Authors: David Isby
Apologists for the Taliban—in both their Afghan and Pakistani forms—claim that “the Taliban culture is simply Pushtun culture.” But the Taliban differed significantly from traditional Pushtun life in key issues such as religious practice, with the Taliban stressing Wahabi-influenced Deobandi-origin practices against the Sufic-influenced traditional Pushtun practices. The Taliban stressed the power of the mullahs rather than the Pushtun balance of tribal, secular, and religious authority. In what became their most controversial policies, both in Afghanistan and internationally, the Taliban made female absence from the public sphere a religious obligation, while Pushtun traditional society realizes that without women’s work in a society dependent on subsistence farming and herding, everyone starves. In the final analysis, Pushtuns value
independence and the Taliban proved willing to be used by outsiders such as the ISI or Al Qaeda to achieve their goals.
The original Afghan Taliban differed from the 1978–92 Afghan resistance that fought against the Soviets, even though all of the present Taliban leaders are former mujahideens. They were able to use the networks created by the ISI, international Islamic NGOs (whose numbers and significance greatly increased over the course of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan), Pakistani religious parties, the “Afghan Arabs,” and the Pushtun diaspora. The most important were the networks of Pushtun religious figures, educated at the same Deobandi-inspired madrassas in the FATA.
The origins of the madrassa network in the FATA go back to the early years of the twentieth century and were seen by many Deobandi clerics as a way of creating a generation of ulema out of reach of British law or “modernizing” elements of Islam from the subcontinent. The growth of the madrassa network—also reflecting the failure of Pakistan to put in place an effective state school system in the FATA—was accompanied by a rise of Deobandi-influenced mullahs. Their practices started to displace the Sufic-influenced Islam traditional among the FATA’s Pushtuns even before the 1978–2001 conflicts. This was made possible by funding from elsewhere in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf. This also led to increasing tension with the FATA’s minority population of Shia Pushtuns in the 1980s, forcing them to seek support from Iran in response.
It is often stated that the Taliban were welcomed by the population of Pushtun Afghanistan in 1994–96, who saw them as deliverers from local tyrants and criminals and absent rule from a Kabul government of limited capability and legitimacy, dominated by Panjsheris whose control of state power was seen as a departure from Afghan ways. As with much that is “common knowledge” about Afghanistan, this sentiment is not true.
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It is an accurate description of some parts of Kandahar province, where the crime situation was compounded by the tribal dynamics, the presence of potentially valuable prey (the truck traffic from Pakistan), and the unwillingness of the then-ISA government in Kabul to upset the dysfunctional local situation because it needed the support of those in charge. Even had
the ISA wished to remove the local leadership from power in 1992, they lacked an effective way to execute their will.
In much of Pushtun Afghanistan, however, the Taliban had to use armed force or, more often, a mixture of force and persuasion to gain power. This is why it was only in 1996 that they were able to seize the momentum that took them from Logar (where they absorbed most of HiH’s forces that had been waging the civil war, including those that had intensively rocketed Kabul) to Jalalabad to Kabul, despite having seized Kandahar two years before. The key change between 1994 and 1996 was that Pakistan’s ISI had made the decision to drop HiH as their chosen instrument of Afghanistan policy and replaced them with the Taliban.
The pre-2001 Afghan Taliban essentially offered a competing system that connected elements of the Pushtun Sunni religious leadership with shared links to Deobandi-based madrassas in Pakistan. These networks linked primarily the non-Sayid ulema from southern Afghanistan that had studied there, Durranis and Ghilzays alike, with former students (talibs) from these madrassas. These networks competed with the longer-established traditional religious authority of Sufic brotherhoods. These had been especially important in southern Afghanistan but, like all traditional Afghanistan institutions, had been weakened by the impacts of the war and exile in Pakistan.
The 1990s Afghan Taliban was the ulema, especially non-sayid, of Pushtun Afghanistan in arms, often able to use mullah-to-mullah ties that could cross ethnolinguistic barriers. The original Taliban’s supporting networks also included tribal leaders (reached through kinship ties), bazaar merchants, hundi/hawala bankers, weapons dealers, land speculators, and small industrialists. Access to Pakistani government support helped it access more powerful interconnected interests—the transport mafia, oil smugglers, timber mafia, the increasingly-important narcotics mafias (linked through Pakistan to international markets), and their own networks of dependent growers (increasingly important under Taliban rule), and smugglers of consumer goods (the bara bazaar network in Pakistan).
This cemented the link between the nominally “law and order” Taliban and criminals. While the Taliban came to power in southern Afghanistan in 1994 with their reputation burnished by clearing away checkpoints on
highways and suppressing extraction from local inhabitants, their links to the different mafias operating cross border-trade soon spread to narcotics cultivation and other criminal activity. As a result, the Taliban seemingly attracted every fugitive from the Islamic world in 1994–2001, aware that no extradition warrants were being served. This trend accelerated after 2001. By 2008–10 the activities of criminal groups, especially banditry and kidnapping, in southern and eastern Afghanistan were indistinguishable from the Taliban insurgency. Indeed, much of the criminal activity has been by individuals and groups that claim to also be Taliban.
The Afghan Taliban believe that the government in Kabul rightfully belongs to Pushtuns and the Durand Line is no barrier to those who need to retrieve this prize, kept from them by non-Pushtuns, infidel foreigners, and takfir Afghans. The Taliban offered a return to the Pushtun nationalist vision of “Afghanistan as the lands of the Pushtun.” While the 1994–2001 Taliban welcomed non-Pushtun Sunnis and appointed some to positions of titular (but not significant) authority, their insistence upon submission to their own authority effectively ensured that, in practice, non-Pushtun Afghans had no greater rights in Afghanistan—and in practice much less—than those associated with any other Muslim.
The Afghan Taliban have had an international dimension since their inception. Mullah Omar assumed the title of
Amir al Mumin
in 1994, a title requiring obeisance by all Muslims, across frontiers. Though starting as a Pushtun movement, there was never a sense that their message was limited to that group. The shift from the more traditional Pushtun internal worldview to one that increasingly saw themselves as part of a global struggle for Islam initially reflected the camps’ location in Pakistan, support networks running to them from throughout the Islamic world (which, in the 1980s, saw a growth of non-government organizations), and the ISI’s desire to carry the war to then-Soviet central Asia, which they saw as vulnerable to Islamic resistance. With guerillas and aid crossing the Durand Line daily to fight the Soviets, the Afghan Pushtun view that it was not a border that was legitimate to them or should restrict their movements became widespread. “The Taliban were raised in the refugee camps in Pakistan and, rather than a sense of Afghan nationhood, were indoctrinated in an Islam without borders,” said a veteran Afghan political observer.
The pre-2001 Afghan Taliban’s Islamic universalist and cross-border ideology, which was often difficult to reconcile with its more parochial Pushtun roots, was not brought in bin Laden’s luggage, but was there from the roots of the movement in Pakistan in the 1970s and 80s. The Taliban’s ideology easily evolved, from the belief that the Durand Line should not be a barrier to the Pushtuns it divided, to a belief that “there are no borders in Islam.” Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership’s attraction to the goal of a restored Sunni Khalifait in which they would play a major role predated Al Qaeda’s transnational appeal.
All these factors made the original Afghan Taliban a formidable force. They were able to achieve a degree of legitimacy with Pushtun Afghanistan that HiH, their predecessor and rival, was unable to achieve despite having the full backing of Pakistan and a more sophisticated party organization. In the final analysis, HiH’s explicit Islamist ideology—looking to Islam as a modernizing force that will transcend the backwardness of tribal, divided, underdeveloped Afghanistan—was less attractive to the conservative Afghan Pushtuns than the Taliban’s implicit fundamentalist ideology, looking back to an Islamic past of piety which, if as imaginary as Pushtun tribal lineages, was no less powerful for that fact.
Shaping the Vortex: The Post-2001 Afghan Insurgents
The post-2001 Afghan Taliban, revived in Pakistan, has since been re-exported—by cross-border insurgency and propaganda—into southern and eastern Afghanistan. What has emerged in the Vortex is different from the pre-2001 Taliban in Afghanistan. The pre-2001 Taliban had lost legitimacy, and this was further undercut by the scope of their military defeat.
Driven into sanctuaries in Pakistan following their defeat in Afghanistan in 2001, the remaining Afghan Taliban were largely cut off from their bases of support back home. With little interest shown by the winners, Afghan and foreign, in cutting them in on the post-conflict settlement, they had no choice except to transform.
The beaten Afghan Taliban of 2001 became part of an insurgent coalition that by 2008–10 threatened the future of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. They rebuilt where the “Taliban culture” strong and state institutions weak in both countries. Motivation was provided by Al Qaeda-developed
propaganda and the alienation of many Pushtun leaders. The failure of post-2001 Kabul and its foreign supporters to use effective patronage, strengthen the institutions that meant something to Afghanistan’s rural Pushtuns, create effective and legitimate governance, and provide meaningful conflict resolution, when combined with the aggressive Taliban culture, meant that the insurgent threat has gained strong inroads where its predecessors were defeated less than a decade before.
The Afghan Taliban and their insurgent allies that have emerged from the Vortex are not the same pre-2001 organizations.
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In 2002–06, the Afghan Taliban in Pakistan accelerated their cross-fertilization from other organizations that had marked the later years of their rule in Kabul. This included participation in the rise of the Pakistani Taliban. The government of Pakistan refused to move against the Afghan Taliban in their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
In Pakistan, Afghan insurgent groups have access to networks running outside the FATA, and money from Karachi, Lahore, and elsewhere made involvement in Pakistani internal politics even more important. In 2001, the Taliban had found few willing to fight to the death for them except some foreigners. By 2008–10, there was no shortage of insurgent fighters: Afghans, Pakistanis, and a new generation of foreigners. Despite the increased internationalization of the conflict, the leaderships of all Afghan insurgent groups are Pushtuns. Those Afghans fighting in the insurgency were, in 2008–10, almost exclusively Pushtuns. The current Afghan insurgents have, like the 1994–96 Afghan Taliban, been able to present themselves internally as the banner carriers of Pushtun nationalism and the restorers of Pushtun power in Kabul while holding fast to a transnational ideology of Sunni Islamic radicalism.
The post-2001 Afghan insurgent groups rely on the networks used by its pre-2001 Taliban predecessor and also share them with Al Qaeda and other threats, terrorist and insurgent alike. Post-2001, the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups have managed to come out from under Osama bin Laden’s effective control. The post-2001 Taliban has become the leading Afghan insurgent group, dominating but not controlling a diverse insurgent coalition, but has retained its links with Al Qaeda. But while Al Qaeda focused on its global mission, the post-2001 Afghan Taliban
instead aims at seizing state power in Afghanistan as part of an insurgent coalition that includes, among other groups, its pre-2001 rival HiH.
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It remains, however, that the insurgents, including the post-2001 Afghan Taliban, have not been able to claim the allegiance of all the ulema that had given at least passive support to its predecessor. Many of those with links to Kabul and those that still retained ties to the Sufic orders have not supported the insurgents, although signs that the Taliban have been increasingly penetrating brotherhoods in southern Afghanistan in 2008–10 have been disconcerting.
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Other pro-government mullahs continue to resist the insurgents.
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Before 2001, many of the cultural restrictions that made the Taliban a brutal occupying force in Kabul or the Hazara Jat were applied more leniently—or at least more haphazardly—in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan. The current Afghan insurgency combines some of this approach. In many areas, the insurgents make use of outreach to local inhabitants where possible. But more brutal and direct methods associated with the cross-border insurgency are also widespread. The Afghan insurgency is a mix of Afghan Taliban Pushtun origins and a potential Islamic Khmer Rouge. Xenophobia has been exalted, reflecting the need to de-legitimate the foreign presence that supports Kabul and reflecting the Al Qaeda-provided narrative that Afghanistan is one front in a global struggle against Crusaders and Zionists. It builds on a shared sense of deep humiliations to Muslims worldwide.
The worst crimes of the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban and their allies—the massacres in the Hazara Jat and Mazar-e-Sharif, the despoliation of the Shomali Plain, the repressive rule in Kabul and other cities—are likely to be the standing operating procedures of their successors. In south Afghanistan by 2008–10, the murder of pro-government religious figures and aid workers, and the massacre of civilian Afghans, have been widespread. Perhaps most telling, the intimidation of rural Afghan Pushtun leadership figures has forced many to flee to Kandahar, Kabul, or Dubai. Many of these were the bedrock of local support for the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban. The Afghan insurgent coalition is a different type of force.