Authors: Jason Burke
By 1995, Pakistan’s three strands of Islamic militancy all appeared to be completely out of control. In Kashmir, the Deobandi Harkat ul-Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba cadres had pushed the violence to an unprecedented level. A series of murders of Westerners there had drawn international outrage. Pakistan itself was convulsed with sectarian violence.
In June 1995, Islamic activists based in Sudan and linked to Egyptians in Peshawar, nearly killed Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Then, on the morning of 19 November, the calm of Islamabad’s diplomatic quarter, several square miles of leafy roads and high-walled compounds, was shattered by a huge explosion. An enormous bomb had reduced the Egyptian embassy to a smoking pile of rubble, killing 16 people and injuring 60. Windows several miles away were splintered by the blast. The attack was claimed by both Islamic Jihad and their rival, al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya. In fact, it was a faction of the former, led by al-Zawahiri, which was responsible. Over the next month, dozens of foreign extremists were arrested in Karachi and in Peshawar. One of the biggest raids was on Sayyaf’s compound in Pabbi. Benazir Bhutto told the world that her government had a grip on the problem. Few believed her.
8
Seekers
Long lines of men were striding through the weak sunlight of an Afghan autumn afternoon. From the main bazaar, from the ruins of the west of Kabul, from the wealthier suburbs to the north and east the crowd flowed swiftly over the bridge in the centre of the city and on to the old football stadium with its rotting concrete terraces and rusting Olympic rings. Toyota pick-up trucks, packed with heavily armed Taliban fighters, pitched and swerved on the potholed roads. The dark blankets the fighters had wrapped around their shoulders against the cold and the tails of their black turbans fluttered like pennants.
The crowds, thicker than normal for an execution, filed into the stadium slowly. That afternoon’s entertainment was special. A woman, a self-confessed murderer, was to be killed. Behind the spectators on the top row of the terraces was a clear blue sky, and the brown, craggy mountains that ring Kabul which, it being November, were topped with snow and very beautiful.
A microphone had been set up on the edge of the football pitch and a mullah, wearing a white turban and wrapped in a cream cloak, was standing before it. A little over a year earlier, I had heard the same man addressing a similar crowd in the same place. It had been a hot day in August and the atmosphere was very different. Then the spectators had cheered as a male murderer was shot and two thieves had a hand and a foot amputated. As I left the stadium, I had watched a Taliban fighter holding the men’s severed hands above his head to keep them out of the reach of the young children scampering around him. The children were leaping up to try and touch them, broad grins on their filthy faces. Blood ran from the severed wrists down the talib’s own.
Now the mullah’s tone was almost plaintive. There was none of the confidence and triumph of a year before. He knew, and the spectators knew, that there had to be a very good reason for shooting dead a middle-aged woman in the centre of a stadium. He was trying to give them one:
Where once there was crime and anarchy there is now order. There is no thieving and your women are now safe. It is only because of the implementation of justice according to the Shariat that there is this security. Life is given by Allah and so is His mercy.
A red pick-up truck bounced into the middle of the pitch with three women sitting in the back in light-blue
burqa
. A group of soldiers fanned out around the truck as the condemned woman was helped down. She walked unsteadily and, though actually only 35, seemed very old. She was led to the edge of the penalty box and knelt down and then started to rise again but seemed to change her mind and knelt once more. Then, like a shy, unsure child on stage in a school play looking for her teacher, she glanced over her shoulder uncertainly.
The mullah read from a page of notes over the microphone:
This woman is Zarmina, daughter of Ghulam Haznat of Paghman province of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. She is a mother of seven children and has confessed to killing her husband with a heavy hammer five months ago. The sentence of death has been upheld by three courts.
The mechanical rasp of the breech being worked on the Kalashnikov could be heard clearly from where I was sitting around 20 metres away. It seemed extremely loud and was followed by a long moment of utter silence during which I watched the breeze gently ruffling the pleated hem of the woman’s burqa. Then three sharp shots cracked out through the still air and though they were less than a second apart I saw the dust spurt each time from the ground in front of the woman’s crumpling body and then, on the third shot, saw white shards of skull fly out through the air and hit the grass. Then the blue burqa, darkening quickly, fell heavily across the spattered stain on the ground and hid it. This time there was no triumphal cheer but just a low muttering of ‘Allahu Akbar’ that rose, almost imperceptibly, like an
oath or an excuse or a muttered blessing or imprecation, into the still, cold air.
It was November 1999, just over three years since the Taliban had captured Kabul, more than five years since they had first emerged in the southeast of Afghanistan. At the time they exercised nominal control over around 80 per cent of the country. The exact reasons for their extraordinarily swift rise to power are still unclear. The Taliban themselves, and supporters in Pakistan, say that in the spring of 1994 a Deobandi mullah in the dirt-poor village of Sangesar to the southwest of Kandahar became so incensed at the depredations inflicted on local people by the warlords who had carved out fiefdoms there after the end of the war against the Soviets that he had gathered a group of men around him to act. Thousands spontaneously joined him in a bid to clean up their neighbourhood, and then their country. Because everyone was sick of violence and chaos, the Taliban had been welcomed everywhere.
1
Many contested this story, and still do. It does indeed have all the hallmarks of a foundational myth. Instead, political opponents within Afghanistan claim, the Taliban were little more than proxies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, their success entirely due to the support of foreigners. Others, particularly non-Pashtuns, alleged the Taliban were simply a product of Pashtun tribal chauvinism and arrogance. Observers have pointed out, correctly, that much of Afghanistan was relatively peaceful in 1994 and that the Taliban often had to fight hard to conquer territory.
2
On the other hand, locals today confirm most details of the Taliban’s own claims, and State Department documents from the time are unequivocal about the widespread support for the Taliban in much of the country. More problematic than the exact details of the Taliban’s formation was the perception among millions of people across the world who suddenly found themselves focusing on Afghanistan for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks that the movement was indistinguishable from the al-Qaeda leadership and fighters they harboured.
The narrative sweep of the rise and fall of the Taliban movement is covered by a number of excellent books, and I have no wish, or ability, to duplicate that here. I hope instead to explain the phenomenon of
the Taliban and to examine their relationship with bin Laden and the other Islamic militants who gathered in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule. The changing nature of that relationship shows clearly that extant groups, rooted in a specific conjunction of local and broader factors, developed links with bin Laden and were influenced by his ideology at a relatively late stage in their history. It is important to remember both that the Taliban had established themselves as a major force in Afghanistan long before bin Laden arrived there and that they did not invite bin Laden or his aides to their country. It is also important to understand that the ideology and worldview of the Taliban and that of the militants around bin Laden were, at least to start with, very different. The Taliban were a local movement with limited knowledge of the world, Islamic or otherwise, and profoundly parochial ambitions. The defining element of bin Laden’s discourse was its burgeoning internationalism.
Both the Taliban and the new wave of internationalist Islamic militants of the early and mid 1990s can be seen as part of a broad reaction across the Islamic world to the inability of the political Islamism that emerged in the mid to late 1980s to achieve its goals. In earlier chapters, I traced the shift from early post-colonial ideologies including nationalism, socialism and pan-Arabism to political Islamism as the dominant discourse articulating aspirations for change in the Islamic world. The early 1990s saw another shift. Scholars such as Olivier Roy, Gilles Kepel and Malise Ruthven all detect the retreat (even ‘the failure’ in Roy’s view) of political Islamism at this time. Its apparent strength in the late 1980s and early 1990s was, they say, an illusion.
3
As a result the angry and the alienated turned towards more violent, nihilistic and mythic discourses instead. These are the ideologies, if such a word befits such essentially anti-political ways of thinking, that predominate today.
Certainly by the mid 1990s it was becoming very clear that the various political Islamist groups that had emerged in the previous two decades across the Islamic world were further away than ever from seizing power and Islamicizing their respective states. The Iranian Revolution had once seemed the natural candidate to lead a wave of Islamist revolts but had failed to inspire similar developments in other
Muslim countries except among some Shia minorities. By the early 1990s, Iran had implicitly acknowledged its failure to export the revolution and was, despite radical rhetoric, simply using radical groups abroad as a tool of its nationalist foreign policy.
4
The dissatisfaction bred by the reign of the mullahs among the vast bulk of Iran’s young population was clear. In Pakistan, as we saw in Chapter Six, the years when the government was at its most Islamist saw the emergence of sectarian conflict, not its end. There were few genuine Islamic measures on the part of the post-Zia governments. In fact, political Islamism was being marginalized as the army, Jamaat Islami and Nawaz Sharif, Zia’s protégé, lost ground to the Deobandis.
The situation in Algeria, where the relatively moderate political Islamists of the Front Islamique de Salut lost their battle to Islamicize the Algerian state and were swiftly supplanted by a new wave of violent extremists led by Afghan veterans, gave a glimpse of the future. The same situation prevailed elsewhere. Most mainstream Islamist bodies, such as Refah in Turkey or the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, were caught between repression and radical splinter groups and opted for a lower profile.
In Afghanistan, this shift from political Islamism to more radical strains of Islamic activism can be seen very clearly. By 1993, the men who had failed to mount an Islamist rebellion in the country in 1975 were in power. Yet they proved completely incapable of effecting radical change or bringing about a significant improvement in the living standards of the Afghan people. Certainly social justice, the key aspiration behind political Islamism, was as far off as ever. Political Islamism had always been hampered by the lack of a coherent idea of what to do after seizing power. Though an effective ideology for opposition, it had little to offer in the way of practical guidance for governing a modern state. In Kabul that failure was particularly obvious.
It was this failure to bring justice that motivated the early leaders of the Taliban. Almost to a man, they adhered to the narrow Deobandi Salafism they had been taught in their medressas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Though their Salafism was superficially similar to that of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri
et al
., it stemmed from a very different source. The Taliban movement can be placed squarely in a tradition of religious (or religio-political) revivalist movements in southwest Asia going back several centuries. Such movements in Afghanistan have already been detailed. More broadly, one could include the long series of uprisings against the British on the northwest frontier in the nineteenth century (including the campaign of Syyed Ahmed Barelvi around the Peshawar frontier in the late 1820s), the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and even the fatwas of Shah Waliullah, the Indian Muslim cleric, against the threatening Hindu Marathas before that.
The Taliban can also be seen as part of Islamic revivalist movements elsewhere in the Islamic world going back to the Sudanese Mahdi, the Wahhabis and beyond. In all these cases, anger and a sense of injustice compounded by continued social and economic crisis resulted in movements coalescing around charismatic religious figures who used the language of Islam to articulate a variety of diverse grievances and to suggest a solution. The solution almost always relied on a rejection of current Islamic practice and political structures and actors in favour of a reversion to a pure and unpolluted ‘truth’. However, these movements are not purely ‘fundamentalist’. Though their frame of reference may be Islamic, their aim, while often indistinct, is to create, or return to, some kind of imagined ‘just’ traditional society. Revivalism is underpinned by a desire for a ‘revolution’ in its original, inherently conservative, sense, as in a reversion to a previous, more just time. For the Taliban this was imagined as a nostalgic, idealized, mythic vision of rural Pashtun village life. This has been nicely characterized as neo-Traditionalism and adequately sums up the early aims of the Taliban.
Where the Taliban were close to both the more extreme political Islamists and men like bin Laden was in their Salafism, their rigorous insistence on the practical implementation of the behavioural injunctions contained in the holy texts. For the Taliban, the Shariat was ‘the way’. ‘Shariat’ derives from the old Bedouin word used to describe a well-worn route across hazardous territory to an oasis or similar destination. Deviation from the path could, of course, be fatal. For the Taliban it was clear that if all Muslims followed the way then the destination, an almost mystical transformation to a just and perfect world, imagined, in their case, as a Pashtun rural idyll, would be
achieved. Outside Mullah Omar’s office in Kandahar a slogan had been painted on a huge board. ‘Success springs from Allah,’ it said. ‘The hour of complete victory is at hand.’ This is an almost millenarian conception that at some defined moment, when God is ready or sufficiently appeased, all will be set right, and it is shared by bin Laden and his associates.