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The Foreign Policy

of the Taliban

William Maley

council on foreign relations

new york

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Foreword

Understanding and dealing with “Islamic fundamentalism” hasbeen one of the more difficult foreign policy challenges for theUnited States in the last decade. Few policymakers seem tocomprehend the ideology behind so-called fundamentalistgroups or the rationales behind their actions.While some analystscall it the successor to the Red Scare and have dubbed it theGreen Menace, others contend that these groups are essentiallysocial movements with a religious emphasis. Whichever view iscorrect, there is broad agreement that the topic of “Islamic fun-damentalism” requires further attention, and the papers fromthe Muslim Politics Project hope to address this issue.

The goal of the Muslim Politics Project, which began in1994, was to counter the misperceptions that prevail in influentialcircles and to present Islamic intellectual and political agendasin all their complexity and diversity. One of its several under-takings was to commission papers on Islamist foreign policy inorder to better understand the international political attitudesand policies of various Islamist groups. This resulted in paperson the following movements: Jama’at-i Islami,Hamas,Hizballah,the Taliban, the Central Asian Islamic Renaissance Party, as wellas an analysis of U.S. policy toward Islamism. Each of these papersgoes into detail not only about the movements themselves,but alsoabout how they affect U.S. foreign policy. We believe that theyprovide insights on a topic that challenges policymakers and willhelp prevent future misunderstandings.

Lawrence J. KorbMaurice R. Greenberg Chair, Director of Studies

Council on Foreign Relations

Acknowledgments

The Muslim Politics Project was made possible by the gener-ous support of the Ford Foundation. This project began underthe leadership of former Council Senior Fellow James Piscatoriand was brought to conclusion by Directors of Studies GaryHufbauer and Lawrence J. Korb. However, this project couldnot have been completed without the guidance of the Studiesstaff, including Nancy Bodurtha, Rachel Bronson, RichardMurphy, and Barnett Rubin. Patricia Dorff, Miranda Kobritz,Roshna Balasubramanian, and Michael Moskowitz provided edit-ing and production assistance. Hilary Mathews provided initialeditorial assistance, and Haleh Nazeri completed the editing andsupervised the administrative and final production arrangements.

For movements that ground their legitimacy on claims of tran-scendent universality, the notion of “foreign policy” is in someways a curious one. It implies a degree of accommodation witha world in which the fruits of universal good have yet to be ex-ploited. When Joseph Stalin put forward the policy of “social-ism in one country” in 1924, it came as a shock to a number ofhis Bolshevik colleagues, for whom Marxism had provided a“scientific” demonstration of the marginality of nationalidentifications in a world in which the great boundary betweenpeoples was set by class.1 In the realm of religion, such compro-mises could be equally controversial. When the Peace of West-phalia of 1648 put an end to the hopes of an undivided Chris-tendom, the pope responded by labeling it “null, void, invalid,iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and devoid ofmeaning for all time.”2 Yet with closer scrutiny, the fact thattranscendent movements should also pursue foreign policies isnot quite so strange. Religious movements are fashioned fromwhat Immanuel Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity,”3

and as a result they are bearers of particularity as well as univer-sality. It is rarely illuminating to speak of “civilizations” as politicalentities, although shared cultural norms and values may providea certain amount of context in which political actors function. Itis even less illuminating to treat religions as monolithic deter-minants of political behavior. This is true of Christianity, and itis also true of Islam. As James P. Piscatori has observed, “theseamless unity of dar al-islam has been as great a legal fiction as

The Foreign Policy of the Taliban

William Maley

[ 1 ]

the bifurcation of the world into hostile camps.”4 And few Is-lamic movements have demonstrated this as potently as have theTaliban in Afghanistan.

The aim of this study is to explore the challenges that theTaliban have faced in coming to terms with the wider world,particularly in the period since they occupied the Afghan capi-tal, Kabul, following the retreat of the Rabbani government inSeptember 1996 and began to claim for themselves a statusdefined not simply by Islam but by the structures of interna-tional society that had developed in the aftermath of the 1945 es-tablishment of the United Nations as an organization of sover-eign states.This study is divided into seven sections. In the first,I discuss some general problems in analyzing foreign policy. Inthe second, I give a brief account of the contexts in whichAfghan foreign policy has historically been devised. In the third,I note some of the specific characteristics of the Taliban move-ment. The fourth deals with the Taliban’s broad internationalobjectives and traces the relationship of these objectives to con-cerns in achieving regime consolidation. The fifth examines thetensions between developing international norms of conductand Taliban domestic policies, which have thwarted Talibaneªorts to secure widespread acceptance. The sixth addressesTaliban policy toward a number of important states. The sev-enth section deals with the di⁄cult question of whether the Tal-iban are likely to be an expansionist movement, and it oªerssome concluding observations.

“The Taliban,” Olivier Roy has argued, “have no foreign pol-icy.”5 If foreign policy is viewed in purely programmatic terms,then this is certainly the case; but the proposition does not holdif one accepts that behavior oªers a window through which pol-icy orientations can be discerned. Those who write about for-eign policy usually direct their attention to the foreign policy ofstates, and this reduces considerably the complexity of the taskthey confront. It is commonly the case that in states, one canfind bureaucratic agencies charged with the task of producingprogrammatic documents dealing with the relations of theirstate to the wider world. However, such documents can at best

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[2]

be a starting point for serious foreign policy analysis, since thediscrepancies between “declared” policy and steps actually takenby a state can be massive. For a more nuanced account, one willneed to examine the behavior of the state, in the hope of findingpatterns of action from which a disposition to act in particularways might be inferred.6 However, two qualifications are inorder. First, the distinction between statements and “behavior”should not be drawn too sharply, since some types of statementsare also actions—or as a shrewd diplomat once put it, “words arebullets.” 7 Second, it is by no means the case that all states willbe capable of articulating or enacting a “policy” su⁄ciently co-herent to merit the title. Diªerent bureaucratic agencies may befree to pursue their own agendas, free from the discipline im-posed by a superordinate authority, in which case discerning aclear foreign policy line may be very di⁄cult indeed.

Similar challenges can arise when one discusses the foreignpolicy of movements. In part this reflects the diversity of the phe-nomena that such a label can embrace. At its most basic theword “movement” may simply be a synonym for “party.” Thisusage is well established in Persian, where the Arabic wordharakat (movement) has been used to designate organizationsthat might just as easily have carried the Arabic label hezb(party). Movements in this sense may well produce program-matic documents on foreign policy issues, and if they are oppo-sitional movements with no access to state power, these mayprovide the only basis on which their foreign policies can beidentified and evaluated. Unfortunately, matters become a gooddeal messier when “movement” means more than just “party.”This is partly because at this point, the exact meaning of “socialmovement” proves hard to pin down: Paul Wilkinson hasrightly pointed to the “diversity and confusion of conceptual-izations” of the term.8 For the purposes of this study of the Tal-iban movement, I take as a starting point the definition of move-ment oªered by Sidney Tarrow: movements are “collectivechallenges by people with common purposes and solidarity insustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities.”9

But even once such a precise definition of movement is ac-


[3 ]

cepted, movements that are captured by the definition are likelyto prove so inchoate that to depict them as authors of “policy”(of any kind) is to speak metaphorically rather than empirically.This problem has been neatly captured by Tarrow: “Internally, agood part of the power of movements comes from the fact thatthey activate people over whom they have no control. Thispower is a virtue because it allows movements to mount collec-tive actions without possessing the resources that would be nec-essary to internalize a support base. But the autonomy of theirsupporters also disperses the movement’s power, encouragesfactionalism and leaves it open to defection, competition and re-pression.”10 This is not to deny that movements typically haveleaders whose utterances can be analyzed. But they are also likelyto contain a large number of undisciplined followers—some ofthem potential leaders—who oªer their views freely on a widerange of topics, including foreign policy. The low level of insti-tutionalization of movements can make it very di⁄cult to tellinto what category a particular “spokesman” falls.

It is extremely rare for consolidated, highly institutionalizedstates to be successfully taken over by movements of this variety.A crisis in the legitimacy of a ruling elite is likely to lead to itsdisplacement by some counter-elite, such as the military througha coup d’état, or a defecting fragment of the old elite. Where theinstitutions of the state have crumbled or collapsed, the situationis quite diªerent.11 In such circumstances, political dominancewill be claimed by those who can control the symbols of the state:they need not be capable of administering complex state institu-tions with complex roles, for such institutions have eªectivelyceased to exist. In the short-to-medium term, movements thatfind themselves in this position are unlikely to be able to takemore than symbolic steps in domestic politics, for they lack theinstruments to do so—most importantly revenues—and the bu-reaucracies to collect and spend them. In the sphere of foreignpolicy, it is easier to make a mark, since much can be done withwords alone. However, which words matter may again be di⁄cultto determine for two reasons. First, a movement may not controlall the symbols of the state but only some—its foreign policy

William Maley

[4]

pronouncements may be contested by other political forces. Sec-ond, within the movement, too many words may flow from toomany mouths, creating a cacophony of signals that defy ready in-terpretation by the wider world. Both these problems have con-fronted the Taliban since they overran Kabul.

One final point: since the foreign policy of a state is made upof a complex mixture of declarations and actions, the boundariesof foreign policy are not fixed, but are flexible and contestable,involving interaction with a wider world and feedback from it.Although a regime may protest that what occurs within its fron-tiers is a matter of sovereign responsibility and no business ofother states, to the extent that those states make it their businessit becomes a foreign policy problem for the regime. And to a fargreater extent than the Taliban seem to have anticipated, theirdomestic policies have played a significant role in shaping theirforeign policy dilemmas. Those Taliban charged with attempt-ing to present an acceptable face to the wider world are entan-gled in a particularly awkward two-level game.12

Viscount Palmerston’s nostrum that there are no eternal al-lies, only eternal interests, serves as a useful reminder that theforeign policy moves of the Taliban are to some extent the prod-uct of context. In the following remarks, I wish to identify boththe constraints that the Taliban face as a result of Afghanistan’sgeopolitical position and the attitudinal legacies in Afghanistanand its surrounding region that continue to limit the freedom ofAfghan policymakers’ actions.

What is now the state of Afghanistan emerged in the nine-teenth century as a landlocked buªer between the Russian em-pire and British India, dominated in the last two decades of thecentury by the British-backed Mohammadzai Pushtun AmirAbdul Rahman Khan13 and ruled almost uninterruptedly there-after by Mohammadzai Pushtun dynasties until the communistcoup in April 1978. The desire to avoid domination by its imme-diate neighbors prompted a search at diªerent times for friend-ship and support from more remote “countervailing powers”—including prewar Germany, and the postwar United States14—inorder to reinforce a stated policy of “neutrality” (bi tarafi).15 And


[5]

its landlocked character has helped shape Afghan foreign policyever since.The most dramatic manifestation of this surfaced dur-ing the so-called Pushtunistan dispute, a territorial conflict thatarose, after the partition of India, from Afghanistan’s refusal toaccept the 1893 “Durand Line” as an international border sepa-rating ethnic Pushtuns in Afghanistan from ethnic Pushtuns inthe Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan.16 When diplo-matic relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan were sus-pended between September 1961 and May 1963, Afghanistan’sforeign trade was hit hard as well, and laborious maneuveringswere required to secure the export of perishable commodities viaIndia and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the economic costs ofAfghanistan’s isolation undoubtedly played a role in the March1963 resignation of Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud, whohad been a leading figure agitating on the Pushtunistan issue.Afghanistan’s geopolitical vulnerability was plain for all to see.

The December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan exposedanother kind of geopolitical dilemma that Afghanistan faced asa victim of deteriorating relations between the superpowers. Inthe United States, President Jimmy Carter took the lead in con-struing the Soviet presence in Afghanistan as a possible “step-ping stone” toward the oil resources of the Persian Gulf, 17 butthe subsequent release of Soviet archival material has not lentsupport to this interpretation.18 Rather, reported comments inJanuary 1998 by Carter’s National Security Adviser ZbigniewBrzezinski, stating that the Carter administration approvedsupport for anticommunist groups before the invasion in orderto “increase the probability” of a Soviet plunge into what wouldbecome a quagmire,19 suggest that the Afghans may have fallenvictim to Washington’s perception that Afghanistan was simply apawn on a geopolitical chessboard. It is by now a commonplaceproposition that postcommunist Afghanistan has been destabi-lized by the self-interested meddling of its self-styled “friends,”but it seems that this is not as novel a development as one mighthave thought.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union extracted Afghani-stan from one set of geopolitical complexities but enmeshed it

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in another. In developmental terms, Soviet Central Asia hadlong been treated as a backwater, both by Moscow and by theworld. Corrupted local cliques enjoyed considerable power, es-pecially in Uzbekistan,20 but played no significant role in shap-ing Soviet foreign policy. As a result of the chain of events thatfollowed the failed August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow, theCentral Asian republics found themselves thrust in to inde-pendent statehood after a mere four months. Although the exactscope of this “independence” was debatable given the continuedmilitary presence of Russian troops through the mechanism ofthe Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the postin-dependence leaderships were faced with the problem of findingways of securing their own positions and the need to address is-sues previously outside their purview, such as the managementof foreign political and economic relations.21 Even thoughKazakhstan and Turkmenistan abut the Caspian Sea, in eco-nomic terms all five new states face problems of isolation simi-lar to those a¤icting landlocked Afghanistan.They control verysignificant energy resources but require outlets for these re-sources if they are to be able to secure rentier income (incomefrom foreign aid and asset sales) of the kind that could both de-tach them from Russian domination and secure social-eude-monic legitimation for ruling elites. Afghanistan straddles amajor route for the transport of energy resources to viable mar-kets, and this has thrust Afghanistan into the vortex of interna-tional oil and gas politics in a way that would have been un-thinkable had the Soviet Union not collapsed.

Finally, it is important to note that Afghanistan is also posi-tioned between two other troubled regions: South Asia to itseast, and the Middle East to its west. The poisonous characterof relations between India and Pakistan—two nuclear statesthemselves exposed to significant domestic strains22—hasprompted Pakistan to look to Afghanistan as a source of thestrategic depth that Pakistan lacks.23 This has madeAfghanistan a secondary theater in which Indo-Pakistani ri-valry has played out. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the 1979Iranian Revolution, the antagonism between the Shiite rulers of


[7 ]

Iran and the conservative Sunni elite in Saudi Arabia has alsobeen played out to some extent in Afghanistan, although indiªerent ways and times.24 All in all, from a geopolitical pointof view Afghanistan could hardly be in a worse position.

Afghan foreign policy is also significantly aªected by atti-tudes prevalent among its neighbors as a result of events in re-cent decades. On the one hand, the Russian recollection of theSoviet Union’s disastrous 1979 invasion is so strong that fear offurther contamination spreading from present-day Afghanistanto the Russian-protected states of Central Asia is potent inMoscow. On the other hand, the memory in Pakistan of thePushtunistan dispute has haunted Afghanistan’s relations withPakistan. Furthermore, Pakistan’s role as a “frontline state” dur-ing the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, during which its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) sought to promote what itsaw as pro-Pakistan Pushtun elements within the Afghan re-sistance,25 has left a dangerous legacy—most markedly in “theextent to which Pakistan’s military establishment has beentransfixed by the conviction that in some obscure manner Pak-istan’s role in aiding the victory of the Mujahideen overMoscow’s placemen has earned Islamabad the right to decidewho should or should not rule in Kabul.”26 The Taliban are themost recent beneficiaries of such Pakistani “generosity.”

Who, then, are the Taliban? The answer to this question isnot straightforward. Supporters paint them as simply a collec-tion of innocent students on a mission of purification, while op-ponents depict them at best as agents of the Pakistani ISI andat worst as Pakistani o⁄cers disguised as Afghans. Unfortu-nately, although neither of these extreme views properly cap-tures the complexity of the movement, for reasons of space thefollowing remarks can only go a little further in exposing thesecomplexities.27

The figure of the talib, or religious student, has been a fa-miliar one for centuries in the region of the Northwest FrontierProvince, and during the 1980s talibs were involved in combatagainst Soviet forces, often under the direction of mullahs a⁄li-ated with the Harakat-e Inqilab-e Islami Afghanistan, a largely

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[8 ]

Pushtun party led by Mawlawi Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi.The Taliban movement, on the other hand, emerged as an or-ganized military force only in 1994, with substantial backingfrom the Pakistani interior minister, General NaseerullahBabar. In securing a foothold in Afghanistan, the Taliban wereable to draw on massive disaªection in the Kandahar area withthe local mujahideen rulers, who in the period following the col-lapse of the communist regime in Kabul in April 1992 had notwon distinction for either honesty or competence. Pakistanplayed a key role in turning the Taliban into a functioning mil-itary force by providing training, logistical support, and equip-ment, and this was one factor that enabled them to seize thewestern city of Herat in September 1995 and then the ultimateprize, Kabul, in September 1996.28 The most revered figure inthe Taliban movement is an ethnic Pushtun named MohammadOmar, identified by the traditional title Amir al-Momineen(“Lord of the Believers”). His base is Kandahar, which is alsohome to the ruling shura (council) of the Taliban movement, abody heavily dominated by Durrani Pushtuns. Indeed, the en-tire movement is Pushtun-dominated, with only a nominalpresence from deracinated members of other ethnic groups.

The Taliban leaders preach a fundamentalist form of Islamderived from the Deoband tradition that originated at the fa-mous Dar ul-Ulum Deoband in British India.29 In the hands ofat least some of the Afghan “Deobandi” ‘ulama, however, thetradition was distinctively influenced by Pushtun tribal values,and it again received a distinctive twist when Afghan refugeeswere inducted into Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan run by aPakistani political party, the Jamiat-e Ulema-i Islam. As a result,the “Islam” of the Taliban is neither endorsed by the contempo-rary Deobandi sheikhs30 nor is a reflection of the pragmatic tra-ditions of normal Afghan village life, which few of the youngtalibs ever experienced. This helps explain how these Talibancan engage in activities that would be unthinkable in normal cir-cumstances in Afghanistan, such as the beating of women in thestreet; in this respect there are few precedents in Afghanistan’shistory for such a movement, and only a few elsewhere, includ-


[9]

ing perhaps the Boxer Movement in turn-of-the-century Chinaand later the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution,which reflected a similar mixture of social alienation and ideol-ogizing. Although the Taliban are sometimes labeled “ultra-conservative,” there is a radical dimension to their enterprise,since what they wish to “conserve” is more an imagined com-munity, governed by the Shariah alone, than a community withany actual referent in recent Afghan history.

Apart from its Kandahar-based leadership and its youthfulshock troops, the Taliban movement contains three other im-portant elements. First, as it moved through Afghanistan, itopened its doors to a wide range of ethnic Pushtuns who“reflagged” themselves as Taliban, either for reasons of pru-dence—as seems to have been the case with assorted local rulersin the south of the country—or for reasons of ethnic solidarity,as occurred when various northern Pushtun communities of de-scendants of settlers dispatched to the north by Abdul RahmanKhan in the late nineteenth century rallied to the Taliban dur-ing the 1997 and 1998 pushes into northern Afghanistan. 31 Sec-ond, the Taliban movement contains a significant number offormer members of the Khalq (“Masses”) faction of the com-munist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. They madetheir way into the Taliban by a somewhat circuitous route: inMarch 1990, General Shahnawaz Tanai, the Khalqi defenseminister in the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah,had mounted a factional revolt against the regime. While thisrevolt enjoyed the support of Pakistan’s ISI, it failed, and Tanaiand many of his supporters fled to Pakistan. It was from thisgroup that the Taliban derived some of their key military ca-pacities.32 While a number of Khalqis were purged from Talibanranks in a 1998 crackdown, others remain. The presence of suchfigures in the Taliban’s ranks has done much to fuel the suspi-cion that they are agents of Pakistani interests. Third, it has re-cently made use of Arab combatants from Saudi extremistUsama bin Laden’s 055 Brigade, who together with disaªectedMuslim militants from other parts of the world have gravitatedto those areas of Afghanistan under Taliban control33—a devel-

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opment that the U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi,in July 1999 described as an “extremely dangerous” develop-ment.34

While the exact process of Taliban decision-making remainsquite extraordinarily mysterious, not least because leaders suchas Mullah Omar are uncomfortable with foreigners and avoidmeeting them, it is clear that the Taliban lack competent bu-reaucratic support and sophisticated, highly educated cadres. Asa result, they have little understanding of the evolved practicesof modern diplomacy, virtually no comprehension of the poli-tics of states outside the Muslim world, and a limited capacityto develop and maintain a consistent stance when dealing withtheir interlocutors, a fact that prompted one observer to com-pare negotiating with the Taliban to “grasping smoke.”35 TheTaliban have not produced any comprehensive foreign policymanifesto; and foreign policy attitudes and initiatives are oftendetected from only radio broadcasts or letters sent to interna-tional agencies such as the United Nations. To speak of a Tal-iban “foreign policy establishment” would imply an absurdlygreater degree of organizational coherence than the movementmanifests. Nonetheless, a number of individuals have played arole in articulating what might broadly be regarded as “foreignpolicy concerns.” Mullah Omar has, on occasion, expressedviews on foreign policy issues; various o⁄cials have acted as “for-eign minister,” notably Mullah Mohammad Ghaus and WakilAhmad. And, until his replacement by Mawlawi Sayed Mo-hammad Haqqani, the English-speaking Sher MohammadStanakzai served as “deputy foreign minister” and represented apoint of contact for foreign o⁄cials visiting Kabul, although itrapidly became clear that he lacked any power of his own. In ad-dition, foreign policy statements have on occasion been issuedby those Taliban dispatched to New York to seek the Afghani-stan seat in the U.N. General Assembly, a prize that has thus fareluded them, and by Taliban-appointed ambassadors in Pak-istan, which remains one of only three states (the others beingSaudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) from which theTaliban have received diplomatic recognition.


[ 1 1 ]

The first broad foreign policy objective of the Taliban was towin acceptance as a government. Yet the issue of recognition hasbeen one of the most frustrating with which the Taliban havehad to cope, and it seems further than ever from being resolvedin their favor. In order to explain the nature of the Taliban’sproblem, it is necessary to understand in more detail the natureof recognition and the events that accompanied the Taliban’s oc-cupation of Kabul.

Recognition in international law involves acceptance by astate that the recognized body possesses an international legalpersonality and the rights and privileges that flow from it or isthe exclusive representative of a body with international legalpersonality. The decision to grant or not to grant recognition isa political decision within the sovereign discretion of individualstates. Recognition in principle can be accorded to either statesor governments.36 As to the former, it must be noted that thestate of Afghanistan has been recognized by a large number ofstates, including all permanent members of the U.N. SecurityCouncil, for many years. However, where political power hasfragmented to the extent that it has in Afghanistan in recentyears, there may well be more than one group claiming to be thegovernment. Deciding how best to press such claims is a seriousforeign policy matter for the claimants. Deciding how to re-spond to such claims is a serious foreign policy matter for thegovernments to which they are made. A distinct, if at some lev-els similar, issue arises when more than one “government” sendsa delegation to represent a single state in an international or-ganization such as the United Nations. Here, the problem is oneof how an organization of states can devise a collective responseto such a dilemma.The U.N. General Assembly responds by ap-pointing a credentials committee to make recommendations tothe General Assembly about credentials oªered by the variousdelegations of member states.

The Taliban, upon taking Kabul, immediately demandedboth recognition from other states as the government ofAfghanistan and Afghanistan’s seat in the General Assembly.However, they received neither. As far as recognition was con-

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cerned, the explanation was largely political. On the night theTaliban took Kabul, September 26–27, 1996, Najibullah, the for-mer communist president, was dragged from U.N. premises(where he had been living since April 1992) and murdered; hisbody was hung from a pylon in Ariana Square. This gruesomespectacle attracted a large contingent of international mediarepresentatives, who were then in place to report the impositionof harsh restrictions on the population of Kabul.37 The reactionsin Western states to these reports were extremely adverse, bothat mass and elite levels. As a result, states such as the UnitedStates, France, the United Kingdom, and Australia, in which theRabbani government had diplomatic or consular agents, optedin the first instance to leave the status quo in place. There was asound legal basis for this: as Hersch Lauterpacht observed ofrevolutionary forces, “So long as the revolution has not beenfully successful, and so long as the lawful government, howeveradversely aªected by the fortunes of the civil war, remains withinnational territory and asserts its authority, it is presumed to rep-resent the State as a whole.”38

The Taliban faced similar problems at the United Nations.The U.N. General Assembly on December 14, 1950, adoptedResolution 396(v), which provided that “wherever more thanone authority claims to be the government entitled to representa Member State in the United Nations and this question be-comes the subject of controversy in the United Nations, thequestion should be considered in the light of the Purposes andPrinciples of the Charter and the circumstances of each case.”This has not prevented disputes over credentials in the inter-vening period, but it worked to the disadvantage of the Taliban,whose invasion of U.N. premises in Kabul hardly bespoke a firmcommitment to the purposes and principles of the U.N. Char-ter, and whose treatment of women shocked many memberstates. But two other factors worked to the disadvantage of theTaliban. First, as the authors of the main commentary on theU.N. Charter have observed, in practice a government will beregarded by the General Assembly “as being authorized to rep-resent a member state as long as it has not been replaced by a


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rival claimant who has established eªective control over thestate independently of the support of a foreign power.”39 The wide-spread suspicion that Pakistan had backed the Taliban in itscampaign to overthrow the Rabbani government seems to havebrought this latter qualification into play in the minds of at leastsome of the members of the credentials committee in 1996, 1997,1998, and 1999, since the committee on each occasion opted topreserve the status quo. Pakistan’s persistent attempts to inducethe United Nations to adopt a “vacant seat” formula overAfghanistan40—something for which Pakistan had successfullypushed during the 1996 Jakarta meeting of the Organization ofthe Islamic Conference (OIC)—have failed ignominiously.Second, the Taliban’s nominees charged with seeking theAfghanistan seat at the United Nations—Hamed Karzai,41 fol-lowed by Abdul Hakim Mujahed and Nurullah Zadran—wereno match as diplomats for the Rabbani government’s represen-tative, Dr. Ravan Farhadi, a French-trained scholar who, duringthe rule of King Zahir, had served as head of the U.N. and In-ternational Conferences Division of the Foreign Ministry,counselor in the Afghan Embassy in Washington, secretary tothe cabinet, and Afghan ambassador to France.

The second broad foreign policy objective of the Taliban wasto obtain revenue from international sources. Afghanistan be-fore the 1978 communist coup had many of the characteristics ofa rentier state: at the time of the coup, over a third of total stateexpenditures was financed by foreign aid.42 By the time the Tal-iban took Kabul, years of disorder had destroyed any central-state capacity to raise taxes in an orderly fashion. Yet with thelegitimacy of rulers still contested in significant parts of thecountry, monies could play a valuable role in buying the pru-dential support of strategically placed local power holders. Thismade obtaining external financial support a major aim of theregime. “Saudi Arabia,” Rashid has argued of the period beforethe Taliban takeover of Kabul, “was to become the principalfinancial backer of the Taliban.”43 However, the Taliban—per-haps recalling how fickle had been the support of external back-ers for the mujahideen at diªerent times—sought to diversify

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their income sources. Their eªorts are continuing, but the re-sults have been mixed. Three particular spheres of activity meritattention.

The first relates to the cultivation of international energycompanies.44 In October 1995, the U.S. corporation UNOCALand the Saudi corporation Delta Oil signed a memorandum ofintent with the government of Turkmenistan that anticipatedthe construction of a gas pipeline through Afghanistan to Pak-istan. When the Taliban took Kabul, a UNOCAL vice presi-dent, Chris Taggart, reportedly termed it a “positive develop-ment.”45 However, for both UNOCAL and the Taliban, therelationship proved frustrating. For the Taliban, the relationshipwith UNOCAL delivered neither revenue nor wider Americansupport. Their expectations were extremely unrealistic: accord-ing to Rashid, they expected “the company which wins the con-tract to provide electricity, gas, telephones, roads—in fact, vir-tually a new infrastructure for a destroyed country.”46 FromUNOCAL’s point of view, the Taliban proved unable to deliverthe level of security that would be required to permit such a proj-ect to go ahead—and given the vulnerability not only of thepipeline itself but also the expatriate staª who would inevitablybe involved in its construction, that level of security is extremelyhigh. As a result, according to another UNOCAL vice presi-dent, Marty Miller, “lenders have said the project at this mo-ment is just not financeable,”47 and in August 1998, the companysuspended its involvement in the project following U.S. Toma-hawk cruise missile strikes against alleged terrorist trainingcamps operated in eastern Afghanistan by Usama bin Laden.48

In the face of these problems, the Taliban have sought to main-tain lines of communication with one of UNOCAL’s competi-tors, the Argentinian company Bridas, but Bridas seems as faras ever from securing private-sector finance for what would,under current conditions, be an extraordinarily high-risk un-dertaking. The Taliban’s dilemma is that any warming in rela-tions between the United States and Iran would undercutWashington’s strategic rationale for favoring a pipeline fromTurkmenistan through Afghanistan, rather than directly from


[ 1 5 ]

Iran to Pakistan, as a way of meeting South Asia’s demand forenergy. Indeed, in early March 1998, Pakistani Prime MinisterNawaz Sharif held a meeting with a high-level delegation fromthe Australian corporation BHP to discuss the modalities of anIran-Pakistan pipeline.49 More and more it appears that theTaliban’s hopes of securing a free revenue stream by bargainingwith major multinational consortia are slipping away.

The second relates to the exploitation of “transit trade” andother smuggling between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Under theAfghan Transit Trade Agreement of 1965, certain goods can beimported into Afghanistan through Pakistan, free of Pakistanicustoms duties. It is clear that a significant proportion of thegoods thus imported are then smuggled into Pakistan, wherethey are sold in smugglers’ markets. In recent years, this tradehas been augmented by the transportation into Pakistan ofgoods imported into Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistanfrom Dubai and other trading ports in the Persian Gulf. Thevalue of this trade has been estimated in a World Bank study at$2 billion, and the profit to the Taliban may be as high as $75million, although it is unlikely that it is pooled in such a way asto permit e⁄cient budgeting.50 The Pakistani state is a majorloser from this trade, since it is thereby deprived of the revenuesfrom indirect taxation it would otherwise accrue, and its generaltolerance of the loss is a clear indicator of the extent to whichpowerful groups in Pakistan value the goal of sustaining the Tal-iban regime above the goal of putting Pakistan’s own economichouse in order—something that should be borne in mind by in-ternational financial institutions from whom Pakistan seekslines of credit.

The third relates to the raising of revenues from opium, ofwhich Afghanistan is one of the world’s largest producers.51

Drug tra⁄cking has received considerable attention in recentyears as a “nontraditional” security issue and weighs heavily in thethinking of the U.S. administration.52 Yet opium also representsa revenue source of some potential for power holders in a debil-itated territory such as Afghanistan. The challenge for the Tal-iban therefore has been to extract revenue from this source with-

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out so alienating foreign governments that the costs of the un-dertaking outweigh the benefits. Here again, the Taliban havenot been especially successful.The involvement of the Taliban inthe drug trade is by now reasonably well established. In a 1996 in-terview, Mullah Omar admitted that the Taliban received rev-enue from a tax on opium.53 The Afghanistan Annual OpiumPoppy Survey 1998, published by the United Nations Interna-tional Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), found that the“provinces under the control of the Taliban, at the time of theSurvey, account for approximately 96% of Afghanistan’s totalopium cultivation.”54 The position of the Taliban has been thatit is “di⁄cult to encourage farmers to produce other cashcrops,”55 and there is almost certainly some truth in this claim.However, eyewitness testimony points to Taliban involvementnot only in compelling farmers to grow opium, but in distribut-ing fertilizer for the crops.56 Given the loose structure of themovement, this could well reflect simply the greed of local Tal-iban, but it has not been read in this way: the U.S. State Depart-ment has concluded that there is “evidence that the Taliban,which control much of Afghanistan, have made a policy decisionto take advantage of narcotics tra⁄cking and production in orderto put pressure on the west and other consuming nations.”57 Thishas not been well received in the West, and although the Talibanare undoubtedly obtaining much-needed funds from opiumsales, the political costs they are paying are far from trivial.

Nonetheless, with the possible exception of the Taliban’s hos-pitality to Usama bin Laden, which has catastrophically preju-diced any prospect of amicable relations with the United States,the main consideration thwarting their eªorts to secure interna-tional recognition and legitimacy is their treatment of women.The issue is an extremely important one, not simply becausewomen are a particularly vulnerable and long-suªering compo-nent of the Afghan population, but also because the mobilizationof groups in the international community in defense of Afghanwomen points to ways in which the sovereignty claims of puta-tive state rulers may increasingly be subordinated to evolving in-ternational norms. At the same time, it points to the enormous


[ 17 ]

tension that can arise between these norms and the norms de-fended by groups for whom secular rules must be subordinate tothose seen as divinely ordained. It is this tension that is at theheart of the Taliban’s growing international isolation.

The Taliban could charitably be described as the least femi-nist group in the world. This became clear once they reachedKabul, although the policies they sought to impose in Kabuldiªered little from those which they had forcibly implementedin Kandahar from late 1994 and Herat from September 1995. Inrural areas in which the Taliban found themselves in potentialcompetition with an existing tribal authority structure, they hadfar less scope to impose their puritanical visions, and as a result,there are areas nominally under Taliban control in which girls’schools continue to function.58 In cities, there were far fewer cen-ters of countervailing power, and the Taliban religious police,known as the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Sup-pression of Vice (Amr bil-Maroof wa Nahi An il-Munkir), havehad a free hand. That hand has been directed against women,with a fierce paternalism of which Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisi-tor would have been proud. Under decrees issued by this depart-ment, it is forbidden for women to travel unless accompanied bya close male relative (mahram) or without being swathed in astifling head-to-toe garment known as a burqa.59 These ruleswere enforced in the days following the Taliban arrival in Kabulby teams of young Taliban who beat women with rubber hosesin front of foreign journalists. In addition, girls’ schools in Kabulhave been closed, women have been excluded from most areas ofthe workforce and from Kabul University, and—during a partic-ularly grim period in late 1997—women were denied access toemergency hospital care, with fatal results. According to the U.S.State Department, a nongovernmental organization in October1997 “reported that a female burn victim had died after Talibanauthorities would not allow her to be treated by a male doctor.”60

Furthermore, reports began to appear of young women beingforced to marry young Taliban against their will.61

The topic of gender relations in Afghanistan is complex anddi⁄cult, since social roles for some but not all Afghan women

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[ 19 ]

changed significantly as a result of wider processes of social de-velopment in urban areas, particularly Kabul, over the last fourdecades.62 From 1959 onward, women in Kabul had opportuni-ties to access higher education and employment on a scale thatwould have been unthinkable earlier.63 Following the 1978 com-munist coup and with the backing of coercive threats, the newregime sought to extend its ideology of gender roles to unre-ceptive rural areas. The results were catastrophic—the regimenot only faced intense opposition to its policies from aªrontedrural dwellers, but the entire exercise set back the cause of laud-able objectives such as female literacy by linking them, in theminds of conservative village clergy, with atheism and propa-ganda.64 Furthermore, with the flight of millions of Afghanrefugees to Pakistan, the resulting disempowerment of Afghanmales in many cases prompted an obsessive preoccupation ontheir part with the protection of “female honor,” one of the fewexercises they could still embark on with much hope of suc-cess.65 As a result of these experiences, the social roles of womenbecame increasingly salient benchmarks for distinguishingdiªerent types of sociopolitical order.

It is in this context that women’s rights have become theprincipal battleground between the Taliban and the interna-tional community. The Taliban see their treatment of women ina very diªerent way from outside observers. They rightly pointto the grim experience of Afghan women during the brutal di-vision of Kabul between warring militias from mid-1992 toMarch 1995,66 and credit themselves with eliminating such in-security—although in late March 1998, a Voice of America cor-respondent laconically reported that while a Taliban spokesmanhad said in a statement that there was “complete peace and se-curity” in the provinces controlled by the Taliban, “at the sametime, he told reporters that a lack of adequate security is anotherserious problem in providing education to female students.”67

Earlier, the chair of the Taliban’s “Caretaker Council” in Kabul,Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, had stated that he was “perplexedat the silence of the western media regarding the tragedies andmiseries that prevailed when previous governments were in

power in Afghanistan,” and went on to blame the bad publicityreceived by the Taliban on “world Zionism fighting Islam.”68

Raising an argument for cultural relativism, another Talibanspokesman complained that “in the United States, they want toimpose their American culture on us.”69

This remark obliquely reflected the way in which the Talibanhave become trapped in a series of increasingly acrimonious ex-changes with prominent western women. On September 29,1997, the European Union Commissioner for HumanitarianAªairs Emma Bonino was detained by the Taliban during a visitto what had been designated by the Taliban as a women’s hos-pital. This represented the confusion and incoherence of theTaliban more than a deliberate and planned attempt to intimi-date an international o⁄cial, but it won the Taliban quite dev-astating media coverage (not least because Bonino was accom-panied by the prominent correspondent ChristianeAmanpour)70 and it prompted the German foreign minister todescribe the Taliban justification for the detentions as “unbe-lievable and shameful in every respect.”71 The result was to turnCommissioner Bonino into a frontline critic of the Taliban: theEuropean Parliament adopted “Flowers for the Women ofKabul” as a slogan for the International Women’s Day on March8, 1998. The plight of Kabuli women then figured prominentlyin demonstrations and activities around the world, promptingthe Taliban-controlled Radio Voice of Shariah to describe theInternational Women’s Day as a “conspiracy” by “the infidels ofthe world under the leadership of Emma Bonino” and to com-plain of “the provocation which has been launched by Chris-tendom against the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”72 Evenmore worrying for the Taliban than the opposition of a promi-nent European such as Bonino was U.S. Secretary of StateMadeleine Albright’s November 1997 description of Talibanpolicies toward women as “despicable,”73 an observation that in-terestingly, provoked from the Taliban “foreign ministry” amuch less splenetic response than that encountered by Bonino,namely the claim that Albright’s comments were based on “herincorrect knowledge of reality.”74 Whether the forthright state-

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[20 ]

ments by Bonino and Albright represent the best way to promptTaliban concessions on the issue of women’s rights is not thepoint. Rather, what these episodes demonstrate is the way inwhich Taliban “foreign policy” has become the victim of the Tal-iban’s pursuit of a domestic agenda out of step with much of thewider world.

The Taliban came on the world scene at the wrong time fortheir own good. In the early 1980s, Afghan groups with similarattitudes on women—for example, the Hezb-e Islami of Gul-buddin Hekmatyar—were funded with few qualms by the U.S.administration.75 But by the mid-1990s, the global strategic sit-uation was radically diªerent as a result of the collapse of the So-viet Union, and new agendas of social awareness were beingpressed with increasing vigor. The U.N. International Women’sConference in Beijing in September 1995 confirmed an agendaradically at odds with that of the Taliban, and a dense networkof women’s groups had formed to give eªect to that agenda. In-deed, the failure of the Taliban to secure recognition, orAfghanistan’s seat in the General Assembly, reflected in part theeªective lobbying of those groups (which also put pressure onUNOCAL to distance itself from the Taliban). The FeministMajority Foundation under Eleanor Smeal took a strong lead insuch action, with support from American celebrities such asMavis Leno and Lionel Richie,76 and their position was bol-stered by the release in August 1998 of a damning and widelypublicized report from the Boston-based Physicians for HumanRights entitled The Taliban’s War on Women.77 For these groups,the response of their own governments to the Taliban’s demandsfor acceptance became an important symbol of those govern-ments’ seriousness about gender issues, and—in contrast to whatmight have been the case had the rulers of a resource-rich statesuch as Saudi Arabia been under fire—there were no compellingreasons for the governments to ignore this domestic pressure.

However, the tension between the Taliban and the widerworld over the gender issue reflected a deeper tension—betweena vision of the world governed by rules of an evolving internationalsociety and a vision of the world as ruled by the word of God. For


[21 ]

the Taliban’s Amir al-Momineen, this was the key distinction. In astatement in late December 1997, Mullah Omar claimed that theUnited Nations had “fallen under the influence of imperialistpowers,” and “under the pretext of human rights has misledMoslems from the path of righteousness.” Increased rights forwomen would lead to adultery and herald “the destruction ofIslam.” “We do not,” Mullah Omar went on, “accept somethingwhich somebody imposes on us under the name of human rightswhich is contrary to the holy Koranic law.” The holy Koran, heconcluded, “cannot adjust itself to other people’s requirements;people should adjust themselves to the requirements of the holyKoran.”78 This comes as close as the Taliban have yet progressedin developing a philosophy of international relations. And it is anuncompromising one that repudiates international law, interna-tional opinion, and international organizations if they appear toconflict in any way with the Taliban’s idiosyncratic interpretationof what holy Koranic law might require.

As a result, the United Nations as an organization has foundthe Taliban extraordinarily di⁄cult to handle. Its charter and itspractices carry no particular weight with them, as the murder ofNajibullah made clear. Yet given how few states retain a diplo-matic presence in Kabul, the United Nations is the agency thatcarries the burden of giving voice to international law and in-ternational opinion, even as—in another guise—it seeks to co-ordinate the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Afghans liv-ing in Taliban-controlled areas. The United Nations is really afamily of loosely connected and uncoordinated organizations,with their own interests, tactics, and strategies. The signals thatthe Taliban have received from this labyrinth have been confus-ing, and they have evoked a confused response. While agenciessuch as UNDCP have sought to make the Kandahar leadershippartners in their antinarcotics programs, the General Assemblyhas refused to seat the Taliban. While U.N. staªers in Pakistanmake their way to the Taliban-controlled Afghan Embassy inorder to obtain visas to enter the country, the director-generalof UNESCO calls the Taliban “madmen” and “barbarians whointerpret the Koran as they see fit.”79 It is perhaps not surpris-

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[22 ]

ing that the cynicism of U.N. o⁄cials about the Taliban ismatched by the cynicism of the Taliban about the United Na-tions. But given the tunnel vision of the Taliban, it is doubtfulwhether anything but wholesale support for the Taliban’s poli-cies and aims would have satisfied the Kandahar leaders.

The result has been a growing Taliban contempt for theUnited Nations. On the one hand, this takes the form of a will-ingness to exploit the goodwill of the United Nations for mili-tary purposes.Thus, in March 1998, the head of the World FoodProgramme o⁄ce in Herat claimed that the Taliban had beenusing displaced persons’ camps in the Herat area “as lures forfresh troops to join the front line,” the basic message to malebreadwinners being “move your family down to the camp, andwe’ll make sure they get well fed, and you’ll fight for us.”80 Onthe other hand, it appears in the form of a disdain for U.N. ac-tions from which they cannot benefit. This was clearly mani-fested in the Taliban blockade of food supplies reaching the cen-tral Hazarajat region, a blockade that was implemented in theface of high-level pleas from the United Nations that it not goahead, and which the Taliban enforced by bombing the Bamianairport on January 1, 1998, when a clearly identified U.N. planewas on the runway. Faced with a series of Taliban provocationsthat culminated in an assault on a U.N. staªer by the Talibangovernor of Kandahar, Mullah Mohammad Hassan,81 on March23, 1998, the United Nations ordered the withdrawal of its ex-patriate staª in Kandahar and suspended its humanitarian ac-tivities in the south of the country.82 Ambassador LakhdarBrahimi, the U.N. undersecretary-general for Special Assign-ments, was in Pakistan at the time of the withdrawal and sent avery firm message: if the United Nations could not operate as itdid in all other member states, it “should pack up and go.” Headded that the “international community has a standard and ifyou want to be a member of the club you have to abide by therules.”83 In the same vein, U.N. Undersecretary-General forHumanitarian Aªairs Sergio Vieira de Mello demanded “writ-ten assurances that international humanitarian law and princi-ples will be respected.”84 Some such written assurances were


[23 ]

given in a Memorandum of Understanding signed in Kabul onMay 13, 1998, by the Taliban “planning minister,” Qari DeenMohammad, and the U.N. deputy emergency relief coordina-tor, Martin Gri⁄ths.85 In other respects, however, the docu-ment proved a disaster for the United Nations, since Article 13,in a section entitled “Access to Health and Education” statedthat “women’s access to health and education will need to begradual.” This prompted a scathing attack from the executivedirector of Physicians for Human Rights, Leonard S. Rubin-stein, who stated that the U.N. “endorsement of Taliban restric-tions on women’s basic rights to education and health care is abetrayal of international human rights standards and of the fe-male population of Afghanistan.”86 This specific issue took aback seat when the August 1998 U.S. Tomahawk cruise missilestrikes prompted a U.N. withdrawal from Afghanistan, in themidst of which a military adviser to the U.N. Special Mission toAfghanistan (UNSMA), Lieutenant-Colonel Carmine Calo ofItaly, was murdered in Kabul. And when the Taliban launcheda further major oªensive against their opponents in late July1999—barely a week after a declaration issued at U.N.-spon-sored talks in Tashkent, attended by Taliban representatives, hadcalled for peaceful political negotiations in order to establish abroad-based, multiethnic, and fully representative govern-ment—relations between the Taliban and the United Nationshit a new low.

The Taliban’s relations with nongovernmental organizations(NGOs) have been equally tense, and the images of the Talibanconveyed to the wider world through NGO channels have, onthe whole, been extremely adverse. While some NGOs wel-comed the security that the Taliban brought and found themless corrupt than other groups with which they had to deal, forother NGOs they were at best meddlesome and obstreperous.87

The issue of gender again proved extraordinarily sensitive, andthose bodies that coped most eªectively with the Taliban werethose engaged in “gender-neutral” work such as mine action,88

or those such as the International Committee of the Red Crossthat were not under donor pressure to take a strong political

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[24 ]

stand in response to Taliban policy. Tensions finally came to ahead on July 14, 1998, when the Taliban ordered internationalNGOs in Kabul to relocate to the ruined campus of the KabulPolytechnic, which they were also invited to repair.This was un-derstandably interpreted as a covert expulsion order, and manysuch NGOs opted instead to quit the capital. The Taliban re-sponded by seizing NGO property, notably two vehicles do-nated to a medical charity by the Princess Diana Fund—vehi-cles that, days later, a correspondent reported “now ferry aroundturbaned and gun-toting passengers in comfort through thebumpy and potholed streets of Kabul.”89 While some interna-tional NGOs did shift to the Polytechnic, they were displacedby the Taliban in mid-1999 “after more than 800 troops occu-pied the compound for a month before moving to the front.”90

After the Tomahawk cruise missile strikes, the activities of manyNGOs were further limited by restrictions imposed by donorgovernments; one Western government even warned that itwould suspend all funding to any Pakistan-based NGO whoseexpatriate staª set foot in Afghanistan. Despite a recent Talibandecree designed to guarantee the safety of NGO staª,91 there islittle indication that relations between the Taliban and interna-tional NGOs are likely to improve at any time in the foreseeablefuture, for while the Taliban welcome them as assistants, theycannot abide them as witnesses.

The tensions between the Taliban and the United Nationsreflect tensions between the Taliban and a number of powerfulU.N. members. In the following paragraphs, I explore the di-mensions of Taliban relations with three of the more importantmembers—Pakistan, Iran, and the United States—since thesethree states, by virtue of their proximity or power, are central tothe prospects for any progress toward a settling of the Afghanproblem. I also make some brief comments about Taliban atti-tudes on Saudi Arabia, Russia, and India.

Pakistan is undoubtedly the state closest to the Taliban, andthere is much truth in the claim that were it not for continuing,substantial Pakistani support, the Taliban would face enormousproblems holding their positions in the part of Afghanistan


[25 ]

where they dominate. It is no exaggeration to say that despitePakistani denials,92 the expansion of Taliban power has reflecteda “creeping invasion” of Afghanistan by its neighbor: for exam-ple, in mid-1999, journalist Ahmed Rashid reported that inpreparation for the Taliban’s summer oªensive, “Transportplanes from Pakistan fly military supplies at night to the ram-shackle Kabul airport.”93 To that extent, Pakistan is rightlyviewed as the state that must be pressured if the Taliban are tobe prodded toward a viable settlement of the Afghan conflict,and the military coup by General Pervez Musharraf on October12, 1999, in no way alters this fundamental reality. Yet the rela-tionship between Pakistan and the Taliban is not one of directcontrol for two reasons. First, the loose structure of the Talibanmovement, based on personal ties rather than structured hierar-chy, makes it virtually impossible to control in any carefully cal-ibrated way. This became very clear in May 1997 when the Tal-iban incursion into northern Afghanistan, manifestlyorchestrated by Pakistan, failed dramatically through a lack ofeªective control over trigger-happy foot soldiers.94 Second, theTaliban have proved adept at building ties to diªerent lobbies inPakistan as a way of protecting themselves from disaªection onthe part of any single lobby.95 This does not mean that the Tal-iban leadership can aªord to take the relationship for granted.In supporting a revivalist Sunni Pushtun movement such as theTaliban, various Pakistani agencies have been pursuing a veryhigh-risk strategy—something increasingly pointed out in crit-ical commentaries in the Pakistani press96—and Pakistan in thepast has moved away from long-term surrogates when it hasseemed in its interest to do so. However, Pakistan faces theproblem that the Taliban may slip out of control in more sinis-ter ways than those I have just mentioned. On January 11, 1998,twenty eight Pakistani Shiites were shot dead in a Lahore ceme-tery by Sunni extremists, an atrocity that led to rampagesthrough the streets of Lahore by Shiite militants. What shouldhave been disturbing from Pakistan’s point of view was that thekillers came from a group that regularly receives Taliban hospi-

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[26 ]

tality.97 Pakistan may one day find that having sown the wind,it is left to reap the whirlwind.

Militant anti-Shiism lies at the core of the Taliban’s deeplytroubled relations with Iran. This militancy derives in part fromthe nature of the education available in Deobandi madrassas,but in Afghanistan it is reinforced by patterns of hostility to theethnic group of which a large number of Shiites are members,namely the Hazaras. The Hazaras have a distinctly CentralAsian phenotype and have a long experience of social margin-alization. These experiences have helped shape the character ofShiite political mobilization.98 Since the Iranian population isoverwhelmingly Shiite and the Iranian political system is dom-inated by Shiite ‘ulama, it is hardly surprising that the Taliban’shostility to Shiism has prompted a strong Iranian response inthe form of military and moral support for the Taliban’s armedopponents, most importantly but by no means exclusively theShiite Hezb-e Wahdat. Iran has delighted in highlighting someof the more eccentric aspects of Taliban behavior, not least be-cause on issues such as female access to education and employ-ment, Iran appears moderate, even progressive, in contrast to itsKandahari neighbors. One senior Iranian cleric described Tal-iban policies as “fossilized.”99 A Taliban spokesman, in turn, hasdescribed Iran as “an expansionist state which wants to establish‘Greater Iran’ from the Gulf in the south to the Amu [Oxus]river in the north and the Indus river to the east.”100 In June1997, relations took a nosedive when the Taliban ordered theclosing of the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, and they reached theirnadir in August 1998 when the Taliban seized the northern cityof Mazar-e Sharif, killing 8 staª members of the Iranian Con-sulate, and embarked on an orgy of killing in which perhaps2,500 Shiites perished in just three days.101 This caused outragein Iran and brought Iran and the Taliban to the brink of war,102

which only dexterous diplomacy by U.N. Envoy Brahimi man-aged to avert. Although there has been a certain amount of di-alogue between Iran and the Taliban since then, relations remainextremely tense. If the policy of the Taliban toward the Hazarastakes a further genocidal turn—and this is by no means out of


[27 ]

the question—then it is most unlikely that Iran could remain asrelatively restrained as it has thus far been in the face of the pre-dations of radical Sunnism.

Taliban relations with the United States have also deterio-rated massively. When the Taliban took Kabul, they had highhopes of support from America.103 Staª members of the U.S.Embassy in Pakistan made no secret of their animosity towardthe Taliban’s predecessors, and U.S. Assistant Secretary of Statefor South Asia Robin Raphel had demanded a month earlierthat Iran “should stop supplying Kabul.”104 The U.S. adminis-tration was also sympathetic to UNOCAL’s ambitions for theregion.105 The State Department’s acting spokesman, GlynDavies, remarked that “the United States finds nothing objec-tionable in the policy statements of the new government, in-cluding its move to impose Islamic law.”106 An Afghan-Amer-ican commentator with the RAND Corporation who hadserved in the upper echelons of the State Department and theDepartment of Defense even went into print to argue that it wastime for the United States to reengage in Afghanistan, main-taining that “the departure of Usama bin Laden, the Saudifinancier of various anti-U.S. terrorist groups, from Afghanistanindicates some common interest between the United States andthe Taliban.”107 However, disappointment set in rapidly on bothsides. As noted earlier, the Taliban’s policies toward womenmade them political pariahs, and by 1998, these policies evenwon them criticism from Hillary Rodham Clinton, first lady of the United States. Furthermore, if more explicit U.S. inter-ests in Afghanistan could be summed up in terms of “drugs and thugs”108—in other words, the flourishing of opium cropsand networks of terrorists from the Arab world109—it rapidlyemerged that firm Taliban action could be expected on neitherfront. It soon became clear that bin Laden had not leftAfghanistan; on the contrary, he had been a major financier ofthe Taliban push to Kabul.110 The bomb blasts on August 7,1998, which devastated the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tan-zania, were blamed by U.S. intelligence sources on bin Laden,prompting the Tomahawk missile strikes on his training camps

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in Afghanistan two weeks later. This led to an upsurge of anti-American sentiment on the part of the Taliban and their Pak-istani backers from the Jamiat-e ‘Ulema-i Islami, and ultimatelythe promulgation by President Clinton on July 6, 1999, of an ex-ecutive order freezing all Taliban assets in the United States andbanning commercial and financial ties between the Taliban andthe U.S.111 As relations cooled with the Taliban, Washingtonbegan to flirt with the idea that the former Afghan monarchZahir Shah could play a role in putting together an alternative,something that prompted the Pakistani foreign minister—atthe time an ardent Taliban supporter—to remark in March 1998during a Tokyo press conference that the Americans were “think-ing of putting puppets in Afghanistan,” those puppets being “peo-ple who hover around in Pakistan from one cocktail party to theother.”112 It is now most improbable that any U.S. administrationwill pursue more than low-level contacts with the Taliban for theforeseeable future; and perhaps it was always wishful thinking onthe part of both naive Taliban and naive Americans to expect thatany deeper relations could develop between leaderships with suchradically diªerent Weltanschauungen. Indeed, should Taliban in-transigence on the bin Laden issue persist for much longer,Wash-ington is quite likely to shift to a stance of much more active op-position to the Taliban, a posture that ironically is now beingcanvassed by the very analyst who in 1996 had argued for reen-gagement.113 An early indication of what the future may hold wasthe imposition at U.S. instigation of U.N. sanctions against theTaliban from November 14, 1999. Resolution 1267 of the U.N.Security Council, adopted pursuant to Chapter VII of theU.N. charter, reflected the increasing willingness of the interna-tional community to bring pressure to bear against the Talibanover the bin Laden issue, notably through the disruption of themovement by air of goods to be smuggled into Pakistan by traderswho then rewarded the Taliban for their assistance.

The attitudes of the Taliban to Saudi Arabia, Russia, andIndia are somewhat less complicated than their attitudes to Pak-istan, Iran, and the United States. Saudi Arabia as a financialbacker was initially accorded great respect, although the rela-


[29 ]

tionship was not su⁄ciently intimate as to prompt the Talibanto return Usama bin Laden to the Saudi government followingthe August 1998 bomb blasts—something which led the Saudisunilaterally to freeze their o⁄cial relations with the Taliban.Changes within the kingdom’s somewhat cryptic politics couldinject even more tension into the relationship, as could U.S.pressure on Saudi Arabia to withdraw its de jure recognition ofthe Taliban. Russia, on the other hand, is routinely denouncedin Taliban statements, first because Russia would clearly preferthat the Taliban’s opponents triumph in Afghanistan’s civilwar,114 but second because the Taliban and a large number of or-dinary Afghans clearly recall and rightly deplore the dreadfuldamage their country suªered at the hands of Soviet troops andSoviet politicians,115 some of whom have made careers in thepolitics of postcommunist Russia. Contrary to the perception ofmany Afghans, the Russian federation is in important ways adramatically diªerent state from the old Soviet Union,116 but itis no surprise that in Afghanistan, painful memories die hard.India too is denounced by the Taliban, and the recent electoralsuccesses of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hardly point to anyburgeoning community of interest between Afghanistan andIndia; but it would be as well not to conclude prematurely thatthe relationship will remain frozen. Any breakdown in relationsbetween the Taliban leadership and Pakistan would almost cer-tainly prompt a search for other regional allies, and this is a rolewhich India has been adept at playing in the past whenAfghanistan found itself in conflict with its eastern neighbor.

This brings us to perhaps the most di⁄cult question of all.Are the Taliban a potentially expansionist force, with the capac-ity to destabilize western and Central Asia, or can they safely beregarded as an exotic and eccentric curiosity, worrying forAfghans but for no one else? The answer to this question, alas,remains unclear. Afghanistan under the Taliban is clearly not“expansionist” in the sense that great imperial states have some-times been, driven to expand after reaching an initial plateau ofstrength and thereafter forced to confront the burdens of em-pire.117 But nor can one be certain that in the words of Olivier

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Roy “there is no danger of a Taliban spillover elsewhere.”118 Onthe contrary, there are a number of factors that might lead to amore expansive reconfiguration of Taliban foreign policy objec-tives, as well as a number of forms that a regionally destabiliz-ing foreign policy might take.

Many, perhaps most, of the more intriguing episodes indiplomatic history are interesting because they were unantici-pated. And particularly when one is considering the foreign pol-icy of a loosely structured, weakly institutionalized movement,one should try to expect the unexpected. There are at least threedistinct reasons why the foreign policy priorities of the Talibanmight suddenly shift. First, the character of the movement itselfmay change somewhat. Although it would be going too far tosuggest that distinct factions have emerged in the movement onissues of policy, there is clearly some potential for such factionsto form, not least on the military side of the Taliban where thecohort of former Khalqis already plays a significant role. Thereare limits to how far this process might go: although movementsare to a degree amorphous and in a constant process of reinven-tion, their value orientation means that they cannot drift too farfrom core values without risking total disintegration. Nonethe-less, a certain amount of tactical flexibility is possible and is prob-ably more likely in the sphere of geopolitical alignment, whichmatters less to many Taliban than do issues such as the seclusionof women, which are symbolically at the heart of the movement’sobjectives. Second, the movement may be confronted with newregional opportunities. Hungary, for example, was not a militar-ily substantial interwar power in Europe, but when presentedwith the German obliteration of Czechoslovakia in March 1939,the Hungarian government moved to file its claim.119 Similarly,were the stability of Pakistan to be severely compromised, the re-union of the Pushtuns of Afghanistan with those of the North-west Frontier Province might seem achievable and prompt theTaliban to action. Third, the Taliban leadership might come toperceive a compelling need for superordinate goals by which tomobilize the masses of the movement, and the foreign policysphere might seem to oªer these to them. Movements are not,


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on the whole, energized by interests alone: they need a cause.That cause may be moral perfection, or liberation or some other;but given the right circumstances, there is no reason why it can-not be discovered across an international border.

Also important is one form of regional destabilization I havealready mentioned: a “reflux” of the Taliban into the territory oftheir Pakistani patrons. In certain circumstances this could takethe form of a state-to-state confrontation, but a much more likelyreflux would spring from the very mixed senses of identity thatTaliban on both sides of the border now feel. Ahmed Rashid hasusefully highlighted the ambiguities of Taliban identity: manyAfghan Taliban were born in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan,trained in Pakistani madrassas, carry Pakistani identity cards,and speak Urdu as their second language. Identifications as am-biguous as these are ripe to be manipulated. “The rootlessness ofthe Taliban,” he notes, “and the ease with which they cross twocultures could become a troubling factor for Pakistan in the fu-ture.”120 Indeed, in certain circumstances the Taliban couldgravely destabilize Pakistan even without a conscious decisionfrom the Kandahar leadership. This lies at the heart of Rashid’sdisturbing conclusion: “In any future prolonged confrontationwith Koran-waving Islamic youths, the army’s more secular highcommand would be hard-pressed to order their troops to openfire. The threat of an Islamic revolution in Pakistan has neverbeen greater.”121 It would be exceedingly odd if, in the event ofsuch a confrontation, a good number of the “Koran-waving Is-lamic youths” were not Afghan Taliban.

A second form of destabilization could come from continuedTaliban protection or patronage of other radical groups from theregion. The Taliban hospitality to Sunni extremists from Pak-istan oªers one example of such protection already being ex-tended. Another relates to the situation in Kashmir, in which abitterly fought conflict between Pakistan-backed militants andIndian security forces has cost thousands of lives over the lastdecade.122 There is evidence of longstanding links between theradical Harakat-al Ansar in Kashmir, and Mawlawi JalaluddinHaqqani, a prominent Afghan mujahideen commander from the

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1980s who is now one of the most prominent and important Tal-iban military commanders, as well as between the Harakat andthe Taliban’s strongest Pakistani backers, the ISI and the Jamiat-e ‘Ulema-i Islam.123 The major clashes in Kashmir in mid-1999,which saw large numbers of militants trained in Afghanistaninfiltrated across the Line of Control, points to the dangers thatarise from these complex webs of extremism.

A third form of destabilization could come through inspira-tion. At first glance this might seem an unlikely prospect:Afghanistan under the Taliban, one commentator has recentlyargued, “is hardly a model for any other Muslim society.”124 Un-fortunately, inspiration rarely comes from the hard reality of lifeunder a puritanical chiliastic regime but rather from the deepermeaning the regime’s message is seen to embody. The miseriesof the world can be discounted as epiphenomena of a transitionphase. Furthermore, those in search of inspiration may well seetheir own plights as desperate and be less than sensitive to thedarker aspects of alternatives. For such as these, even “neofun-damentalist” groups emphasizing obedience, ritual, and theShariah rather than sociopolitical transformation per se mayappear inspiring.125 The inspirational message of the Talibanmay find fertile ground in Pakistan. It may also be taken up byvarious networks of believers in Central Asia.The Taliban lead-ership has consistently maintained that it has no political or ter-ritorial aspirations in Central Asia,126 but worshippers in Kabulmosques have on occasion heard rather diªerent messages inFriday sermons127 and the governments of the states of CentralAsia, with the notable exception of Turkmenistan, have re-sponded to the advance of the Taliban with something akin topanic. Whether at present they have any real need to panic isdoubtful.128 Yet even a groundless sense of panic may harm theprospects for stability in those states, by prompting anti-Islamistrepressions that inadvertently encourage the very kind of covert,antisystemic mobilization that the governments hoped to avoid.

Afghanistan stands at the crossroads.The Taliban constitutea profoundly antimodernist movement, the only one of its kindto hold power in the country this century.They are also a move-


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ment with which the modern world is ill positioned to cope. Tostructure a dialogue with such a group demands a vocabularyand a mindset with which few diplomats are equipped, and per-haps it is to their credit that they cannot readily find commonterms of discourse. The Taliban have no hope of reshaping theworld in their own image. As Rodenbeck has written, “If theTaliban do succeed in securing all of Afghanistan, which isdoubtful, they will control one of the most isolated, impover-ished and backward nations on earth. This is hardly a recipe forglobal influence.”129 But neither is this the main danger that theTaliban pose. If the Taliban turn Afghanistan into a CentralAsian Sudan130—a narco-fundamentalist “backlash state”131—it will be their neighbors who suªer first, but the wider interna-tional community will surely be shaken too by the seismic wavesthat severe upheavals in that part of the world are only too ca-pable of triggering. This is not a danger to be taken lightly.

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[35 ]35 ]

notes

1For more detail on these matters, see Ian Cummins, Marx, Engels andNational Movements (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980); VendulkaKubálková and Albert Cruickshank, Marxism-Leninism and Theory of In-ternational Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); WalkerConnor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Practice(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Vendulka Kubálková andAlbert Cruickshank, Marxism and International Relations (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1985).

2 Quoted in Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1996): 568.

3 This splendid metaphor owes its revival to Sir Isaiah Berlin: see Isa-iah Berlin,The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas(London: John Murray, 1990).

4 James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation States (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1986): 145.

5 Olivier Roy, “Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?” in Fundamen-talism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban, ed. William Maley (NewYork: New York University Press, 1998): 199–211, 210.

6 For an elaboration of this point, see Amin Saikal and William Maley,“From Soviet to Russian Foreign Policy,” in Russia in Search of its Future,eds. Amin Saikal and William Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1995): 102–122, 102.

7 See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1975).

8 Paul Wilkinson, Social Movement (London: Macmillan, 1971): 26.

9 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Actionand Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 3–4.

10 Ibid., p. 3.

11 On the dimensions of this problem, see Collapsed States: The Disinte-gration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, ed. I. William Zartman(Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995).

12 See Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: TheLogic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42:3 (Summer1988): 427–460.

13 On the emergence of the Afghan state, see Sayed Qassem Reshtia,Afghanistan dar qarn-e nozdeh (Kabul: Dawlat metbaeh, 1967); J.L. Lee,

The “Ancient Supremacy”: Bukhara, Afghanistan and the Battle for Balkh, 1731-1901 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996); Christine Noelle, State and Tribe in Nine-teenth-Century Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir Dost Muhammad Khan(1826-1863) (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998). On the particular role ofAmir Abdul Rahman Khan, see Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Mod-ern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization 1880-1946 (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1969); M. Hasan Kakar, Afghanistan: A Study ofInternal Political Developments 1880-1896 (Kabul and Lahore: Punjab Ed-ucational Press, 1971); M. Hasan Kakar, Government and Society inAfghanistan: The Reign of Amir Abd-al Rahman Khan (Austin: Universityof Texas Press, 1979).

14 See Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan’s Foreign Relations to the Mid-Twentieth Century: Relations With the USSR, Germany, and Britain (Tuc-son: The University of Arizona Press, 1974); Francis R. Nicosia, “’Drangnach Osten’ Continued? Germany and Afghanistan during the WeimarRepublic,” Journal of Contemporary History 32:2 ( July 1997): 235–257; LeonB. Poullada and Leila D.J. Poullada, The Kingdom of Afghanistan and theUnited States: 1828-1973 (Omaha: Center for Afghanistan Studies, Univer-sity of Nebraska at Omaha, 1995).

15 See Louis Dupree, “Myth and Reality in Afghan ‘Neutralism,’” Cen-tral Asian Survey 7: 2–3 (1988): 145–151.

16 See Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1980): 538–554.

17 See Gabriella Grasselli, British and American Responses to the SovietInvasion of Afghanistan (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing, 1996): 121.

18 See “Sekretnye dokumenty iz osobykh papok: Afganistan,” Voprosyistorii 3 (1993):3–32; Odd Arne Westad, “Prelude to Invasion: The SovietUnion and the Afghan Communists, 1978-1979,” International History Re-view 16:1 (1994): 49–69; Raymond Garthoª, Détente and Confrontation:American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington DC: TheBrookings Institution, 1994): 977–1075.

19 Le Nouvel Observateur, January 14, 1998.

20 See Graeme Gill and Roderic Pitty, Power in the Party: The Organi-zation of Power and Central-Republican Relations in the CPSU (London:Macmillan, 1997): 149–154.

21 There is by now a very large literature on the problems of post-So-viet Central Asia. For a sampling, see Graham E. Fuller, Central Asia: TheNew Geopolitics (Santa Monica: Rand R-4219-USDP, 1992); Robert L.Canfield, “Restructuring in Greater Central Asia: Changing PoliticalConfigurations,” Asian Survey 32:10 (October 1992): 875–887; AhmedRashid, The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism? (Karachi: Ox-

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[36 ]

ford University Press, 1994); Central Asia and the World: Kazakhstan,Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, Michael Mandel-baum, ed. (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1994); AnthonyHyman, Power and Politics in Central Asia’s New Republics (London:Conflict Studies No. 273, Research Institute for the Study of Conflict andTerrorism, 1994); Anthony Hyman, Political Change in Post-Soviet CentralAsia (London: The Royal Institute of International Aªairs, 1994); MarthaBrill Olcott, Central Asia’s New States: Independence, Foreign Policy, and Re-gional Security (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press,1996); R.D. McChesney, Central Asia: Foundations of Change (Princeton:The Darwin Press, 1996); John Anderson,The International Politics of Cen-tral Asia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Olivier Roy, LaNouvelle Asie Centrale ou la fabrication des nations (Paris; Éditions du Seuil,1997).

22 See Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: AComparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1995).

23 See Amin Saikal, “The Regional Politics of the Afghan Crisis,” inThe Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, eds. Amin Saikal and WilliamMaley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 52–66.

24 See Anwar-ul-haq Ahady, “Saudi Arabia, Iran and the conflict inAfghanistan,” in Fundamentalism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban,pp. 117–134.

25 See Marvin G. Weinbaum, Pakistan and Afghanistan: Resistance andReconstruction (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994): 33–37.

26 Anthony Davis, “How the Taliban became a military force,” in Fun-damentalism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban, p. 70.

27 For further discussions of the Taliban movement, see Barnett R.Rubin, “Women and Pipelines: Afghanistan’s Proxy Wars,” InternationalAffairs 73:2 (April 1997): 283–296; Rameen Moshref, The Taliban (NewYork: Occasional Paper No. 35, The Afghanistan Forum, May 1997); Kris-tian Berg Harpviken, “Transcending Traditionalism: The Emergence ofNon-State Military Formations in Afghanistan,” Journal of Peace Research34:3 (August 1997): 271–287; “Bernt Glatzer, ‘Die Talibanbewegung: Einigereligiöse, lokale und politische Faktoren,” Afghanistan Info 41 (October1997): 10–14; William Maley, “Introduction: Intepreting the Taliban,” Fun-damentalism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban, pp. 1-28; Peter Marsden,The Taliban: War, Religion and the New Order in Afghanistan (London: ZedBooks, 1998); Kamal Matinuddin, The Taliban Phenomenon: Afghanistan1994-1997 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

28 See Davis, “How the Taliban became a military force.”


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29 On the Deoband tradition, see Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revivalin British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1982).

30 Kenneth J. Cooper, “Afghanistan’s Taliban: Going Beyond Its Is-lamic Upbringing,” The Washington Post, March 9, 1998.

31 See Nancy Tapper, “Abd al Rahman’s North West Frontier: ThePashtun Colonisation of Afghan Turkistan,” in The Conflict of Tribe andState in Iran and Afghanistan, Richard Tapper, ed. (London: Croom Helm,1983): 233–261.

32 See Davis, “How the Taliban Became a Military Force,” p. 54; andAhmed Rashid, “Pakistan and the Taliban,” in Fundamentalism Reborn?:Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press, 1998):72–89.

33 For details, see Ahmed Rashid, “Afghanistan: Heart of Darkness,”Far Eastern Economic Review (August 5, 1999): 8–12; Anthony Davis, “OneMan’s Holy War,” Asiaweek (August 6, 1999): 2–24.

34 Reuters, July 30, 1999.

35 Michael Keating, “Women’s Rights and Wrongs,” The World Today53:1 ( January 1997): 11–12.

36 For more detailed discussion, see Hersch Lauterpacht, Recognition inInternational Law (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1948); JamesCrawford, The Creation of States in International Law (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1979); Stefan Talmon, Recognition of Governments in In-ternational Law: With Particular Reference to Governments in Exile (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

37 See, for example, Sarah Horner, “Kabul falls under the Islamic lash,”The Sunday Times, September 29, 1996; Christopher Thomas, “MilitantsBring a Veil Down on Battered Kabul,” The Times, September 30,1996;John F. Burns, “For Women in Kabul, Peace at the Price of Repression,”The New York Times, October 4, 1996; Jon Swain, “Kabul Hushed by Tal-iban Dark Age,” The Sunday Times, October 6, 1996.

38 Lauterpacht, Recognition in International Law, p. 93.

39 The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary, ed. Bruno Simma(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 224 (emphasis added).

40 See BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3164/A/2-3, March 2,1998.

41 Hamed Karzai, who had previously served as spokesman forAfghanistan’s first postcommunist president, Sebghatullah Mojadiddi,

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rapidly relinquished his position with the Taliban; his father, Abdul AhadKarzai, leader of the Kandahari Popalzai tribe, was murdered in Quetta inmid–July 1999, in a move widely seen as a symbolic attack on moderatePushtun forces.

42 See Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State For-mation and Collapse in the International System (New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1995): 297.

43 Rashid, “Pakistan and the Taliban,” p. 76.

44 For further details, see William Maley, “The Perils of Pipelines,” TheWorld Today 54: 8–9 (August-September 1998): 231–232.

45 Reuters, October 1, 1996.

46 Ahmed Rashid, The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan Pipeline:Company-Government Relations and Regional Politics (Washington DC:Focus on Current Issues, The Petroleum Finance Company, October1997): 10. Rashid notes that “the Taliban’s negotiating team with the oilcompanies is made up of half a dozen mullahs with a madrassa educationand one engineering student who has never practiced engineering” andthat the Taliban’s “Minister for Mines and Energy … was a carpet dealerin Saudi Arabia before joining the movement.”

47 Reuters, March 11, 1998.

48 Agence France Presse, August 24, 1998.

49 Reuters, March 3, 1998.

50 There is nothing secretive about this smuggling; in May 1998, thepresent writer saw trucks laden with new color televisions (an item bannedby the Taliban) driving through Jalalabad towards the border with Pak-istan. For further detail, see Ahmed Rashid, “Wages of War,” Far EasternEconomic Review, August 5, 1999, pp. 10–11.

51 On the background to the production of opium in Afghanistan, seeHazhir Teimourian, “Drug baron in the border hills,” The Times, Septem-ber 25, 1989; Scott B. McDonald, “Afghanistan’s Drug Trade,” Society, 29:5(1992): 61–66; Alain Labrousse, “L’opium de la guerre,” Les Nouvellesd’Afghanistan 68 (1995): 18–20.

52 See William Maley, “Approaches to Transnational Security Issues inthe Asia-Pacific,” in Asia-Pacific’s Security Dilemma (London: ASEANAcademic Press, 1998), Abdul Razak Baginda and Anthony Bergin, eds.pp. 109–122.

53 See “Entretien avec Mollah Mohammad Omar,” Politique interna-tionale 74 (Winter 1996–97): 135–143.


[39 ]

54 Afghanistan: Annual Opium Poppy Survey 1998 (Islamabad: DrugControl Monitoring System AFG/C27, UNDCP, 1998).

55 See Final Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan Sub-mitted by Mr. Choong-Hyun Paik, Special Rapporteur, in accordance withCommission on Human Rights resolution 1996/75 (United Nations:E/CN.4/1997/59, February 20, 1997) para. 104.

56 See Andrew Meier, “Afghanistan’s Drug Trade,” Muslim Politics Re-port 11 ( January-February 1997): 3–4.

57 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1997 (WashingtonDC: Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Aªairs,US Department of State, March 1998).

58 See A.W. Najimi, Report on a Survey on SCA Supported Girls’ Educa-tion and SCA Built School Buildings in Afghanistan in Regions under South-ern and Eastern SCA Regional Management (Peshawar: Educational Tech-nical Support Unit, Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, 29 August1997).

59 See Final report on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan sub-mitted by Mr. Choong-Hyun Paik, Special Rapporteur, in accordance withCommission on Human Rights resolution 1996/75, Appendix I. Other de-crees, detailed in this report, banned music and tape cassettes, beard trim-ming, kite-flying, pictures and portraits, dancing at wedding parties, theplaying of drums, and “British and American hairstyles.” Not all these de-crees are enforced with equal rigor; nevertheless, what is important is thatthey are available to be enforced should that be the whim of a particularo⁄cial of the religious police.

60 Afghanistan Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1997(Washington DC: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S.Department of State, February 1998).

61 Private sources in Kabul.

62 For a detailed discussion, see Nancy Hatch Dupree, “Afghan womenunder the Taliban,” in Fundamentalism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Tal-iban, pp. 145–166.

63 On these developments, see Dupree, Afghanistan, pp. 530–533;Fahima Rahimi, Women in Afghanistan (Liestal: Stiftung BibliothecaAfghanica, 1986); Nancy Hatch Dupree, “Afghanistan: Women, Society andDevelopment,” in Women and Development in the Middle East and NorthAfrica, Joseph G. Jabbra and Nancy W. Jabbra eds. (Leiden: E.J. Brill,1992): 30–42; William Maley, “Women and Public Policy in Afghanistan:A Comment,” World Development 24:1 ( January 1996): 203–206.

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64 See Nancy Hatch Dupree, “Revolutionary Rhetoric and AfghanWomen,” in Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Per-spectives, eds. M. Nazif Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield (Berkeley: Insti-tute of International Studies, University of California, 1984): 306–340;Micheline Centlivres-Demont, “Afghan Women in Peace, War, andExile,” in The Politics of Social Transformation in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pak-istan, Myron Weiner and Ali Banuazizi eds. (Syracuse: Syracuse Univer-sity Press, 1994): 333–365.

65 See Inger W. Boesen, “What Happens to Honour in Exile? Conti-nuity and Change among Afghan Refugees,” in The Tragedy ofAfghanistan: The Social Cultural and Political Impact of the Soviet Invasion,eds. Bo Huldt and Erland Jansson (London: Croom Helm, 1988): 236–237.

66 On this experience, see Women in Afghanistan: A Human Rights Cat-astrophe (London: Amnesty International, ASA 11/03/95, 1995). ForAmnesty International’s assessment of the status of women under the Tal-iban, see Women in Afghanistan: The Violations Continue (London:Amnesty International, ASA 11/05/97, June 1997).

67 Voice of America, March 19, 1998.

68 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3136/A/2, January 28, 1998.

69 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3145/A/2, February 7, 1998.

70 See Christiane Amanpour, “Tyranny of the Taliban,” Time, October13, 1997.

71 Reuters, September 29, 1997.

72 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3172/A/1, March 11, 1998.

73 Reuters, November 18, 1997.

74 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3083/A/2, November 22, 1997.

75 See Olivier Roy, The Lessons of the Soviet/Afghan War (London: Adel-phi Paper No. 259, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Brassey’s,1991 ): 40.

76 Sharon Waxman, “A Cause Unveiled: Hollywood Women HaveMade the Plight of Afghan Women Their Own–Sight Unseen,” TheWashington Post, March 30, 1999; Judy Mann, “The Grinding Terror of theTaliban,” The Washington Post, July 9, 1999.

77 The Taliban’s War on Women: A Health and Human Rights Crisis inAfghanistan (Boston: Physicians for Human Rights, 1998).

78 Agence France Presse, December 29, 1997. A similar statement, “We donot care about anybody as long as the religion of Allah is maintained,” has


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been made by the high-ranking Taliban o⁄cial Mullah Mohammad Has-san: see Interim report on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan sub-mitted by the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights in ac-cordance with General Assembly resolution 51/108 and Economic and SocialCouncil decision 1997/273 (United Nations: A/52/493, October 16, 1997).

79 UN Daily Highlights: Thursday 19 March 1998 (New York: O⁄ce ofCommunications and of Public Information, United Nations, 19 March1998). The director-general’s comments were prompted by reports of pub-lic executions carried out by the Taliban, whose means of inflicting capitalpunishment have included cutting of throats, and–in one particularly grislycase–the beheading of the victim with a blunt knife: see Caroline Lees, ‘Po-lice Outlaw Afghan Video of Beheading,” Daily Telegraph, June 29, 1997.The video in question was screened on Uzbek state television on July 9,1997: see BBC Summary of World Broadcasts FE/2970/A/1, July 14, 1997.

80 Agence France Presse, March 20, 1998.

81 Associated Press, March 24, 1998. In addition to striking an o⁄cer ofthe U.N. Development Programme, Mullah Hassan also threw a teapotand attempted to throw a table at another U.N. staªer.

82 Zahid Hussain, “UN forced out of Kandahar,” The Times, March 25,1998.

83 Associated Press, March 28, 1998.

84 Agence France Presse, March 24, 1998.

85 For the full text, see “Memorandum of Understanding between TheIslamic Emirate of Afghanistan and The United Nations 13 May 1998,” In-ternational Journal of Refugee Law, 10:3 ( July 1998): 586–592.

86 Medical Group Condemns UN Agreement with Taliban (Boston: Physi-cians for Human Rights, 29 June 1998).

87 The security in question mainly takes the form of easier movementon roads, and therefore mostly benefits those NGOs (and the United Na-tions and other international agencies) with large supplies to move. It alsobenefits smugglers and opium traders: see Barnett R. Rubin, “The Politi-cal Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan,” Paper presented to theAfghanistan Support Group Meeting, Stockholm, June 21, 1999.The phe-nomenon of NGOs lauding the incorruptibility of extremist groups is afamiliar one: see Linda Mason and Roger Brown, Rice, Rivalry and Poli-tics: Managing Cambodian Relief (Notre Dame: University of Notre DamePress, 1983): 138–139.

88 See William Maley, “Mine Action in Afghanistan,” Refuge 17:4 (Oc-tober 1998): 12–16.

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89 Agence France Presse, July 24, 1998.

90 Agence France Presse, July 28, 1999.

91 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3569/A/1, June 24, 1999.

92 Pakistan’s denial that it supports the Taliban forms part of a long-standing pattern of denying involvement in Afghanistan. Former Secre-tary of State Shultz recorded in his memoirs a conversation that PakistaniPresident Zia ul-Haq had with President Reagan in 1988 after the signingof the Geneva Accords on Afghanistan: “I heard the president ask Zia howhe would handle the fact that they would be violating their agreement. Ziareplied that they would ‘just lie about it. We’ve been denying our activitiesthere for eight years’” George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years asSecretary of State (New York: Scribner’s, 1993) p. 1091.

93 Ahmed Rashid, “Final Oªensive?” Far Eastern Economic Review,August 5, 1999, p. 12.

94 On these events, see Maley, “Introduction: Interpreting the Taliban,”pp. 10–14; Anthony Davis, ‘Taliban found lacking when nation-buildingbeckoned,” Jane’s Intelligence Review 9:8 (August 1997): 359–364.


96 See, for example, Ahmed Rashid, “Afghan Conflict Eroding Stabil-ity in Pakistan,” The Nation, January 21, 1998.

97 Ibid. For further detail on Pakistani groups backed by the Taliban,see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Sectarianism in Pakistan: The Radical-ization of Shi’i and Sunni Identities,” Modern Asian Studies 32:3 ( July1998): 689–716.

98 See David Busby Edwards, “The Evolution of Shi‘i Political Dissentin Afghanistan,” in Shi’ism and Social Protest, eds. Juan R.I. Cole and NikkiR. Keddie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986): 201–229; HassanPoladi, The Hazaras (Stockton: Moghul Press, 1989); Kristian BergHarpviken, Political Mobilization among the Hazaras of Afghanistan: 1978-1992 (Oslo: Report no. 9, Department of Sociology, University of Oslo,1996); Sayed Askar Mousavi, The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical,Cultural, Economic, and Political Study (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998).On the contemporary political activities of Hazaras, see HafizullahEmadi, “Exporting Iran’s Revolution: The Radicalization of the ShiiteMovement in Afghanistan,” Middle Eastern Studies 31:1 ( January 1995):1–12; Hafizullah Emadi, “The Hazaras and their role in the process of po-litical transformation in Afghanistan,” Central Asian Survey 16:3 (Septem-ber 1997): 363–387.

99 Reuters, October 4, 1996.


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100 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/3145/A/2, February 7, 1998.

101 For details, see Afghanistan: The Massacre in Mazar-i Sharif (NewYork: Human Rights Watch, 1998); Kenneth J. Cooper, “Taliban MassacreBased on Ethnicity,” The Washington Post, November 28, 1998.

102 See Dana Priest, “Iran Poises Its Forces On Afghan Border: Ana-lysts Warn Of ‘Incursion’ Targeting Taliban,” The Washington Post, Sep-tember 5, 1998; Adam Garfinkle, “Afghanistanding,” Orbis 43:3 (Summer1999): 405–418.

103 For a more detailed discussion of U.S.-Taliban relations, seeRichard Mackenzie, “The United States and the Taliban,” Fundamental-ism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban, pp. 90–103.

104 Crosslines Global Report, nos. 22–23 (August 1996): 13. Raphel also“spoke favorably of the Taliban” during congressional hearings: see RalphH. Magnus and Eden Naby, Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx, and Mujahid(Boulder: Westview Press, 1998) p. 184.

105 See Olivier Roy, “Avec les talibans, la charia plus le gazoduc,” LeMonde diplomatique (November 1996): 6–7.

106 Voice of America, September 27, 1996.

107 Zalmay Khalilzad, “Afghanistan: Time to Reengage,” The Washing-ton Post, October 7, 1996.

108 Barnett R. Rubin, “U.S. Policy in Afghanistan,” Muslim Politics Re-port 11 ( January-February 1997): 1–2, 6.

109 On Arabs in Afghanistan, see Anthony Davis, “Foreign Combat-ants in Afghanistan,” Jane’s Intelligence Review 5:7 ( July 1993): 327–331;Anthony Hyman, “Arab Involvement in the Afghan War,” The Beirut Re-view 7 (Spring 1994): 73-89; Barnett R. Rubin, “Arab Islamists inAfghanistan,” in John L. Esposito, Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism,or Reform? (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997): 179–206.

110 Steve LeVine, “Helping Hand,” Newsweek, October 14, 1997. On binLaden’s earlier involvement with the Afghan mujahideen, see R. HrairDekmejian, “The Rise of Political Islamism in Saudi Arabia,” The MiddleEast Journal, 48:4 (Autumn 1994): 627–643.

111 “Executive Order: Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactionswith the Taliban,” Federal Register 64:29 ( July 7, 1999). See also John Lan-caster, “Afghanistan Rulers Accused of Giving Terrorist Refuge: ClintonBans Trading With Taliban Militia,” The Washington Post, July 7, 1999.

112 “Gohar warns of new arms race in region,” Dawn, March 12, 1998.The Pakistan Foreign O⁄ce subsequently made a somewhat laboured at-

William Maley

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tempt to repair the damage done by this outburst: see “FO ClarifiesGohar’s Remarks,” Dawn, March 13, 1998.

113 See The Taliban and Afghanistan: Implications for Regional Securityand Options for International Action (Washington DC: United States In-stitute of Peace, 1998): 9–10.

114 See Anthony Hyman, “Russia, Central Asia and the Taliban,” inFundamentalism Reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban, pp. 104–116.

115 On this damage, see Amin Saikal and William Maley, RegimeChange in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy(Boulder: Westview Press, 1991): 135–142.

116 For evidence which establishes this very clearly, see John Löwen-hardt, The Reincarnation of Russia: Struggling with the Legacy of Commu-nism, 1990-1994 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Stephen White,Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham: ChathamHouse, 1997); Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia(London: Macmillan, 1997).

117 See Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and SocialLife (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): 127.

118 Roy, ”Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?” p. 211.

119 See Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe Between the Wars 1918-1941(New York: Harper & Row, 1967): 347.


121 Ibid., p. 89.

122 See Paula Newberg, Double Betrayal: Repression and Insurgency inKashmir (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for InternationalPeace, 1995).

123 See Roger Howard, “Wrath of Islam: the HUA analyzed,” Jane’s In-telligence Review 9:10 (October 1997): 466–468.

124 Max Rodenbeck, “Is Islamism Losing Its Thunder?” The Washing-ton Quarterly 21:2 (Spring 1998): 177–193.

125 On neofundamentalism, see Olivier Roy, The Failure of PoliticalIslam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994): 75–88.

126 See Hyman, “‘Russia, Central Asia and the Taliban,” p. 114.

127 Private sources in Kabul.

128 See Shahram Akbarzadeh, “The political shape of Central Asia,”Central Asian Survey 16:4 (December 1997): 517–542.


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129 Rodenbeck, “Is Islamism Losing Its Thunder?” p. 181.

130 The Taliban have sought to establish contacts with the Sudaneseregime. See BBC Summary of World Broadcasts FE/3104/A/1, December 17,1997.

131 On backlash states, see Anthony Lake, “Confronting BacklashStates,” Foreign Affairs 73:2 (March/April 1994): 45-55. While one mightquery the accuracy of Lake’s characterization of the states, he discusses, anumber of the orientations he treats as defining a “backlash state” are clearlyvisible in the Taliban movement–although thus far the Taliban lack a stateto control, in either the territorial or administrative sense of the term.

William Maley

[46 ]

William Maley is a professor in the School ofPolitics, University College at the University of NewSouth Wales in Australia.

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