Taliban: Militant Islam, oil, and fundamentalism in central Asia. . - The tragedy of Afghanistan - book review

Progressive, The, Dec, 2001 by Amitabh Pal

Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid Yale Nota Bene. 279 pages. $14.95 (paper).

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."--Ambrose Bierce

Afghanistan is further confirmation of Bierces pithy observaion. This country was thought to be so distant from the United States -- even after the Soviet invasion when the CIA was running a covert war there--that some journalists came up with the term "Afghanistanism" to refer to stories that were too remote from American lives.

Not anymore. After September 11, books about Afghanistan and the Taliban are flying off the shelves. Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia has reached the top of The New York Times paperback bestseller list. Its print run has expanded from an initial 2,000 in March to a current 200,000. Maps of Afghanistan are visible everywhere, from local newspapers to Mapquest.com. The one center of Afghanistan studies in the country--located at the University of Nebraska at Omaha--has been receiving almost nonstop requests for interviews. People with fluency in Afghan languages such as Pashto and Dari, which almost no one in this country knew existed, are now greatly in demand by U.S. intelligence services.

The people of South Asia know that being in the global headlines is not necessarily a good thing, as the Indian scholar Partha Chatterjee pointed out in a recent conference held in Madison, Wisconsin. But at least Americans are beginning to educate themselves about Afghanistan. These two books should be helpful in that regard.

Rashid has a huge advantage over Michael Griffin, author of Reaping the Whirlwind, in that Rashid is a native of Pakistan, as well as a Muslim, and has for two decades covered Afghanistan for Pakistani and Western publications. He has an intricate knowledge of the country and its politics, and a strong grasp of Islam and its various forms, including the extreme variant that the Taliban practice. Griffin, a freelance journalist and associate editor of Index on Censorship, has spent three two-month stints in Afghanistan and is not a scholar of Islam.

Griffin tries to tell the story of the Taliban in the style of a yarn to please the Western reader. He strains to include Western cultural references, and these are sometimes a bit of a stretch, as when he writes: "If Kabul was Afghanistan's Sarajevo in early 1994, Kandahar could lay reasonable claim to being its South Bronx." Or, "Mad Max. Meet the motorized mullahs."

However, Griffin begins his book with words that are uncannily prescient in light of September 11.

"The accession in the U.S. of President George W. Bush, a man with a strong political interest in disinterring the secrets of his predecessor, may shed yet fresh light on at least two of the central mysteries of the Taliban which this book attempts to address," Griffin writes. "The first is the extent to which the Administration of Bill Clinton actively encouraged its former Cold War allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to assemble and finance a tribal military force to end the misrule of the mujahedeen in the post-Soviet years. The second--of greater sensitivity--is to provide a coherent explanation for the studied incompetence of the FBI, CIA, and other American intelligence agencies in addressing the alleged threats posed to the U.S. by Osama bin Laden and his network."

Rashid does a good job of providing a brief history of Afghanistan. Contrary to what many Westerners believe, the country has a rich heritage, including the Kushan Dynasty from the first to the third century A.D., which presided over "the only known fusion between European and Asian cultures," and the mighty Mughal Empire, which ruled the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Rashid observes that Afghanistan's position at the crossroads of various civilizations has also been its bane, since it has often been reduced to a pawn in the hands of greater powers.

The saga of the CIA arming and training the mujahedeen in the 1980s, in cahoots with the Pakistanis, is well known. Rashid, however, adds further details by pointing out how CIA money, through the Pakistanis, reached the most hardline Islamicist groups:

"Prior to the war, the Islamicists barely had a base in Afghan society, but with money and arms from the CIA pipeline and support from Pakistan, they built one and wielded tremendous clout," he writes.

Rashid also underscores the international community's complete neglect of Afghanistan once the Soviets went home. "The moment the Soviets withdrew their troops in 1989, Afghanistan dropped off the radar screen of world attention," he writes. "The ever-dwindling aid from wealthy donor countries, which did not even meet the minimum budgetary requirements of the humanitarian aid effort, became a scandal."

And Rashid's knowledge of Islam in the region serves him well in his description of Afghan religious traditions, which defy Western ideas of a homogenized Islamic culture: