Battle for legitimacy: Afghanistan v the Taliban

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A list of the world's self made female billionaires reveals a curious fact. Lots of them are Chinese. We look at the Mao era attitudes that paved the way for China's billionairesses and why it seems there will be fewer of them in the future. And Barack Obama is laying the groundwork for his presidential library. Every former president has a site in their honor. But what are they? Archives, tourist attractions, PR factories. We take a look at why they're frequently so controversial. But first, Afghan militants and American officials sat down for their latest round of negotiations in Qatar last week. Even as violence continued. Almost 18 years since America and other NATO members invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban is still a powerful and lethal force. Earlier this month, an attack by the insurgency group on an American run compound in Kabul in spread chaos and left at least five people dead. In response to the unrelenting violence, America and its allies are now negotiating with the Taliban, seeking a withdrawal in exchange for a commitment from the group not to harbor terrorists on the ground in Afghanistan. There are plenty of clues as to why the Taliban has been so hard to beat.

So I found myself at this truck stop outside Kandahar, which is city in Southern Afghanistan. We were sat on a rug. They served us tea. There was this kind of enormous storm coming in.

Daniel Knowles is an international correspondent at the Economist. He's been recently reporting in Afghanistan.

And these guys told me about, you know, what it's like to drive across Afghanistan. They drove all over the country carrying goods, and they, you know, they told me about how they get stopped all the time by men with guns. You know, when they get stopped by the Taliban and they get stopped by the Afghan army and by the police. And what they told me is that, you know, there's a difference between the two. You know, both groups are guys with guns who want to take money from you. But when you get stopped by the Taliban, there's a kind of fixed fees. They look at what you've got, and they charge you a fee and they give you a receipt, and you can charge that to your customers. Whereas the government is different. They stop you every time, and they just take whatever they can. They rob you. So, you know, what that told me is that the Taliban are kind of more organized in some ways than the Afghan government. And that's.

And why were you in Afghanistan? What were you trying to find out?

What I wanted to find out is why after 18 years and almost a trillion dollars and so much support, there isn't a government in Afghanistan that's sort of capable of holding territory, that with all the backing of a superpower, why is it that the Afghan state is not able to win the war with this kind of ragtag group, the Taliban?

And so you went to Kandahar to find out?

Yeah, so I went to Kandahar and I went to Kabul. And in Kabul, I met government officials and diplomats and people who trying to do this from the top. And then in Kandahara, and I went and I talked to ordinary people, lorry drivers and police officers and also some officials to see kind of there how they saw things at the ground level.

And what did you learn?

So one person I went to see was the governor, a guy called Hayatullah Hayek.

If there is anything off the record.

I will tell you. Yeah, he just recently arrived in Kandahar, but he's sort of in charge of trying to make this place work. And he's very insistent about how important Kandahar is, is to Afghanistan.

Kandahar is a key. If Kandahar is safe, Afghanistan is safe. If Kandahar is stabilized, so it's stabilizing.

He points out that this is really the heart of Afghanistan, a place where the first true independent Afghan state emerged in the 18th century. It's also where the Taliban themselves came from. You know, in the 1990s, Mullah Omar, who was the leader of the Taliban, lived in Kandahar. He only visited Kabul twice. When the Taliban were in control in. It was really one of those places that they were adamant in 2001 that they would hold onto when NATO troops invaded.

And so this ambitious new governor, what's his plan?

What he talks about is the need to recreate the relationship between the government and people, make people trust the government and give them reason to back the government as opposed to the Taliban.

I was assigned to come here to bring or establish that relation between the central government and Kandahar. I think the relation was a bit.

He concedes there are some real problems in Kandahar, that the government is not very accountable, that things need to change.

We have people here who have worked here for the last 17 or 18 years, and they are not capable of their jobs. As far as the income is concerned, I think the whole thing is not going into the government pockets.

He concedes that the Taliban, that they have their support there, that they are influential.

And so what do you mean when you say that they have influence in the province like Kandahar? What do they actually control?

You know, in terms of actual control in Kandahar, the Taliban, they don't have that much territory that they're in control of, but they're sort of a lot more influential in places that they're not in control of. So they're able to mount attacks and plant bombs and things, but they're also able to work with farmers. There's a lot of people growing opium in Kandahar, opium poppies, which they sell to Taliban middlemen who often do things like providers seek capital, who help people grow so that they can take a chunk of the profits later. They're quite organized in that sense, and that stretches even beyond the parts of the country that they control.

And I suppose with this level of organization and if you like, community involvement, that gives them a lot of legitimacy, sort of, notwithstanding the violent part.

Yeah, I mean, legitimacy is quite strong, but they are more legitimate than the government, and that's sort of all that they need to be. They're not popular. The Taliban people don't like them, but they will turn to them because. Because they're so dissatisfied with the actual government.

As these talks with America play out and discussion turns to a drawdown from American troops, how do you think Kandahar would respond?

What would it look like so that's the big open question, is just what happens to the Afghan government if the support it's getting from America disappears or is reduced a lot. They really rely on kind of American military support to be able to still control territory. And I think the big fear is that the Taliban will be able to come back, they'll be able to take a lot more territory, they'd be able to really operate more in the open and to have a great deal more influence.

So if you have a provincial governor kind of admitting that the central government doesn't really have a good grip on a place like Kandahar, what did the officials in Kabul tell you?

You know, not everybody says exactly the same thing, but this kind of picture emerges of the president and the president. Ashraf Ghani is a guy who seems, you know, pretty much everybody thinks he genuinely wants to transform Afghanistan for the better, that he's very committed to the idea of having a better government, but at the same time, he's kind of a control freak. And he thinks that he's the only guy with a plan. And he's really tried to centralize power and to hoard power and to make all the decisions himself. And that has actually weakened the legitimacy and accountability of the government out in places like Kandahar.

So what's to be done then? After 18 years of American support of the central government doesn't seem to have done very much, and the US now kind of heading for the door, what do you think should be done?

I think Ashraf Ghani, you know, what he has to do is recognize that he's not going to have the support that he has had in the past. And he needs to broaden out and get people who don't particularly like him right now on side and perhaps give up some of the power that he has kind of hoarded for himself in Kabul. And, you know, only that way will he be able to kind of come up with a legitimacy that will allow the government to survive.

Daniel, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you very much.

In China, the philosophy that success depends on hard work is celebrated.

Dongming Ju is from a working class family. She was one of seven children.

Stephanie Studer is our senior China Business correspondent. She's been to meet an entrepreneur whose story, though remarkable, is part of a trend in Chinese business.

It was only at the age of 30 that she decided to leave her hometown. She was recently widowed and had a young son. So she upsticks and went to Zhuhai in the booming south in 1990 and decided to join GRI, which was at the time a young state owned enterprise. It had only just started selling air conditioners and she went door to door selling them for the company. And there are tales of her managing to sell these AC units at full price in the unusually cold spring of 1994. And so she got noticed. She became president of Gris in 2001, then chairwoman in 2012. And Gris is now the largest maker of air conditioning units in the world. And Ms. Dong, very much the face of female enterprise in China. She's really a celebrity here and worth.

A lot of money.

Her wealth is estimated at 3 billion yuan, which is $440 million.

And tell us about meeting her. Where was that? Who was with you?

We met her at the GREE headquarters in Zhuhai. Here you see your factory. Is that your factory.

Service?

Very good. Wonderful. And it's a pretty spartan place, as you might expect for a company that is still nominally owned by the state. It's its largest shareholder. And her office itself is small and pretty sober. There's a portrait of Mao, a black and white sketch hanging above her desk. And from her window she can observe her vast factory where the most extraordinary AC units are now being turned out and put onto the market.

Extraordinary air conditioners, I mean, they're a pretty quotidian thing.

Well, we were given a tour of their showroom and there are some amazing ones. Standalone AC units that are glittery, have crystal bases, some have revolving roses that rise out of them as the AC unit works. And then there are some sleeker designs in golds and silvers.

Was it pretty chilly in there?

Zhuhai is a pretty humid place and they kept the temperatures down.

What did Ms. Dong say about her rise to fame?

Surprisingly little, actually. She knew that I was going there to ask her about women in business in China. I'm asking about women, but you're not answering about women. Is it not a subject that you like to talk about much? Yet she evaded almost every one of my questions. I think as she sees it, her sex is irrelevant to her rise. And from what she told us, she doesn't think about it. When I asked her about her rise in a nation run by men, politically, she said, men or women? Fewer up to the challenge.

And how unusual is Ms. Dong's story?

Not as unusual as you might think. The Hurun Rich List, which is a Shanghai based outfit that puts out a who's who of the rich worldwide, found this year that 51 of 89 self made female billionaires were Chinese and that's quite remarkable because that's 57%, well above their 20% share of the world's women.

Right. So who are China's other female self made ultra wealthy?

The list is rich and colorful, rich being the operative word because on it is a property mogul with a $10 billion fortune and that has won her the title of richest self made woman in the world. There's also Jo Chun Fei of Lens technology who rose from the factory floor, the touchscreen queen who makes them for Apple iPhones. There's a polyester queen, a soy sauce queen, a PA queen, and also two women and two men behind Haidilao, which is a very popular chain of hot pot restaurants.

So why have Chinese women done so disproportionately well?

Well, I think when you're sat here in China, the most natural comparison to make is with South Korea and Japan, and those are both vibrant democracies running on capitalist systems. So then what has China done differently? The temptation, I think is to put it all down to the egalitarianism of China's socialist era. Mao Zedong famously said in 1968 that women hold up half the sky, which perhaps wasn't a reflection of what was happening at the time, but it was certainly an encouragement and expectation that women should enter the labor force. And that's vastly different to the social societal expectations of South Korea and Japan, which to this day struggle with the idea of a working mother. But, but that's not a sufficient explanation. And I think that the likelier reason is China's manufacturing boom that not only propelled its economic ascent, but also that of its women. And in the 1980s, their labor force participation rate was at around 80%, which is enviably high. And then, since then, they've done very well at university too. At the moment, 56% of university graduates are women.

Did Ms. Dong have anything to say about the differences then between the way things were during the Mao era and now?

Yes, that was one way that she approached my question about whether things have changed for women in today's China compared to when she rose. And she said herself, times have changed. And she recalled that she lived in a time when resources were scarce. People knew to cherish what they had, she said. And she made the point that young people now have grown up in a honey pot was the term she used. So I think that there's a sense from her understandably that she had to brave real hardships that young people now in China simply don't have to face.

Is that to say that the opportunity for women in China now is greater.

Well, in lots of ways it is. And Ms. Dong would certainly agree with that. At the moment, for every 10 Chinese men starting a business, eight women are doing the same, which is a very high rate. By the same token, there has been a certain backlash against female entrepreneurs. So even though at a lower level, many more of them are pushing into business, they might be finding it hard to rise. For instance, a Chinese investor in Beijing who was speaking in a public presentation about his top tips for success said that rule number 10 was, I quote, we usually don't invest in female CEOs. And it was encouraging to see the backlash against this from women and men alike. But I was told from female entrepreneurs here that this is increasingly common.

Stephanie, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

In the latest episode of Money Talks, our business and finance podcast, a journey around China and America to understand the roots and the future of the trade war. As Gary Dvorak, a business consultant based in Beijing, puts it, America is just looking for a fair shake.

Everything that the Americans accuse the Chinese of happens, right? So the technology transfer, intellectual property theft, there's a lot of even more basic, just day to day challenges. And I think the Americans have every right to say, we don't want you stealing all of our developments, our technology, all that. We just want a level playing field. The Americans aren't looking for an advantage per se, they're looking for a level playing field.

Money Talk is out every Tuesday. Find it wherever you listen. In February last year, Barack Obama was in Chicago championing his library.

Thank you very much, Chicago.

But the ex president wasn't shilling for donations. He was at a community meeting trying to persuade locals to, to support the project.

Thank you.

It's set to be built on 20 acres of land in Jackson park on the city's south side.

I love all of you.

I'll be back in Chicago.

Michelle says.

Hey.

Barack Obama's presidential library will be built in Jackson Park. It plans to be 20 acres.

Dez Ibikwa is a social media fellow at the Economist.

And there's been some issues with it. So a local pressure group has come forward and called it an illegal land grab because the city has basically given them a 99 year lease for $10 and they claim that there's been some dodgy dealings with it and have taken the city to court.

So what were the plans for the library? What's it going to be? What will it look like and contain?

So the library is essentially going to be a Community center. Unlike other libraries that store archives, it's literally just going to be exhibitions and spaces for the local community. Instead of having the archive, they're going to digitize all his records and put it online. So it's very different to usual libraries.

Well, I mean, what are the usual libraries? I have to concede I haven't been to one.

Right. So the libraries essentially are museums. So they have exhibitions and they have objects. Some of them have replicas of oval offices. And usually on site, there are archives. So all the presidential records, correspondence, books, all those sorts of things are usually stored on site with archivists that look after and help people kind of trawl through.

But you say essentially they're also like museums.

Yeah, they sometimes can be ridiculous. So in Reagan's library, there's a massive plane. Who needs a replica of an Oval Office? We know what it looks like. It's kind of a manifestation of presidential ego. So LBJ reportedly asked the library to start providing donuts and extending opening times. Cause he was really obsessed with attendance figures. Nixon, in the first iteration of his library, which was privately owned, initially framed Watergate as a conspiracy on the part of Democrats to overturn the 1972 election. Reagan's library, which wasn't privately owned, actually for a number of years, failed to mention the Iran Contra scandal, which was a massive scandal in his presidency. So it's kind of funny how these places are supposed to be the kind of culmination of all their life's work and everything they've done in the White House, but it fails to be warts and all.

Is there a but on the other hand?

Yes. Well, some people do think that it does bring some things to the local economy. The Obama foundation describes the library as an economic engine for the city. So there are definitely some positives, but.

In a way, you can kind of see where this pressure group is coming from in terms of handing over a large tract of land to what you're describing as essentially a manifestation of presidential ego.

Yes, definitely. I spoke to an academic who called them basically presidential publicity centers. And it's difficult to marry the idea of taking up public space for what is essentially presidents kind of gloating in their greatness and how great their presidency was and kind of whitewashing the entire thing.

So who foots the bill then?

So the way that the presidential library system usually works is that a president will build their library with funds that they raised themselves, and then transfer it over to the National Archives and Records association, which is a government agency. Then they will pay for maintenance. So American taxpayers usually foot the bill.

So these things are clearly not kind of ever without some level of controversy, how do you think it will play out with Barack Obama's presidential library?

So it's stopped for now. It's stopped the building of the library. I think some people are worried that the fact that there's been so much issue in Chicago, he might go back and choose another place. It really remains to be seen.

Des, thanks very much for coming in.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com radiooffer 12 issues for $12 or $12. See you back here tomorrow.

Sam.