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What to expect from
Taliban 2.0
A wiser, better-traveled and social media-savvy Taliban will
strive to avoid the many dire mistakes of its 1996-2001 rule
By Pepe Escobar
September 09, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House
- The announcement
by Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul of the acting
cabinet ministers in the new caretaker government of the Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan already produced a big bang: it managed
to enrage both woke NATOstan and the US Deep State.
This is an all-male,
overwhelmingly Pashtun (there’s one Uzbek and one Tajik) cabinet
essentially rewarding the Taliban old guard. All 33 appointees
are Taliban members.
Mohammad Hasan Akhund –
the head of the Taliban Rehbari Shura, or leadership council,
for 20 years – will be the Acting Prime Minister. For all
practical purposes, Akhund is branded a terrorist by the UN and
the EU, and under sanctions by the UN Security Council. It’s no
secret Washington brands some Taliban factions as Foreign
Terrorist Organizations, and sanctions the whole of the Taliban
as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization.
It’s crucial to stress
Himatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban Supreme Leader since 2016, is
Amir al-Momineen (“Commander of the Faithful”). He can’t be a
Prime Minister; his role is that of a supreme spiritual leader,
setting the guidelines for the Islamic Emirate and mediating
disputes – politics included.
Akhunzada has released
a statement, noting that the new government “will work hard
towards upholding Islamic rules and sharia law in the country”
and will ensure “lasting peace, prosperity and development”. He
added, “people should not try to leave the country”.
Spokesman Mujahid took
pains to stress this new cabinet is just an “acting” government.
This implies one of the next big steps will be to set up a new
constitution. The Taliban will “try to take people from other
parts of the country” – implying positions for women and
Shi’ites may still be open, but not at top level.
Taliban co-founder
Abdul Ghani Baradar, who so far had been very busy
diplomatically as the head of the political office in Doha, will
be deputy Prime Minister. He was a Taliban co-founder in 1994
and close friend of Mullah Omar, who called him “Baradar”
(“brother”) in the first place.
A predictable torrent
of hysteria greeted the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani as
Acting Minister of Interior. After all the son of Haqqani
founder Jalaluddin, one of three deputy emirs and the Taliban
military commander, with a fierce reputation, has a $5 million
FBI bounty on his head. His FBI “wanted” page is not exactly a
prodigy of intel: they don’t know when he was born, and where,
and that he speaks Pashto and Arabic.
This may be the new
government’s top challenge: to prevent Sirajuddin and his wild
boys from acting medieval in non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan,
and most of all to make sure the Haqqanis cut off any
connections with jihadi outfits. That’s a sine qua non condition
established by the China-Russia strategic partnership for
political, diplomatic and economic development support.
Foreign policy will be
much more accommodating. Amir Khan Muttaqi, also a member of the
political office in Doha, will be the Acting Foreign Minister,
and his deputy will be Abas Stanikzai, who’s in favor of cordial
relations with Washington and the rights of Afghan religious
minorities.
Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob,
the son of Mullah Omar, will be the Acting Defense Minister.
So far, the only non-Pashtuns
are Abdul Salam Hanafi, an Uzbek, appointed as second deputy to
the Prime Minister, and Qari Muhammad Hanif, a Tajik, the acting
Minister of Economic Affairs, a very important post.
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The Tao of
staying patient
The Taliban Revolution
has already hit the Walls of Kabul – who are fast being painted
white with Kufic letter inscriptions. One of these reads, “For
an Islamic system and independence, you have to go through tests
and stay patient.”
That’s quite a Taoist
statement: striving for balance towards a real “Islamic system”.
It offers a crucial glimpse of what the Taliban leadership may
be after: as Islamic theory allows for evolution, the new
Afghanistan system will be necessarily unique, quite different
from Qatar’s or Iran’s, for instance.
In the Islamic legal
tradition, followed directly or indirectly by rulers of
Turko-Persian states for centuries, to rebel against a Muslim
ruler is illegitimate because it creates fitna
(sedition, conflict). That was already the rationale behind the
crushing of the fake “resistance” in the Panjshir – led by
former Vice-President and CIA asset Amrullah Saleh. The Taliban
even tried serious negotiations, sending a delegation of 40
Islamic scholars to the Panjshir.
But then Taliban intel
established that Ahmad Masoud – son of the legendary Lion of the
Panjshir, assassinated two days before 9/11 – was operating
under orders of French and Israeli intel. And that sealed his
fate: not only he was creating fitna, he was a foreign
agent. His partner Saleh, the “resistance” de facto leader, fled
by helicopter to Tajikistan.
It’s fascinating to
note a parallel between Islamic legal tradition and Hobbes’s
Leviathan, which justifies absolute rulers. The Hobbesian
Taliban: here’s a hefty research topic for US Think Tankland.
The Taliban also follow
the rule that a war victory – and nothing more spectacular than
defeating combined NATO power – allows for undisputed political
power, although that does not discard strategic alliances. We’ve
already seen it in terms of how the moderate, Doha-based
political Taliban are accommodating the Haqqanis – an extremely
sensitive business.
Abdul Haqqani will be
the Acting Minister for Higher Education; Najibullah Haqqani
will be Minister of Communications; and Khalil Haqqani, so far
ultra-active as interim head of security in Kabul, will be
Minister for Refugees.
The next step will be
much harder: to convince the urban, educated populations in the
big cities – Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif – not only of their
legitimacy, acquired in the frontlines, but that they will crush
the corrupt urban elite that plundered the nation for the past
20 years. All that while engaging in a credible, national
interest process of improving the lives of average Afghans under
a new Islamic system. It will be crucial to watch what kind of
practical and financial help the emir of Qatar will offer.
The new cabinet has
elements of a Pashtun jirga (tribal assembly). I’ve
been to a few, and it’s fascinating to see how it works.
Everyone sits on a circle to avoid a hierarchy – even if
symbolic. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion. This
leads to alliances necessarily being forged.
The negotiations to
form a government were being conducted in Kabul by former
President Hamid Karzai – crucially, a Pashtun from a minor
Durrani clan, the Popalzai – and Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, and
former head of the Council for National Reconciliation. The
Taliban did listen to them, but in the end they de facto chose
what their own jirga had decided.
Pashtuns are extremely
fierce when it comes to defending their Islamic credentials.
They believe their legendary founding ancestor, Qais Abdul
Rasheed, converted to Islam in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad,
and then Pashtuns became the strongest defender of the faith
anywhere.
Yet that’s not exactly
how it played out in history. From the 7th century
onwards, Islam was predominant only from Herat in the west to
legendary Balkh in the north all the way to Central Asia, and
south between Sistan and Kandahar. The mountains of the Hindu
Kush and the corridor from Kabul to Peshawar resisted Islam for
centuries. Kabul in fact was a Hindu kingdom as late as the 11th
century. It took as many as five centuries for the core Pashtun
lands to convert to Islam.
Islam with
Afghan characteristics
To cut an immensely
complex story short, the Taliban was born in 1994 across the –
artificial – border of Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan as
a movement by Pashtuns who studied in Deobandi madrassas in
Pakistan.
All the Afghan Taliban
leaders had very close connections with Pakistani religious
parties. During the 1980s anti-USSR jihad, many of these Taliban
(“students”) in several madrassas worked side by side with the
mujahideen to defend Islam in Afghanistan against the infidel.
The whole process was channeled through the Peshawar political
establishment: -overseen by the Pakistani ISI, with enormous CIA
input, and a tsunami of cash and would-be jihadis flowing from
Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world.
When they finally
seized power in 1994 in Kandahar and 1996 in Kabul, the Taliban
emerged as a motley crew of minor clerics and refugees invested
in a sort of wacky Afghan reformation – religious and cultural –
as they set up what they saw as a pure Salafist Islamic Emirate.
I saw how it worked on
the spot, and as demented as it was, it amounted to a new
political force in Afghanistan. The Taliban were very popular in
the south because they promised security after the bloody
1992-1995 civil war. The totally radical Islamist ideology came
later – with disastrous results, especially in the big cities.
But not in the subsistence agriculture countryside, because the
Taliban social outlook merely reflected rural Afghan practice.
The Taliban installed a
7th century-style Salafi Islam crisscrossed with the
Pashtunwali code. A huge mistake was their aversion to Sufism
and the veneration of shrines – something extremely popular in
Islamic Afghanistan for centuries.
It’s too early to tell
how Taliban 2.0 will play out in the dizzyingly complex,
emerging Eurasian integration chessboard. But internally, a
wiser, more traveled, social media-savvy Taliban seem aware they
cannot allow themselves to repeat the dire 1996-2001 mistakes.
Deng Xiaoping set the
framework for socialism with Chinese characteristics . One of
the greatest geopolitical challenges ahead will be whether
Taliban 2.0 are able to shape a sustainable development Islam
with Afghan characteristics.
epe Escobar
is correspondent-at-large at
Asia Times.
His latest book is
2030.
Follow him on
Facebook.
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