Taliban collapse

Last night, Charlie Rose asked Ahmed Rashid, author of "Taliban: 
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" to explain 
the collapse of the Taliban. Rashid said it was both startling and 
unprecedented and predicted the end of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in a 
few weeks. But as far as *explaining* the collapse, he could not. And 
this guy is supposed to be the number one expert in the world.

Predictably, the US press has explained it in terms of a successful 
military campaign, omitting all political considerations entirely. It 
is just assumed that any government that does not permit its 
population to fly kites will crumble at the first assault, like a 
house built on rotten foundations. 

After scouring through the international press on Lexis-Nexis, I 
found an article that begins to tell another story. Keep in mind that 
the withdrawal from the north was ordered by the Mullah Omar 
precisely to spare civilian casualties, according to the NY Times. 
Now we discover in the Independent that withdrawal from the southern 
stronghold is based on the same considerations--to "avert the feared 
bloodbath" as the article puts it.

The Independent, 17 November 2001

Feared warlord threatens march on stronghold
War on Terrorism: Kandahar
By Jakob Menge

One of Afghanistan's most feared warlords, already in control of 
Herat, last night threatened to march on the Taliban stronghold of 
Kandahar.

The mujahedin commander and ethnic Tajik leader Ismail Khan declared 
yesterday that he intended to march on the Taliban's spiritual home 
and occupy it if necessary.

The prospect of the Taliban's old enemy heading towards them may have 
help persuade the leadership to abandon the city in the hope its 
population would be spared. Khan was driven out of Herat in 1995, 
jailed by the Taliban in 1997, but escaped last year in a 
now-legendary feat.

Under constant bombardment from American warplanes for weeks now – US 
jets hit the Taliban foreign ministry building and a mosque yesterday 
– the Taliban leadership may have decided that the advance of Ismail 
Khan would be the last straw. Thus the dramatic move to cut and run 
and avert the feared bloodbath.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, apparently agreed to depart 
within 24 hours, following "in-depth" discussions with "close friends 
and army commanders". Under the deal, reported by the Taliban news 
agency, control of the city will pass to Mullah Naqibullah and Haji 
Basher, two former commanders of Afghan resistance forces in the war 
against Soviet invaders who are not members of the Taliban.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=105400

You can see a consistent pattern here. By all accounts, including 
those of the 1997 Pulitzer prize winning John Burns of the NY Times, 
the Taliban first came to power in order to quell warlord violence. 
As a government, it simply lacked the social or political vision to 
provide anything more than elementary law and order based on a 
medieval version of Islam. This was Lenin's definition of the state 
as "bodies of armed men" incarnate. To illustrate the Taliban's 
failure to see the big picture, we can find no better example than 
the decision to blow up the Buddha sculptures. This bought them 
nothing politically except to harden their own ranks. Their decision 
to go ahead with this seemingly mad action was guaranteed by the 
literalist interpretation of the Koran which governed their every 
deed.

Since the Taliban has been consistently mentioned in the same breath 
as al-Qaeda, there has been a tendency to ascribe the same kind of 
millenarian, anti-Western, global political goals. The left, 
including myself, has not worked hard enough to approach the two as 
distinct entities. The Independent article, and much else that has 
begun to appear (including an excellent piece by Robert Fisk at: 
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=105385,
roots the Taliban in Pashtun nationalism. To be more exact, it is 
rooted in Pashtun tribalism which has resisted and resented its 
division between Afganistan and Pakistan for over 100 years. So, the 
goals of the Taliban were ultimately very conservative: to defend the 
interests of their tribe and to create a society based on Wahabbist 
Islam.

This leaves us to the question of the fate of al-Qaeda type Islamic 
radicalism. There can be no doubt that this will constitute as much 
of a defeat as Egypt's defeat in 1967, which led to the collapse of 
the Nasserist brand of militant nationalism and the beginning of 
accomodationism to Israel and imperialism. It is entirely likely that 
this will be the outcome today. Forces in the Arab and Islamic world 
will conclude that the "paper tiger" is in their own midst, not in 
their enemy's.

More ominously, the military defeat will only encourage US 
imperialism just as Hitler's blitzkreig against Poland encouraged 
further assaults on Eastern Europe. Right now, the USA has identified 
"terrorist" enemies across the world, even including the tepid FSLN 
election campaign of Daniel Ortega as a threat. The State Department 
and the Pentagon might be encouraged to attack Iraq or to intervene 
in Colombia, the two places where Evil Incarnate also exists.

Yesterday, I attended a luncheon honoring people who had completed 10 
years of employment at Columbia. My boss, who administers student 
services as well as EDP, was running late. He had to give a report on 
how the Patriot Bill affected the university. Lubricated by a 
Manhattan, I commented that I hope the cops didn't come to pick me up 
because I had photos of the Sandinista revolution in my office. When 
they pooh-poohed the idea, I had to remind them that Columbia 
University fired every single professor who had been accused of 
Communist sympathies or party membership during the 1950s.

Events are moving very swiftly. Perhaps the only lesson that can be 
drawn from all this is one that has been true for the longest time, 
namely that individual acts of terrorism are politically 
counter-productive. Just as Narodnik assassination attempts, 
successful or unsuccessful, on Czars and their officials tended to 
unleash repression against the left and pogroms against the Jews, 
9/11 has only encouraged repressive tendencies nationally and 
internationally. The only question is whether the same forces that 
generated Islamic and Narodnik terror in different historical epochs 
will now begin to generate a renewal of the revolutionary movement. 
Without such a renewal, barbarism is inevitable.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 11/17/2001

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