AFGHANISTAN – INGOVERNABILE MERAVIGLIA 3ª PARTE

FONDAMENTALISMO E TRADIZIONALISMO – I TALEBANI

The last time our steps took us across the steep slopes of Afghanistan, we had the opportunity to dwell for some time on the genesis of the Taliban, from their birth to their seizure of power, up to their reconquest of the country following the events of last August.
By following the events that marked the birth of the most successful movement in the history of Islamic fundamentalism, we have observed how its structure and ideology exhibit characteristics directly inherited from the country's internal traditions. However, we have also noted that, even within its doctrine, there are many elements that, despite its proclamations, have no origins in the Quran or traditional Muslim culture, as our brief examination of the behavioral restrictions introduced by the regime has made clear.

We therefore felt it appropriate to devote greater attention to the political aspects of the regime, since it is rarely taken into consideration by those who, in various capacities, undertake the difficult task of providing the general public with an explanation of the Afghan events that is capable of reconciling completeness and objectivity with the necessary conciseness.
The threat of modernity

The Taliban are the product of today's fracture between an all-encompassing Islam and an open Islam. They found in Wahhabism […] their ideological starting point, later transforming it into the ideology of the Pashtuns, over 12 million people divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan. […] Al Qaeda understood well that the Taliban phenomenon could become a political experiment, a laboratory from which political Islam could draw, dragging the entire Muslim world along with it. It is therefore a battle of meanings that is taking place in Afghanistan; and the fate of much of the Muslim world will depend on its outcome.
Khaled Fouad Allam

We have already seen how recent Afghan history has been profoundly shaped by the events that began in 1979; how they reduced Afghanistan to a veritable barracks for Islamic fundamentalism, making it a global phenomenon. It is therefore time to focus on fundamentalism itself, so that the reader can understand why it should not be confused with simple religious traditionalism. Fundamentalism, in fact, is a movement that is political rather than religious in nature: it sets itself primarily political goals, for whose implementation it relies on instruments that have little to do with the spiritual sphere, and its very development has been shaped by the political pressures to which the Muslim world was subjected during the 20th century.

Beginning with the First World War, contact with the West became increasingly intense and traumatic for the Muslim world, prompting in all Muslim-majority countries an intense process of reflection on their own social structure and the ideological foundations upon which it had been based for centuries. After 1914, the Muslim world saw its spiritual leader, the Sultan of Istanbul, who also held the title of Caliph (i.e., successor to the Prophet as leader of all believers), first unscrupulously use jihad to justify his attempts at revenge in the Balkans, and then, after the war, forced to take orders from the victorious infidels.

Shortly thereafter, the Bolsheviks denounced to the world the existence of secret agreements (the Sykes-Picot Agreements) by which the British and French intended to divide the remnants of the Istanbul empire, in defiance of the many promises they themselves had made to the peoples once subject to the Ottomans. The British's ambiguity became even more evident when, shortly thereafter, riots broke out in Palestine and Jordan, and French hypocrisy was no less evident in Syria. How distant the days of the Prophet and the great Suleiman seemed, when nothing seemed capable of opposing the swords of Islam!
The Middle East before and after the First World War. Der Spiegel

At the root of fundamentalism, therefore, lies the awareness of a lack of compatibility between Islamic traditionalism and modernity, and the attempt to find a way to avert, for Muslim countries, the fate of subordination to the technological superiority of the West that has already befallen much of Asia.

Indeed, the post-World War I period marked the beginning of a long period of political and economic subservience to European interests for Muslims in the Middle East, an order of things that could only be challenged following the Second World War, with the definitive decline of European military power. However, even in this new state of affairs, only American threats managed to prevent a full-scale return of colonialism, when in 1956 France and Britain attempted to exploit the distraction of the unrest in Eastern Europe to reclaim Egypt and Syria. Although European dominance had waned after 1945, a vulnerable inferiority continued to characterize relations between Muslim countries and the West.

Unwilling to entrust their protection to the Americans, whom anti-communist fanaticism was dragging further and further from their original anti-colonial ideals, and even less willing to fully integrate into either of the two great post-war ideological blocs, whose doctrines they struggled to identify with, Muslim countries found themselves forced to rely on themselves for their political independence. If episodes like 1956 had demonstrated that a return to their former colonial rule was no longer possible, this was due not to the Muslim countries' capacity for resistance, but rather to the conflicts dividing the Western powers. Moreover, while the formal sovereignty of the various Muslim countries could be guaranteed by the new political circumstances of the post-war world, there was no similar protection for their actual sovereignty, openly undermined by Western economic penetration (neocolonialism) and the tendency of both superpowers to fight each other openly, albeit by proxy, outside their own areas of control, that is, on the borders of Muslim countries.

For these reasons, the issue of material backwardness compared to the West could no longer be postponed. The Muslim world needed to accelerate the development that had taken the West an entire century. A recipe for development was needed, and, for better or worse, the West was the most successful example, especially in its Soviet incarnation, which had demonstrated how centralized planning could enable industrial takeoff even in conditions of persistent backwardness and shortage of resources and capital.

Following a model already successfully tested by other societies that found themselves dealing with Westerners from a position of inferiority (e.g., mid-nineteenth-century Japan), the Muslim world therefore chose to resort to a partial, off-the-shelf modernization, incorporating only those aspects of Western culture deemed most advantageous and least invasive of the traditional social order. This process was carried out almost everywhere by the same traditional aristocratic ruling classes, who were able to navigate the turbulent waters of change without their position at the levers of power being questioned, not even by those members of their ranks who, more or less regularly, violently seized power in their countries. This was a class made up of men whose culture was now predominantly European, whose offspring were educated in Europe's finest universities, where they learned to regard the West as a model to imitate, as well as an adversary to be feared. A social stratum as small as it was culturally distant from the rural masses it had striven to rescue from poverty and inert traditionalism. But although it was increasingly polarized, the traditional social hierarchy held almost everywhere, for about thirty years, from the 1940s to the 1960s, thanks to a widespread sharing of a vague idealism mingled with nationalism, a desire for political equality with the West, and religious solidarity.

Almost everywhere, including Afghanistan, the choice was therefore to simply adopt the West's material technology. Thus, within a few decades, the medinas of Asia filled with engineers, architects, physicists, and entrepreneurs, and the still landscapes of the semi-desert and the vast expanses of the steppe, the Iranian plateau, India, and China were populated with roads, dams, gas stations, pylons, and gigantic power plants. The economic and social progress brought about by the adoption of new technologies was impressive by any measure, even taking into account the pockets of backwardness that material progress failed to eradicate. As had already occurred in the West, major infrastructure projects ended up being concentrated almost exclusively in the main cities, abandoning the vast rural areas to material and social backwardness. Yet, by any measure of human development, progress was, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, undeniable.
The increase in life expectancy, which perhaps demonstrates better than any other data the real development of a region, has characterized the post-World War II period, even in the Middle East.

Nonetheless, the patient refused to continue therapy. Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, a profound and traumatic cultural shift began to take place across large parts of the Muslim world; after decades of staunch Westernization, a staunch rejection of Westernization increasingly spread across Islamic societies. It was the failure of the political programs of secular forces that led to fundamentalism and its proliferation. While previously it had been viewed exclusively positively, as a model of material progress whose effectiveness was unquestionable, and the only real solution capable of preventing Muslim countries from the sad fate of colonialism, from the 1960s onwards, the voices of those criticizing the social consequences of Westernization became increasingly vocal: the uneven distribution of economic development, on the one hand, and the profound transformation of social relations, on the other. When, despite modernization, the Arab states suffered yet another defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, the event had profound resonance in the Muslim world: those who had always opposed Westernization saw in those events a demonstration of its inadequacy in guaranteeing the Muslim world a non-subordinate position vis-à-vis Western countries.
The size of Israel before and after the 1967 war; in light blue, the territories occupied by Israel at the expense of neighboring Arab states, much of which remains in Israeli possession, without a clear legal definition, even today. BBC.com

As in the rest of the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, too, the persistence of poverty and rampant corruption within the massive bureaucracies created by the very projects of Westernization provided abundant ammunition for the more conservative fringes of the Muslim world, particularly the clergy and rural community leaders; the higher literacy rate and the spread of modern communication tools, paradoxically, ensured that they lacked neither voice nor ears.

Irreducibly hostile to any process that might threaten any real change in social relations, these groups, which until then had been minorities with no real capacity to influence national politics, soon found themselves at the helm of vast movements calling for a return to the origins of Muslim morality, spreading to every social sphere that had remained, by their own choice or that of others, outside the process of Westernization.

It is not possible here to account for the innumerable political turmoil experienced by Muslim countries in the 1960s and 1970s; we will limit ourselves to emphasizing how even Iran, where modernization had achieved truly extraordinary results, found itself in the throes of a revolution explicitly aimed at halting the Westernization of its society in 1979.

In the same year, across the border, foreign military intervention in support of an unpopular government that, blinded by ideology to the point of political shortsightedness, had even attempted to impose state atheism on a country that found in the Muslim faith one of its few elements of real cohesion, ended up dooming the cause of modernization in Afghanistan as well. We have already noted how, within a few years, the entire Muslim world came to see the Hindu Kush as a sanctuary for the struggle against the depravity of society, threatened both by the egalitarian and consumerist liberal democracy of US origin and by the new materialist and atheistic faith of Marx and Lenin.
A totalitarian movement

For twenty years, even in narrative, we were content with the word: Taliban. It was enough. It was even too much: the Taliban, yes, the fanatics, the enemies of women, the iconoclasts of Bamiyan. What else is there to say? Because we don't waste time researching the sociology of Evil. Which, instead, is often providential. We hesitate to explore, we focus on our own repugnance. Photographs of bearded men wrapped in miserable chlamys, striking menacing poses with their Kalashnikovs, were enough for us. Let's confess: beyond folklore and history, we have never really considered who the Afghans are; in fact, their troubles were not the reason we went to Afghanistan.
Domenico Quirico

What has been said so far, however, seems to contradict our initial assertions. It is clear that, while there was widespread resentment in various sectors of society at the expectations that the results of modernization had disappointed, it is also clear that it was the most conservative elements of Muslim societies that fueled these resentments, giving them a distinctly traditionalist form. This is undoubtedly true: fundamentalism stems from traditionalism, and indeed this has been duly noted by Western observers. What has largely gone unnoticed, however, is the fact that this relationship evolved well beyond its initial form, and that Taliban fundamentalism, upon its seizure of power at the end of its long gestation in Pakistan, ultimately took on a content quite unique to that of simple religious traditionalism.

The seizure of power by this mysterious group of intransigent clerics was greeted in Afghanistan with a mixture of weary indifference and wary anticipation. Their calligraphic banner, deliberately similar to those of the Arab armies of the caliphs' time, their faceless leaders, and their adherence to a particularly rigid conception of religion were novelties to which the Afghans, however, struggled to adapt.

The West, disoriented by the sight of a political landscape so different from what it is accustomed to, has long focused exclusively on tribalism and religious traditionalism, the only points of reference in an otherwise remote and difficult-to-decipher reality. For this reason, few have had the clarity to understand that Taliban fundamentalism constituted, in Afghan politics, a profoundly revolutionary phenomenon, which took even its contemporaries by surprise, no less than the advent of Mussolini's regime did the Italians in the 1920s.

Of course, in the eyes of successors, everything always makes sense, and they are rarely capable of grasping the unpredictability of past events. But Afghanistan in the 1990s had never witnessed the seizure of power by a group intent on thoroughly controlling social relations, halting ongoing developments in society, and blocking the progress it had previously undertaken, diverting it, like wolves among flocks, onto paths chosen for it from above, often against its own will.

This characteristic—control not only of the mechanisms by which power is exercised, but above all of the subjects upon whom it falls, and in particular, of their behaviors (even those that do not concern the relationship between subjects and power)—is precisely what marks the dividing line between dictatorship and totalitarian regime, between the monopoly of formal power and the complete control of a community, both in its external relationships (e.g., clothing) and internal ones (beliefs, attitudes, or relationships between generations and genders).

As dictator, Julius Caesar managed to gain control of the entire Roman political apparatus, and could use its enormous economic and military resources at his disposal at his leisure. As emperor, for ten years Napoleon was able to decide from his throne the fate of France and all the territories it controlled. But although their achievements far surpassed those of their great admirer, neither Caesar nor Napoleon ever ventured to attempt the ethical refoundation Mussolini desired for the Italians. Neither the Rome of the Caesars nor Bonapartist France ever had institutions specifically designed to mobilize civil society and make it perceive a whole series of messages, images, and meanings intended to replace previous behaviors and beliefs, even the most intimate ones.

Fascism created the first mass culture in Italian history, the only one that political power was able to create, and not merely shape. Just as today's mass culture aims to transform us into consumers devoid of common sense and foresight, Fascist mass culture aimed to make Italians conceive of the bayonet as an extension of their arm, and Italian women of family and children as the sole fulfillment of their person. History has clearly shown us how unsuccessful the results of this operation were, but this in no way detracts from the seriousness of its intentions.

But if the seeds of totalitarianism lie in intentions, why should the same considerations be ruled out for the Taliban? The totalitarian phenomenon in Afghanistan undoubtedly took on a different form than that experienced by totalitarian regimes in European history, but the underlying variables are the same. Of course, the Taliban certainly lacked the political sophistication necessary to conceive a popular culture modeled on the fascist one, just as the rest of the country lacked the means of communication necessary to embrace it, but they lacked intentions at all: as we have seen, the extent of the prohibitions imposed by the Taliban on the population clearly demonstrates this, as does the population's astonished reaction. "It seemed the Taliban didn't want us to do anything. They even banned one of our favorite board games, which is played with tokens on a wooden board," Malala Yousafzai later said.
A political novelty

Despite having taken its final form nearly four hundred years after the death of Muhammad, in the imperial era of Muslim history, the Quran provides very few details on the political structures best suited to rightly guiding a community of believers.

For this reason, when in the 1970s the need to restructure Muslim societies around the dictates of faith was felt, following the rejection of Western-style modernization, these intentions were based, for the first time in the history of Islam, on control of the state apparatus, rather than on the simple hadiths of the Book. Although it was ultimately the priestly castes that everywhere appropriated the right to determine the forms in which relations between the various articulations of society could take place, and although they offered, wherever they succeeded in gaining power, an extremely conservative interpretation of social relations, contact with modernity radically altered their original political projects: the sheer volume of tasks to be accomplished, in an effort to equip their countries with the strength to resist external pressure, the confrontation with ideologies irreducible to the doctrinal framework outlined by Islam, and the pre-existence of an administrative apparatus that had grown enormous over the long decades passed, everywhere, under the guidance of secular and Westernized governments, ultimately profoundly influenced the political agenda of fundamentalist movements. Thus, in the 20th century, for the first time, the ancient dream of creating an authentic Islamic state abandoned precepts and oral literature to take on a clearly political form.

Following the events of 1979, fundamentalism finally reached remote Afghanistan. Revolting against the ideological excesses of the communist regime and the intervention of Soviet forces, the mujahideen based their ideology on the Pashtun ethical code and religious traditionalism, but lacked the complete rejection of every aspect of Western culture that animated the Taliban. With the exception of female equality, which had long been neglected even by Western progressive movements, concepts such as religious tolerance (e.g., toward neighboring Shiites) and the superiority of elected institutions were not necessarily opposed by the mujahideen, who actually recognized their continuity with traditional Pashtun culture.

Under the Taliban, however, fundamentalist idealism took a quantum leap, marked by absolute radicalization. Even before the destruction of the Bamiyan statues in 2001, the spectacle of stadiums transformed into gallows, the swollen faces of adulteresses distorted by stoning, and public amputations for common crimes like theft, gripped the country in total shock, a shock that Western observers, however, struggled to register. The images of women who only fifteen years earlier had dressed in Western clothing suddenly seemed as distant in time as the refined tunics of the era of the caliphs. Veiled from top to bottom, Afghan women were barred from all professions and education. Although justified by the Taliban through religious references, events like these were entirely new in Afghan history. Regardless of what the Taliban wanted to make people believe, the rigors of their rule had no precedent in the country's political tradition, for which they constituted an explosive and traumatic novelty.

The attention paid by Mullah Omar's followers to external signs of adherence to the new regime is perhaps the clearest example of the distance between the conservatism of the mujahideen and the revolutionary fundamentalism of the Taliban. In photographs from the war against the Red Army, black coiffures are sparsely displayed among the mountain fighters; rather than the eyes sharpened by veils from the Arabian Nights, the rounded, domestic forms of the traditional pakol dominate; rather than the rough, pointed beards of the Arabian Desert ascetic, for almost the entire duration of the war, the very worldly mustache of a family man completes the rustic uniform of the fighter for the faith. The mujahideen stands sentry, dressed as he happens to be and armed as he can; unlike the Taliban, he rarely has time to devote to his beard, or clothing to choose from.

And how could the devout traditionalist, unable to see that crescents illuminate the nights and angels shape the clouds, ever long for an eternity of orgies and rapes without trembling with horror and fear at the promise of endless sin?
Mujahideen fighters in the mountains of Kunar province, early 1980s. Note, in addition to their physical appearance, the obsolete equipment of most of them, equipped almost exclusively with single-shot rifles and completely lacking any offensive weapons against armored vehicles. – AP Photo