Who Are Those Guys: Quick Overview of the Taliban

Hunter killer drone strikes in Pakistan are directly linked to the war in Afghanistan but I suspect that most Americans have little understanding of who is fighting there and why.  Many of us could identify “The Taliban” as the enemy (especially if it was a multiple choice question) but would find it very hard to explain who they are and why our government has felt it necessary to fight them for the past 10 years.

The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a excellent example of a colonial border that is little more than a line drawn on a map arbitrarily dividing members of an existing society.  The border does exist, there are check points along the roads and soldiers who will question you if you want to go visit friends and family and who have to be avoided or bribed if your business is taking untaxed or illegal merchandise from one side to the other, but it is more of  an inconvenient fiction than a true division.  People think of themselves as members of their extended families, their village societies, and the broader clans and groups that make up the community of Pashtu speaking traditional people and not as citizens of Pakistan or Afghanistan.  The idea that I am Pakistani and my mother’s brother’s son who lives in the next valley over is a citizen of Afghanistan and therefore a foreigner is nonsensical.

Much of the Pakistani army is stationed in this northeastern section of the country to maintain order.  But the central government in Islamabad is far away and leaves everyday governance and economic life to traditional leaders in the villages. On the Afghan side the central government is even further away and even more irrelevant.

The outside world intruded heavily in Pashtun life in the 1980s when the Soviet Union sent its military into Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime.  Resistance to foreign forces was fierce across Afghanistan and refugees flooded into northeast Pakistan.

The United States framed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as part of the Cold War and sought proxies to fight the Red Army.  Anti-communist, anti-Russian Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, framed the invasion as atheists assaulting Islam.  Pakistan framed the invasion as India’s ally, the USSR, threatening Pakistan’s security.  The result was the emergence of the Taliban as the largest and most well supported opposition force.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency became the primary conduit for money and weapons from the U.S. and Persian Gulf states to anti-Soviet fighters.  The ISI is a highly secretive, quite autonomous branch of the military that combines many of the functions of the CIA, special operations forces, and the FBI.  The ISI recruited young men from refugee camps, from villages along the border with Afghanistan and incorporated a wave of volunteers from the Middle East  to create a very effective guerrilla force that could launch operations in Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan.  Saudi Arabia also supplied a number of religious leaders who set up schools in refugee camps and worked with potential fighters to promulgate a particularly austere and conservative version of Islam.

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan,

• the foreign fighters left, some to become Al Qaeda;
• the Taliban triumphed in the chaotic melee among different ethnic groups contending for power in Afghanistan and the dominant faction, influenced by the Saudi version of Islam,  instituted a government mirroring life in the most rural and reactionary villages;
• the Taliban regime provided a refuge for its erstwhile allies in Al Qaeda who had been chased out of their camps in Sudan;
• the ISI retained its close ties to its proteges

Very few people outside the ISI shed any tears when the United States attacked the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after 9/11 to remove Al Qaeda’s major ally.  The regime was notorious for oppression, mindless assaults on its own cultural heritage, and defiance of the international community and was beset by a powerful insurgency which was motivated largely by traditional rivalries and resentment of Pashtun dominance.  The U.S. and NATO forces tipped the balance and presided over the installation of a new Afghan regime which had to struggle from the beginning for both legitimacy and effective control. 

It is a question for another day, a classic “woulda coulda shoulda” question, to decide how different Afghanistan would have been if the U.S. had not almost immediately launched the war in Iraq, if there had been a strong and consistent focus on the civilian side of national development and building effective governance institutions, if we could have avoided becoming perceived as yet another band of foreigners trying to impose a corrupt and intrusive regime.  The fact is that is how the situation came to be defined. 

It is convenient to lump all the groups fighting against us under the rubric “Taliban” and to perceive all of Afghanistan as a single combat zone.  American strategy is more complicated than that and we do, at least at times, recognize that there are divisions and factions within the coalition that is opposing us.  The most important groups are Pashtun, motivated as much by xenophobe as religious or social values and their ability to rest and regroup in Pakistan’s tribal areas is critical.  And the most important groups have some kind of relationship with Pakistan’s ISI.

There are two optimistic scenarios for the end of American direct combat in Afghanistan.  One is that the investment in training the Afghan army and national police pays off and the Karzai government can survive.  The other is that the U.S. and the Karzai regime can split their opponents and negotiate a power sharing agreement with enough factions within the Taliban to block the most extreme leaders and the groups most under the sway of the ISI from returning to power.  The drone attacks are seen by the Obama administration as supporting either of those happy outcomes.