Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2000, pages 105-106

Book Review

Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia

By Ahmed Rashid, Yale University Press, 2000, 274 pp. List: $27.50; AET: $21.

Reviewed by Lucy Jones

When the Taliban seized control of the Afghan capital Kabul in 1996, very few people knew anything about the movement. The Taliban had only come into existence in 1994. Then it had swept through Afghanistan from its base in Kandahar in the south at breakneck speed. As the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar put it: “We took five months to capture one province but then six provinces fell to us in only 10 days.”

Little is known about the Taliban because, perhaps with the exception of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, it is the most secretive movement in the world today. A ban on photography and television means that nobody knows what its leaders look like. The Taliban’s one-eyed leader has never met with journalists or Western diplomats.

Yet the Taliban and its interpretation of the shariah law, which leads it to prevent girls from attending school and women from working, has grabbed plenty of headlines. From Tehran to Luxembourg, women’s groups have taken up the cause of Afghan women. Luminaries such as Hillary Clinton have joined the fray. She condemned Taliban policy in 1999 as “the destruction of the spirit of these women.” America’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently described the Taliban’s treatment of women as “despicable.”

But there has been little in-depth analysis of the movement which now rules 90 percent of Afghanistan. That was until a Pakistani journalist and long-time Afghan expert, Ahmed Rashid, wrote Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia published this May.

Rashid begins in March 1997 at the sweltering Kandahar football stadium. A few weeks earlier, the Taliban had lifted its ban on soccer. Seizing the opportunity to encourage this apparent thawing of the Taliban’s ban on entertainment, the United Nations aid agencies rushed in to rebuild the stands and seats of the bombed-out stadium.

But no inaugural game ever took place. There was an inaugural execution instead. It’s events such as these, Rashid points out, that have made the Taliban as controversial in the Islamic world as in the West.

Rashid gives a history of the Taliban, in part told through a long-time Taliban member, the governor of Kandahar, Mullah Mohammed Hassan Rehmani, who has a Long John Silver-style wooden peg leg which is badly chipped as a result of negotiating the rocky terrain outside his office. (It’s “color” like this that makes Taliban read more like a thriller than a current affairs book.)

We are told that until the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan in 1979 the Islamists barely had a foothold in Afghan society. But with money and arms from the CIA they built one that gave them tremendous clout.

Meanwhile the “traditionalists” (who were more secular and had largely supported the Soviets) and the Islamists fought so mercilessly that by 1994 there were few leaders from either side remaining, leaving the path clear for a new wave of even more extreme Islamists—the Taliban.

A “talib” is an Islamic student. As most of Mullah Omar’s supporters in 1994 were part-time or full-time students at madrassas, Islamic schools, and more were later to come from the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, the name “Taliban” stuck.

But while the Taliban has been criticized by the West and by some Islamic nations, Rashid goes some way in explaining its appeal. The warlords continued to rule their respective patches following the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, in some cases acting as they pleased. There were cases of indiscriminate murder, corruption and rape. The Taliban offered an end to all this. As Rashid writes: “Omar emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. He asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system.”

Rashid also gives us some notion of how this feared organization operates day-to-day. Its preferred mode of transport is Japanese two-door pick up trucks and its treasury consists of U.S. dollars stuffed into tin trunks which reside next to Mullah Omar. While the “religious police” are busy measuring beards on the streets (men must grow beards the length of a fist), ministers work without paper or computers.

But the Taliban, Rashid demonstrates, knows well how to bribe pugnacious warlords and to fight. It has also received assistance from neighboring Pakistan. Between 1997 and 1998, Pakistan provided the Taliban with an estimated $30 million, and since 1994 has given it invaluable political support. Rashid questions whether this pro-Taliban policy will later return to haunt Pakistan.

He says some of its intelligence officers have now become “more Taliban than the Taliban,” and that, in fact, there has been a degree of “Talibanization” of Pakistan. “The Taliban was not providing strategic depth to Pakistan, but Pakistan was providing strategic depth to the Taliban,” he writes.

The Taliban’s policy toward women is extreme, Rashid reports. Women must “refrain from hitting their shoes on the ground, which makes noises,” says one Taliban edict. They must wear the burkha, a cloak which covers every inch of the body (including the eyes). They cannot work or wear makeup or nail polish. Men must “refrain from clapping” at sports events, and instead chant “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great).

The vast majority of Afghans feel repressed by these policies, according to Rashid, and are demoralized by the Islamic world’s unwillingness to condemn the Taliban. (Iran, however, has criticized the Taliban since the deaths of Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan in 1998.)

Rashid also examines the Taliban’s booming heroin trade. According to some estimates, more than 80 percent of the heroin in Europe comes from Afghanistan. But Afghan poppy production is having an impact closer to home. The Iranian government admits to having 1.2 million addicts. Pakistan had virtually no heroin addicts in 1979, but by 1999 had an estimated 5 million.

There is also the issue of Osama bin Laden, the dissident Saudi Arabian who is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, and the terrorist activity he is thought to have instigated. We learn from Rashid that between 1982 and 1992 more than 35,000 Muslim radicals (including Bin Laden) from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East traveled to Afghanistan to fight for the Mujaheddin (funded by the CIA) against the Soviets. It was the first time these ardent Muslims from such diverse nations had studied, trained and fought together.

“None of the intelligence agencies involved wanted to consider the consequences of bringing together thousands of Islamic radicals from all over the world,” Rashid writes. “American citizens only woke up to the consequences when Afghanistan-trained Islamic militants blew up the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.”

The holding up of Bin Laden as the man behind many terrorist attacks worldwide, continues Rashid, “was the Clinton administration desperately looking for a diversion as it wallowed through the mire of the Monica Lewinsky affair and needing an all-purpose, simple explanation for unexplained terrorist acts. Bin Laden became the center of what was promulgated by Washington as a global conspiracy against the U.S.” Rashid then makes the point that no one in the White House was prepared to admit that the CIA-funded Afghan jihad had spawned dozens of fundamentalist movements across the Muslim world.

Rashid coined the phrase “the new Great Game” in 1997 when he wrote a cover story for the Far Eastern Economic Review on the oil and gas pipeline battle emerging in the region since the republics of Central Asia achieved independence from Moscow in 1991. Successive U.S. oil companies have competed with an Argentine oil company, Bridas, for rights to build a pipeline through Afghanistan from Chardzhou in northern Turkmenistan to Gwadar in Pakistan. But none has succeeded.

“It was clear that no U.S. company could build an Afghan pipeline with issues such as the Taliban’s gender policy, Bin Laden and the continuing fighting,” Rashid writes. “U.S. policy appeared to have come full circle, from unconditionally accepting the Taliban to unconditionally rejecting them.”

In conclusion, Rashid says, the new Great Game must be one where the aim is to stabilize and settle the region, not increase tensions. In its present form, the Taliban is unlikely to be recognized by the international community. However, the rise of the Taliban means Western popular perception is increasingly equating Islam with the Taliban and Bin Laden-style terrorism.

“Many Western commentators do not particularize the Taliban, but condemn Islam wholesale for being intolerant and anti-modern,” Rashid writes. Fundamentalism, drugs, weapons and social breakdown are spilling out of the country. In short, Afghanistan cannot be ignored because the stakes are too high.

Taliban is a compelling read. Rashid certainly knows how to tell a good story. His discussion is peppered with entertaining detail and quotes, but at the same time he provides a thorough treatment of the subject, although the geopolitical discussions are sometimes less interesting than his revelations about the Taliban. To date, Taliban is the only book on this mysterious organization. Fortunately, it is a good one.

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist formerly based in Tashkent.