Faisal Devji writes:

Most accounts of the Taliban’s emergence in the 1990s attribute it to a Saudi-funded and Pakistani-led project. Its aim was to create an Islamic state in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, one that would keep Iran at bay for the Saudis and India for the Pakistanis. This was necessary because the mujahedeen, who had routed the Soviets with help from the United States, were too riven by internecine quarrels to form a government. But the Taliban were also heirs to the Marxist state the mujahedeen had defeated. Like many anticolonial movements during the Cold War, Islamists, too, had adopted the Soviet model of an ideological, one-party state.

The Taliban were belated supporters of this Cold War model, which had already outlived its global historical context. Unlike Iran, the only successful version of such an Islamic state, the Taliban’s emirate in Afghanistan was crude, violent and unstable. But in contrast to pre-modern examples of Islamic governance, it remained true to the Soviet model in establishing the collective rule of an ideological party, without sharing it with kings, aristocrats, military commanders or even the higher clergy who had traditionally advised and supported Afghanistan’s previous rulers. The Taliban of the 1990s represented not the Middle Ages but rather a worn-out modernity from the 20th century.

The Taliban was also one of the last Islamist movements to emerge at a time when Islamism’s old-fashioned vision of an ideological state was being challenged or discredited globally. This soon became evident when al Qaeda sought refuge in Afghanistan, taking advantage of the country’s poverty, instability and lack of international recognition. Unlike the Taliban, al Qaeda was a post-Cold War movement dedicated, like its Western enemies, to a global project in which the state was a means rather than an end. It would displace Islamism from the radical edge of politics and drive it to the center, sometimes even toward liberalism, exemplified by the increasing popularity of the so-called Turkish model of electoral power and capitalist economics among parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda after 9/11.

Coming to Afghanistan as adventurers, al Qaeda’s fighters turned into parasites who ended up destroying their host. The Taliban seem to have imagined they could use the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to claim the international recognition they craved, either by conducting the investigation into al Qaeda’s responsibility or even by surrendering to the U.S. In the event, they famously “melted away” with the U.S. invasion in the classic gesture of Afghan warfare, which is about negotiation and shifting allegiances more than it is about zero-sum games. Ideology here is not an existential condition so much as the mark of loyalty to a cause that is itself revocable. [Continue reading…]