Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (40 page)

criminal behaviors of the mujahideen’s leadership. Many of the members of the Taliban had been born in refugee camps in Pakistan along the Pakistan– Afghanistan border and viewed themselves as part of the true Muslim generation who would restore peace and justice to Afghanistan by imposing the full force of Islamic law upon the entire country. These members of the Taliban, in addition to learning about Islam from the madrasahs in the Pashtun areas, had learned their battle skills from the mujahideen, many of whom had been trained by the CIA, or directly from the CIA itself.22

Amir Mullah Mohammed Omar: Leader of the Taliban

Some members of the Taliban say that the Afghan Pashtun Amir Mullah Mohammed Omar (who is often called “Mullah Omar”) was chosen as the Taliban’s leader largely because of his strong Islamic beliefs and unswerving piety. Others say that he was chosen by God. Mullah Omar himself explained the situation in this way: “We took up arms to achieve the aims of the Afghan jihad and save our people from further suffering at the hands of the so-called Mujahideen. We had complete faith in God almighty. We never forgot that. He can bless us with victory or plunge us into defeat.”23

Mullah Omar was born to Pashtun parents, who were landless peasants, in approximately 1959 in a small town near Kandahar. During the 1980s while the mujahideen were fighting against the Soviets, his family moved to a small town which was in a difficult-to-access region in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, where Mullah Omar’s father died while Omar was a young man. Later, Mullah Omar moved to a town in Kandahar province where he became the town’s mullah, or Muslim teacher and religious leader, and he established a small madrasah. Previously, his own studies as a madra- sah student had been interrupted twice, first by the Soviet invasion and then by the establishment of the Taliban. Between 1989 and 1992, Mullah Omar was a soldier in an Afghan Islamist group that fought against the government of Afghan President Muhammad Najibullah. Omar has three wives and five children, who were students in the madrasah where he taught.24

While there are numerous stories that attempt to explain how Mullah Omar mobilized the Taliban against some of Kandahar’s greedy, violent, and self-serving warlords, the one that is repeated most frequently is the following. In the spring of 1994 several of Mullah Omar’s neighbors from the town of Singesar, where he had been teaching in the madrasah, told him that a warlord from Kandahar had abducted two teenage girls who had been taken to a militia base and repeatedly raped. Omar gathered roughly 30 students from his madrasah, who had only 16 rifles between them, and attacked the base, liberating the girls, and hanged the commander, while seizing ammunition and arms.25

A few months later, two warlords in Kandahar argued with each other over a young boy, whom each one wanted to rape. In the fight that ensued, several other people were killed. Mullah Omar’s Taliban freed the boy and then others in Kandahar began asking Omar and the Taliban to assist in their disputes. In the minds of many people in Kandahar province, Mullah Omar was a person who helped poor people against greedy, ravenous, and unjust warlords. One of the reasons his reputation became increasingly positive was that he did not ask the people whom he helped for any reward; his primary demand was that they support the Islamic system he espoused. Mullah Omar told the people whom he assisted and others that his good deeds were motivated by his faith in God and that if they supported him in transforming Afghanistan into a true Islamic state, justice and fairness would rule and there would be no more harmful and self-absorbed leaders governing the land; the day of the powerful exploiting the weak would end. He preached his message quoting passages of the Quran and Hadith which proclaimed the importance of justice, liberty, and the horrors of self- aggrandizement and taking advantage of others.26 Using simple language that both the literate and the illiterate (who comprise over 70 percent of Afghanistan’s population) could understand, Mullah Omar stated that, in the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds, he stood for a community that manifested mercy, compassion, beneficence, righteousness, and justice, and he told Afghans that if they joined his Taliban movement they could create the kind of society which God and Muhammad envisioned.27

At the same time, Mullah Omar sent peace emissaries to leaders outside of Kandahar province, such as Ismael Khan, Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, seeking a modicum of peace with them. In addition, some of Mullah Omar’s and the Taliban’s strongest connections were with Pakistan’s government and with the ISI, a large number of whose members were Pashtun and had studied in Saudi-financed Islamist madrasahs in the majority-Pashtun borderland regions along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. These ISI agents had strong Islamist sympathies. While these ISI agents’ Islamist orientation and Pashtun ethnicity were crucial points of overlap between them and most members of the Taliban, the ISI agents were employed by Pakistan’s largely secularist government, which, during key periods of the Taliban’s emergence, was under the largely secularist leadership of Benazir Bhutto, who was Pakistan’s Prime Minister from 1988 until 1990 and again from 1993 until 1996.28

As employees of the Pakistani government, the ISI agents also shared some priorities with it, namely the goal of the Pakistani government to use routes through Afghanistan for trade and commerce with the newly-emerged countries of Central Asia and the Pakistani government’s long-standing goal of maximizing its influence in Afghanistan so as to gain additional strategic depth against India. In order to attain these goals, the Pakistani government

and the ISI had to make Afghanistan’s highways and roadways that connected Pakistan with Central Asia as safe as possible. Because of Afghanistan’s multi-sided civil war during the early 1990s, various bandits and warlords ruled virtually all of these highways, charging astronomical tolls, blocking portions of the highways at will, and raiding whichever vehicles they chose. Members of the Pakistani government and the ISI knew they had to end this state of affairs if they were to use these highways for trade and increase Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan and eventually in Central Asia.29

Early Taliban Victories

While members of the Pakistani government deliberated the course of action they should take in attempting to achieve their goals, the Taliban gained two major military victories: first in October 1994 in the southern Afghan town of Spin Boldak, which is on the border with Pakistan and was a key town on the highway between Quetta, Pakistan and Ashgabat (the capital of Turkmenistan), and second in November 1994 in the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city and a key point on the Quetta-Ashgabat highway. The members of the Taliban were strongly tied to each other through their common Islamic faith, their Pashtun ethnicity, military experience gained from their resistance against the Soviets, the absolute belief that God was on their side, and promises of sizable cash bonuses and monthly stipends from the transport operators if the Taliban could secure Spin Boldak. With these deep connections to each other giving them strength, the Taliban seized a key military garrison and an arms depot there which provided them with 18,000 Kalashnikov rifles, numerous pieces of artillery, huge amounts of ammunition, and several vehicles.30

By early November 1994, the Taliban had moved north to the city of Kandahar, where after two days of fighting and the loss of just 12 Taliban soldiers, they captured Kandahar and a cache of weapons and arms there including large numbers of tanks, armored cars, military vehicles, and other equipment, much of which was still in Kandahar from the time of the Soviet occupation. After this victory, which the Taliban gained partly as a result of assistance from their Islamist allies and the Pakistani government, the Taliban secured enough of the Quetta-Ashgabat highway in December 1994 to charge a one-time toll to trucks and enable a 50-truck convoy carrying raw cotton from Turkmenistan to arrive in Quetta after the truck operators paid the Taliban a toll of 5,000 dollars. After these victories, approximately 12,000 students from Islamist madrasahs in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, inspired by the Taliban’s gains and their belief that the Taliban and its victories were blessed by God, joined the Taliban in Kandahar with the hope of eventually bringing all of Afghanistan under Islamic law.31

Soon after its victories, the Taliban strictly enforced its interpretation of Islamic law in all of the areas that it controlled. In addition to bringing peace and security to the areas which had previously been torn by civil war, they closed girls’ schools and banned women from working outside of the home, because, according to their interpretation of the Quran and Hadith, there was no justification for women receiving an education or working outside of the home. In their view, these Islamic sacred texts taught that women had the responsibility of staying at home and caring for their children and husbands, while men had the responsibility of working outside the home and caring for their wives and children. The Taliban also forbade the use of television sets because, in their view, Islam’s sacred texts strictly prohibit the creation or conveying of images. The Taliban also believed that televisions were Western inventions that if improperly used, as they had been by Westerners on many occasions, could promote greed, selfishness, materialism, and sex outside of heterosexual marriage. The Taliban also forbade most sports and recreational activities because they viewed them as Western contrivances which brought useless pleasure and severely distracted Muslims from their Islamic obligations and their focus on God.32

Not all Islamists necessarily agree with all of the Taliban’s policies. Among many other examples, members of some Islamist groups in Egypt and among the Palestinians believe in women and men being properly educated in Islam and other disciplines and having distinct roles within these groups’ activities.33 With the exception of the Taliban, a very large number of Islamist groups throughout the world use television and video for a variety of purposes, including the spread of their message.34 Many Islamist groups also support the utilization of sports and recreation – as long as women and men remain separate from each other and engage in sports in accordance with Islamic principles – as legitimate and important ways of enabling Muslims to condition their bodies and build strong ties with each other.35

With regard to the Taliban, utilizing methods that were similar to those that they used in their conquest of Spin Boldak, Kandahar, and the securing of the Quetta-Ashgabat highway, they were able to take control of 12 of Afghanistan’s 31 provinces in the period between November 1994 and February 1995. After the Taliban’s victories in Kandahar, they followed the Quetta-Ashgabat highway in a northwesterly direction toward Herat, Afghanistan, which is a largely ethnically Tajik and Persian-speaking part of Afghanistan. By February 1995, as the Taliban were moving toward Herat, some reports suggest that as many as 20,000 Afghan and Pakistani students who had been studying in the madrasahs within the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan streamed toward Kandahar and areas north of it to join the Taliban in their march and effort to capture Herat and, as they hoped, eventually all of Afghanistan. Many of these madrasah students, all

of whom were men, were between 14 and 24 years of age and while at least some had never fought, they knew how to handle a weapon.36

In their studies at the madrasahs, these young men had learned the Quran, the Hadith, and certain aspects of Islamic law as taught by teachers some of whose own educational backgrounds were relatively limited. Very few of the students or teachers had a significant knowledge of math, science, geography, or history, for example. These young men who had joined or would soon join the Taliban had never seen Afghanistan in a state of peace. The simple and straightforward Islamist form of Islam, which these young members of the Taliban had learned in their madrasahs, was the only form of Islam that they knew and gave their lives meaning. Unlike their parents and ancestors who were in traditional professions such as farming, herding, and the making of handicrafts, many of these young members of the Taliban were largely trained for warfare.37

For a variety of reasons, these young members of the Taliban, who were too young to have fought within the mujahideen against the Soviets, had not known the company of women. For example, some of these young Taliban members were orphans, who were raised in orphanages, refugee camps, and/ or madrasahs without mothers, sisters, aunts, great aunts, grandmothers or female cousins. The male Muslim teachers of these men who were to join the Taliban taught their students that the Quran and Hadith required Muslims to separate women and men and that the only Islamically-approved sphere where women were permitted to dwell was the home. Thus, the Taliban’s policy which involved limiting women to the home was motivated by those men’s almost life-long separation from women and their understanding of Islam’s teachings.38

As the Taliban gained quick and decisive military victories, especially during 1994 and 1995, most members of the Taliban believed that God had granted them these victories, much like God had granted (1) Muhammad and the early Muslims military victories against their enemies in the seventh century; (2) Muhammad’s successors victories in the 100-year period after Muhammad’s death; and (3) Muslim armies victories against the Western Crusaders during the Middle Ages. This interpretation of Islamic history played a crucial role in catalyzing the Taliban and helping the group gain more recruits.39 While the Taliban experienced some victories and defeats between January and September 1995, when it finally conquered Herat, it captured considerable amounts of ground during that period including provinces, towns, and cities such as Uruzgan, Zabul, Helmand, and Wardak. By September 5, 1995, which is when the Taliban with approximately 20,000 of its soldiers conquered Herat, the Taliban controlled the entire western part of Afghanistan, which is largely ethnically Tajik and Persian-speaking. At this point, the Taliban held sway over Afghanistan’s western border region with Iran, where the national language is Persian,