This book came out at an important time, exactly one year before 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. It was the product of several decades of travel, correspondence, and research by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. At several moments in his career, he had wanted to write a book on Central Asia; with the Taliban’s sudden rise to power, he finally had the reason.
The rise of the Taliban seemed pretty implausible. The movement was started by Muhammad Omar, a man of little-to-no standing who had fought with the Mujahideen against the Soviets. When he gave up the insurgency he turned towards Islam, establishing a madrassa (an Islamic school) with himself as the teacher. Shy, uninspiring, parochial, of powerful convictions but limited intelligence and education, Omar was an unlikely leader. Neverthless, he succeeded where others had failed, tapping into public outrage against the warlords who ruled Afghanistan: openly corrupt, ruling purely in self-interest, they did not even feign observation to the public good, nor to Islam.
Omar’s movement gained ground by kicking the warlords out of town and administering a strict, Deobandi-inspired form of Islamic justice. With logistics routes under their control, the Taliban were able to cash-in on the profits made by trucking cartels and opium smugglers. They established a loose network of madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, from which devoted students were called up to fight the jihad.
In a way, the Taliban were modernisers. The old warlords legitimated their rule through tribal connections, personal charisma and cunning, and the evocation of Pashtunwali, the traditional Pashtun way of doing things. The Taliban were different. Although their popular support was also largely a Pashtun phenomenon, the movement put Islam first. Its soldiers and commanders were historically ignorant; they knew little to nothing of their country’s past, its history and its heritage; most had never known anything other than war.
While the Taliban checked the inter-tribal Pashtun squabbles, they failed to make inroads with the rest of the country, especially with the Hazaras of the north. They also refused to actually govern, proclaiming themselves a purely religious movement. Their ideal of governance was to simply purge the ruling class of those who were (in their eyes) disobedient of Islam. God would take care of the rest.
I got a sense that the Taliban were—in those days at least—fairly amateurish. They knew little beyond small villages and the self-contained world of the madrassa. They had no grasp of international politics. They burnt unnecessary bridges with foreign dignitaries by spurning or ignoring their offers and communications, sometimes for such trivial reasons like that no-one had bothered to pick up the phone. When the movement finally rolled in to Kabul, its rule was more like a military occupation than a change of regime.
One thing Rashid never makes clear is how the Taliban, who sought to purify society, justified their profits from the opium trade. On many occasions, their deeds were at odds with their words. For a movement sustained on outrage against the corrupt elites, how did they keep the moral high-ground? Was it just a case of them capturing the madrassas, thus ensuring a pipeline of devoted followers childhood-to-madrassa-to-battlefield? I’m thinking here of something like how Shaka Zulu monopolised reproduction and upbringing, training boys from birth to be fierce, obedient warriors in pursuit of the cause.
This is not a bad book, although it has dated poorly, almost beyond the point of relevance or enjoyment. Rashid is obviously well-researched. He will often explain X person or Y event by appealing to the fact that he was there when it happened. He has a deep grounding in Afghanistan and the broader conflicts of Central Asia. Still, the writing is a bit too factual, with little synthesis or narrative to communicate Rashid’s obvious insight. A lot has happened since 2000; hell, a lot has happened since 2021, when the Taliban came back to power. As impressive as this book must have been on its release, it is now probably too limited in scope to be worth your while.