William Maley is associate professor of politics, University College, University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of The Afghanistan Wars (Palgrave, 2002), and edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York University Press, 1998).
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan
by michael griffin
London, Pluto Press, 2001. 312 pages
Hardback: UK £19.99, US $27.50
The smashing of the Taliban movement by the armed forces of the United States has come as a relief to many observers who viewed the fundamentalist regime and its policies with horror. Until the events of 11 September 2024 carried Afghanistan to the top of the US political agenda, policymakers in Washington had failed to develop a coherent and comprehensive policy to address the threat, which was growing in southwest Asia. Indeed, it is doubtful whether they had even appreciated just how dangerous were the forces with which they had become involved. The August 1998 attack on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had focused attention on the activities within Afghanistan of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation, and various kinds of sanction had been put in place against its Taliban hosts. But the situation in Afghanistan still struggled to capture the attention of key US decision makers. Michael Griffin’s new book, Reaping the Whirlwind, shows just how serious an error of judgement this was.
Griffin’s account of his aims is quite modest. He describes himself as “badly qualified to embark on an academic analysis of the Taliban” or of the authenticity of their spiritual mission. He describes his book, “plotted as a whodunnit”, as a collation of reports from the world’s media (pp. xx–xxi). Fortunately, it offers a good deal more than that. On fine points of detail, specialists will question aspects of Griffin’s narrative, but as an insight into the Taliban’s Weltanschauung, it is strikingly acute.
The emergence of the Taliban in November 1994 did not present the international community with any immediate challenge, since at that time they appeared to be just another non-state actor on Afghanistan’s cluttered and untidy stage. That they reflected a serious Pakistani attempt to mount a “creeping invasion” of Afghanistan was then not obvious: even the Afghan leaders Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud were initially mystified by their sudden appearance and accepted their claims at face value, not least because they seemed to pose a greater threat to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the rival Afghan warlord backed by Pakistan, than to the “Islamic State of Afghanistan”, of which Rabbani was president. The Taliban seizure of the Afghan capital in September 1996 changed the situation.
The Taliban’s gender policies attracted widespread and shocked international attention, of a kind which disinclined states to grant the movement recognition despite its oft-repeated claim to be in control of large chunks of Afghanistan. Instead, the task of establishing some kind of dialogue with the Taliban was left to the United Nations and non-governmental organisations. Griffin gives a vivid account of the travails involved, and of the tensions between engagement, on the one hand, and the compromising of fundamental principles on the other. He observes, with ample documentation, that “the conduct of ‘constructive dialogue’ with the mullahs had ended by coining a language of complicity” (p. 173). The perils of dialogue with the Taliban were never more clearly exposed than in May 1998, when a UN official signed a memorandum of understanding with the Taliban concerning access for humanitarian workers. The memo contained the formal statement that “women’s access to health and education will need to be gradual”. This understandably outraged humanitarian groups such as Physicians for Human Rights, and amply demonstrated just how dangerous tunnel vision can be.
Pakistan’s complicity in the rise of the Taliban has figured less prominently in post–11 September analyses of Afghanistan than should be the case. Griffin does not make this mistake. He gives a rich account of the roles of key Pakistani actors in the genesis and flourishing of the Taliban, especially that of Naseerullah Babar, Benazir Bhutto’s interior minister, whose conviction that he had a unique understanding of the complexities of Afghanistan led him to embark on what was to be a fateful journey of patronage and manipulation. The roots of this hubris, of course, ran much deeper. The attitudes of Pakistani officials of Babar’s generation were shaped by the “Pashtunistan” dispute, a border quarrel that had led successive Afghan governments to press for the creation of a breakaway state from Pakistani territory inhabited by Pashtun tribespeople, who also form the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan. The dispute had poisoned Pakistan-Afghanistan relations in the decades following the emergence of Pakistan as an independent state. It fed the belief in Islamabad that Afghanistan had to be ruled by Pashtuns, but Pashtuns of a religious rather than secular stripe (nearly all the Taliban were Pashtuns). Pashtun nationalism was to be resisted at all costs, lest it lead to Pakistan’s fragmentation. But as Pakistani leaders were to learn, their interference in Afghanistan ultimately bore heavy costs.
One kind of cost came in the form of emerging Talibanisation within Pakistan itself. This was reflected not in party politics, but in the mushrooming of Deobandi madrassas (religious schools) in various provinces. The phenomenon was limited in scope, with the conservative Northwest Frontier Province being the principal locus of activity. The failure of Pakistan’s religious parties to mobilise popular opposition to the launch of America’s Afghan war in October 2001 largely reflected just how alien the Taliban phenomenon was even to many Pakistani Muslims. However, given the weakness of the Pakistani state, it is still too early to be confident that the efforts of its leader, General Pervez Musharraf, to bring extremist groups under control will succeed.
Another cost to Pakistan of supporting Pashtun surrogates in Afghanistan flowed from the hospitality which those surrogates granted to Osama bin Laden, which after 11 September led squarely to Washington’s ultimatum to Islamabad to decide whether it was a friend or foe. Unsurprisingly, Musharraf chose the first option, but the consequence was that Pakistan was sidelined while the United States obliterated the Taliban regime, leaving Islamabad with virtually no influence over those who filled the most important positions in Afghanistan’s interim administration.
Griffin’s discussion of bin Laden is well crafted, although he relies too readily on the suspect claims of the writer Yossef Bodansky. He also indulges in some generalisations about the Afghan mind, according to which, in his account, “a terrorist is someone who, first and foremost, damages Islam; all Muslims are brothers; and a foreigner is always non-Muslim” (p. 138). These claims range from the debatable to the highly suspect. The speed with which the Taliban collapsed in November 2001, and the ecstatic celebration in Kabul of their defeat, should put paid to such simplistic notions. The attitudes Griffin mentions may have been held by certain Taliban circles, but certainly not by Afghans as a whole. However, these are minor weaknesses in a generally illuminating analysis, and Griffin appropriately notes that Afghanistan’s willingness to harbour bin Laden may not have been prompted by religious solidarity alone, but also by Pashtun traditions of hospitality and the allure of his considerable fortune.
The potency of these factors renders all the more curious Washington’s apparent belief between August 1998 and September 2001 that if Pakistan were able to play the role of “honest broker”, then the Taliban might be induced to hand bin Laden over. This was fantasy for two (ostensibly conflicting) reasons. The first is that Pakistan was in no sense an honest broker. Its relationship to the Taliban was not that of friendly sovereign equal, but more like that of organ-grinder to monkey. The second is that the Taliban would never in any circumstances have surrendered bin Laden. Handing over a guest was virtually the only thing that Pakistan was not in a position to force the Taliban to do. Norms of hospitality in Pashtun society are not minor conventions to be swept aside at the dictates of convenience: in a very real sense they are constitutive of Pashtun identity. This became abundantly clear in late 2001, when the Taliban preferred to see their regime die than die in their own eyes by doing the unthinkable, namely, surrender bin Laden to the United States. American wishful thinking in this period gave bin Laden three years’ breathing space, and he used it to devastating effect.
But the failings of US policy go well beyond the clumsy and fitful response of the Clinton administration to the August 1998 embassy bombings, which rather than undermining bin Laden, simply boosted his profile. From the 1980s, the United States had handled Afghanistan with less care than ordinary Afghans were entitled to expect. Supporting the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation was not in principle an indefensible policy: the legitimacy of the cause was widely accepted not only in the United States, but in many other parts of the world as well. The criticism to be levelled at Washington is rather in terms of its insensitivity to Afghan complexities. This led the United States, effectively manipulated by Pakistan, to fund the arms stockpiles of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezbi Islami (Party of Islam), which for the most part did not use them to fight the Soviets, but instead saved them for future use against moderate mujahideen. The period of maximum Hezbi Islami destruction was also one of significant US disengagement from Afghanistan: the Clinton administration, smarting from its humiliations in Somalia, was not looking to solve Afghanistan’s problems.
When the United States did re-engage, it was in support not of serious conflict resolution, but rather of the delusion that US corporations might build oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan from Central to South Asia. Griffin devotes a crisp chapter to tracing the course of this fantasy, which seems to have owed something to the notion that Afghanistan was breathlessly awaiting the arrival of a Texaco. Sympathy to big business also led Washington, if not positively to support the Taliban, at least to view Pakistan’s promotion of the regime with a not-uncharitable gaze, as a potential supplier of “security” for the pipelines. The possibility that a neo-fundamentalist, anti-modernist force such as the Taliban could spell disaster for Western interests simply did not register. Instead, policy was informed by a crude hostility to Iran, as evinced in the comment of US official Robin Raphel in August 1996 that Tehran “should stop supplying Kabul”—a demand from which only the Taliban stood to gain.
One silly bureaucrat in the State Department, in conversation with a well-known writer on Afghanistan, said of the Taliban that “you get to know them and you find they have a really great sense of humour”. The humour of life under the Taliban was lost on a large number of Afghans. Unfortunately, those who sow the wind often leave others to reap the whirlwind. That, at least, unites ordinary Afghans with those who perished in Washington and New York on the sunny morning of 11 September.
