by Ahmed Rashid
As fighting subsided around Kabul, the Taliban launched an offensive on July 28 in the north east of the country, in a bid to cut Masud's supply lines with Tajikistan. The Taliban carried out intensive bombing of civilian targets as the Taliban slowly made headway towards Taloqan, the political headquarters of the NA. After a four week siege and heavy fighting Taloqan fell on September 5, after Masud conducted a strategic withdrawal from the city to prevent civilian casualties. Masud withdrew to the borders of Badakhshan, the last province under his control as 150,000 refugees fleeing Taloqan and the Taliban advance pressed up against the border with Tajikistan and asked to be given refuge. The Taliban also captured several towns on the Afghanistan–Tajikistan border, creating a wave of panic in Central Asia.
Throughout 2000 there were growing signs of splits and dissent within the Taliban leadership, while the tribal Pashtuns demonstrated growing resentment against the strictures and corruption of Taliban rule and their lack of consideration for the suffering population. On January 13, the money market in Kabul was robbed by its Taliban guards who stole the equivalent of some US 200,000 dollars. The money maket shut down in protest for several days as the ‘Afghani’ plummeted against the US dollar. On January 25, 400 tribal leaders from four eastern provinces—Paktiya, Khost, Paktika and Gardez—forced the Taliban to replace local Governors, as they protested the conscription drive by the Taliban and the sharp rise in taxes, which they complained were being sent to Kabul rather than being used for local relief. On January 27, over 2000 people held an unprecedented anti-Taliban rally in Khost. The draught and the Taliban's insistence on continued fighting, increased public criticism of the Taliban's lack of concern for the civilian population. Smugglers and transporters blamed the Taliban for harbouring Bin Laden, which had led to UN sanctions and a cut back in the smuggling trade. In late April the Taliban arrested the head of its air force General Akthar Mansuri and 10 other officials in Kandahar for helping Ismael Khan escape.
There was also increasing hostility to the Taliban's expanding support to Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist movements from neighboring countries, especially in Central Asia. The Taliban were playing host to extremist groups from Central Asia, Iran, Kashmir, China and Pakistan whose militants fight for the Taliban. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which in the summer of 1999 and again in 2000 launched abortive offensives against Uzbekistan's regime have bases in northern Afghanistan. More than one third of the 15000 strong Taliban force which captured Taloqan was made up of non-Afghans, which included 3000 Pakistani militants, 1000 fighters from the IMU, several hundred Arabs under Bin Laden as well as Kashmiris, Chechens, Philipinos and Chinese Muslims.
International efforts by the US, Russia and the regional states to coordinate anti-terrorism measures were stepped up. Russia's accusations against the Taliban increased dramatically after Kabul recognised the government of the breakaway Republic of Chechnya and allowed the Chechens to open an embassy in Kabul on January 16, 2000. After the military coup in Islamabad on October 12, 1999 Pakistan stepped up its support to the Taliban providing increased military aid to the Taliban for its summer offensive in 2000. Pakistan remained the only country in the world supporting the Taliban and countries in the region became more hostile to the military regime.
Several attempts by the UN and Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to bring the warring factions to the negotiating table failed to yield positive results. Francesc Vendrell, a Spanish diplomat was appointed as the new UN Secretary General's Special Representative to Afghanistan on January 18. In March and again in May, the OIC organised indirect talks between the Taliban and the NA in Jeddah with no outcome. Even as they appeared to be winning control of the entire country, the Taliban remained internationally isolated and condemned as a pariah movement by all of Afghanistan's neighbors.
Part 2
Islam and the
Taliban
∼ 6 ∼
CHALLENGING ISLAM:
THE NEW-STYLE
FUNDAMENTALISM OF
THE TALIBAN
Islam has always been at the very centre of the lives of ordinary Afghan people. Whether it is saying one's prayers five times a day, fasting in Ramadan or giving zak&t- an Islamic contribution to the poor – few Muslim peoples in the world observe the rituals and the piety of Islam with such regularity and emotion as the Afghans. Islam has been the bedrock for the unity of Afghanistan's diverse and multi-ethnic peoples while jihad has frequently provided the principle mobilizing factor for Afghan nationalism, during the resistance against the British and the Russians.
Rich or poor, communist, king or Mujaheddin it makes little difference. When I met with the ageing ex-King Zahir Shah in Rome in 1988, he quietly interrupted the interview so he could go into the next room to pray. Communist ministers prayed in their offices. Mujaheddin warriors would break off from fighting to pray. Mullah Omar spends hours on his prayer mat, often doing much of his strategic thinking after his prayers. Ahmad Shah Masud leads breaks from directing a battle to pray and then goes into a deep spiritual silence as booming guns and wireless chatter fill the air.
But no Afghan can insist that the fellow Muslim standing next to him prays also. Traditionally Islam in Afghanistan has been immensely tolerant – to other Muslim sects, other religions and modern lifestyles. Afghan mullahs were never known to push Islam down people's throats and sectarianism was not a political issue until recently. Until 1992 Hindus, Sikhs and Jews played a significant role in the country's economy. Traditionally they controlled the money market in urban centres and when Afghan kings went to war they often borrowed money from them.
After 1992 the brutal civil war destroyed this age-old Afghan tolerance and consensus. 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, the Hazaras’ massacre of the Taliban in Mazar 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 religious soul. The Taliban's deliberate anti-Shia programme has denigrated Islam and the unity of the country as minority groups tried to flee the country en masse. 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.
Eighty per cent of Afghans belong to the Sunni Hanafi sect, the most liberal of the four Sunni schools of thought.1 The minority sects were few and scattered along the fringes of the country. Shia Islam is predominant amongst the Hazaras in the Hazarajat, a handful of Pashtun tribes, a few Tajik clans and some Heratis. The Ismaelis, the followers of the Agha Khan, follow a branch of Shiism. They have always lived in the inaccessible north-east, contiguous to the Ismaeli communities in the Pamir mountains which today constitute eastern Tajikistan and Pakistan's northern areas. The Afghan Ismaeli leader Syed Nadir Shah Hussain, who died in 1971 was made head of the community by the Agha Khan. His sons have led the Ismaeli community since then, playing a prominant role in the anti-Taliban alliance. Hindus and Sikhs who arrived with the British as camp followers in the nineteenth century had mostly left the country by 1998 as had the Bukharan Jews although a few dozen remained.
The Sunni Hanafi creed is essentially non-hierarchial and decentralized, which has made it difficult for twentieth-century rulers to incorporate its religious leaders into strong centralized state systems. But for centuries this admirably suited the loose Afghan confederation. Traditional Islam in Afghanistan believed in minimum government, where state interference was as little and as far away as possible. Everyday decisions were carried out by the tribe and the community. Amongst the Pashtuns, village mullahs, although largely uneducated, ensured that the mosque was the centre of village life. Students or Talibs studied at the small madrassas that were scattered through the tribal areas. In medieval times Herat was the centre of Afghanistan's madrassa system but fr
om the seventeenth century Afghan scholars travelled to Central Asia, Egypt and India to study at more renowned madrassas in order to join the ranks of the ulema.2
Islam was also deeply rooted in Afghanistan because Sharia law governed the legal process until 1925, when King Amanullah first began to introduce a civil legal code and the state took on the role of training ulema to become Qazis, Islamic judges. In 1946 a Sharia Faculty was set up in Kabul University which became the main centre for integrating the new civil code with the Sharia. This merging of the traditional with the modern was epitomized by Mohammed Musa Shafiq, the last Prime Minister under the monarchy, which was overthrown in 1973. Shafiq studied at a madrassa and at the Sharia Faculty in Kabul and then went on to take another degree from Columbia University in New York. When he was executed by the communists in 1979 his death was widely mourned.3
Thus it was not surprising that in 1979 the mullahs did not join the radical Islamic Mujaheddin parties, but the more traditional tribal-based parties such as Harakat Inquilabi-Islami headed by Maulana Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi and Hizb-e-Islami led by Maulvi Younis Khalis. Both men were maulvis who had studied for a time at the Haqqania madrassa in Pakistan and then established their own madrassas inside Afghanistan. After the Soviet invasion they set up loose organisations which were decentralized, unideological and non-hierarchical, but they rapidly lost out as the CIA-ISI arms pipeline supported the more radical Islamic parties.
Another moderating factor for Islam in Afghanistan was the enormous popularity of Sufism, the trend of mystical Islam, which originated in Central Asia and Persia. Sufi means ‘wool’ in Arabic and the name comes from the rough woollen coats worn by the early Sufi brethren. The Sufi orders or Tariqah, which means ‘the way’, was a medieval reaction against authority, intellectualism, the law and the mullah and thus immensely appealing for poor, powerless people. The Sufis build their faith on prayer, contemplation, dances, music and sessions of physical shaking or whirling in a permanent quest for truth. These rituals create an inner spiritual space within man that the outsider cannot penetrate. Seven centuries ago the famous Arab traveller Ibn Battuta described Sufism: ‘The fundamental aim of the Sufi life was to pierce the veils of human sense which shut man off from the Divine and so to obtain communion and absorption into God.’4
The two main Sufi orders in Afghanistan of Naqshbandiyah and Qaderiyah played a major role in uniting the anti-Soviet resistance as they provided a network of associations and alliances outside the Mujaheddin parties and ethnic groups. Leaders of these orders were equally prominent. The Mujaddedi family were leaders of the Naqshbandiyah order and had been king makers in Kabul for centuries. In a brutal act, the communists killed 79 members of the Mujaddedi family in Kabul in January 1979 to eliminate potential rivals. Nevertheless one survivor, Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, set up his own resistance party in Peshawar, the Jabha-i Najat Milli Afghanistan, National Liberation Front of Afghanistan, and became a fierce critic of the radical Islamic parties. He was appointed President of the Afghan interim government in 1989 and then became the first Mujaheddin President of Afghanistan in 1992.
Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, the head of the Qaderiyah order and related to ex-King Zahir Shah through marriage, set up the Mahaz-e-Milli, National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, in Peshawar. Both leaders were supporters of Zahir Shah and remained the most moderate of all the Mujaheddin leaders. They were also sidelined by the CIA-ISI nexus and by Hikmetyar and Masud and later by the Taliban. They returned to politics in 1999 by setting up a new Peace and National Unity party that attempted to mediate between the Taliban and their opponents.
Before the Taliban, Islamic extremism had never flourished in Afghanistan. Within the Sunni tradition were the Wahabbis, followers of the strict and austere Wahabbi creed of Saudi Arabia. Begun by Abdul Wahab (1703-1792) as a movement to cleanse the Arab bedouin from the influence of Sufism, the spread of Wahabbism became a major plank in Saudi foreign policy after the oil boom in the 1970s. The Wahabbis first came to Central Asia in 1912, when a native of Medina, Sayed Shari Mohammed set up Wahabbi cells in Tashkent and the Ferghana valley. From here and from British India the creed travelled to Afghanistan where it had miniscule support before the war.
However, as Saudi arms and money flowed to Saudi-trained Wahabbi leaders amongst the Pashtuns, a small following emerged. In the early stages of the war, the Saudis sent an Afghan long settled in Saudi Arabia, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, to set up a Wahabbi party, the Ittehad-e-Islami, Islamic Unity, in Peshawar. The Wahabbi Afghans who are also called Salafis, became active opponents of both the Sufi and the traditional tribal-based parties but they were unable to spread their message because they were immensely disliked by ordinary Afghans, who considered it a foreign creed. Arab Mujaheddin including Osama Bin Laden, who joined the jihad, won a small Pashtun following, largely due to the lavish funds and weapons at their disposal.
Thanks to the CIA-ISI arms pipeline, the engine of the jihad was the radical Islamic parties. Hikmetyar and Masud had both participated in an unsuccessful uprising against President Mohammed Daud in 1975. These Islamic radicals had then fled to Pakistan where they were patronized by Islamabad as a means to pressurize future Afghan governments. Thus when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan already had effective Islamic radicals under its control which could lead the jihad. President Zia ul Haq insisted that the bulk of CIA military aid was transferred to these parties, until Masud became independent and fiercely critical of Pakistani control.
These Islamic leaders were drawn from a new class of educated university students – Hikmetyar studied engineering at Kabul University, Masud studied at Kabul's French Lycée – who took their inspiration from the most radical and politicized Islamic party in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami. The Pakistani Jamaat in turn was inspired by the Ikhwan ul Muslimeen or the Muslim Brotherhood which was set up in Egypt in 1928 with the aim of bringing about an Islamic revolution and creating an Islamic state. The founder of the Ikhwan, Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949) was a major influence on Abul-Ala Maududdi (1903–1978), who founded the Pakistani Jamaat in 1941.
The old Ikhwan movements around the Muslim world wanted an Islamic revolution rather than a nationalist or communist revolution to overthrow colonialism. In opposition to the traditional mullahs these Islamicists refused to compromise with the indigenous neo-colonial elite and wanted radical political change, which would create a true Islamic society as constituted by the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca and Medina as well as deal with the challenges of the modern world. They rejected nationalism, ethnicity, tribal segmentation and feudal class structures in favour of a new Muslim internationalism which would reunite the Muslim world or Ummah.5 To achieve this, parties like the Pakistani Jamaat and Hikmetyar's Hizb-e-Islami set up highly centralized modern parties organized along communist lines with a cell system, extreme secrecy, political indoctrination and military training.
The greatest weakness of the Ikhwan model of political Islam is its dependence on a single charismatic leader, an Amir, rather than a more democratically constituted organization to lead it. The obsession of radical Islam is not the creation of institutions, but the character and purity of its leader, his virtues and qualifications and whether his personality can emulate the personality of the Prophet Mohammed. Thus these movements pre-suppose the Islamic virtue of individuals, even though such virtue can only be logically acquired if a society is already truly Islamic.6Invariably, as was the case with Hikmetyar, this model allowed dictatorship to flourish.
Nevertheless these radical Islamicists, as compared to the Taliban, were relatively modern and forward-looking. They flavoured women's education and participation in social life. They developed or tried to develop theories for an Islamic economy, banking system, foreign relations and a more equitable and just social system. However, the radical Islamicist discourse suffered from the same weaknesses and limitations as the Afghan Marxist did: as an all-inclusive ideology, they rejected rather than integrated the vastly differen
t social, religious and ethnic identities that constituted Afghan society. Both the Afghan communists and Islamicists wanted to impose radical change on a traditional social structure by a revolution from the top. They wished to do away with tribalism and ethnicity by fiat, an impossible task, and were unwilling to accept the complex realities on the ground.
The Afghan Islamicists‘ political failure and their inability to produce reality-based theories of change is a widespread phenomenon in the Muslim world. The French scholar Olivier Roy has dubbed it ‘the failure of political Islam’.7 Muslim societies in the twentieth century have been divided between two contradictory structures. The clan, tribe and ethnic group on one hand and the state and religion on the other. It is the small group versus the larger faith or the tribe versus the Ummah, which has been the main focus of loyalty and commitment rather than the state.8Afghanistan's Islamicists failed to resolve this dichotomy.
The Taliban had set out as an Islamic reform movement. Throughout Muslim history, Islamic reform movements have transformed both the nature of belief and political and social life, as Muslim nomadic tribes destroyed other Muslim empires, transformed them, and then were themselves urbanized and later destroyed. This political change has always been made possible through the concept of jihad. Western thought, heavily influenced by the medieval Christian Crusades has always portrayed jihad as an Islamic war against unbelievers. But essentially jihad is the inner struggle of a Muslim to become a better human being, improve himself and help his community. Jihad is also a testing ground for obedience to God and implementing His commands on earth. ‘Jihad is the inner struggle of moral discipline and commitment to Islam and political action.’9