They parted ways but not without a smile, and a friendly squeeze of the arm. The atmosphere was relaxed. "Give me a Kalashnikov," said the Talib. And without complaining, the policeman took the gun from his shoulder and handed it to the Talib.
The rest of the video showed a larger group of policemen and Taliban chatting and milling around together amid what seems to have been a larger handing over of weapons. This surreally sociable encounter between what are meant to be enemy parties took place in Baghlan province in northern Afghanistan recently. A Taliban fighter filmed it and sent it to the BBC. His message: even the police force has sided with the Taliban.
The Afghan interior ministry was quick to dismiss the video as Taliban propaganda, implying the film was a forgery. An article in Sorush-e Mellat was worded along similar lines, speculating that the Taliban had staged the meeting to make the public lose trust in the Afghan government. If this is true, the Taliban are fighting a pointless battle because the public has already lost trust in Kabul. The fraud-ridden presidential election did the Taliban's job for them in undermining the credibility of the central government.
Be that as it may, the video's reception on the part of the government, the public and the media was revealing. What is particularly interesting is that what might seem to a non-Afghan audience the most obvious interpretation of the event – as a run-of-the-mill act of police corruption – is the one that has been least accepted by Afghan commentators.
Instead, in line with the Afghan penchant for seeing political motivations and machinations everywhere, most commentators have seen the encounter as suggesting a political strategy rather than financial transaction. Thus, for some, the meeting represented an example of Pashtun ethnic solidarity overriding loyalty to the nation as a whole. This is because the conversation between the police and Taliban in the video was conducted in Pashto, in a relaxed and friendly manner.
Critics have often accused President Karzai of deliberately allowing emotional attachment to ethnic affiliation to compromise the country's security and institution-building. Karzai's refusal to pursue a consistent aggressive policy with regard to the Taliban has been interpreted in this light. Critics argue that the chain of ethnic loyalty begins at ministries in Kabul, infiltrating the police force and reaching the Taliban, as evidenced in the film.
The theory is neat, but there's a serious flaw. Pashtun civilians have died in their thousands in Nato airstrikes, and Kabul has done little to protect them. Karzai may offer peace to the Taliban but the people in the south and east are dying nonetheless. Ethnic solidarity is not protecting them.
Amid accusations and counter-accusations between the government and its critics, it remains unclear exactly what motivated the policemen in the video to simply hand over their weapons to the Taliban without putting up a fight or even showing anger. But there could be many reasons, some of which may have more to do with local rather than national politics.
There is the possibility that the pockets of Pashtun settlement in the north are feeling under threat after the presidential elections brought to the fore Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik leader in close competition with Karzai. The possibility of a non-Pashtun power takeover could be a terrifying prospect for the Pashtun populations there.
After all, there are allegations that forces loyal to the Afghan-Uzbek leader General Rashid Dostum killed 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war in 2001. The Obama administration has recently ordered a review of that incident, which allegedly took place soon after the collapse of the Taliban regime. But Dostum's followers have raised objections, correctly saying that singling out Dostum while offering negotiations to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, smacks of injustice and hypocrisy. The ordering of the review has done little for inter-ethnic trust in Afghanistan. It is, after all, Dostum's troops who are fighting the Taliban in the north.
Anecdotal evidence is also widespread that families are hedging their bets between Kabul and the Taliban by sending one cousin to fight for the Taliban and another to serve the police force. This kith-and-kin interpretation of the meeting seen in the video may have an element of truth to it. After all, keeping one's options open with both – the power in charge and the power that might be – is a known survival strategy dating back to the war in the 1980s. Those who deployed the strategy in the 1980s turned out to be wise. Solid ideological loyalty is a luxury that few can afford in Afghanistan, especially now the international community has offered negotiations with the Taliban.
Ultimately, it is the commentary that has surrounded the video that is more revealing than the footage itself. It was always clear that the Taliban were getting their weapons from somewhere, and in an economy so reliant on notionally corrupt transactions as that of Afghanistan, it would be surprising if some policemen were not selling their weapons to Taliban "enemies" with whom they may well have grown up. What the video and the discussions around it have revealed, then, is the paranoia of ethnic conspiracy that embroils Afghanistan. And no amount of cracking down on police corruption is likely to put a stop to that.
Nushin Arbabzadah, who brought up in Kabul during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.