Taliban: Islam, oil and the new great game in central Asia
Ahmed Rashid I B Tauris, 874pp, £12.95
ISBN 1860644171
When six Afghan hijackers seized an airliner on a domestic flight and diverted it to Stansted airport, anti-terrorist teams prepared for the worst. The plane was surrounded, the negotiators began talking and the SAS were put on notice to go in if hostages were harmed.
But for four puzzling days nothing happened. There were no demands and no threats, and only when the gunmen finally gave themselves up did it emerge that they had in fact achieved their aims the moment the Ariana jet touched down in Essex. The men were not trying to free guerrilla leaders or demand concessions from the west. They simply wanted to start a new life abroad with their families, who turned out to be many of the passengers.
Reading Ahmed Rashid's book on the rise of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, it is easy to understand why people might be driven to such desperate measures. A few years in a British jail could be preferable to ordinary life under the rule of what Rashid describes as the Central Asian equivalent of the Khmer Rouge.
When the movement exploded into the bloody Afghan civil war in 1994, it was initially greeted with some enthusiasm. Afghans hoped that it would end more than 15 years of conflict, and even the west hoped that a single power could finally unite the divided country.
Afghanistan had been torn apart during a decade of Soviet occupation and the subsequent infighting of the victorious mujahedin guerrilla groups, which had amassed huge arsenals through the backing of the US and Pakistan. Controlled by Mullah Omar, a reclusive cleric in Kandahar who keeps the movement's treasury in a trunk in his office, the Taliban was supported by thousands of young Islamic students who grew up in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. However, the hopes of change died quickly. The Taliban, a militant version of orthodox Saudi Wahhabism, began by banning women from working or studying, abolishing music and television, and ruthlessly eliminating their foes.
The United Nations and many aid agencies - the lifeline for many Afghans - were driven out, and even the skeletal remains of government disappeared under a regime seeking to drag the country back to the Middle Ages. When traditional Islamic punishments, such as stoning adulterers or amputating the limbs of thieves, failed to specify what to do with homosexuals, for example, the Taliban improvised. In this case, it devised a capital punishment that involved placing the victims beside a large wall and then knocking the wall down on top of them.
In successive battles for control of Afghanistan, the Taliban lost any claim to represent a united force for the country. It became increasingly brutal and sectarian, relying entirely on its Pushtun faction for support. Rashid estimates that during the summer offensive in northern Afganistan in 1998, 8,000 civilians, mainly ethnic Tadjiks and Uzbeks, were murdered by the Taliban and that around 400 Hazara women were taken "as concubines".
Arguably, Rashid's most damning critique of the fundamentalist movement is that it has betrayed the very basic principles of Islam that it aspires to uphold. Aside from waging war against fellow Muslims and stripping women of their rights, the Taliban is today responsible for the production of 90 per cent of the world's heroin crop, strictly forbidden by the Koran.
Rashid's account is not for the casual reader hoping for a colourful story of one of the world's most bloody but inaccessible countries. The book is meticulous and, at times, laboriously detailed. But it comes alive when the author describes the insights he has gained, through personal experience of Afghanistan over the past decade, into the secretive and bizarre Taliban leadership.
The one point where the book strays is with the notion that Afghanistan is the fulcrum of a new "Great Game" in Central Asia, with competing powers seeking rights to the mineral resources of the region. While the country was indeed squeezed between the British and Russian empires in the 20th century, today's renaissance of Kipling's famous "Great Game" is being played far away in the Caspian basin and the Caucasus.
What is most chilling about this book is the conclusion. Far from writing off the Taliban as just another Afghan faction, Rashid warns that the movement could threaten the entire region. The west has already had a foretaste of what could happen if the revolution is exported. Ossama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist leader responsible for bombing attacks against US targets, is still living in Afghanistan under Taliban protection.
More disturbing is the fate of Pakistan. The country's intelligence services armed and funded the Taliban from its birth, but now the pupil is teaching his master. Today, there is virtually no border between the two states, and Taliban ideology is spreading through Pakistani Pashtuns.
With Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons and involved in a border war with India over Kashmir, the implications are alarmingly clear. "If the war in Afghanistan continues to be ignored, we can only expect the worse," concludes Rashid. "Pakistan will face a Taliban-style Islamic revolution which will further destabilise it and the entire region."
Richard Beeston is diplomatic editor of the "Times"
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