AFGHANISTAN – INGOVERNABILE MERAVIGLIA 2ª PARTE
I TALEBANI
Like many other aspects of the country's current conditions, the history of the Taliban begins during the long war between Afghans and the Soviets in the 1980s (1979-89), following the military intervention of the USSR to aid the shaky communist government, which had come to power shortly before through a coup d'état.
At first, the military intervention of what was then, in the decade that had seen the American war machine repeatedly humiliated in Vietnam, the world's greatest superpower, seemed to achieve its goal. The communist government ensured that Soviet armored columns found the doors open everywhere in the country's major cities, and within a few weeks, with connections between Moscow and Kabul re-established, the operation seemed to be a success, yet another success achieved by the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s at the expense of its great rival, busy licking its wounds.
Outside Kabul, Kandahar, and the other major cities, in the escarpments and deserts of the hinterland, the rural population seemed forced to endure the Soviet presence and the regime it propped up with resigned humiliation. Not even the famous holy warriors, the mujahideen, could do much against the bulk of the imposing Soviet bear. In the early stages of the conflict, courage was all the Afghans could muster against the exuberant weaponry of the Red Army, watching helplessly as it carved its way around the Hindu Kush, barely disturbed by the echo of solitary rifle shots hurled from the mountains.
It must also be said that 1979 also saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which, during the ten years it lasted, prompted Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries to send armed militants to Afghanistan to fight against communism and atheism. This gave rise to the Taliban groups that brought so much unhappiness to the region.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
The territories controlled by the Red Army are shown in red. The other colors indicate the areas controlled by various mujahideen groups.
However, contrary to initial expectations, the situation soon took a turn unexpected by the high authorities in Moscow. The Americans, Saudis, and Pakistanis, albeit for different purposes, found a singular agreement on the need to expel Soviet influence from Central Asia at all costs, and joined forces to provide aid to the militias operating along the country's northern passes, through which passed the bulk of the supplies needed to maintain the operational capacity of the large Soviet forces now permanently stationed in Afghanistan.
When the Soviets realized they were losing the initiative, when the mujahideen began attacking them with modern assault rifles and previously unseen surface-to-air missiles, supplied to them by the Americans through the mediation of Pakistani intelligence, Moscow decided to reformulate its strategy.
When the highly sophisticated Hind missiles were no longer sufficient to counter the Stinger missiles, the Kremlin also decided to resort to the strategy of attrition, which could be achieved with less expensive means than conventional weapons. It was then that Afghanistan became the minefield we see today.
Mujahideen with Stinger missile launchers
Carcass of Mi-24 (Hind) shot down by mujahideen
The Soviets, however, did not limit themselves to making extensive use of classic anti-personnel mines, but above all employed new-concept prototypes: small devices, with less destructive potential, but much easier to position, since they could easily be dropped on the ground from an airplane, rather than having to be buried, as is necessary with traditional mines, which are too large to go unnoticed.
This new type of mine, perfected starting in the 1950s, could therefore be rapidly disseminated even in terrain like Afghanistan, which is particularly difficult to excavate, without exposing a single man to enemy fire. Even more sinisterly, before being used in Afghanistan, these devices apparently underwent careful revisions, so as to give them a shape that would arouse curiosity, rather than alarm, encouraging the unfortunate unsuspecting who were unfortunate enough to stumble upon them to pick them up, thus triggering the detonator.
The Soviets knew the mujahideen would soon learn to live with this new threat, but they also believed that the youngest and oldest among them would not be as reactive. It was precisely among children that these devices performed best, and for this reason they went down in history as toy mines. And it seems that this was indeed the Kremlin's precise intention: to eliminate the current resistance on the ground and nip the future generation of guerrillas in the bud.
Not even pastures, villages, and farms were spared. Wherever the Soviet helicopters managed to reach, flames and smoke were all the eye could see.
An example of a Soviet toy mine (PFM-1)
Thus, while the Soviets increasingly found themselves shooting at shadows, tactically outmatched despite their superior weapons, the mujahideen now also had to contend with an enemy against which they had no answer. Accustomed as they were to constant tribal warfare, they had never before witnessed such strategies of systematic extermination, and flight was the only recourse they could resort to. Women and children abandoned Afghanistan en masse, seeking refuge in neighboring countries, particularly Pakistan, where the majority could count on the support of other Pashtun tribes. Soon, only the men capable of fighting remained in Afghanistan; with the loss of contact with their families, these men lost the only elements of affection capable of softening, even to a limited extent, the iron ethical code dictated by religion and the harsh life of the mountains.
The years of war, a war whose dynamics resembled those wrought by assassins rather than generals, condemned an entire generation to inexorable dehumanization. It was a psychological shock of unprecedented magnitude, even in a warlike society like Afghanistan's; a shock comparable only to that experienced, in European history, by the generation of the trenches, forced for too long into living conditions so far removed from their idea of normality that they emerged mentally devastated.
Book in hand, rifle on shoulder
While their fathers and brothers fought the infidels in their homeland, the sons of the mujahideen who had taken refuge in Pakistan began to be educated, in special Koranic schools, in the most radical currents of the Sunni faith, often by teachers from the heart of Arabia, the inexhaustible homeland of the most intransigent Islam.
In the Pashtun territory straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan, an immense complex of lodgings, training camps, and indoctrination schools arose, financed by the most religiously hardline states (especially Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and the United States of America, with the precise aim of bolstering the ranks of the faith's fighters as much as possible, to the point that the mujahideen forces became, over the years, increasingly international.
The Pashtun cultural territories between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the network of Afghan refugee camps in Pakistani territory between 1994 and 2001. Laura Canali for Limes
It was precisely in the day-to-day management of this immense operation to support the mujahideen and their children that the Pakistani security service became the true political superpower it is today, and it was in these schools, in the second half of the 1980s, that the core of the Taliban movement was formed. In Pashto and Persian, Taliban (طالبان) actually means students.
The Taliban, in particular, benefited most from this state-within-a-state that was created in Kashmir. Among the plethora of increasingly radical Islamist movements, Pakistani intelligence identified Mullah Omar's future followers as the group most capable of governing Afghanistan after the war. Incredible as it may seem to today's reader, the Pakistani security services chose the Taliban precisely because they were one of the most moderate groups among the many that had formed in the Afghan diaspora.
The Taliban were thus able to find in Pakistan safe bases, substantial funding, and an abundance of potential followers, both among the Afghan refugees crowded into the myriad of camps that dotted the Pashtun territory of western Pakistan, and among the volunteers who began arriving in Pakistan from every corner of the Muslim world to take part in the fight to defend the faith.
It was precisely in the madrasas (schools) of Baluchistan, Western Punjab, and Khyberistan that the mullahs arose who, in the decades that followed, held Afghanistan hostage to the most inflexible religious fundamentalism the Muslim world had witnessed since the days of the great Arab conquests, when even the great caliphs could not help but be horrified by the tales of the atrocities committed by their warriors against the enemies of the faith. Muslim tradition well recalls how Abu Bakr, Muhammad's direct successor as leader of the believers, could only severely rebuke General Khalid al-Walid for the atrocities committed by his soldiers during their victorious campaigns in Palestine, Syria, Armenia, and Mesopotamia.
In the profound silence of the ravines of Afghanistan and in the madrasas of western Pakistan, however, the difficult life of exile, the suffering caused by an atrocious war, the open irreligion of the enemy, the weakness of secular culture, and the constant coming and going of fighters from one side of the border to the other produced an unstoppable tendency toward the religious radicalization of the struggle and its participants, a tendency that did not even spare the Taliban.
Better them than the mujahideen
In the 7th century, as in the 20th, it was primarily spiritual and tactical factors that determined the victor in the struggle for faith. The mujahideen's victory, while certainly indebted to their stubborn determination, also owed much to the key characteristic of their military organization: the complete lack of a unified command. This deficiency made it impossible for the Soviets to defeat the Afghan militias, as each armed band operated completely independently of the others, regardless of any agreements the enemy might have reached with them, or any changes in their strategic position, perhaps as a result of a defeat on the battlefield.
The main mujahideen groups during the war against the Soviets (circa 1985)
Once the struggle for religion was over, however, this same political fragmentation proved fatal for the victors. If the task of restoring order in the country had proved impossible for the massive Soviet military force, which nevertheless lacked the necessary tools for the task, how could militias that were the purest expression of that very fragmentation succeed?
The Soviets, in fact, possessed a perfectly centralized organizational structure, considerable experience in subduing vast, underdeveloped territories hostile to any central government, and their arsenal shone with high-tech vehicles, capable of traversing the vast distances of Asia in a short time. The mujahideen, however, united only by their common enemy, completely lacked any of these tools.
The lack of an institutional apparatus capable of giving a national dimension to the political activities of the various commanders also meant the total lack of any alternative to private vengeance as an instrument of justice, and the impossibility of resorting to tools other than fear as a mechanism for territorial governance. But what the mujahideen lacked above all was a truly shared political vision, a particularly acute deficiency in a society already divided by deep fractures and severely lacking in experiences of unified government lasting longer than the brief lives of a few brilliant tribal leaders.
Thus, the Soviet withdrawal did not mean the end of the war for Afghanistan, and the 1990s were also marked by battles and raids, between the mujahideen and the remnants of the communist government barricaded in Kabul, as well as between the mujahideen militias themselves.
It was precisely during this period that his future captors appeared in the country. Fully supported by Pakistani intelligence, which hoped to use them to install a puppet government in Afghanistan and increase their country's influence in the Muslim political arena, the Taliban quickly established themselves in eastern Afghanistan, winning the population's favor for their ability to establish order without resorting exclusively to military force.
The years spent peering at the mountains through a scope, trembling at the crunch of every stone, without the possibility of receiving replacements, without any contact with their families, and with death as their only companion, had accustomed the mujahideen to violence to such an extent that they could no longer do without it. When they crossed the western border into Pakistan in 1994 to return to their home country, the Afghan civilian population, exhausted by the war and the daily feuds between the mujahideen factions, welcomed the arrival of these captivating individuals with their ever-ready retort, considering them a more honest and forgiving alternative to the violent mountain fighters.
Compared to their mujahideen rivals, unable to provide a real alternative to the imminent collapse of the communist government in Kabul, the Taliban possessed several strategic advantages:
They had had at their disposal the best Quranic education that money could buy;
They had a common political vision;
They had no history in the feuds of robbery and murder that pitted the mujahideen gangs against each other;
They had behind their backs, across the border, in safe territory, a perfectly oiled recruitment and indoctrination system.
Strengthened by popular support, especially in the southeastern part of the country, dominated by other Pashtuns like themselves, the Taliban managed to expel from Kabul in 1996 the remnants of the communist government, by then abandoned by Moscow to its fate, and by 1998 their power was consolidated enough to allow the warriors in black to launch their last major offensive towards the northern plains, which the Hazaras and Tajiks had practically isolated from the rest of the country.
Map of Afghanistan during the Taliban's first takeover (the names of their respective leaders are in brackets)
The capture of the northern plains, covered with vast opium poppy plantations, was probably even more important than that of the capital. From then on, opium became the main source of funding for the Taliban regime, which proved capable of providing funds virtually limited only by the meager amount of arable land afforded by the mountains and mines.
Beyond laying the groundwork for the Taliban's seizure of power in Afghanistan, however, the jihad's victory over the Soviet invaders marked a momentous turning point for the entire fundamentalist front. Thanks in part to the unique political dynamics of the Cold War, the struggle unfolding in Afghanistan took on an international dimension never before seen in the Muslim world, not even during the Crusades. Never before had so many volunteers from every corner of the Muslim world flocked to participate in the armed struggle in defense of the faith for such a sustained period.
Moreover, the Mujahideen's victory demonstrated that, under the right circumstances—a territory capable of reducing the enemy's technological advantage, the full support of the population, and a significant influx of foreign aid, in terms of both men and materials and money—it was possible for ultraconservative Islamism to triumph even against a nuclear superpower.
Thanks to the mujahideen, the Muslim world had finally defeated the secular West, and with a complete triumph. The victory in Afghanistan against the materialist and atheistic Soviet Union (and later against the other remaining great superpower) gave credibility to Islamism, trained millions of young people in armed struggle, with tactics capable of nullifying the West's technological advantage, and spread militant fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world, because the young people who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, at the end of the conflict, exported jihad to their countries of origin.
A map of the main Islamist groups and their respective areas of activity
It was precisely the success of the mujahideen guerrilla warfare that convinced the other ultraconservative forces in the Muslim world to go on the offensive, rather than limiting themselves to actions that were criminal in nature but lacking a truly military and systematic dimension (such as kidnappings for ransom and drug trafficking).
Osama bin Laden was merely the luckiest of these terror warriors; his career also began in Afghanistan, as an officer of that immense paramilitary complex. Without the mujahideen's victory in Afghanistan, neither al-Qaeda nor ISIS would ever have become the transnational movements capable of controlling vast swathes of territory and organizing attack after attack in the heart of Western capitals.
A country held hostage
It seemed the Taliban didn't want us to do anything. They had even banned one of our favorite board games, played with tokens on a wooden board. We heard that they had heard little girls laughing and making noise in a room and had come in to destroy the board. It seemed they saw us women as little dolls to be controlled, told what to do and what not to do, and how to dress. But I thought that if God had wanted us this way, he wouldn't have made us so different.
Malala Yousafzai
The Taliban's seizure of power brought about a series of radical changes in every aspect of daily life in Afghanistan. Central to their political vision was the belief that the survival of Muslim communities, and above all their freedom from Western control, required a radical restructuring of society, a true refoundation, to be implemented under the strictest interpretation of the most radical Koranic doctrine, Salafism.
It is essentially an ideology hostile to every aspect of Western culture.
Where the latter supports the need for the secularization of social and institutional relations, Salafism intends to anchor both to religious moralism;
Where the West makes the lack of constraints imposed on individuals the foundation of its entire material and spiritual culture, Salafism counters with a vision of individuals as mere joints of the social body, devoid of real value if detached from it, like fingers torn from hands;
While the West considers emotional fulfillment the ultimate goal of life, understood in purely earthly terms, Salafism maintains that it consists in accessing paradise, attainable only through ironclad moral conduct. Freedom and self-satisfaction on the one hand, belonging and self-control on the other.
Once in power, the Taliban quickly established a body of law consistent with their beliefs, entrusting the fundamental task of regulating relationships between the various branches of society to their own version of sharia, the law inspired by the purest interpretation of the Koran.
Here are some examples of the rules that Afghans had to abide by from 1996 to 2001, and which they will likely have to reacquaint themselves with soon:
All citizens are required to pray five times a day; anyone caught doing anything else during those hours will be beaten.
All men must wear beards, at least a hand's breadth below the chin; anyone who does not comply will be beaten;
All children must wear a turban: black for elementary school students, white for high school students, and they are required to wear Islamic dress; regardless of the season, shirts must be buttoned completely up to the neck.
Singing, dancing, playing cards, gambling, chess, and even flying kites are prohibited.
It is forbidden to write books, watch films and paint.
If you steal, your hand will be cut off; if you steal again, your foot will be cut off as well.
If you are not a Muslim, you will be beaten and then imprisoned if you are caught practicing your religion in places where other Muslims can see you.
If you are caught converting a Muslim to your faith you will be executed.
If you convert (apostasy, that is, betrayal of faith), you will be punished by death.
Doubt is a sin and free debate is an expression of heresy.
As for women, whom the mujahideen's traditionalism would have simply forced, at most, a return to their colorful traditional clothing, the Taliban stripped away not only any freedom that modernization had granted them, but also all the opportunities for expression afforded them by tradition itself. In addition to the transplantation of the full-face veil from the Arabian Peninsula, the burqa, women were subjected to all sorts of prohibitions:
Prohibition on leaving the house alone, and obligation, in case of necessary outing, even just to go to the hospital, to be accompanied by a male relative (mahram);
Ban on speaking in public and even on laughing;
No makeup, jewelry, or even the slightest bit flashy clothing;
Ban on working outside the home, studying, and appearing on television;
Prohibition of obtaining higher education;
Before long, Afghan women, whose beauty had come to outweigh even the iron discipline of 19th-century British military discipline, found themselves in a situation comparable, in Western history, only to that of the Jews in Germany in 1935.
Afghan women in traditional dress.
But although the Taliban claim the opposite, the Islamic law they established does not draw its precepts exclusively from the Koran and the Sunnah (the doctrinal elaboration of the very brief Koranic prescriptions); rather, it combines these sources with many customs from the Pashtunwali, the informal code that regulates the concept of honor among the Pashtuns.
The existence of legally binding prohibitions (i.e., sanctioned) even for acts that do not materially impact the legal sphere of others, and the lack of equality of legal subjects before the law, are not the only aspects that alienate Sharia from Western legal culture. The interpretation and application of the precepts of Taliban Sharia, in fact, depend exclusively on individual muftis (or fuqaha, scholars of Islamic law), who issue a ruling (fatwa) containing the provisions to be implemented. In the complete absence of any centralization or coordination among judges, including the transcription of rulings, which are merely read aloud, the application of these same rules often differs from area to area. Naturally, judges' rulings cannot be appealed, nor can they be reviewed by different judges, a possibility that exists in other systems, such as Pakistan, which are also based on Sharia.
And in most cases, the judges themselves are also responsible for carrying out the sentences, which almost always involve corporal punishment based on the typically religious concept of atoning for the sin committed against the community through physical pain.
This, then, is the particular response that the ultraconservative Muslim world has produced in Afghanistan to put an end to the political decline it perceived, as in the rest of the Islamic world, throughout the 20th century. The fruit of a genuine political revolution no less than the Iranian regime, the Islamic state established in Afghanistan has ultimately taken a wholly unique form, profoundly different from that of the state created in revolutionary Iran, which still today constitutes the most direct comparison with the reality across the border.
While in Iran, following contact with the country's political and social reality, the original radicalism has cooled, the isolation in which the war has kept Afghanistan has, on the contrary, meant that it has continued to expand ever more.
Although Iran has also imposed traditional dress on both men and women, Tehran has never stripped women of their professions, education, or property, nor has it stripped the country of elected institutions accountable to citizens. It took the Taliban just five years to plunge the country into terror and despair.
While Tehran has agreed to open up to Western technology and, even if only to a limited extent, to the social reshuffling that it entails, by implementing institutional and social reforms and launching its own research and development programs, Mullah Omar's Afghanistan has refused any contact with modernization, slipping into hunger and almost irreparable poverty.
Having risen to power thanks to popular and Pakistani support precisely because of their moderation, the Taliban quickly lost all semblance of the moral superiority they had managed to gain. They managed, for a time, to bring some semblance of order to a country torn apart by war and hunger, but with their growing radicalism and involvement in international arms and drug trafficking, they quickly lost the trust placed in them, ending up lording it over a resigned and terrified country.
Of their original ancestry, only the tribal one was able to withstand the second test of arms. With the arrival of the Americans in 2001, only the Pashtuns of its west continued to support Mullah Omar's forces. The rest of the country, however, surrendered without hesitation to NATO forces, casting off their turbans and burqas with the same relief with which a traveler frees his foot from a too-tight boot.
Only the same mistakes of the past prevented the Taliban's complete collapse. The abandonment of rural areas, the murderous patrols of American drones, and the rampant corruption in central bureaucracies prevented the democratic governments that came to power after 2001 from once and for all eliminating the Taliban's support base. As in the early 1990s, the villages of the Hindu Kush had to face the reality that the Taliban were the lesser evil for their future. The total disorganization of central institutions, especially the army, did the rest.
The new Taliban, in power since last August, have nevertheless proven different from their predecessors. By sitting at major international forums (such as in Doha, the usual venue for the OECD), by navigating social media, and by granting interviews even to Western or pro-Western journalists, this second generation of Taliban has asserted its desire to leave behind the sinister politics of the past and demonstrated its understanding of the need to embrace Westernization, at least in terms of its technology and language.
Even in their own governance, the new Taliban have implemented local management systems that, for better or worse, have met the needs of the rural population much better than the programs of previous democratic governments, and it is clear that, with or without a rifle in hand, the mullah's warriors are back to stay.
A few months after taking power, however, the scant news filtering out of the country paints a very different picture than the one proclaimed to the cameras on the eve of their assault on the capital. Hastily evacuated by international development workers and with Western financial aid blocked until further notice, the country has collapsed in less than 100 days, and the only rising statistics are the refugee numbers and incidents of violence and intimidation against women, who, after all, never had any illusions about what lay ahead.
Only time will tell whether we are facing a regime willing to embrace Iran's lessons, even to a limited extent, even if only in part, or simply a fundamentalism that conceals behind more pop-culture overtones the renewed intransigence induced by victory.