Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, & the Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Ahmed Rashid)

Behind all wars, Ahmed Rashid contends, are power brokers who remain hidden in shadows. Afghanistan and all that has happened to it is no exception. Bringing his immense and intimate knowledge of the geo-political and spiritual layout of the country to bear, Ahmad Rashid takes us into the brutal and quasi-tragic world of the Taliban. From their meteoric rise fighting against the atrocities of petty warlords, down to their eventual demise at the hands of a United States vengeful over 9-11; the story of the Taliban has many missing pieces that Rashid attempts to plug.

The author rightly begins from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a catastrophic period in which the Taliban had had no part to play. He painstakingly traces the development of a gureilla corps that would later become the Afghan Mujahideen. Actively trained and supported by Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency (ISI), the Mujahideen also presented the Americans with a tantalizing opportunity to deal a serious blow upon its then-Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. Successive American presidencies thus approved the shipment of weapons to Afghanistan, evening the odds of the ragtag Mujahideen against the Soviet army.

The distribution of these weapons by the ISI gave Pakistan incredible leverage over the various political factions in Afghanistan, which followed ethnic and religious lines. Some groups were generously equipped, while others ignored. This dangerous game of favoritism would spell disaster for the Afghan people even after the Soviet occupation ground to a slow, painful halt in 1989.

The jihad against the Stalinist regime was by no means egged on by the United States and Pakistan alone. In the Middle East, Ayutullah Khomeni’s Islamic Revolution alerted many Arabs to the growing power of the Shia sect of Islam. Similar revolutionary ideals spread like wildfire across the Arab countries. Sunnis and Shia alike adopted Ayutullah Khomeni’s line that most Arab governments were in reality Western stooges. This alarmed the region, especially Saudi Arabia, which saw the Shia as apostates. It also became clear that Saudi Arabia could not do without its own "epic war" to fight in the name of Sunni Islam. If anything, such an event would send a clear message to both Shias and Sunnis that the Saudi brand of Islam was here to stay, and that it would be championing under Sunni’ism’s banner. This was a shrewd move because the Saudi regime has not always had an easy relationship with the Sunni orthodoxy.

That is the main reason why Riyadh invests heavily into the vehicle of ‘dawa’, or evangelism. Unlike Christian evangelism, Saudi evangelism totally ignores non-believers, and focuses more on purging what it considers to be "misguided practices" in the Muslim community. From their standpoint, it was perhaps easier to change the Muslim world than to change itself. Money that comes from Saudi Arabia’s immense oil wealth sponsors the building of mosques and the education of Islamic teachers across the whole world. Select groups like the Taliban are bankrolled so that they might attain political power and implement what it regards as the correct form of "shariah" (religious law). It is no coincidence that when such groups do attain political power, society begins to mirror the outward trappings of Saudi Arabia’s own society. The easiest markers to spot are the general degradation of women’s rights, the banning of the spiritual aspect of Islam (Sufism) and the overt repression of Shia Muslims. These actions are gradual. But when they do set in, take on a more extreme appearance than their actual counterparts in Saudi Arabia itself. The dichotomy is easily explained. While Saudi Arabia itself has in recent times tried to moderate its positions over various issues, these reversals move too quickly for ideological movements outside the kingdom to keep up with. Indeed, groups like al-Qaida frequently accuse the Saudi rulers of betraying the original ideals of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, even as they carefully avoid criticizing the Saudi clergy.

Nonetheless, for Saudi Arabia, the lure of establishing its leadership over the global Sunni community, without actually committing its armed forces into the Afghan jihad, was perhaps too great to pass up. Billions of dollars were poured into the Afghan cause. Dreams of martyrdom were kindled and Saudi Arabia, through various organizations, transplanted young Arab men into the Afghan jihad. A significant number of them came from Saudi Arabia. These non-Afghans never really assimilated with the natives, but instead introduced yet another faction into Afghanistan’s already chaotic mix; the Arab Afghans. Fatefully, the legion’s leadership, a prestige meant for a Saudi prince, was instead given to a scion of an important clan. His name was Usama bin Laden.

Usama bin Laden has often been described as an unremarkable man, but I have always suspected this to be a sham. The bin Ladens are a powerful family in Saudi Arabia, made incredibly wealthy by the many construction deals that the Saudi royal family imparts on them. Rashid tells us that Usama’s father had actively supported the Afghan struggle with money. So when Usama decided to join the Mujahideen, his family had responded enthusiastically. Perhaps the family saw in Usama an atonement for the crimes that had been committed earlier by a member of the bin Laden family. A certain Mahrous bin Laden had helped a group of Saudi dissidents take control of the holy grounds in Mecca in 1979. The dissidents, led by Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al Utaibi, had accused the Al Saud dynasty of surrendering its legitimacy through corruption, ostentation and the aggressive implementation of a policy of Westernization. The event, later known as the Grand Mosque Seizure, deeply embarrassed both the Al Saud and the bin Laden families.

Usama often traveled to Afghanistan to meet with local Afghan leaders and bring them Saudi donations. Eventually, Usama wrote in a letter,

"To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan."

The Arab-Afghan legion were not Afghanized Arabs, but people who brought with them their own prejudices and ideologies. Their extreme practices, which they had imported from the Wahhabi environment of Saudi Arabia, made them a hated faction. They found natural allies in the ethnic Pashtuns, who because of their rabid nationalism, shared the Wahhabi dislike for Shia Muslims.

The most striking consequence of the war that eventually drove the Soviets from Afghanistan were the tens of thousands of orphans left stranded in refugee camps. Because of logistical convenience, most of them were situated near or within the borders of Pakistan. This was also the period of explosion for a Pakistani group called the Jamaat-e-Ullema (JUI). Though completely disregarded by the ISI in the beginning, the JUI was to play a far more important role in the aftermath of the Afghan jihad.

The JUI had been originally set up by the Deobandis as a purely religious movement. In 1962, however, Maulana Ghulam Ghaus Hazarvi turned the JUI into a political organization and as a result, it quickly split into several factions. During the Afghan jihad, the fractured JUI, under the leadership of one Maulana Fazlur Rehman consolidated its popular support by establishing madrassas, especially in rural regions and Afghan refugee camps. The latter were run by semi-educated mullahs who were ‘far removed from the original reformist agenda of the Deobandi schools‘. Aside from being heavily influenced by Pashtun-wali, the tribal code of the Pashtuns, the regional mullahs were also indebted to Saudi largesse, which came with the condition that the official Wahhabi creed be dominant.

It was perhaps inevitable that the Taliban would draw its ranks from these male orphans. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of what would become the Taliban, had been particularly outraged by reports of  tribal warlords raping orphan boys. He was increasingly pressured by friends and colleagues to do something about the warlords’ excesses, and so formed a militia. The Pakistani madrassas responded enthusiastically by closing-shop and sending their students to Mullah Omar. Eventually, the militia called themselves Taliban, or students.

Indoctrinated by Wahhabi teachers, these orphans had also grown up in an all-male environment. The results of such a mix manifested itself in their despotic and uncivilized attitude towards all women in general. Moments after taking over provinces, the Taliban would do nothing about fortifying their positions, but would focus all their attention on closing down schools, banning women from study and work, enforcing the full burqa and gradually removing them from the social life of the cities. Their repression of women is characteristic of men who are both attracted and repelled by the very idea of sex. Nowhere is this more evident than the fact that the first thing they bombed in Bamiyan weren’t the Budhha statues, but the statues’ genitals.

Usama bin Laden’s duties to Afghanistan did not end with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. He continued to serve as a conduit between donors in Saudi Arabia and local Afghan leaders, using the money to build roads and hollow out large and defensive caverns in the mountains. The Taliban’s spectacular conquests over much of Afghanistan would not have been possible without the generous bribes that drew on the deep pockets of Saudi donors. Large sums of money were paid out to Afghan chieftains for them to lay down their arms without fighting the Taliban. By now, Usama bin Laden was also monopolizing the myth that the Soviet Union had been single-handedly beaten and then dismantled by the Afghan jihadists. This was highly ironic since most of the original Mujahideen like Ahmad Shah Massoud detested Usama bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs.

Because Saudi involvement in Afghanistan was largely a proxy one, Riyadh had no trouble sponsoring the cause of the Taliban when it became clear that they were going to be a dominant force. This was in spite of the fact that the movement, because of its Deobandi origins, had yet to be completely Wahhabi in outlook.

Rashid reveals that Afghanistan has seldom been allowed the freedom to attain anything on its own terms. The many clans and militias have for decades been the pawns of her neighbors, the superpowers and various Muslim countries jostling for religious legitimacy. The United States had exploited the feverish theme of jihad carried by the Afghan Mujahideen as a proxy army against the Soviet Union. Pakistan had meddled to both extend her porous borders with Afghanistan and to establish untraceable training camps for militants bound for Kashmir; there to fight a war of attrition against India. Rashid reserves the most stinging rebuke for Saudi Arabia, whom he says lacks a rational foreign policy which suits its national interests rather than merely appeasing its domestic Wahhabi lobby. Much of foreign policy is instead run on the basis of personal relationships and patronage rather than through state institutions. Thus, it was a short, personal meeting between Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and Prince Turki Ibn al-Faisal, Riyadh’s chief of intelligence that ended Saudi support for the militia.

"When he [Mullah Omar] continued to insult Saudi Arabia and the royal family, I ended the meeting. I recommended that my government freeze its relations with the Taliban, and that’s exactly what happened."

The kingdom’s lack of a rational foreign policy means that it has been immensely difficult to hold any state institution accountable for the growth of radicalism amongst Muslim youths all over the world, even though many of the these radicalized youths make no secret about the sheikhs (religious authorities) they take their religious rulings from. We cannot simply dismiss these youths as being wrong and misguided in their interpretation of that particular brand of Islam, when the outcome replicates itself with such wonderful consistency.

No matter how much Saudi Arabia attempts to adorn their current hostility towards Usama bin Laden and Mullah Omar in religious imagery, there is no reason to believe that the central motivations, themes and religious devices of al-Qaida and the Taliban differ very much from the religious lobby of Saudi Arabia. Both share the same enemies. Both are are exclusivist. The only reason they hate each other is because both focus on different charismatic personalities. While traditional Islam generally falls back on a multi-faceted legacy, ideological Islam resembles a personality-cult that picks and chooses what it likes through its own lens, becoming more or less attuned to the whims of either one man or a small group of individuals.

Rashid’s well-written book does not just deal with political interference, but also the vested interests of feminists, oil companies, opium cartels and neighboring countries. In the end, though, Rashid’s most important warning concerns the deadly blowback of these little games of political and commercial intrigue. Already, Saudi Arabia is reeling from its own terrorist attacks, waged by no less than Usama bin Laden and his organization, al-Qaida. He was incensed that the Saudi rulers had spurned his offer to help free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in 1990, only to call upon the United States to do the job. It was a betrayal he never forgot. Using the same rhetoric that Utaibi had used in the Grand Mosque Seizure, Usama bin Laden accused Saudi rulers of capitulating to Western interests.

It is unfortunate that the Taliban’s negative and destructive interpretation of Islam has been allowed to take the place of the real face of the religion as an inclusive and tolerant phenomenon. Western commentators do not bother to differentiate between the Taliban’s brand of Islam and Islam itself. In the words of Ahmed Rashid:

The Taliban, like so many fundamentalist groups today, divest Islam of all legacies except theology- Islamic philosophy, science, arts, aesthetics and mysticism are ignored. Thus the rich diversity of Islam and the essential message of the Koran- to build a civil society that is just and equitable in which rulers are responsible for the citizens- is forgotten.

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