Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Second Edition

by Ahmed Rashid

  If there was a single inspiration and hope for peace amongst ordinary Afghans after the Taliban emerged, it was the fact that they governed through a collective political leadership, which was consultative and consensus-building, rather than dominated by one individual. The Taliban Shura in Kandahar claimed it was following the early Islamic model where discussion was followed by a consensus amongst ‘the believers’ and sensitivity and accessibility to the public were deemed important. The Shura model was also heavily based on the Pashtun tribal jirga or council where all clan chiefs took part in deciding upon important issues which the tribe faced. On my early visits to Kandahar, I was impressed with the debates, which sometimes went on all night as commanders, mullahs and ordinary fighters were called in to give their views, before Mullah Omar took a decision.

  Many Afghans were also impressed by the fact that initially the Taliban did not demand power for themselves. Instead they insisted they were restoring law and order, only to hand over power to a government which was made up of ‘good Muslims’. However, between 1994 and the capture of Kabul in 1996, the Taliban's decision-making process was to change and become highly centralized, secretive, dictatorial and inaccessible.

  As Mullah Omar became more powerful and introverted, declining to travel to see and understand the rest of the country and meet the people under his control, the movement's power structure developed all the faults of the Mujaheddin and communist predecessors. Moreover after 1996, the Taliban made known their desire to become the sole rulers of Afghanistan without the participation of other groups. They maintained that the ethnic diversity of the country was sufficiently represented in the Taliban movement itself and they set out to conquer the rest of the country to prove it.

  The initial hopes generated by the Taliban were a direct result of the degeneration of the former Mujaheddin leadership. During the jihad, the Mujaheddin leadership based in Peshawar was highly factionalized and personalised. The parties were held together by charismatic leaders and warlords rather than an organisation. As the war progressed these leaders became more and more dependent on Western supplied funds and arms to keep their field commanders and guerrilla fighters loyal. They spent much of their time literally buying support inside Afghanistan, while bickering with each other in Peshawar.

  Pakistan only helped fuel this process of disunity. General Zia ul Haq had commanded Pakistani troops in Jordan in 1970 and had helped King Hussein crush the Palestinians. He had seen at first hand the threat that a united guerrilla movement posed to the state where it had been given sanctuary. By maintaining a disunited movement with no single leader, Zia was able to keep the Mujaheddin leaders obligated to Pakistan and Western largesse. But when Islamabad desperately needed a coherent Mujaheddin leadership to present a political alternative to the communist regime in Kabul in 1989 as Soviet troops withdrew, and again in 1992 as the Najibullah regime collapsed, the disunity amongst the Peshawar-based Mujaheddin leaders was too far gone to mend – even with significant bribes. This disunity was to have a profound effect on Afghanistan's future inability to achieve a consensus government.

  The second element in the anti-Soviet resistance leadership were the field commanders, who became increasingly frustrated by the disunity and corruption of the Peshawar leaders and the ease with which they were held hostage over funds and weapons supplies. The very nature and hardship of the war demanded that they cooperate with each other, despite the feuding of their party chiefs in Peshawar.

  There was a passionate desire for greater structural unity amongst the field commanders. Ismael Khan organized the first meeting of field commanders in Ghor province in July 1987, which was attended by some 1,200 commanders from across Afghanistan. They adopted 20 resolutions of which the most important was the demand that they, rather than the Peshawar leaders, dictate the political movement. ‘The right of determining the future destiny of Afghanistan lies with the heirs of the martyrs and with the Muslims of the trenches, who are struggling in bloody fronts and are ready to be martyred. Nobody else is allowed to make decisions determining the fate of the nation.’1

  Some 300 commanders met again in Paktia province in July 1990 and in Badakhshan in October. However, ethnicity, personal rivalries and the urge to be the first into Kabul broke down their consensus as the Mujaheddin competed to seize the capital in 1992. The battle for Kabul brought the divisions between north and south and Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns into the open. Ahmad Shah Masud's inability to compromise with Pashtun commanders opposed to Hikmetyar, even as Masud seized Kabul in 1992, badly dented his political reputation. He was never to regain the trust of Pashtuns, until after the Taliban had conquered the north in 1998.

  A third level of leadership within the resistance were the scholars, intellectuals, businessmen and technocrats who had escaped from Kabul to Peshawar. Many remained independent advocating unity amongst all the resistance forces. But this group of educated Afghans was never given a serious political role by the Peshawar parties nor by Pakistan. As a consequence many left Peshawar for foreign countries, adding to the diaspora of Afghan professionals. They became marginal in influencing political events at home and when they were needed after 1992 to help rebuild the country, they were not available.2 The Pashtun ulema and madrassa teachers were scattered throughout the resistance movement, some as party leaders in Peshawar, others as field commanders, but they formed no united, powerful presence within the resistance and even their individual influence had waned considerably by 1992. The ulema were ripe to be taken over by a Taliban style movement.

  When the Taliban emerged in 1994 only the old, bickering resistance leadership was left and President Burhanuddin Rabbani had failed to unite them. In the Pashtun areas there was a total vacuum of leadership as warlordism gripped the south. The Taliban rightly considered the former Mujaheddin leaders as redundant and corrupt. Although the Taliban revered some leaders from the ulema who were their earlier mentors, they gave them no political role in their movement. Nor did the Taliban have any liking for the independent-minded field commanders, whom they blamed for the débâcle of the Pashtuns after 1992. Important field commanders who surrendered to the Taliban were never elevated within the Taliban military structure. The Taliban also completely rejected Afghan intellectuals and technocrats, as they considered them the spawn of a Western or Soviet-style educational system which they detested.

  The Taliban's emergence thus coincided with a fortunate historical juxtaposition, where the disintegration of the communist power structure was complete, the Mujaheddin leaders were discredited and the traditional tribal leadership had been eliminated. It was relatively easy for the Taliban to sweep away what little of the old Pashtun leadership was left. Thereafter, from within the Pashtuns, the Taliban faced no possible political challenges to their rule. They now had the opportunity to build a more tribal-democratic, grass-roots organisation. Imbued with the legitimizing factor of Islam, it could have responded to the population's needs, but the Taliban proved incapable and unwilling to do this.

  At the same time, they refused to evolve a mechanism by which they could include the representatives of the non-Pashtun ethnic groups. Their supreme position in the Pashtun areas could not be duplicated in the north unless they had the flexibility to unite the complex mosaic of the Afghan nation under a new style of collective leadership. Instead, what the Taliban ultimately created was a secret society run mainly by Kandaharis and as mysterious, secretive and dictatorial in its ways as the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

  The Taliban's apex decision-making body was the Supreme Shura which continued to be based in Kandahar, a city which Mullah Omar has left only once (to visit Kabul in 1996) and which he turned into the new power centre for Afghanistan. The Shura was dominated by Omar's original friends and colleagues, mainly Durrani Pashtuns, who came to be called the ‘Kandaharis’, even though they hailed from the three provinces of Kandahar, Helmand and Urozgan. The original Shura was made up of ten members, (see Appendix 2) but
military commanders, tribal elders and ulema took part in Shura meetings so that it remained loose and amorphous with as many as 50 people often taking part.

  Of the ten original Shura members, six were Durrani Pashtuns and only one, Maulvi Sayed Ghiasuddin, was a Tajik from Badakhshan (he had lived for a long time within the Pashtun belt). This was sufficient as long as the Taliban were advancing in the Pashtun belt but after the capture of Herat and Kabul, the Shura became totally unrepresentative. The Kandahar Shura never broadened its base sufficiently to include Ghilzai Pashtuns or non-Pashtuns. It has remained narrowly based and narrowly focused, unable to represent the interests of the entire nation.

  Two other Shuras report to the Kandahar Shura. The first is the cabinet of acting ministers in Kabul or the Kabul Shura. The second is the military council or military Shura. Out of 17 members in the Kabul Shura in 1998, at least eight were Durranis while three are Ghilzais and only two were non-Pashtuns (see Appendix 2). The Kabul Shura deals with the day-to-day problems of the government, the city and the Kabul military front, but important decisions are conveyed to the Kandahar Shura where decisions are actually taken. Even minor decisions taken by the Kabul Shura and its chief Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, such as permission for journalists to travel or new UN aid projcts, have been frequently revoked by the Kandahar Shura. It soon became impossible for the Kabul Shura, which acted as the government of Afghanistan, to take any decision without lengthy consultations with Kandahar, delaying decisions interminably.

  In Kabul and Herat and later in Mazar – none of which have a Pashtun majority – the Taliban's representatives such as the governor, mayor, police chiefs and other senior administrators are invariably Kandahari Pashtuns who either do not speak Dari, the lingua franca of these cities or speak it poorly. There is no prominent local citizen in any of these local Shuras. The only flexibility the Taliban have demonstrated is in their appointments of governors to the provinces. Of 11 governors in 1998, only four were known to be Kandaharis.3 In the past the governors and senior local officials were usually drawn from the local elite, reflecting the local ethnic make-up of the population. The Taliban broke with this tradition and appointed outsiders.

  However, the political powers of the Taliban governors have been considerably reduced. The paucity of funds at their disposal, their inability to carry out serious economic development or rehabilitate refugees returning from Pakistan and Iran gave governors even less of a political, economic or social role. Mullah Omar has also kept the governors under control and not allowed them to build up a local power base. He has constantly shifted them around and sent them back to the battle front as commanders.

  After the Mazar defeat in 1997 there was growing criticism from Ghilzai Pashtun commanders that they were not being consulted on military and political issues, despite the fact that they now provided the bulk of the military manpower. In Mazar the Taliban lost some 3,000 of their best troops, 3,600 were taken prisoner and ten leaders were killed or captured. Thus the Taliban were forced to draw upon new recruits from the Ghilzai tribes of eastern Afghanistan but the Taliban were not prepared to yield them political power or include them in the Kandahar Shura. Increasingly the Ghilzais were not prepared to accept being used as cannon fodder by the Taliban and resisted recruitment.

  The military structure of the Taliban is shrouded in even greater secrecy. The head of the armed forces is Mullah Omar although there is no actual definition of his position or his role. Under Omar there is a chief of general staff and then chiefs of staff for the army and air force. There are at least four army divisions and an armoured division based in Kabul. However, there is no clear military structure with a hierarchy of officers and commanders, while unit commanders are constantly being shifted around. For example, the Taliban's Kunduz expeditionary force, which was the only military group in the north after the 1997 Mazar débâcle, saw at least three changes of command in three months, while more than half the troops were withdrawn and flown to the Herat front and replaced by less experienced Pakistani and Afghan fighters. The military Shura is a loose body which plans strategy and can implement tactical decisions, but appears to have no strategic decision-making powers. Military strategy, key appointments and the allocation of funds for offensives are decided upon by Omar.

  Apart from the general conscription enforced by the Taliban, individual commanders from specific Pashtun areas are responsible for recruiting men, paying them and looking after their needs in the field. They acquire the resources to do so – money, fuel, food, transport, weapons and ammunition – from the military Shura. There is a constant coming and going as family members change places at the front, allowing soldiers to go home for long spells. The regular Taliban army has never numbered more than 25,000 to 30,000 men although these numbers could be rapidly increased before new offensives. At the same time Pakistani madrassa students, who by 1999 made up some 30 per cent of the Taliban's military manpower, also served for short periods before returning home and sending back fresh recruits. Nevertheless this haphazard style of enlistment, which contrasted sharply with Masud's 12,000 to 15,000 regular troops, does not allow for a regular or disciplined army to be created.

  As such, the Taliban fighters resemble a lashkar or traditional tribal militia force, which has long historical antecedents amongst the Pashtun tribes. A lashkar has always been quickly mobilized either on orders of the monarch or to defend a tribal area and fight a local feud. Those who joined a lashkar were strictly volunteers who were not paid salaries, but shared in any loot captured from the enemy. However, Taliban troops were forbidden from looting and in the early period they were remarkably disciplined when they occupied new towns, although this broke down after the 1997 Mazar defeat.

  The majority of Taliban fighters are not paid salaries and it is up to the commander to pay his men an adequate sum of money when they go on home leave. Those who are paid regular salaries are the professional and trained soldiers drawn from the former communist army. These Pashtun tank drivers, gunners, pilots and mechanics are fighting more as mercenaries, having served in the armies of whoever controls Kabul.

  Several members of the military Shura are also acting ministers, creating even greater chaos in the Kabul administration. Thus Mullah Mohammed Abbas, the Health Minister, was the second-in-command of the Taliban expeditionary force trapped in the north after the 1997 Mazar defeat. He was then pulled out and sent to Herat to organize another offensive and finally returned to his job as Minister six months later -leaving UN aid agencies whom he was dealing with in consternation. Mullah Ehsanullah Ehsan, the Governor of the State Bank commanded an elite force of some 1,000 Kandaharis, ensuring his financial job received little attention before he was killed in Mazar in 1997. Mullah Abdul Razaq, the Governor of Herat who was captured in Mazar in 1997 and later freed, has been leading military offensives all over the country since 1994. Almost all the members of the Kandahar and Kabul Shura, except for those with physical disabilities, have acted as military commanders at some time or the other.

  In one sense this allows for remarkable flexibility amongst the Taliban hierarchy as they all act both as administrators and generals and this keeps them in touch with their fighters. However, the Taliban administration, especially in Kabul, has suffered enormously. While a minister is away at the front no decisions can be taken in the ministry. The system ensured that no Taliban minister became proficient in his job or created a local power base through patronage. Mullah Omar would send any minister who was becoming too politically powerful back to the front at a moment's notice. But the result of this confusion was a country without a government and a movement without clearly defined leadership roles.

  The Taliban's excessive secrecy has been a major deterrent in winning public confidence in the cities, the foreign media, aid agencies and the international community. Even after they captured Kabul, the Taliban declined issuing any agenda on how they intended to set up a representative government or foster economic development. For the Taliban to in
sist upon international recognition when there was no clearly demarcated government only increased the international community's doubts about their ability to govern. The spokesman of the Kabul Shura, Sher Mohammed Stanakzai, a relatively suave English-speaking Ghilzai Taliban from Logar province who had trained in India as a policeman, was the Taliban conduit for the UN aid agencies and the foreign media. However it quickly became apparent that Stanakzai had no real power and did not even have direct access to Mullah Omar in order to convey messages and receive an answer. As a consequence his job became meaningless as aid agencies never knew if their messages were even reaching Omar.

  The Taliban increased the confusion by purging Kabul's bureaucracy, whose lower levels had remained in place since 1992. The Taliban replaced all senior Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara bureaucrats with Pashtuns, whether qualified or not. As a result of this loss of expertise, the ministries by and large ceased to function.

  Within the ministries the Taliban's work ethic defied description. No matter how serious the military or political crisis, government offices in Kabul and Kandahar are open for only four hours a day, from 8.00 a.m. to noon. The Taliban then break for prayers and a long afternoon siesta. Later, they have long social gatherings or meetings at night. Ministers desks are empty of files and government offices are empty of the public. Thus while hundreds of Taliban cadres and bureaucrats were involved in a drive to force the male population to grow long beards, nobody was available to answer queries in the ministries. The public ceased to expect anything of the minstries while the lack of local representation in urban administrations made the Taliban appear as an occupying force, rather than administrators trying to win hearts and minds.

  The Taliban have to date given no indication as to how and when they would set up a more permanent representative government, whether they would have a constitution or not and how political power would be divided. Every Taliban leader has different views on the subject. ‘The Taliban are willing to negotiate with the opposition, but on the one condition that no political parties take part in the discussions. Most of the Taliban have come from political parties and we know the conflict they create. Islam is against all political parties,’ a minister told me. ‘Eventually when we have peace people can select their own government, but first the opposition has to be disarmed,’ said another minister. Others wanted an exclusive Taliban government.4