Reaping the Whirlwind: the Taliban movement in Afghanistan Michael Griffin Pluto Press, 283pp, £19.99 ISBN 0745312748

In December 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in order to prop up a faction of the ruling Afghan Communist Party. Intensified Ameri-can support for the anti-communist Afghans, or mujahedin, quickly turned the country into a new site for the cold war. It is hard to imagine now the glamour this war gave Afghanistan. American cold warriors lined up to emulate Zbigniew Brzezinski, who stood at the Khyber Pass aiming a rifle at Soviet troops across the border. Kirk Douglas, Princess Anne and Margaret Thatcher also showed up. Many American journalists now appear to have been very eager to help out with the CIA-led jihad against Soviet communism. Almost every journalist visiting from the west had his favourite "muj", who was generally described in the same cliched terms that British imperialists had originally used about their brave, perspicacious and loyal Afghans.

These days, the celebrities stay away from the extensive ruin that is Afghanistan. Many of the roads and bridges lie half-destroyed. This is the third year of a severe drought, and the canals have dried up. A civil war rages on in the north of the country, from where hundreds of thousands of refugees stream southward to join the three million Afghans already living in appalling conditions in Pakistan and Iran.

This clearly wasn't the work of a day, although it almost seems that way if you believe recent newspaper reports about the designer fanaticism of the Taliban: reports that - in their lack of any recognisable context - are only a form of atrocity-mongering, a demonstration of the great power of the west to define and redefine its "other" perpetually to its advantage, while the west's own history of arrogant meddling is allowed to fade, or be replaced by humanitarian concerns.

The attempt by the communists, in the 1970s, to replace the mullahs with Marx is usually cited as the beginning of Afghanistan's present-day troubles. But the problem of how a technologically backward society was to adapt to the western ideal of a modern world had confronted Afghanistan as early as the 19th century.

In the same century in British colonies such as India, there had been scientific innovations in transport and communications, as well as the birth of new educational institutions; these were the inadvertent advantages of direct colonial rule. But Afghanistan remained no more than a buffer state for the British empire, between itself and Russian expansionists. The British subsidised the Afghan army and hand-picked a local despot from the majority Pushtun or Pathan community. It was the despot's job to suppress discontent among the country's ethnic communities and to keep out the Russians, along with all other potentially destabilising foreign influences.

Thus, the legacy of British rule in Afghanistan was a stubborn backwardness, at a time when modernisation and secularisation alone seemed to offer a chance to subjugated societies to catch up with the west. Not surprisingly, the relatively enlightened men who ruled Afghanistan after formal liberation from British interference in 1919 were modernisers in a hurry.

But, as now, a majority of Afghanistan's population lived in the countryside: communities held together by tribal codes of honour and various folk and orthodox versions of Islam. They saw the proactive Afghan state and influences from the west as profoundly disruptive. In 1929, conservative elements within the clergy and the military banded together to overthrow King Amanullah. His ambitious reforms were reversed, and women were bullied back into veils. Soon afterwards, Afghanistan stabilised under Zahir Shah, who ruled from 1933 to 1973 and supervised some less aggressive reforms. In 1959, women once again appeared without the veil in the streets of Kabul and, in 1965, were allowed to run for public office. More Afghans were educated abroad and brought back new political ideas. In 1968, Kabul University was, like the Sorbonne, full of radicalised students.

It was with the help of some of these impatient men that Zahir Shah was deposed in 1973. In 1978, the communists assumed full power. One of their leaders was Hafizullah Amin, a former student of Wisconsin and Columbia universities, who busied himself with destroying the influence of both the traditionalist Islamic clergy and the radical Islamists. Amin sought to crush all opposition to him within the Communist Party - an opposition often based on ethnic and tribal differences.

Thousands of Afghans, including members of the country's educated elite, were murdered in the purges. Thousands more rose in revolt against the attempt to create a communist society overnight. This worried the ageing leaders of the Soviet Union; and when garrisons of the Afghan army began to mutiny, they panicked.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has recently revealed that cold warriors such as himself had been waiting for the Soviet Union to become militarily embroiled in Afghanistan. The Soviet intervention came as the opportunity to "give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam war", as Brzezinski wrote to President Carter. The rest of the shameful story is well known: the furtive channelling of billions of dollars' worth of aid to the anti-communist Afghans, many of whom were drug smugglers posing as mujahedin; the hectic complicity of despotic pro-American regimes in Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia; the CIA's cosseting of rich Arab fixers such as Osama bin Laden; the destruction of Afghanistan's basic infrastructure, and the death and displacement of millions of Afghans.

In 1989, after a long, devastating and largely inconclusive war, the Soviet Union withdrew its army from Afghanistan. The Soviet empire began to fall apart soon afterwards. The United States lost interest in Afghanistan, which quickly degenerated into factional fighting among the mujahedin who, thanks to the largesse of the CIA, had become rather well-equipped warlords.

It is this more complicated story - the rise of the warlords and their subsequent vanquishing by the Taliban - that Michael Griffin describes in his splendid book. The Taliban belong to the second and third generations of displaced Pushtun students. They grew up in the madrasas (Muslim colleges) of Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, where they absorbed a particularly puritanical Islamic ideology called Deobandi. Griffin seems right in suspecting that the sharia is only a version of martial law for the Taliban who, while imposing it, reassert the traditional dominance of the majority Pushtun community over the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities. Certainly, Griffin's book confirms my own general impression of the Taliban as an assortment of undereducated young men and rural mullahs with stylish turbans and grand delusions. You don't have to talk to them for too long to discover that their understanding of Islam is superficial. Village feuds and tribal loyalties seem to shape their foreign policy. Behind their hobnobbing with Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamists of Pakistan is a desperately naive belief in pan-Islamic solidarity.

Their harshness and arrogance makes them increasingly unpopular in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it is worth stressing that, even at their most xenophobic, they articulate some not entirely baseless fears about western modernity, whose previous enforcers - the communist omelette-makers, as well as the CIA arms suppliers - have been the source of much pain and despair in Afghanistan. These fears partly explain the failures of communication - and Griffin discusses them sensitively - between the Taliban and the agencies of the United Nations, communication that is crucial if the Afghans are to avoid mass starvation. The UN agencies insist that the Taliban relax their restrictions on women, while the Taliban suspect the UN, with not insufficient reason, of being an agent of western imperialism.

So there is a stalemate, a kind of mutual bewilderment, towards which all the divergent historical experiences of Afghanistan and the west seem to have led. A way forward might consist of toning down the anti-Taliban hysteria (which is often a kind of Islamophobia), ending the current build-up of Osama bin Laden as the first great villain of the new century and accepting that the Taliban are not a monolith, but have their own divisions between hardliners and moderates.

Societies that have been dealt a bad hand by history and ravaged by proxy wars and "great games" need a lot of time to recover their equilibrium. The Taliban are hardly likely to help in the process; but the urge to impose alternatives from outside must be resisted.

Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics (Picador) won the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website