THE U.S. WITHDRAWAL,TALIBAN TAKEOVER,AND ONTOLOGICAL (IN)SECURITY IN AFGHANISTAN

Abstract

Security discussions of the Taliban’s second takeover of Afghanistan center on physical security threats, neglecting the ontological aspect related to how security entails the metaphysics of life—being, feeling alive, or having a sense of self. This article examines this ontological threat to the Afghan people to complement the security discussion and open up more avenues of dialog. I use ontological security to explain the Afghans’ behavior toward the Taliban takeover and ask how does the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan pose a security threat to urban Afghans? Why are urbanite Afghans paranoiac about the Taliban presence to the extent that some choose to die by falling from a moving aircraft? I use the ontological security analytical framework and discursive approach to finding answers. I argue that the Taliban takeover creates ontological insecurity that threatens urban Afghans’ sense of ordinary living or being in the world. Specifically, ontological insecurity creates significant and chronic uncertainties and dangers to Afghans. This is especially so regarding the urbanites with higher socioeconomic status, whose being in the world is threatened as their ordinary living conditions are likely to be contested by the Taliban. The contest is asymmetric, favoring the Taliban. Such uncertainty of existential conditions leads to mistrust of Urban Afghans’ basic sense of safety and a misrecognition of their true identity. Thus, their actions and behaviors have been consequent attempts to respond to the anxieties and risks to their existential position. This work contributes to the ontological security literature, helping fill the gap in the security discussions in international relations and serves policy relevance.

Between August 6 and 16, 2021, the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan, following the American military withdrawal from the country. The Afghan security forces that the United States had sponsored and trained over the last two decades did not resist, surrendering sophisticated weapons to the Taliban. This takeover has received global attention. It has fomented public, journalistic, academic, and expert discussions, mainly from the security perspective. However, the various security discussions in the media have centered on the physical security threats that Afghans, neighboring states, and the world is likely to suffer. They include domestic brutalities and human rights abuses, protracted refugee problems and associated humanitarian crises, and regional and global terrorism. These security discussions, although tremendous, are incomplete—for they omit a critical security concern that is not physical but ontological, relating to how security entails the metaphysics of life. Thus, the overarching purpose of the present work is to explore and analyze this critical security concern the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan engenders in the Afghan people, especially in the urban population. In so doing, I attempt to give meaning to their responses to this threat. Specifically, I demonstrate how the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan creates a security concern for Afghans that goes beyond the physical to include ontological insecurity that affects their nature of being, feeling alive, or their sense of self. In this way, the present work joins the growing scholarship on ontological security in international relations.

The article seeks to answer several related questions stemming from this. How does the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan pose a security threat to Afghans in urban areas? What kind of threat does the Taliban pose to urbanite Afghans’ security? How do we assess this security threat effectively? Why are urbanite Afghans so paranoid about the Taliban presence to the extent that some have chosen to die by falling from a moving aircraft? I use the ontological security concept as an analytical framework and discursive approach to finding answers. Understandably, people worldwide are skeptical that the 20 years of the Taliban's absence from power have changed them. Thus, its governance would renew a heightening security threat—first, for the Afghan people in the cities whose identities are at odds with the Taliban, second, for the region, and third, for the entire world, especially its rivals.

The central argument driving the present work is that the Taliban takeover of government creates ontological insecurity that threatens urban Afghans’ sense of ordinary living in the world, feeling alive, or being in the world. Specifically, the ontological insecurity created by the Taliban takeover creates significant and chronic uncertainties and dangers to Afghans, especially the being in the world of those urbanites with higher socioeconomic status, as their ordinary living conditions are likely to be contested by the Taliban. The contest is asymmetric, favoring the Taliban. Further, this uncertainty of existential conditions leads to mistrust of Urban Afghans’ basic sense of safety and a misrecognition of their true identity. Their actions and behaviors, including hiding in homes, attempting to seek refuge at the airport, stampeding to board aircraft, and clinging to the wing of a taxiing plane (and subsequently falling to their death) were consequent attempts of Afghans to respond to the anxieties and dangers to their existential position. To contextualize these actions to better understand them and potential mitigate future repetitions or repercussions, an ontological security analysis appears to be needed to make whole the discussion of security vis-à-vis the Taliban takeover. Nevertheless, it must be stated at the outset that not all Afghans share this ontological insecurity. The predominantly rural Afghans who identify themselves with the Taliban's ideal world and interpretation of Islam may coexist with the Taliban relatively peacefully. However, it is plausible to claim that those urbanite Afghans with Western and modernized lifestyles are likely to feel tremendous ontological insecurity.

This work breaks from the state-centric to the people-centric aspect of ontological security, focusing on urban Afghans vis-à-vis the threat of the Taliban. I attempt to demonstrate how the Taliban takeover has created an ontological insecurity that affects the feeling of aliveness of urban Afghans. Thus, this study adds a contribution to the rapidly expanding ontological security literature, augmenting the mostly state-centric discussions on the insecurity the Taliban takeover has created for Afghans in some crucial, and very human, ways. The study also shows that the physical security debate alone is insufficient to discuss Afghans’ insecurity with appropriate nuance. It also serves a policy relevance that could, in future, help deal with the likely humanitarian crisis that continues in Afghanistan.

I organize the rest of the article as follows. I first explore the ontological security concept and literature in greater detail. Second, I trace the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, comparing the 2021 regime with the pre-2001 regime to show why the Afghan people, especially those in the urban areas and the world fear it. Third, I show how significant anxieties about human security metamorphose into ontological insecurity. I then apply the Afghan situation to the ontological security framework, demonstrating that the anxieties and uncertainties associated with the takeover in fact do create ontological insecurity. The Afghans’ behavior and actions were, I argue, in response to such insecurity. The final section offers my concluding remarks.

Ontological Security Literature in International Relations

The concept of security has varied definitional and explanatory underpinnings depending on what one wants to discuss. One type of security goes beyond the physical realm to relate to “how security language implies a specific metaphysics of life” (Huysmans 1998, 231). Approaching security from a metaphysical perspective came from psychology through R. D. Laing, who referred to it as “ontological security” (Laing 1990, 39–61). The phrase was applied to international relations by Jef Huysmans (1998, 226–55). Laing (1990, 39) described an ontologically secure person as “a man,” including infants, who has “a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person [or entity].” In this case, they or the new organism or entity “can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous” (Laing 1990, 39). Thus, for individuals, ordinary circumstance does not constitute a perpetual threat to their existence.

Nevertheless, an ontologically insecure person develops anxieties “where there is the partial or almost complete absence of the assurances derived from an existential position” (Laing 1990, 39). Such individuals may feel more unreal and dead, constantly questioning their identity and sense of autonomy. They can no longer be secure in themselves. They thus can no longer live in a secure world because they are “preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying [themselves]: the ordinary circumstances of living threaten [their] low threshold of security” (Laing 1990, 42). That is, ordinary lives “constitute a continual and deadly threat” (Laing 1990, 42). We can characterize their everyday life as “life, without feeling alive” (Laing 1990, 40). Ontological security is an emotional phenomenon concerned with the nature of being or the being-in-the-world. It attempts to explain the relationship between self-identity, others, and security.

It is about the natural and unconscious ways people consistently see themselves in relation to others in their environment. Thus, they perform actions that endorse their sense of self or who they believe they are for others to affirm that sense. Such endorsement of self by the self and others preserves the continuity and the security of the individual's ordinary circumstances. The absence of such assurance or anxiety in everyday life constitutes insecurity. Therefore, security here is not just about a narrative defining a specific threat but rather how that security narrative “defines our relations to nature, to other human beings and to the self” (Huysmans 1998, 231). The concept follows the same line of explanation when applied to the state itself—how a state sees itself and others and how it wants others to see and recognize it. Therefore, misrecognition constitutes continual insecurity that threatens every day or ordinary circumstance. It means that ensuring the state's security and survival also serves as a security structure for citizens to achieve their ontological security. Some scholars assign individual personality status to the state to explain that states, like humans, care about their ontological security. Therefore, states’ actions and behaviors are aimed toward maintaining their stable, self-perceived identity or sense of self (Ringmar 1996; Zarakol 2010; 2017).

For example, the Ladakh Crisis—the military clash between Chinese and Indian forces at the contentious border at Ladakh in June 2020—marked a heightening Indian national security threat from China. However, Purayil and Purayil (2020) demonstrate that the security concerns that the clash engendered in India transcended the physical boundaries of threat, shaking the heart and mind and the very being or the nationally self-perceived identity—or identity as perceived by others—of the Indian state as a rising power, a regional hegemonic competitor, and South Asia's source of security. Moreover, Zarakol (2010) explains that Turkey and Japan have not been able to apologize for the Armenian genocide, nor for the atrocities committed against China during World War II, respectively, due to the ontological insecurity that shapes their self-identity and their identity as perceived by the international community.

Nevertheless, Zarakol (2017) finds that not all states seek ontological security, although the concept is a valuable instrument to study international relations because it provides a platform to compare systems across time and space without necessarily assuming the centrality of politics. From a people-centric perspective, Kinnvall (2004) opines that people and groups have become more ontologically insecure and existentially uncertain due to global processes such as the globalization of economics and politics. Our fear of losing work, home, status, privileges, etc., causes us to adopt new strategies and identities to respond to these threats that globalization brings. Therefore, this prompts people to seek ontological security from collective identity signifiers such as nationalism and religion due to their persuasive rallying features. This work joins the growing scholarship on ontological security in international relations from a people-centric perspective focusing on urban Afghans.

Afghanistan Under the Taliban Rule

Taliban Emergence (1994–1996)

In 1978, the Soviet Union's aggression and support enabled the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) to stage a coup d’état that brought the Khalq faction of PDPA into power. PDPA reforms—modernization, mosque and state separation, education, banning feudal practices—were unwelcomed by the predominantly rural Afghan people because they saw them as un-Islamic, clashing directly with their traditional values and understanding of Islam. Due to its persuasive rallying features, religion became the only collective identity signifier for the various ethnic and tribal divisions because it conveyed a sense of security and stability. A religious local resistance group, the Mujahideen—or “those who wage jihad”—challenged the government, claiming an assault on their traditional values. In 1979, the Soviet Union subsequently invaded Afghanistan and installed the Parcham faction of the PDPA. Combined Soviet support and the PDPA's socialist reforms appeared to intensify the insecurity of the Afghan masses, thus, leading to an intensification of their challenge. The coup and the subsequent Soviet invasion disrupted Afghan political culture which was accustomed to solving grievances through traditional forums and disrupted communal autonomy. The United States (providing dollars), Saudi Arabia (another financial provider), Egypt (a military supplier and training ground), and Pakistan (a recruiter and channel of assistance for fighters and refugees) covertly supported the Mujahideen (Nojumi 2008, 91–4).

The rebels made the war extraordinarily costly for the Soviets and, in 1989, withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving a fractured, disordered, and devastated Mohammed Najibullah's Afghanistan to be overthrown in 1992. Nevertheless, the Mujahideen was a group of numerous factions. Notable ones included: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's predominantly Pashtuns Hizb-e Islami (Islamic Party), Abdul Ali Mazari's Hizb-e Wahdat-e Islami-ye Afghanistan (Party of Islamic Unity of Afghanistan), and Ahmad Shah Masud's Shura-ye Nazar (Supervisory Council). When Najibullah's government fell, the factions fought against each other to assert control over Kabul throughout the early 1990s. The previous regime's militia under Abdul Rashid Dostum defected and fought as Junbesh-e Melli-ye Islami-ye Afghanistan (National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan). In addition to recruiting ethnically, these groups received foreign support from India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, several Central Asian countries, and different Arab states (Sinno 2008, 62).

Hekmatyar's Islamic Party enjoyed tremendous Pakistani and U.S. assistance. Thus, it could “open military training camps and a large network of religious schools, where Islamic extremism became an integral part of the curriculum” (Nojumi 2008, 92). The war disrupted social life and created chaos as brutality, banditry, and crimes against local values and women were rampant. What is more, it created a political vacuum. Amid the anarchy, the Taliban—led by Mullah Muhammad Omar—emerged from the Kandahar Province in 1994 to provide order, forcing the warring factions into a discordant alliance. Therefore, some argue that the Taliban succeeded because there was a waiting leadership vacuum they walked in to fill (Nojumi 2008, 101).

The Taliban was a group of idealistic students from the numerous religious boarding schools (madrasas) established with covert international financial assistance through Pakistan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (Nojumi 2008, 97; Sinno 2008, 63). While some young boys took advantage of the free schooling, several thousand were recruited among the refugee communities. They were trained in the political ideology of the Mujahideen, thus embracing a requirement that boys must participate in military training and engage in active frontline militant activities. The students (Talibs) frequently participated in the anti-Soviet and anti-PDPA rebellion as Mujahideen. By the early 1990s, almost all the preachers in mosques along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border were former students of those religious schools.

The Taliban launched an assault on Afghanistan in September 1994 and took over Spin Boldak—a border crossing point with a significant Hekmatyar's Hizb-e Islami weapons depot. The Taliban then received tremendous support from Pakistan, which the United States gave the green light to support them. Nojumi (2008, 102) declares that a former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, revealed her government trained the Taliban with American dollar assistance. Pakistan shifted support from Hekmatyar to the Taliban after the latter freed a Pakistani convoy taken captive in Kandahar by militiamen—a feat Hekmatyar could not achieve. They marched through Kandahar to capture strategic points, dismantled bandits and checkpoints that extorted traders and travelers, and imposed a traditional code of social conduct, gaining popular support. They captured the Zabul and Uruzgan Provinces in December and Helmand Province in January. By early 1995, the Taliban had defeated Hekmatyar, seized all the Pashtun areas, and imposed Sharia-based social order. Capturing Hekmatyar bases, the Taliban gained tremendous resources because Hekmatyar had been long-propped by Pakistan and the United States. By September 1995, they controlled the west by defeating Ismail Khan's Herat. They took over Kabul in September 1996 to begin official rule. By May 1997, countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognized the Taliban as the Afghan government (Nojumi 2008, 67).

They swept through other areas such as Mazar by defeating Dostum in August 1998 (Sinno 2008, 64–6). Except in the north, the Taliban controlled most parts of Afghanistan. Its association with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden living in eastern Afghanistan led to its defeat by the United States in 2001. Apart from the vacuum argument, some scholars also accept that the Taliban was successful because of the external support, particularly from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other regional powers. For example, Anthony Davis notes that:

The Taliban were pre-eminently a military organization rather than a political movement. The organizational skills and logistical wherewithal required to assemble from scratch, expand, and maintain such an integrated fighting machine during a period of continuous hostilities are simply not to be found in Pakistani madrassas or Afghan villages. Covert Pakistani support for the Taliban can thus be inferred to have been fundamental if not to the movement's political inception then at least to its expansion as a regional and then national force. (Davis 2001, 69)

Rubin (2000, 1794) writes relatedly that “the Taliban mobilized social capital created in madrasas to create a homogeneous leadership group linked to political networks in Pakistan and used assistance from Pakistan and Saudi governments and traders to build up a military force and buy off opponents.”

Nevertheless, Sinno (2008, 61) asserts that the Taliban's success was not about what others did wrong but rather what the Taliban did right by co-opting and mobilizing or marginalizing many entrenched Pashtun leaders because no one can rule Afghanistan without Pashtuns consent. The Taliban was able to do this by shrewdly undercutting Pashtun leaders’ support—the local people—and directly appealing to the Pashtun masses. The Taliban also appealed to the sensibilities of the Pashtuns through public spectacles to gain their support. For example, in 1996, Mullah Muhammad Omar was said to have unprecedentedly shown to the public a supposed cloak of Prophet Muhammad—believed to produce miracles—kept in a mosque in Kandahar. Only two people before that event had seen it (Cole 2008, 126). They were also rooted in remote rural areas where people abhorred urbanite culture. Thus, it enjoyed public support to clean the system (Nojumi 2008, 106). Undoubtedly, the Taliban benefited from external support. However, external support does not sufficiently explain why the group succeeded because it cannot explain why others such as Hekmatyar, long-propped by the United States and Pakistan, failed. Moreover, all the rivals received various forms of external support.

First Taliban Governance (1996–2001)

Describing the Taliban's journey is not about how they militarily conquered Afghanistan; however, it is about how they ruled as a government responsible for providing all forms of security. The Taliban, instead of giving protection, unleashed significant insecurity. They took away people's sense of feeling alive. Under the Taliban, an individual sense of self or living as a natural person constituted a constant threat. Afghans were living without feeling alive due to the continuous loss of the private sphere. The Taliban, who seldom studied beyond primary school, held a distinctive interpretation of Islam that influenced their ideology. Such localized understanding and interpretations were entirely at odds with the urban and intellectually characterized societies. Trained in Pakistani religious schools, the Taliban and the preachers in most mosques went through a system different from the traditional Afghan system. They were divorced from Afghanistan's history, culture, and societal interplay. Again, they had learned a “highly charged and politicized version of Islam that spoke of the expectation of a holy war around the world” (Nojumi 2008, 107).

Due to their mentality, they attempted to provide security in the ways they thought would be suitable for Afghans through brutal policies, resulting in insecurity. Although they were good militarily, they lacked bureaucratic and managerial skills. Thus, they relied on punitive measures and moral theology over legal decisions. On December 17, 1996, the Taliban banned 16 public activities. Some include the following:

The first group involved temptations likely to cause public disturbance, such as exposing women's faces, were forbidden. Taxi drivers were banned from accepting fares from women who did not completely cover their faces with a burka (punishment was imprisonment). Women were forbidden to walk in the street without a male company; (2) Music in all public places, including shops, hotels, and cars, was forbidden (punishment was imprisonment); (3) Shaving a beard was forbidden. Men required six weeks to wear a beard (punishment was imprisonment until the beard grew out); (5) It was forbidden to train pigeons and play with birds as pets; (7) Kite flying was prohibited; 8. People's photos could not be displayed in public places as it constituted idolatry; (10) Keeping hair or trimming in American or British fashion was forbidden; (11) Taking interest on loans was prohibited. The offence was long imprisonment; (13) Music and dancing were prohibited at wedding ceremonies; (15) Men were banned from tailoring women's clothing, including taking their measurements (punishment was imprisonment) (Cole 2008, 135–136).

A second group concerned their demands on Afghans to obey their rules and it was obligatory to execute those who disobeyed, demanding women to have the most circumscribed role in society. They banned women's education, public participation and appearances, and restricted women and children from essential services like health care (Nojumi 2008, 108). In some cases, women “were beaten because they were wearing white socks. That is the color of the Taliban flag, and women do not have the right to wear white” (Cole 2008, 130). They also banned televisions, videocassette recorders, and satellite dishes. Therefore, those who dared to use them had to paint their windows black to prevent those Taliban religious police patrolling the streets from seeing the glow of the television screens (Nojumi 2008, 134). They whipped people accused of fornication. They amputated the hands of those charged with stealing (Cole 2008, 129). Notably, the punishments for offenses were publicly administered, and everybody, including children, was required to attend. The aim was to serve as a deterrent to others. A primary account revealed that, “they want their children to realize what will happen to them if they ever steal anything. They think scaring them is a good way to educate them” (Cole 2008, 130).

Some public executions required further publication. Thus, the “corpse was driven around the city, swinging from a crane” mounted on a Toyota truck (Cole 2008, 130). Sometimes, accused burglars were “sentenced to death by being partially buried in the ground and then having a wall pushed over on them by a bulldozer” (Cole 2008, 139). However, the public shows were acts to assert power more through spectacular violence than piety. Juan Cole notes that “Sharia does not require, and perhaps even discourages, punishment as spectacle. [Thus] the Taliban engaged in ‘staged publicity’ that ritually affirmed their power and legitimacy. For this reason, watching the spectacles of punishment was not voluntary” (Cole 2008, 129). The Taliban established the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice to implement decrees of social conduct. They censored the few newspapers and appeared intermittently to give, explain, or remind social and behavioral codes. Since most Afghans were illiterate, the radio was the practical means Afghans received social conduct instructions. In villages, a network of Taliban clerics performed this task (Cole 2008, 124).

In general, public beatings of men and women, public executions, stonings, as well as the amputation of hands and limbs became routine practices. Nojumi (2008, 112) notes that in the “entire reign of the Taliban, their government failed to provide public services or undertake any significant reconstruction project in Kabul or in their spiritual capital, Kandahar.” The Taliban's Islamic doctrines were inconsistent with others and lacked the approval of prominent religious leaders worldwide and internationally respected Islamic establishments. Cole (2008, 118) writes that “even the ayatollahs in Tehran—long been called medieval itself—issued a statement condemning the Taliban for defaming Islam by confusing it with medieval obscurantism.” The problem is that the Taliban could not distinguish between running a militaristic movement and state governance—thus, losing touch with the Afghan masses.

Second Taliban Governance (2021)

The new Taliban regime promised a significantly different rule from the previous regime, highlighting that, unlike the pre-2001 regime, women could attend school, including universities. Thus, university students returned to school after the Taliban took over, although women were separated from men with curtains or boards (Reuters 2021). Nevertheless, I must note that concerning women, little was changed because, although they were to go to school, no opportunities existed, by decree, for utilizing the education for employment or careers. Women were immediately excluded from work. For example, in Kandahar, Taliban fighters entered a bank and ordered working women to leave for men to take over their places. In Kunduz, the new Taliban rulers in the city asked women working in government to leave their work (Nagourney 2021). Despite promising to undertake reforms, evidence shows that the Taliban, after all, are not reformers as they had promised. Instead, they are hard-liners turning back the clock to the 1990s.

In less than a year, the Taliban have introduced a series of draconian policies in Afghanistan, resonating with the 1990s. The regime unexpectedly broke its promise to allow girls above the sixth grade back to school, in a move that even caught the Afghan Education Ministry off guard. When girls in the higher grades returned to school at the start of the school year, they were asked to go home (Associated Press 2022; Gannon 2022a; Kugelman 2022). In addition, the Taliban have banned women from taking flights or travelling more than 48 miles without an accompanying male chaperone. Guardianship rules are extended on a much wider scale: male relatives must accompany women in daily rudimentary activities, including entering government buildings, seeing a doctor, or boarding a taxi (Calder 2022; Gannon 2022b; Kugelman 2022).

They have segregated parks by sex where both sexes cannot go to the park on the same day. While men have four days, women have three days. This means that couples and families cannot have fun in the park together (Gannon 2022b; Kugelman 2022). Broadcasts of local-language programming of the BBC, Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle and foreign drama series are off the Afghan airwaves (Calder 2022; Gannon 2022b; Kugelman 2022). Like the pre-2001, the Taliban, in late March 2022, instructed all government workers to wear a beard and adhere to a dress code, consisting of a long loose top, trousers, and a turban, or risk punishment (Reuters 2022).

In late 2021, the Taliban reinstated the Ministry for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. This ministry strictly enforced the Taliban's rules of virtue and ideal lifestyle during the first regime. The reinstated ministry vows to take action on the “major sins of Islam” and “punish as per the Islamic rules. Whatever Islam guides us, we will punish accordingly” (McKay 2021). It clarifies that, apart from execution, “if there is a theft, the hand will be cut off” and offenders of illegal intercourse will be stoned (McKay 2021). It hints at public flogging, amputations, stoning, and public executions. If the Taliban is merely ruling and administering justice with Islamic principles, nobody would have had a concern. Nevertheless, its version of Islam is highly charged and at odds with everyone's version. Although it is very early to make an objective assessment of the current Taliban regime, a comparison of the current regime with the pre-2001 regime reveals little difference. There is enough evidence to show that women would continue to have the most circumscribed role in society, and fear, repression, and brutality would be the trademark of the present regime. Thus, it is not incorrect to assert that such regime rule is likely to elucidate significant ontological insecurity in the urban population.

The recent turnaround may reflect an internal power play within the Taliban between the group's most ideologically hardline factions, who were in the Taliban regime in the 1990s—including Mohammad Hasan Akhund (Prime Minister) and Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada (Supreme Leader)—to assert power over the more moderate faction such as Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (Deputy Prime Minister) who operated from Qatar (Kugelman 2022). Some commentators argue that the hardliners may have the upper hand because they control the highest-ranking positions in the Taliban administration (Kugelman 2022; Siddique 2022). Siddique (2022) believes that there is also growing competition between the Haqqani faction in the east and a Kandahar-based faction in the south. Thus, due to this internal conflict, the hardliners may want to appease Taliban ultraconservatives and the predominantly rural population for support. For example, making a U-turn on girls’ education is a kind of concession to the rural population who are the backbone of the Taliban regime and generally oppose girls’ education (Associated Press 2022; Siddique 2022).

Two important developments have taken place in the international system that should, to some extent, affect the regime and its administration—the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Scholars have examined how the leverage that regimes wield changes in the international system, particularly during global emergencies, to manipulate international norms and to repress civilians in order to consolidate power (Davenport 2007; Grasse et al. 2021). Davenport (2007) explains that governments—for example, the United States—use internal and external threats as a license to legitimize state repression. Grasse et al. (2021) investigate the relationship between governments’ repression and the COVID-19 pandemic to argue that the pandemic created an enabling environment for governments to suppress their citizens and especially their political opponents. This is because COVID-19 prevention and control measures, including lockdowns, provided governments with opportunities to directly and mostly forcefully intervene in citizens’ lives. Thus, the pandemic provided some form of a window for certain governments to legitimize repression through public health interventions (Grasse et al. 2021).

From this background, one would not be incorrect to assume that the Taliban would take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to unleash the most brutal repression on the Afghans. However, it is difficult to directly assess the Taliban from this position. The international community even stoked fears that the Taliban would oppose COVID-19 vaccination as they had done for other vaccinations and immunizations in the past. The Taliban once feared that vaccination officials ostensibly used the campaign to sterilize Muslims, collect intelligence, and target insurgents. Thus, they had resorted to extreme measures against the officials (Devraj 2021; Kapur 2021). Surprisingly, however, the 2021 regime has taken the COVID-19 threat seriously and accepted the vaccination. Before taking over Kabul, the Taliban emphasized public health services to reduce COVID-19 spread and fatalities in areas under their control, including permitting health workers in their areas, embarking on public awareness workshops, and setting up quarantine centers (Kapur 2021). Some commentators believe that the Taliban's unexpected COVID-19 response is because certain top-ranked hardliners, including Akhundzada and Haqqani, contracted the virus while others argue that it is part of the Taliban's grand strategy and propaganda to boost pubic confidence, win legitimacy, and be seen as a responsible government (Jackson 2020; Kapur 2021).

Nevertheless, the concern is that the Taliban's fundamentalist view of Islam, which severely restricts especially women and children's basic rights, causes conflict with Western governments. Thus, although the Taliban has not used COVID-19 as a pretext to repress, its presence has reduced access to basic rights such as medical care as Afghanistan depends heavily on Western donor and humanitarian support and imports for medical equipment and supplies (Martellucci et al. 2021). While COVID-19 has not necessarily been used as a smokescreen to repress, the Taliban has taken advantage of the Russian-Ukraine crisis to recently increase brutality (Donovan 2022). This situation is at least partly due to the fact that the world's eye has shifted from Afghanistan to Ukraine. Realizing that the world is not watching, the Taliban, since March 2022 has seen an opportunity to execute hardline laws that increase assault on Afghans, particularly women. The information shortage creates a condition where beatings and crackdowns go unreported (Donovan 2022; Kugelman 2022).

From Physical and Human (In)Security to Ontological (In)Security

Although security is a contested concept, a consensus is that it entails freedom from threats to core values—whether the focus is on the individual, national, or international (Baylis, Smith and Owens 2014, 230). Buzan explains that “in the case of security, the discussion is about the pursuit of freedom from threat. When this discussion is in the context of the international system, security is about the ability of states and societies to maintain their independent identity and their functional integrity” (quoted in Baylis, Smith and Owens 2014, 231). Thus, national security, primarily expressed in military terms or capabilities, is the extent to which a state is not in danger of sacrificing its core values or absence of fear or threat that its core values will be attacked.

This article's reference point of security is the individual or the people-level security—human security—underlying the dangers to human safety and survival caused by living conditions such as poverty, abuses, disease, environmental stress, and armed conflict. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP 1994, 23) explains that:

Human security can be said to have two main aspects. It means, first, safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression. And second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life-whether in homes, in jobs or in communities. Such threats can exist at all levels of national income and development.

In simple terms, human security is concerned with people's security and their relationship with their society and state. It is associated with individuals’ essential wants and needs within their immediate environment and claiming a stake to entitlements such as food security, employment, accommodation, and access to critical goods and services such as healthcare and education. Such entitlements give meaning to life and, to some extent, give life itself and protect it as lived in personal environments or communities. It involves protection from all kinds of abuses—structured and unstructured violence from the state and other sources of repression concerning gender or status, denying access to the essentials of life and opportunities for political, social, economic, cultural, and scientific development.

The UNDP (1994, 24–33) identifies various scope areas of human security, including economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security, and political security. These scope areas enable us to distinguish between two components of human security—freedom from want and freedom from fear. The threats that the former addresses are non-traditional concerns such as poverty, disease, hunger, and unemployment, while the latter addresses concerns of armed conflicts and violence against individuals (Baylis, Smith and Owens 2014, 452; UNDP 1994, 24). Conceptualizing security in this way means that the sources of insecurity would include poor governance practices that force a wedge between the rulers and the ruled, restrictions and denial of individual liberties in the name of religion, abuse of religion, imbalances in societal and ordinary living conditions, and the absence of effective societal control.

In Afghanistan, threats to freedom from want and freedom from fear are inextricably bound. That is, coupled with the perpetual exposure to the Taliban's threat, physical violence and harm against individuals underscore the people's vulnerability due to deprivation and development that increases their exposure to the Taliban's ideological abuses. From this perspective, Busumtwi-Sam (2008) examined human security by contextualizing and disaggregating individuals’ deprivations and levels of vulnerabilities, arguing that human security and human development are complementary, albeit distinct. That is because the nature, scope, causal arrow, and levels of development and human security affect each other correspondingly. Therefore, regarding Afghans, it is relatively easy to find that their deprivation-induced vulnerabilities, in addition to threats to freedom from fear, make their human insecurity much greater.

By seeking its national security and performing its core functions, the state acts as a structure or security institution for the people to achieve human security. Thus, governance is not merely linked to security; it is the central element in acquiring human security and a viable mechanism within which citizens’ human security can be protected. Therefore, when people seek and leaders embark on institutional reforms toward achieving good governance, the essence is to create a capable state with the military, institutional, bureaucratic, and fiscal wellness to ensure national security to fulfill human security obligations. ¹ Therefore, national security and human security are integrally linked, and the latter complements the former.

Nevertheless, in many countries in the Global South, such as Afghanistan, human security can and does get threatened by state actions and non-state actors to the extent that it affects the people's existential conditions. Thus, although the state remains the foremost purveyor of security, it often fails to fulfill its security responsibilities and, in many cases, has even become a source of threat to its citizens (Mack 2004, 366–7). Threats to human security are often common in weak states. However, in Afghanistan, the magnitude of Afghans’ direct fear of physical safety in the belief that the Taliban would harm them and deny them their human security was significant enough to metamorphose into metaphysical insecurity, affecting their existential conditions.

Saying this does not imply that all Afghans felt this threat in the same way because the Afghan society is, of course, not monolithic. For example, the people in the urban areas such as Kabul—who have adopted urbanized and, to some extent, Western lifestyles—felt the most threatened because it is this Western lifestyle that the Taliban considers inimical. In the urban areas, the thought that the Taliban is coming back with a governance system that would pose a significant danger to human security such as unemployment or loss of once-held socioeconomic and political status, denial of life essentials such as education, health care, sports, and armed conflict and violence against individuals, overwhelms urbanized Afghans’ human nature, and innately kills them. These perceived dangers to freedom from want and freedom from fear create a feeling of having a life without being alive because “people are restricted in what they can do with… freedom if they are poor, ill, illiterate, discriminated against, threatened by violent conflict or denied a political voice” (UNDP 2005, 18).

Afghans in Ontological Insecurity

Existential Anxiety

Since the state is assumed to care about its security and survival in the international relations literature, “we can conceive of it as an ontological security-seeking agent itself” (Zarakol 2017, 49). When the state attains its ontological security, it can then provide for the people's ontological security. Thus, the state is “understood to be an ontological security-providing institution for its citizens,” acting as a shared ontological structure for the people to achieve their ontological security (Zarakol 2017, 49). Therefore, the state appears to be a kind of mediator of life and death. On this basis, “the legitimacy of the state rests on its capacity to provide order—not a particular content of order but the function of ordering, of making life intelligible” (Huysmans 1998, 242). It is difficult to argue that Afghans, especially those in urban areas, trust or are confident that Afghanistan under the Taliban can seek its ontological security to provide the people with theirs; hence, the mass pandemonium to escape.

However, we need to remember that rural Afghans would relatively coexist with the Taliban due to their traditional understanding and interpretation of Islam. It is this congruity that has helped the Taliban be rooted in the remote rural areas and enjoy rural support. Some rural people even abhor urbanite culture and consider it un-Islamic (Nojumi 2008, 106). However, the focus is on the urban population whose understanding and interpretation of Islam are at odds with the distinctive interpretation of the Taliban and the rural populations. The urban Afghan women prefer to go to school and study to the highest level and work in various institutions, aiming to be independent women. They see nothing wrong with a woman engaging in sport; for example, playing football for the country. In general, it is the urban populations in places like Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat who have a modernized view of Islam and a taste of Western culture. They have a high socioeconomic status and belong to the intellectual group—those that the Taliban always suspect. The people in these places and other cities are most likely to feel the greatest existential anxieties.

For many urbanite Afghans, the Taliban presence is an Afghanistan devoid of existential certainty, a situation in which no one knows what tomorrow will bring and whether or not they will live to see it. It does not mean that they were guaranteed certainty and security of life under the American propped Ashraf Ghani government. According to a Pentagon survey, 80 percent of Afghans perceived the Ashraf Ghani government as corrupt and illegitimate, providing significant economic insecurity (Department of Defense 2020, 32–80). However, the Taliban's takeover intensifies this level of insecurity. It makes it more complicated because the life they once lived and the identity they had built in the last 20 years is likely to be contested. In layman terms, Afghans are experiencing existential anxieties. The fear of losing work, status, daily activities like schooling, sport, once-held privileges, and the certainty that who they are now and where they are going or want to go is most likely to be brutally challenged by the Taliban makes Afghans ontologically insecure.

Existential anxiety is Afghans’ significant insecurity engendered by the Taliban takeover. Laing (1990, 43) identifies three forms of anxiety that an ontologically insecure individual encounters—engulfment, implosion, and petrification. An individual with a low-security threshold is engulfed with fear of absorption into others that “practically any relationship with another person, [even with himself], however tenuous or however apparently ‘harmless,’ threatens to overwhelm him” (Laing 1990, 44). This occurs because of the uncertain stability of his autonomy and fear of losing his identity. Thus, like urban Afghans, the individual chooses isolation, fleeing, to preserve his identity and save himself from drowning. Second, implosion makes an individual feel complete emptiness. The person “longs for the emptiness to be filled [but] he dreads the possibility of this happening because he has come to feel that all he can be is the awful nothingness of just this very vacuum” (Laing 1990, 45–46). Therefore, any contact with others becomes a threat to his identity. Third, an ontologically insecure person, like certain Afghans, would be petrified of being turned from a live person into a dead thing. They feel that someone—the Taliban—would attempt to take their autonomy and identity by ignoring their feelings and killing the life in them (Laing 1990, 46).

However, “anxiety is not an absolute state but a matter of degree. Low levels of anxiety are associated with relative stability, whereas higher levels can unsettle systems of meaning and identities” (Gustafsson 2016, 619). Anxiety in itself is a more general condition. When other states’ behavior makes a state feel anxious, the anxious state may attempt to reduce its anxiety by securitizing (Gustafsson 2016, 619). That is, making the others an enemy by transforming the political issues into a danger to the state's well-being, fearing it, and in this case, undertaking appropriate internal and external balancing measures. For the urban citizens of Afghanistan, the incongruity between Taliban identity and theirs, respectively shaped by the Taliban's understanding and interpretation of Islam, and the traditional Afghan values, is widened by the 20 years of American reconstruction, creating a taste for Western culture and behavior. This can lead to a tremendous source of increased public anxiety, wondering whether or not it may function as a window of opportunity for the Taliban to unleash a brutal form of their 1996–2001 rule.

For example, the Afghan public is aware of the circumscribed role the Taliban accords to women. However, during the reconstruction period, women in the urban areas have become footballers, athletes, activists, bankers, educationists, etc. The uncertain fate of girls freely going to school, happily learning with peers in the classroom or achieving in their sport, and the anxiety that their education or sport would be considered a crime elucidate great ontological insecurity. It connotes a future that has been stolen, a dream that has been shuttered, and personal autonomy that has been seized. Therefore, Afghan women footballers’ behavior, including the feeling of helplessness, captured in their petition to the football governing body, FIFA, as well as calls on the international community for emergency evacuation, were responses to their deep-rooted existential anxiety. The evacuation was, therefore, “an important victory” (BBC 2021). Like the state, for urban Afghan citizens, securitizing existential anxiety would mean making the state an enemy and fearing it bringing citizens into a direct conflict with the state, that is, the Taliban. Afghans are sure of a worsened ontological insecurity in this situation since it is unsurmountable to challenge the Taliban except by changing identity.

The whole of the Afghan population cannot be evacuated from the clutches of the Taliban. Thus, since the state is the crucial ontological security-providing institution acting as a shared ontological structure for the people to acquire security, the Taliban, if other forces do not challenge them for Afghanistan, would be the ontological security provider for the larger population of Afghanistan. Kinnvall (2004, 742) argues that “as individuals feel vulnerable and experience existential anxiety, it is not uncommon for them to wish to reaffirm a threatened self-identity. Any collective identity that can provide such security is a potential pole of attraction.” Nationalism and religion are essential sources to reaffirm such security “because of their ability to convey a picture of security, stability, and simple answers” (Kinnvall 2004, 742). Although the previous government did not change the Afghan religion, its practice mode was quite relaxed in comparison to under the Taliban regime. Since an individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, and identity of him- or herself and the Taliban for granted, and at the same time cannot isolate, or flee, the best option to be ontologically secure would be absorption into the Taliban's notion of an ideal world. It entails changing identity to prevent losing the self. Gustafsson (2016, 619) corroborates this assertion, noting that “higher [anxiety] levels can unsettle systems of meaning and identities and thereby make possible identity change.” However, this identity change, especially in the cities, is the source of ontological insecurity.

Mistrust and Uncertainty

Ontological security is not cognitive, but instead, emotionally related—thus, embedded in the unconscious. Therefore, questions people may ask when seeking ontological security may include do I really exist? Do people see my existence? Do I matter? Is this me? Am I the same person now as I used to be? Will I continue to have what I have today when I am not in the same position tomorrow? Ontological insecurity triggers an expression of fear of the unknown due to existential uncertainty. Such questions are emotionally related, and one cannot directly answer them through rationality. ² Giddens (1990, 93) explains that such anxieties may be normal in individuals. However, “when they are profound and chronic, as irrational, these feelings are more the result of emotional super-sensitivity than irrationality.” Such feelings are results of mistrust and uncertainty about identity and existence (Giddens 1990, 93–5). Trust is an essential component of Giddens’ ontological security that he explains as a “person's fundamental sense of safety in the world and includes a basic trust of other people. Obtaining such trust becomes necessary in order for a person to maintain a sense of psychological well-being and avoid existential anxiety” (Giddens 1991, 38–9). Trust is like an emotional inoculation serving as a “protection against future threat and dangers which allows the individual to sustain hope and courage in the face of whatever debilitating circumstances she or he might later confront” (Giddens 1991, 39).

Thus, the urban Afghan's chronic mistrust of the Taliban is due to history and the profound uncertainty of its current nature and what it will do drive significant ontological insecurity. It is based more on this mistrust and uncertainty than the physical threat of the Taliban presence that made some Afghans cling onto the wing of a moving aircraft and fall to their deaths (Muzaffar 2021; Young 2021). It was a response to their ontological insecurity. People clung to the plane not because they did not know that they would fall and die. They believed that if they could hang on and arrive at the next destination, a reward may be achieved. But if they should fall and die, they have lost nothing because it is the same as living in Afghanistan feeling unreal and dead anyway. It suggests that people believe that if they should die, they should die a natural death, even by falling from a moving plane, instead of experiencing death or life without feeling alive. In effect, the Taliban's history drives mistrust and uncertainty, which causes ontological insecurity and makes urban Afghans, who mostly suffered in the first rule, uncertain about their life. An illustration is instructive. Tossing a child and catching them in the air is dangerous. However, children enjoy it and trust the parent or the caretaker doing the tossing to catch them. The child has built this trust because they have consistently enjoyed regular care, affection, and nourishment from the latter and learned to rely on the consistency and continuity of the adult care. However, a child who does not enjoy such adult affection or has been dropped once from such tossing will cry or resist in horror when one attempts to toss them.

Like the orientation between the child and their caretaker, it is not surprising that Afghans in Kabul seek to run away due to the self-identity the Taliban created for itself during its previous rule. There is no trust. We cannot discount the physical security threat of Taliban presence, including domestic brutalities and protracted human rights abuses. However, the security is so immense that it goes beyond this physical threat to affect their metaphysical life due to mistrust for the Taliban and uncertainty about the Taliban's identity, what it will make of its identity, and sense of being of the urban Afghan people. Due to a mistrust emanating from history, people in the cities are unconvinced that the Taliban would satisfy their ontological security. For example, in Kunduz—the first provincial capital the Taliban captured—Nagourney (2021) declares that people have expressed signs of ontological insecurity, noting that “I am afraid because I do not know what will happen and what they will do. We have to smile at them because we are scared, but deeply we are unhappy.” This feeling of anxiety and absence of certainty of life as a continuous person is what this paper has reiterated.

Routinized Thick Misrecognition

One essential characteristic of states is recognition by other states (Malanczuk 1997, 80). Such recognition gives the people belonging to the state a new and different outlook. Thus, although the recognition is given to the state, it filters down to the people and gives them rights and opportunities they previously did not have. This gives two distinctive recognitions—thin and thick recognition (Gustafsson 2016, 617). Thin recognition is what the existing international states accord a new state, as a sovereign entity to be part of the collective membership and enjoy their status. Coggins (2015, 98) explains that “the correlation between battlefield and political outcomes is imperfect because the international states system is a high-status social group whose new members are importantly determined by existing states.” The recognition allows the new state to share a common identity or being with the existing states. Thin recognition activates thick recognition, enabling the state to demonstrate and assert its uniqueness and specific characteristics to elucidate the others’ appreciation of it. It shows the people's distinct identity, different from other individual members of the international community.

Thick recognition fulfills the ontological security of the state and the people because it goes beyond recognizing the physical existence of the state to affirm how the state and its people see themselves and how they want to be seen by others (Purayil and Purayil 2020, 3). In this situation, individuals can differentiate themselves “from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly that [their] identity and autonomy are never in question” (Laing 1990, 41). It makes the people identify themselves with the state and show their emotional feelings toward it. They get hurt when the state is hurt and get offended when the state is criticized. Thus, the state and the people's identities are fused (Ringmar 2012, 7–8). Although there may be some economic sanction or isolation, especially when its security objectives are inconsistent with the West (Musumeci 2021), a Taliban government does not necessarily make Afghanistan lose its thin recognition. However, the takeover and the unfolding chaos and fear associated with it made worldwide news. Thus, in addition to years of terrorist stereotypes, as Afghans—especially the urbanites with previous high socioeconomic status who are most likely to feel Taliban pressure—spread around the globe as refugees or resettle in other countries, they are likely to be misunderstood by the global public and face various forms of thick misrecognition through routinized utterances and behaviors that deviate from how Afghans have constructed their identity.

This would lead to a “routinized [a regularly followed sequence of actions] recognition [which is] an ongoing way of recognizing the other that is not departed from” (Gustafsson 2016, 618). However, such routinized recognition would be a misrecognition. It would not be a correct representation of the Afghan population. Such global misunderstanding and misrecognition of the Afghan people is a source of tremendous insecurity, which could cause anger in Afghans worldwide and conflict in various places they may inhabit. Nandy (1997, 158) notes that, as people's “cherished world becomes more difficult to sustain, as they and their children begin to show symptoms of integration into their adopted land, they become more protective about what they think are their faiths and cultures.” A short narrative is instructive here. A viral social media video intended largely as a joke tells a story of a 2030 Olympics in Afghanistan. The 100 meters final featured an athlete, Ali, believed to represent Afghanistan and appearing as a Taliban. Due to the power of his gun, he doubled as the starter, and his starter pistol could fire real ammunition. He raced ahead of his competitors before firing to start the race. He shot any athlete who attempted to catch up or overtake him. Fearing their lives, the judges met him halfway to the finish line, and a track judge decorated him with the Afghan flag. In that fictional Olympics, Ali won 14 gold medals with the same method.

Why this narrative? This video indicates what the global public might think about the thick recognition of the Afghan population and the long-term image it is likely to build. Although the video's purpose was to provide comic relief, it is derogatory, giving a false representation of the Afghan population. It associates Afghans and Afghanistan with Talibanism, synonymous with guns, violence, cheating, and brutality. Rural Afghans who rarely travel outside their homes and are less likely to do so may not feel this impact and would probably not be aware. However, urban Afghans’ concern about this misunderstanding and misrecognition draws great anxieties that cause insecurity. Ringmar (2012, 7) corroborates this assertion, declaring that “to be denied [thick] recognition is a traumatic experience. We feel slighted, insulted, and brought low; our pride is injured, we have lost our status and face.” This type of misrecognition affects not the physical security but rather Afghans’ very nature of being. Therefore, Afghan refugees’ protests outside the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New Delhi, expressing depression, uncertain future, work permits, etc. (Aljazeera 2021), were responses to their deep-rooted ontological insecurity emanating from anxieties of misconception and misrecognition.

Conclusion

The present work has attempted to demonstrate that the security concern relating to the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan goes beyond the physical to include ontological insecurity that affects urban Afghans’ nature of being, feeling alive, or sense of self. Taking inspiration from the first Taliban rule, 1996–2001, the second takeover created mistrust, anxiety, and the absence of certainty of life as a continuous person. The predominant rural Afghan people are not likely to feel much heat like their brethren in the cities. For example, the traditional nature of the rural population engendered protestation against PDPA's reforms in the late 1990s seeking to modernize the country, separate the mosque from the state, expand education, and end feudal practices. The urban population do not see these practices as un-Islamic. Thus, their identities are most likely to clash with the Taliban. Questions about their identities engender a great sense of anxiety about their ordinary living conditions.

R. D. Laing makes us aware that, under usual circumstances, the birth of a new organism, including man, ushers ongoing processes whereby the entity feels real and alive with a sense of continuity in the world (Laing 1990, 41). However, concerning the larger urban Afghan population, prior experiences under the Taliban rule—such as brutality, banditry, and crimes against local values and women, including public executions, bans on essential services like social media, etc.—made them lose this feeling of realness and aliveness. Like the urban Afghan population, individuals whose experiences of themselves in their immediate environment are of this gloomy order cannot live in a secure world. Thus, their sense of self will be as good as dead.

Therefore, the thought that the Taliban have returned as the rulers of Afghanistan creates tremendous anxiety and uncertainty in urban Afghans’ existential positions. Specifically, although people have life, they have no feeling of being alive—they are dead inside. Thus, the actions, including clinging onto a moving plane, were a response to such acute insecurity. This is the sort of insecurity this article has examined. Although it is early to make an objective judgment about the second rule of the Taliban, enough reports of brutality and intimidation have surfaced to send chills through Afghans that make them feel innately insecure and indicate that the second rule might not be significantly different from the first. Therefore, it is significant that we take the unfolding metaphysical insecurity of Afghans into critical perspective.