The Taliban is typically portrayed as a group of men with beards and turbans, driven by Islamic fundamentalist ideology and responsible for widespread violence. But to understand the group that is poised to return to power in Afghanistan, and what we might expect from its rule, we need a much more nuanced picture, says Kaweh Kerami, PhD candidate in Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, in an article in The Conversation.
To start with, it’s important to understand the Taliban’s origins in the 1980s during the cold war. Afghan guerrillas called the Mujahedeen waged war against Soviet occupation for around a decade. They were funded and equipped by an array of external powers, including the US.
In 1989, the Soviets pulled out and that marked the beginning of the collapse of the Afghan government that had relied heavily on them. By 1992, a Mujahedeen government was formed but suffered from bloody infighting in the capital. The unfavourable conditions on the ground created fertile ground for the emergence of the Taliban.
An Islamic fundamentalist group dominated by those of Pashtun ethnicity, the Taliban is believed to have first appeared in Saudi Arabia-funded hard-line religious madrassas in northern Pakistan in the early 1990s, Kerami said. Some of them were Mujahedeen fighters against the Soviets. In 1994, the Taliban started a military campaign from the south of Afghanistan. By 1996, the group had captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, without much resistance.
For the war-weary people of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s promise of bringing security and order on the one hand and curbing corruption on the other was appealing. But that was coupled with a high and sometimes unbearable cost: introduction of harsh punishments such as public executions, closing girls’ schools (for those aged ten and above), banning television and blowing up historical Buddha statues, to name a few. The group’s justification stemmed from the blending of a fundamentalist understanding of Islam with Afghan traditions. During the peak of the Taliban rule (1999), not a single girl was enrolled in a secondary school and merely 4 per cent of those eligible (9,000) were at primary schools. Now around 3.5 million girls are in school. After the US-led invasion of the country following the Taliban’s refusal to hand over those behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, many of the Taliban’s senior figures evaded capture and reportedly took refuge in Quetta in Pakistan. Later, this led to the formation of the Quetta Shura the Taliban leadership council that guides the insurgency in Afghanistan.