Darkness and Light. And Headlines.

Because I’m still deep down in those projects that are keeping me away from the National Post and I’m worried about being inattentive to the Real Story’s various interests, my pal Lauryn Oates is here today with a guest post for the Labour Day weekend.

I’ll touch on some relevant news below that has barely managed to make its way into the headlines, but the main attraction is Lauryn’s piece. It’s a bit of a departure for her, and for this newsletter. It’s mostly a kind of disquistion on Manichaeism, a religion you’ve probably never heard about. It was born in Persia and once rivalled Christianity, preceding Islam over a broad sweep of the earth, from the Mediterranean to China.

The Manichees’ ideas just happen to be relevant to the most daunting challenges of our time, as Lauryn will explain.

By way of introduction, Lauryn is executive director of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. CW4WA runs an online secondary school for Afghan girls and several other education projects devoted to restoring the right to learn to those denied it by the theocratic-fascist Islamic Emirate, otherwise known as the Taliban.

Lauryn was already a much-quoted authority on the Taliban when she was barely out her teens. She’s spent more time in Afghanistan than anyone I know, probably more time than any other Canadian.

From last Friday, in Foreign Policy magazine: Al Qaeda Expands Its Footprint in Afghanistan. “Al Qaeda has set up nine new terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 2024, a sign of the Taliban’s increasing tolerance of terror groups in their backyard in spite of pledges to crack down. . .” Fox News: Top general in fight against the Taliban says Afghanistan has once again become a ‘crucible of terrorism’.

Finally somebody’s noticing, I guess. This is from my dispatch to the National Post two months ago:

“While we weren’t looking, Afghanistan was becoming another Gaza, and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) was becoming another UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA). Just as UNRWA placed itself in service to Hamas, UNAMA is ministering to Hibatullah Akhundzada’s Islamic Emirate. Jihadists from all over the world are now arming and training in Afghanistan again. It’s just like the days before Sept. 11, 2001.

“Al-Qaida is back. According to a high-level UN report released in January, al-Qaida has already established eight new training camps in Afghanistan. The UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team found that al-Qaida is increasingly assisting a Taliban offshoot in its terror operations in Pakistan, including ‘suicide bomber training,’ and al-Qaida’s relationship with the Taliban high command ‘remains strong.’”

Here’s the Associated Press, from Saturday: “The United Nations will continue to engage all stakeholders in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, a U.N. spokesman said, even though Afghanistan’s rulers issued a ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public and severed ties with the U.N. mission after it criticized them.”

Here’s the Taliban’s Akhundzada from a couple of weeks ago in an almost entirely unnoticed celebratory statement observing the third anniversary of the world’s abandonment of Afghans to his foul mercies, taking the opportunity to reiterate his From the River to the Sea standpoint: “Pray that Allah free the Muslims of Palestine from the oppression of Israel. May Allah, with your grace and power, free them from the oppression and cruelty of the unbelievers that they are facing today, just as you freed the Afghans.

“May Allah make them free like the Afghans who are free. May Allah bring victory to them. May Allah see this Masjid Al-Aqsa and Bayt al-Maqdis (Palestine) conquered and liberated before our eyes. May Allah punish Israel like he punished Pharaoh, Nimrod, and Shaddad.”

From last Friday’s France 24: Afghan women erased by the Taliban as the international community looks on: “Invisible, and now silent. Three years after the Taliban’s return to power, Afghan women continue to see their few remaining rights dwindle away. A Taliban ministry promulgated a new set of laws on August 21 that it said ‘will be of great help in the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice’. The laws aim to control all aspects of the social and private life of Afghans, especially of Afghan women.”

In this Real Story piece from July 7, Dispatches from the war, at home and away, I reported on the activity of Afghanistan’s NRF. On Saturday, CNN published an interview Peter Bergen conducted with the NRF’s Ahmad Mahsoud, who presents an upbeat account of how the resistance movement is faring.

I agree with Bergen that the NRF’s claims about its successful actions are “nearly impossible” to verify, owing to the near absence of independent news media in the country. But I receive regular reports from the NRF, often with video evidence, and I can tell you that the UN is being weirdly parsimonious in its claim that there were only 29 NRF attacks on Taliban targets during the first six months of this year.

In the latest message I got from them, the NRF credibly claims to have attacked a Taliban militia that was harrassing people on Saturday in Kabul’s Security Zone 13. The NRF says it destroyed a military vehicle, killed two Talibs and wounded three others. The NRF also reported an encounter with a Taliban morality-police squad in the “Pashtun Bridge” area of Herat province on Friday night. Two Talibs were killed and a quantity of weapons were seized.

Earlier in the week the NRF attacked the Third Brigade of the Taliban’s Al-Farooq Corps in Baghdis Province, killing three corpsmen, wounding their commander and destroying a military vehicle. Hours later, the NRF ambushed and killed the Al-Farooq Corps’ deputy intelligence officer in Herat, along with three of his guards.

I get reports like this every other day.

Now, on to today’s main Real Story attraction.

It’s been nearly 20 years since I first met Lauryn Oates so I bear no resentment over her occasional reference to me as Uncle Terry. Apart from an abiding interest in the struggles of the Afghan people (here’s my book if you’re interested) and other matters, Lauryn and I share a fascination with the life and works of Eric Blair, the journalist and novelist best known as George Orwell.

Lauryn and I have spent time together in Afghanistan. Less known is that we once travelled together to the place where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s the still-standing deerstalker’s redoubt several miles down a muddy footpath on the remote and barely-populated Scottish island of Jura, in the Hebrides, at Barnhill Cove. Since we’re borrowing liberally from religious metaphors today, you could say it was a kind of pilgrimage.

Lauryn’s essay came untitled. If you know anything about Orwell you will understand the headline I’ve given it.

by Lauryn Oates

The ancient Persian religion of Manichaeism was premised on the idea that at the beginning of time there was a Kingdom of Light and a Kingdom of Darkness. The two kingdoms were completely segregated from each other, but the Kingdom of Darkness eventually noticed and began to envy its opposite. And so it went on the attack, setting in motion an epic cosmological conflict.

In the resulting chaos, light and dark were transposed, and those who remain in the Kingdom of Darkness who side with the light, with virtue and reason, engage in a perpetual struggle to recover the particles of light that have become imprisoned in the dark.

The great journalist, critic and novelist Rebecca West understood this state of affairs as showing that the world is a “field for moral effort,” and that this the world we have all come to inhabit.

Derived from the teachings of the Parthian prophet Mani in the 3rd century CE – Mani was a visionary beheld as the last in line after Adam, Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus – Manichaeism was a reaction to the moral confusion of the age. It was an age of empires and warfare and great suffering.

As Manichaeism died out, it left behind a world seeped in the same moral disarray that prevails today.

Those of us in the relatively comfortable “west” are mostly protected from the other world of systemic evil: grinding poverty and exploitation, unbridled abuse, the sex trafficking of children, the utter absence of freedom and dignity that’s built into caste systems and rigid social hierarchies and all the other evils of totalitarianism and authoritarianism: torture, superstition and ignorance.

Yet, at the same time, we in the “west” know more about the suffering of those who still experience these evils that at any previous time in our history. But we are otherwise occupied. I’ve often asked myself why this is so, why we’re so bound up in “identity politics” and oblivious to the suffering of Afghan women and girls, condemned to the sadism of the Taliban.

Perhaps it’s just that everyone has their own pet causes, and their own reasons for what stirs them. Yet if we use a simply pragmatic measure, like the extent of human suffering caused by a particular ill in the world, this doesn’t hold up. Shouldn’t our concern and empathy rise along with the level of pain and harm endured by our fellow human beings, regardless of where they are physically located in the world?

How is it, for instance, that the coordinated gang rapes of imprisoned Afghan women, the documented sexual torture of women’s rights defenders in Taliban prisons, even with video evidence reported in the “western” media, does not elicit at least the same global outrage that triggered the #MeToo movement?

Or that the images of children working in brick factories – whose mothers are banned from working – fail to convey to us an acute and present tragedy?

If we use an even cruder measure – the loss of human life – you will not find any identity-based discrimination that steals more lives than misogyny. In any given year it is routine for multiple times as many women to die in childbirth than the number of people who die in any form of warfare – civil or international. Add to this the women and girls who die every year from domestic violence, femicide, honour killings and other forms of abuse and violence.

Then count the girls who are never born due to sex-selective abortion, or those who die early due to “son preference” and its results, like differential feeding. The sex ratio in Pakistan in 2019, for example, was 108 males to every 100 females.

You will find no campus encampments protesting this genocide, which is the most pernicious, egregious and longstanding in the history of civilization, and unquestionably the most deadly in terms of the sheer volume of deaths.

There are occasional rays of light that prove exceptions to the rule, as when Nadia Murad, the Yazidi activist campaigning on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, and who is herself a survivor of ISIS sexual violence, became a Nobel Laureate in 2018.

But this was a rare nod to the evil that persists in the world, directed at an identity trait associated with half the world’s population – being female. But it doesn’t translate into any kind of sea change.

It’s true that most governments in the developed world have policies promoting gender equality, and sometimes even foreign policies that aim to improve gender equality abroad. Institutions across the world talk the talk, with gender-mainstreaming plans and diversity quotas.

None of this prevented the world’s most militarily and economically powerful countries from passively observing the Taliban walk into Kabul and immediately begin to reinstate gender apartheid.

Ultimately, this is about our culture, and the “narratives” we cling to. It’s the low bar we set for our moral courage, the tiresome hypocrisy of “social justice” that is so very selective about who qualifies for it. Social justice, in its present conception is an ideology, a political umbrella. But it is not a moral movement – not as long as those experiencing the worst of all harms suffered in the world are ignored and excluded from the movement’s agenda, in favour of the most narrow view of its own backyard.

At the end of the day, the governments we elect will mirror the societies they come from. We will vent our frustration, throw up our arms and carry on complaining about the policies and the people in power we don’t like. But this doesn’t change the fact that we put them there, and that they are often crafting policies they imagine will please us, or at least enough of us to vote favourably at the next opportunity. We get what we pay for, with the cultural currency we have opted to spend.

It’s not that nobody is paying attention. Think-tanks analyze the case for and against engagement with the Taliban, for instance. NGOs scramble to stand up programs that will keep some people from starving as a result of the Taliban’s deadly policies, or they put effort into programs that will restore education through alternative means for some Afghan girls.

There are people like me who publish op-eds decrying the Taliban’s behaviour, the consequences for women and girls, and the outrageous inaction and silence of our governments and our supra-government, the United Nations (See: Engaging With the Taliban Doesn’t Work, in The Diplomat). And there are those who share news articles on their Facebook pages (if they live outside Canada where they can still do this, that is), or make donations.

It’s the same with the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women, the practice of female genital mutilation, the ongoing moral blight that is child marriage and the sexual abuse it condones and promotes. These efforts matter; they sometimes allow some meaningful action, however painfully slow and incrementally. But the cultural ground never seems to shift.

Public outrage simmers here and there, but it never boils over. There are no first principles; the underlying ideological worldview infusing our current civilizational “discourse” is amoral. En masse, we’re simply not that upset over the enslavement of women and girls in Afghanistan. We’re just not all that concerned with the core of the Taliban’s ideology, which is the same as that of Hamas, of Boko Haram, and of the Houthi jihadists of Yemen.

It’s an ideology that sees women as servile and rape as acceptable – even encouraged. Young girls are fair game for the unrestrained sexually violent compulsions of men of any age. It’s an ideology that sees pluralism as the enemy. This includes wishing violent death upon non-Muslims, and Muslims too, if they don’t cooperate in the aims of jihad.

Somehow we either don’t understand this, or we don’t care, or we worry so much about offending a religious community, ever conscious that too many people can’t distinguish between criticism of Islamism and criticism of Muslims.

Whatever the reason, we certainly aren’t following the ideas that animate the Taliban and Hamas to their logical end or seeing the implications of our mostly passive reaction to an ideology that compares with all the worst “isms” the world has suffered, which we duly recognize as evil. Like Nazism.

We live in the chaos the Parthian visionary Mani attempted to articulate 17 centuries ago, the murky world where the kingdoms of Darkness and Light have become suffused into each other, rendering us incapable of discerning one from the other.

Notwithstanding the religious aspect of this Light/Darkness metaphor there is indeed a place in the secular world for the concept of evil. We need to speak frankly about horrible ideas and the harm they cause human beings. For the foreseeable future we will need a good measure of moral courage to do so, because it’s no longer a cultural norm. We need to decide on our moral position as a society, and decide practically which things are more important than others.

Is it really more important to avoid inadvertently offending people or to remain quiet for fear of being called discriminatory or an ‘imperialist’ rather than to declare unequivocally that nowhere on earth, under no religious or cultural justification in any moral universe, is it ever acceptable that children be subjected to rape under the guise of marriage? Or that women be gang-raped as a punishment?

We need to bring a set of first principles to our culture that will help us determine this order, and decide what properly counts as an outrage, and how to react proportionately. We might start by looking very closely at our conception of justice and injustice, how we talk about it, and most importantly, what we intend to do about it.

The Manichees saw that in the chaos of human existence, everyone has elements of both good and evil. They saw this, all those centuries ago. Our existence remains a battle to inch back towards the good, to sort out our moral confusion. To reach forward to the light.