RESISTING THE TALIBAN AND TALIBANISM IN AFGHANISTAN: LEGACIES OF A CENTURY OF INTERNAL COLONIALISM AND COLD WAR POLITICS IN A BUFFER STATE

Year 2000, Volume: 5 Issue: 4, 0 - 0, 01.12.2000

M Nazif Shahranı

Abstract

The Afghanistan people's jihad victory over the Afghan Communist regimes and their Soviet Russian patrons, which lasted for a decade and a half 1978-1992 , turned quickly into a bitterly disappointing inter-ethnic sectarian war of all against all, culminating in new foreign proxy wars and the rising menace of Talibanism, which is threatening peace and stability in Central and southwestern Asia. Explanations of why the Afghan Mujahidin did not could not? translate their signal military triumph into a national political success have for the most part focused on the impact of external forces shaping events following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. For example, Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Byman assert: "As the United States departed [after the withdrawal of Soviet Red Army from Afghanistan in February 1989], a vicious civil war spread throughout the country. Once the Soviet-backed regime fell, war, anarchy and fragmentation followed. The conflict became increasingly one of ethnic and sectarian groups, particularly Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and the Shiah Hazaras. ... The war also became a proxy war between Iran and Pakistan, with each power backing different factions."1 The role of outside powers and foreign forces in the factional wars of the post-jihad period 1992 to the present , while undeniable, is also more fully documented

References

• 1 Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Byman, 'Afghanistan: the Consolidation of a Rogue State', Washington Quarterly, 23:1 winter 2000, p. 67.
• 2 See: Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Yale University Press, 2000; and various authors in William Maley (ed.), Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, C. Hurst, London, 1998.
• 3 Two important exceptions are: Olivier Roy, Afghanistan: from Holy War to Civil War, Darwin Press Inc., Princeton, New Jersey, 1995. Roy examines the evolving relationship between the notions of qawm (language, kinship, sectarian and locality based solidarity groups or ethnicity) and ideologically organised Islamist political groupings during and a couple of years immediately following the Afghan Jihad. And David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier, University of California Press, Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1996. Edwards blames the co-existence of three sets of contradictory and incompatible moral codes - honour based ultraindividualism (nang), the universalist moral principles of Islam, and the rules of state and kingship - that underpins Afghan society.
• 4 See, Zalmay Khalilzad, Daniel Byman, Elie D. Krakowski and Don Ritter, US Policy in Afghanistan: Challenges & Solutions, Afghanistan Foundation White Paper, Washington DC, 1999, p. 7.
• 5 Parts of my argument on this theme are taken from: Nazif Shahrani, 'The Taliban Enigma: PersonCentered Politics & Extremism in Afghanistan', ISIM Newsletter, 6, pp. 20-21, 2000, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden, The Netherlands
• 6 For a description and analysis of this phenomena see the classic ethnography of Fredrik Barth, Political Leadership among Swat Pathans. London: Athlone Press, 1959.
• 7 Eric Wolf, Europe and People without History, University of California Press, Berkeley: UC Press, 1982 p. 94. For a further development of this idea, see M. Nazif Shahrani, 'State Building and Social Fragmentation in Afghanistan: a Historical Perspective', in Ali Banuzizi and Myron Weiner (eds.), The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 23-74.
• 8 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see M. Nazif Shahrani, 'State Building and Social Fragmentation in Afghanistan: a Historical Perspective', in Ali Banuzizi and Myron Weiner (eds.), ibid., pp. 23-74.
• 9 See: Sayed Askar Mousavi, The Hazaras of Afghanistan: an Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study, St Martin Press, New York, 1997; Hassan Poladi, Hazaras, Mughal Publishing Co., Stockton, California, 1989; and M. Hasan Kawun Kakar, Government and Society in Afghanistan: the Reign of Amir 'Abd al-Rahman Khan, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 1979.
• 10 See: Nancy Tapper, 'The Advent of Pushtun Maldars in North-western Afghanistan', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 36(1), 1973, pp. 55-79; and Jon Anderson and Richard F. Strand (eds.), Ethnic Processes and Intergroup Relations in Contemporary Afghanistan, Asia Society, Afghanistan Council, New York, Occasional Paper No. 15, 1978.
• 11 See Sayyid Abdulebir Azmi, Amir-i Bukahara, Gaziantep, Turkey 1367/1997, pp. 49.
• 12 For a detailed discussion of these questions, see M. Nazif Shahrani, 'Pining for Bukhara in Afghanistan: Poetics and Politics of Identity and Exilic Emotions'. Presented to an invited panel on Population Movements in the Middle East, Past and Present: Politics, Ecology, and Cultural Identity, at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, 2-6 December 1998.
• 13 See Afifi, Muhammad Ibrahim, 'Mukhtasaraki Khaterat, bakhsh duwum' (Minutia of Memoirs, part two), Omaid Weekly, 244, 1996, p. 4. Also see Muhammad Isma'il Mushfiq, 'Hatam Beg (Atam Beg) Cheguna ba Shahadat Raseed' (How was Hatam Beg [one of Ibrahim Beg's well known commanders] Martyred?), Andisha, 7, 1372/1993, pp. 18-23, published in Mazar-e Sharif, northern Afghanistan.
• 14 See Kamoloudin Najmudinovich Abdoullaev, 'Central Asian Refugees: a Historical Retrospective,' Central Asian Monitor, 5, 1994, p. 26.
• 15 Reported in Andisha (Reflection/Mistrust), a short-lived journal published by the Junbushi Milli-i Islami Afghanistan (National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan), in Mazar-e Sharif during General Abdul Rashid Dostum's semi-independent rule (1992-1997/8) in parts of Afghan Turkistan. See 'Wazir Muhammad Gulkhan Muhmand wa Karnamaha-i Fashisti Uo' (Minister Muhammad Gulkhan Muhmand and His Fascistic Legacies), Andisha, 1372/1993, No. 6, pp. 16-43, and No. 7, pp. 24-28.
• 16 See Audery Shalinsky, Long Years of Exile: Central Asian Refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan, University Press of America, 1994.
• 17 Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City: the Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis, Boston: Little, Brown, 1970, p. 85.
• 18 A policy that created large numbers of provinces and district units in Pashtun inhabited areas for relatively small numbers of people while creating fewer such electoral units in non-Pashtun areas with larger populations.
• 19 For further details on the desirability of community based self-governance as a means of resolving the civil war in Afghanistan, see M. Nazif Shahrani, 'The Future of the State and the Structure of Community Governance in Afghanistan', in William Maley (ed.), Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, Hurst and Company, London, 1998, pp. 212-242.
• 20 Lahaouari Addi, 'The Islamist Challenge: Religion and Modernity in Algeria', Journal of Democracy, 3, October 1992, p. 4.
• 21 For a discussion of this general tendency in Islamist political movements and the history of Islamic states, see Fatima Mernissi, 'Arab Women's Rights and Muslim State in the Twenty-first Century: Reflections on Islam as Religion and State', in Mahnaz Afkhami (ed.), Faith & Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, Syracuse University Press, 1995, pp. 36.
• 22 For details of the involvement of these two countries and others in the region see Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000; and William Maley (ed.), Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban. London: Hurst & Company, 1998.
• 23 For example, at the end of the long wars of succession in 1880 when Amir Abdur Rahman, the so called 'Iron Amir' assumed power and, in the 1929 civil war, Nadir Shah came to power, both with patronage from British India and the discourse of jihad against their real and presumed enemies.