Security

Winning Over the Taliban? Fat Chance

U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is premised in part on the hope that the Afghan government can reconcile with “lower case T” Taliban: Fighters who are motivated by the promise of a paycheck, not by ideology. Reading two new accounts of life inside Taliban country, it’s hard to be optimistic about that proposition. Over at Foreign […]

reconciliationU.S. strategy in Afghanistan is premised in part on the hope that the Afghan government can reconcile with "lower case T" Taliban: Fighters who are motivated by the promise of a paycheck, not by ideology.

Reading two new accounts of life inside Taliban country, it's hard to be optimistic about that proposition.

Over at Foreign Policy, Afghanistan-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn describe life in Kandahar, the traditional heartland of the Taliban. Living outside the confines of blast walls and secure compounds, the two writers describe the omnipresence of the Taliban, who form a parallel administration in the Kandahar region:

In Kandahar, the Taliban are a fact of life -- not necessarily liked, but present nonetheless. The traditional Pashtun recourse to healthy dollops of pragmatism means that a government official can enjoy live music with a Talib, even while each has full knowledge of who the other is. These lines are blurred and the tectonics shift constantly wherever you go in Kandahar. The government is apparently fighting 'the Taliban,' this amorphous force that everybody has so much trouble defining, but with whom, at an individual level, there seems to be plenty of room to sit and do business. Indeed, previous governors of Kandahar regularly called and conferred with their ostensible enemy, the Taliban shadow governor.' More than once, we have sat down to dinner with Afghans who had been fighting Canadians or Americans in neighboring districts earlier that afternoon.

Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn's account should be read alongside the grim, fascinating five-part series by David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who spent seven months as a captive of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. His account describes a movement that has absorbed a Utopian vision of a new Islamic caliphate.

"After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become," Rohde writes. "Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of 'Al Qaeda lite,' a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan. Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world."

That point, in particular, undermines the message the Taliban has tried to propagate in its information campaign. According to the Taliban propagandists, they are fighting for limited aims: an Islamic state in Afghanistan.

[PHOTO: RFE/RL]

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