the North and East, and wants the US to be “the mediator that studies and approves these solutions.” That is a tall ask by any measure and it has come in the wake of dinner diplomacy by the outgoing US US Ambassador Alaina B. Teplitz, that included TNA MP M.A. Sumanthiran and the new Foreign Minister GL Pieris (PGLP) who apparently was directed to attend by his SLPP boss, Finance Minister and dual citizen Basil Rajapaksa. The TNA has been asking for an appointment with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa “to discuss their proposals with him prior to the UNHRC session.” Now they have been put on the spot to talk about the government’s decision to declare Emergency Rule.

When President Jayewardene imposed Emergency Rule exclusively on the Jaffna Peninsula in 1979, the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice & Equality (MIRJE) placed it in the context of Sri Lanka’s historical experience of emergency rule – imposed either to quell working class agitations or political protests. Before and after their 1977 landslide win, JRJ and his UNP severely criticized the prolonged emergency rule of the previous (United Front) government and vowed not to impose emergency rule again. The promise was broken first in Jaffna – ostensibly to “eliminate the menace of terrorism in all its forms,” and over time more inclusively in every part of the country. At the time the Public Security Ordinance No. 25 was enacted in 1947, fundamentally in response to the General Strike of that year, neither Sri Lanka’s first parliament nor anyone else would have foreseen the law becoming, 30 years later, a powerful weapon in the hands of a single individual, namely, an elected president.

Even under the presidential system, parliament retained the power to periodically review and endorse the continuation of emergency rule. The second Rajapaksa regime (2010-2014) managed to find ways to finesse around this requirement. One of the achievements of the one-term Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government was its success in avoiding the imposition of emergency rule. As well, the same government put an end to arbitrary arrests and detentions, and to kidnappings and disappearances outside the law’s radar. Emergency rule is back now, surreptitiously or not, and we know not how far its tentacles will be set to stretch during the remainder of this regime’s tenure. What we know is that emergency rule is not going to be of any help in either controlling Covid-19 or helping people to survive the current ordeal.