8 - 14 November 2001
Issue No.559
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 8 - 14 November 2001 Issue No.559 |
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In search of the Taliban
L'Ombre des Taliban (Shadow of the Taliban), Ahmed Rashid, Paris: Editions Autrement, 2001. pp283
In L'Ombre des Taliban, Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who has spent more than two decades reporting from Afghanistan, has written what must at present be considered the definitive history of the Taliban, this now famous, but in 1994 when it first appeared, hitherto-unknown militant Islamist grouping that relaunched the Afghan civil war and by 1997 had taken over two-thirds of the country. His book, which is also available in English as Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia (London: 2000), describes the movement's history, ideology and organization and provides a sketch of the geopolitical stakes of the conflict in Afghanistan, particularly regarding the Central-Asian region's oil-wealth and its relations with neighbouring regional powers, such as the Russian Federation, Iran and China.
Already seriously destabilised in the 1980s by fighting between foreign-backed Islamist guerrilla factions, the mujahedin, and the Soviet- supported Communist government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the capital Kabul, Afghanistan's internal security further deteriorated following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the country in 1989. By 1992, different mujahedin warlords controlled the country's major towns, with fighting continuing for control of Kabul, and the emergence of the Taliban, a loose network of Afghan mullahs supported by young fighters from madrasas [Islamic schools] in neighbouring Pakistan, was at first welcomed by a population exhausted by 15 years of war.
Against a background of widespread famine and the mass movement of population with the disruption, or destruction, of local or tribal ties this entailed, together with a refugee crisis that in the 1980s had already meant that over a third of the Afghan population had fled to neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, this new group seemed preferable, especially to Afghanistan's majority Pashtun population, to the "tens of petty warlords, either ex-mujahedin or authentic bandits, who looted the population at their leisure" while fighting among themselves for control of Afghanistan's lucrative drug crop.
The Taliban's message of restoring peace, disarming the population, applying Islamic Shari'a and defending the integrity of Afghanistan from foreign interference meant that young men who ten years earlier would have joined one or other of the mujahedin groups fighting the Soviets now joined the Taliban with the intention of fighting the mujahedin. According to Rashid, Mullah Mohamed Omar, the group's leader, early on had something of the appeal of the mediaeval English folk-hero Robin Hood, who took from the rich and gave to the poor, in this case apparently taking the part of the population as a whole against the rapacious warlords left over from over a decade of continuous civil war.
"Those who gathered around [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar were the children of a jihad" against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, Rashid explains. They "had been cruelly disillusioned by the factional in-fighting and criminal activities of the mujahedin chiefs they had idealised. They considered themselves to be the purifiers of a guerrilla campaign that had lost its bearings, of a failing social system and of an Islamic way of life threatened by corruption and excess....These young taliban [students] knew nothing of the history of their movement or of their own country, but the madrasas they had attended in Pakistan had made them familiar with the ideal Islamic society created by the Prophet Mohamed 1400 years ago, which they wanted to imitate" and introduce in Afghanistan at the expense of post- Soviet chaos.
In this, the Taliban fighters were remarkably successful, taking Kandahar in October 1994 from the local mujahedin commanders and giving the local population a taste of the domestic policies that they would soon be applying in the rest of the country. These policies included denying education or work to women, destroying television sets, video-cassette players and satellite TV dishes, outlawing various sports and kinds of entertainment, including chess, football and singing, and insisting on a strict dress-code for men and for women.
They went on to take the city of Herat from mujahedin commander Ismael Khan, installing a garrison there to ensure that the policies they had introduced in Kandahar were submitted to here as well. By the end of 1997, Taliban units had entered Kabul, forcing the mujahedin commander charged with defending the city, Ahmed Shah Massoud, to flee, and lynching the Soviet-era Afghan president Najibullah, who had taken refuge in UN offices in the city, and hanging his body from a lamp-post.
photo: AFP
Describing the results of Taliban success, Rashid quotes the Roman historian Tacitus on the conquest of Britain by the Romans: "the Roman army created desolation there," Tacitus wrote, "calling this peace."
Cutting across Rashid's historical narrative of Taliban military success is an account of the ethnic and religious origins of the new movement, as well as of its organisation. Unsurprisingly, Rashid has not been able to discover very much concerning the latter, reporting that Mullah Omar, born probably in 1959 and originally a mujahedin fighter against Najibullah's Soviet- backed regime, issues orders written on small pieces of paper, which are then interpreted by his close advisor Mullah Wakil Ahmed. Originally, there seems to have been a consultative shura council that advised Mullah Omar, but this has not met since 1996.
In general, Rashid says, the Taliban have "refused to give the least information on what type of government they intend to install, or what their economic policies will be." Former Afghan government offices in Kabul are ruined or deserted, and Rashid quotes Mullah Wakil Ahmed to the effect that "Mullah Omar will be the highest authority, and the government will not be able to institute any policy without his agreement. Since elections are incompatible with the Shari'a, we reject them."
Rashid has more to say, however, on the movement's ethnic and religious origins. Drawn from the ranks of Afghanistan's majority Pashtun population and at first supported by Pakistan and certain Arab countries, the Taliban have attempted a policy of ethnic and religious "cleansing" in the country. The targets of this have been Afghanistan's Shi'ite population, as well as its Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek minorities, the latter two always concentrated in the country's northern provinces and now the backbone of the ex- mujahedin, and anti-Taliban, Northern Alliance.
While Pakistan has supported the Taliban, Iran and the other states of the region have supported its Shi'ite and Hazara rivals, leading to increased regional tensions. Such policies on the part of Afghanistan's neighbours have exacerbated ethnic conflict in the country, leading to well- documented atrocities on both sides, as Taliban fighters have massacred Hazara villagers and Uzbek and Tajik farmers, and Northern Alliance forces have in turn massacred the Taliban.
Concerning the Islamist ideology promoted by the Taliban, Rashid says that this has thus far been notable for its "lack of perspective or historical tradition. The Taliban have produced not a single Islamist manifesto, not a single specific analysis of the history of either Islam or Afghanistan." Afghanistan, he explains, has historically been a country where ethnic and religious minorities have played a major role, both in economy and society, and where majority religious practice has been closely linked both with traditional and community ties and with a strong Sufi religious tradition.
This changed to a certain extent in the 1980s, with the development of the Islamist guerrilla movements charged with fighting the Soviet Union. But the Taliban, Rashid comments, are "neither radical Islamists" on the mujahedin model, "nor are they Sufis, nor are they traditionalists. They do not belong to the ferment of ideas and Islamist movements that appeared in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1994. In fact, one could say that the degeneration and disappearance of legitimacy of these three tendencies, radical Islamism, Sufism and traditionalism, ... created the ideological vacuum that the Taliban rushed to fill. They represent no one but themselves, and recognise no other version of Islam than their own."
The last section of Rashid's book contains a discussion of what he calls the "new Great Game" in Central Asia, namely the geopolitical implications of oil. To the north of Afghanistan, the area around the Caspian Sea stretching into Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan contains what are believed to be the world's last major reserves of oil and natural gas. Though early estimates of the size of these reserves have been scaled down, they are still large enough to excite the interests of governments and oil companies. The problem has been how to get this oil and natural gas out onto world markets, with pipelines being planned to run across Turkey, down through Iran, and, in at least one case, from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Persian Gulf.
"Afghanistan's instability and the advance of the Taliban," Rashid writes, "have thus added a new dimension to this rivalry for oil, the country being, as it was in the 19th century, the pivot of a new Great Game. States and oil companies have had to choose whether to confront or to cultivate the Taliban, asking whether the latter were an advantage or an obstacle for the planned Central- Asian pipelines."
Finally, Rashid implies that the Taliban are the product of a near-complete social breakdown in Afghanistan, compounded by successive foreign interventions, global oil interests and the home- grown trauma of thousands of disinherited young men eager to join a militia movement that seemed to offer something other for their country than post-Soviet chaos. But, as the French expert on Central Asia Olivier Roy explains in his afterword to Rashid's book, the Taliban leadership, in identifying themselves with the global ambitions of Osama Bin Laden's terrorist network, have tragically ignored their own national interests, in so doing "destroying the state that they had originally proposed to renovate."
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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