Prophetic document on the Taliban

Whether or not those monumental events really changed the world in a significant way and there is a spectrum of opinions on this these books serve to provide a deeper understanding beyond what we get from television and newspapers.

I know of many Muslims from all walks of life who were angered by the recent events in Afghanistan, seeing the Taliban as victims of an arrogant, anti-Islam super power. That may well be partly true, but no less true is that many Afghans are happy to give a chance to the new broad-based government to rebuild their nation after years of poverty, hunger, fear and submission.

After that anger has dissipated, now is perhaps the best time to evaluate and reflect on the Taliban phenomenon. Quite understandably, a number of these hurriedly published books have that wiser-after-the-event quality, written by lesser journalists and scholars with one eye on the cash register. Others genuinely attempt to offer a better understanding of the rise of global terrorism, the politics of Afghanistan and the Taliban phenomenon in the context of late 20th century phenomenon of the rise of political Islam.

Browsing through a number of these books, I finally settled for Ahmed Rashid's Taliban The story of the Afghan warlords (Pan Books, 2001) mainly for the author's credentials and what it has to say. Moreover, unlike most of its peers on the shelf, this was originally published just over a year ago under the title Taliban: Islam, oil and the new great game in Central Asia. It is republished under its present title with a new foreword after the Sept 11 attacks.

Firsthand witness

The author is a Pakistani journalist who has an abiding interest in Afghanistan and has been reporting on the country since its slide into chaos and destruction that began with the communist coup against President Mohamad Daud in 1978, followed by the Soviet invasion a year later.

He witnessed firsthand many of the momentous events that shaped Afghanistan's modern history. His encyclopaedic knowledge of the country's politics and its major players is amply demonstrated by his meticulous documentation and appendices.

Coming from Pakistan, his intimate familiarity with the history, culture and politics of the region and the resurgence of religious fervour taking place in the Islamic world in general during that period is reflected in the depth and lucidity of his insightful analyses.

The book is a culmination of years of reporting and research that included his own interviews with Taliban leaders, their adversaries as well as the peripheral players officials of Pakistan's government agencies, political organisations and those of the UN and oil and gas executives among others. Numerous references were quoted from major newspapers and news magazines, specialised journals and monographs by scholars on Afghanistan.

Readers could pick out four important strands that the author weaved together.

The first concerns the phenomenon of the Taliban itself its rise to power, its political structure and its administrative policies.

The second describes the extent of Pakistan's interference in Afghanistan in the furtherance of its own strategic interests and how that led to the regional instability with unintended consequences for Pakistan itself.

The third deals with the Taliban's association with Osama bin Laden and the global jihad of al-Qaeda, and the latter's growing influence on the former.

The fourth gave a detailed account of the rivalry between an Argentinian and an American company to construct oil and gas pipelines across Afghanistan and its role in the formulation of US policy on the Taliban.

The Taliban phenomenon

After giving a brief contextual history of Afghanistan and the tribal and ethnic divisions that characterise its society, the author sets out to trace the origins and rise of the Taliban and gave a detailed account of its administration and its policies.

Furthermore, in the appendix section, a chronology of the Taliban enumerates the major and minor events that began in April 1992 with the fall of Kabul to the Mujahidin forces in September 2000 with the capture of Talokan and Takhar from Ahmad Shah Masud.

Suffice to say that the Taliban emerged in a climate of complete breakdown of law and order in the region around Kandahar where Pashtun tribal warlords terrorised the population. They made a rapid expansion in the Pashtun belt as people welcomed the return of stability in place of banditry and warlordism, and as Pakistan shifted its support from Hizb Islami's Gulbuddin Hikmetyar for his failure to take Kabul, to the Taliban.

The Taliban's slide into notoriety began as they swept north beyond their Pashtun homeland to take Kabul and areas dominated by Hazara Shia, Uzbeks and Tajiks, in a continuation of the civil war that began in 1992 after the fall of Najibullah's communist regime. Their first symbolic act was the brutal, extra-judicial killing of President Najibullah.

"The civil war has divided Islamic sects and ethnic groups in a way that before was unimaginable to ordinary Afghans. Masud's massacre of the Hazaras in Kabul in 1995, Hazara's massacre of the Taliban in Mazar e Sharif in 1997 and the Taliban massacres of Hazaras and Uzbeks in 1998 has no precedent in Afghan history and perhaps has irreparably damaged the fabric of the country's national and religions soul ... for the first time in Afghanistan's history the unifying factor of Islam has become a lethal weapon in the hands of extremists, a force for division, fragmentation and enormous blood-letting." (p 83)

Squandered opportunity

The Taliban administration in non-Pashtun areas that came under their control were regarded like an occupation force. Their harsh and bizarre policies are well known to the world and a sample of the decrees relating to women and other cultural issues after the fall of Kabul, 1996 is given in Appendix 1.

The Taliban squandered the opportunity of governing Afghanistan under some kind of tribal democracy, incorporating some degree of representation, with Islam as a legitimising factor. The author gives an insightful analysis as to why the Taliban administration came to represent state failure in the extreme.

The radical Islamists that fought the Soviet like Hikmetyar's Hizb-Islami and Burhanuddin Rabbani's Jamaat Islami were relatively modern and forward looking, as part of a movement inspired by Ikhwan Muslimin of Egypt and Jamaat Islami of Pakistan.

They developed or tried to develop theories for Islamic economy, banking system, foreign relations and a more equitable just social system. But they suffered the same weaknesses and limitations as the Afghan marxists. With an all-inclusive ideology they wanted to impose radical change on a traditional social structure in disregard of vastly different social, religious and ethnic identities.

Their inability to produce reality-based theories, their failure to create institutions and their reliance on the personality and charisma of their leaders led to factional strife and internecine warfare. The Taliban came to fill the vacuum resulting from this naked power struggle.

Anomaly

The Taliban interpretation of Islam, jihad and social transformation was an anomaly in Afghanistan, they were "... neither radical Islamicists inspired by the Ikhwan, nor mystical sufis, nor traditionalists. They fitted nowhere in the Islamic spectrum of ideas and movements that had emerged in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1994." (p 87)

As is well known, the leaders of the Taliban movement and their followers largely grew up and were educated in Deobandi madrassah and refugee camps in Pakistan. Their ideological base is an extreme perversion of the Deobandi's, a reform movement founded in British India after the Muslim defeat in 1957 that sought to revive Islamic values based on intellectual learning, the syariah and spiritual path.

While Islamic radicalism in the 20th century has a long history of scholarly writing and debate, the Taliban has no such historical perspective or tradition. There is no Taliban Islamic manifesto or scholarly analysis of Islamic or Afghan history. This has created an obscurantism which allows no room for debate even with fellow Muslims.

As listed in Appendix 2, very few of the Taliban leaders had formal non-madrassah education and most were in their 30s and 40s when they rose to power. That explains the bizarre character of their administration and their work ethics.

The author gives the example of the finance ministry which had no trained economist or central banker, and that government offices only opened for half a day, most of them devoid of the public. The Taliban were incapable of carrying out even the minimum of development.

They were untutored in the conventions of diplomacy, constantly running into confrontations with UN officials and humanitarian agencies. The lack of central authority, state organisations, a methodology for command and control, and mechanisms which can reflect some level of popular participation make it impossible for many Afghans to accept the Taliban or for the outside world to recognise a Taliban government. (p 212)

Pakistan's 'strategic depth'

Chapter 14, entitled "Master or Victim: Pakistan's Afghan war", enlightens the reader of the self-destructiveness of Pakistan's support for the Taliban, the manifestation of which can be seen in the current tension with India, sparked by the extremist attack in India's Parliament recently.

It is widely known that the Taliban could not get to where they were without the support of Saudi money and the Pakistan military, chiefly its intelligence agency, ISI, in terms of arms, training and advisers.

ISI support was a continuation of its 1980s legacy when billions worth of arms were channelled through it to the Mujahidin. When Hikmetyar's forces failed to take Kabul and were weakened by the Taliban, their fellow Pashtun rivals in the south, ISI switched its support to the latter as their new protg with the hope of installing a Pakistan-friendly government.

The Pakistan military's Afghan policy has the prime objective of achieving a "strategic depth" in its war with India over Kashmir as well as curbing Pashtun nationalism in the frontier region. This also allowed Pakistan to move Kashmiri militants based within her borders to Eastern Afghanistan, narrowly saving herself being declared a sponsor of terrorism.

During Benazir Bhutto's second term (1993 - 1996), one of her coalition partners was the Jamiat Ulema Islami (JUI) who had set up numerous Deobandi madrassah, the Taliban's birthplace, in the frontier province during Zia Ul Haq's Islamisation programme of the 1980s.

JUI's leader Maulana Fazlur Rahman was made chairperson of the National Assembly's Standing Committee for foreign affairs, a position he used to promote the Taliban in Washington, the European capitals, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

The JUI's access to the corridor of power led to the 'civilianisation' of Pakistan's Afghan policy with ministries and corporations taking on projects to help the Taliban with budgets that were supposedly for developing Pakistan's economy. At one stage even the salaries of Taliban leaders were paid by Pakistan's finance ministry. (p 183)

Biggest smuggling racket

The author contends that Pakistan became a victim of its strategic vision. The Taliban's deep connections to Pakistani state institutions, political parties, Islamic groups and the madrassah network led to what he called the 'Talibanisation' of Pakistan.

It gave sanctuary to the most violent sunni extremist groups in Pakistan, like the lashkar e Taiba and Jaish e Mohamad which today have become household names in the current escalation of tension between Pakistan and India.

What is less well known is the decimation of Pakistan's economy because of the transport mafia's smuggling racket between Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics via Afghanistan.

"What is euphemistically called the Afghan Transit Trade (ATT) has become the biggest smuggling racket in the world and has enmeshed the Taliban with Pakistani smugglers, transporters, drugs barons, bureaucrats, politicians and police and army officers. This trade became the main source of income for the Taliban even as it undermined the economies of neighbouring states." (p 189)

In the discussion on the interference of neighbouring state, the author does not spare his criticisms of Iran whom he said had contributed heavily to Afghanistan's fragmentation by playing the Shia card, the Persian language card and keeping the very ethnic groups it supports divided among themselves.

He also criticised Saudi Arabia which appears incapable of evolving a rational foreign policy which suits its national interests rather than merely appeasing its domestic Wahabbi lobby. It took Mullah Omar to personally insult the House of Saud before the Saudis pulled away from the Taliban in 1998.

The connection with Osama and al-Qaeda

Chapter 10, "Global Jihad : The Arab Afghans and Osama bin Laden" helps readers understand why the US had wanted so much to capture Osama and were prepared to go to war with the Taliban.

Within a few weeks of the East Africa bombing, the Clinton administration had demonised Osama to the point of blaming him for every atrocity against the USA in the Muslim world.

But there are strong grounds for it in February 1998 at the Khost camp, all groups associated with al-Qaeda issued a fatwa, "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies civilians and military is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do." (p 134)

This chapter also details Osama's background and rise to prominence which is familiar to many readers. Importantly, it examines the new radicalism that sprang up in form of extremist groups in the Middle East as a phenomenon born of the Afghan jihad if they had defeated one superpower, the Soviet Union, could they also not defeat the other superpower?

But the logic of this argument was based on the simple premise that the Afghan jihad alone had brought the Soviet state to its knees.

The author tells us that Pakistan was closely involved in introducing Osama to the Taliban leaders in Kandahar because it wanted to retain the Khost training camps for Kashmiri militants. The Taliban shifted Osama to Kandahar in 1997.

Osama endeared himself to Taliban leadership by promising civic projects (but could not be completed because his funds were frozen) and by sending Arab Afghans to participate in the 1997 and 1998 Taliban offensives in the north, helping out with the massacres of Shia Hazaras and fighting against Masud.

Increasingly Osama's worldview appeared to dominate the thinking of senior Taliban leaders. "After the East Africa bombings, the Taliban became increasingly vociferous against the Americans, the UN, the Saudis and Muslim regimes around the world. Their statements increasingly reflected the language of defiance Bin Laden had adopted and which was not an original Taliban trait." (p 140)

The author had predicted even before Sept 11 that they were to pay very dearly for their association with Osama and al-Qaeda.

Oil and gas politics

Three chapters of the book are dedicated to uncovering the intrigues of the rivalry to construct trans-Afghan pipelines which had entangled the US with the Taliban until 1998. The author called this "The New Great Game" in a throwback to Kipling's description of British and Russian rivalry for the control of Afghanistan a century ago.

This has been brought to the public's attention more famously by the publication in November last year of Bin Laden: la verit interdite by two French investigative journalists.

Essentially, it is a rivalry between Bridas, a relatively small Argentinian company and Texas oil and gas giant Unocal. The author published this story in Far Eastern Economic Review in 1997 after much persuasion of the editors. The chapters are well-documented and a detailed chronology of this great game is given in Appendix 4.

The US government backed Unocal in wooing the Taliban, even promising them diplomatic recognition, the elusive prize that the Taliban had always sought. The US' support of the Taliban via Pakistan prompted Iran and Russia to intensify their support for the Taliban's adversaries, escalating the tribal and sectarian conflict in Afghanistan.

But it became clear that the continuing civil war will not make the project viable and Unocal soon became the target of vociferous criticism from American feminists for its association with the Taliban. After August 1998, following the East Africa bombings, the Taliban, which the US had been courting earlier were demonised alongside Osama.

Important reminder to Muslims

For lay-followers of Afghanistan affairs, this uncannily prophetic book affirms what many already know but more importantly it helps fill many gaps in our knowledge of the country. The author has skillfully woven the disparate strands of the realities that was Afghanistan of the last decade into a coherent whole.

He has rightly put some of the blame for the suffering of the Afghans through wars of attrition on the flawed policies of the country's neighbours, his own Pakistan in particular. To him, the answer to Pakistan's predicament lies in improving illiteracy and poverty, cutting the military down to size and the restoration of genuinely democratic civilian government.

However, I found one little flaw among his many brilliant analyses. He seems to have an overly charitable view of US foreign policy by mentioning on a few occasions that had it not been misled by ISI and the Pakistani government, the US could have played the role of a neutral peacemaker instead of supporting the Taliban, thus drawing Iran and Russia deeper into the proxy war.

The US interference in foreign nations has rarely been based on altruistic motives, and today nobody speaks anymore about infinite justice nor of enduring freedom. Sept 11 may have changed the world at the level of individuals and communities, but one begins to see that the denouement of the "war on terrorism" is the strengthening of the unipolar world order, and as of the root causes of terrorism, they have not been seriously addressed.

Nothing is also mentioned of the opposition to the Taliban from among the Pashtun, those who make up part of the present interim government. But this is perhaps not a very fair criticism given the time frame in which the book was written.

For Muslims, the book serves as an important reminder that the domination of Islamic discourse by radical extremists whose methodology includes terrorism on the one hand and by anti-modern obscurantism on the other is serving neither Islam nor its believers. It is time that the voice of reason and moderation reclaim the centre stage.