Read Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics Online
Authors: Jon Armajani
Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (43 page)
reduction of American aid for and interest in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal from the country helped generate a situation that led to the establishment of al-Qaida, the Taliban, and other Islamist groups that opposed Western countries and the governments of most countries in the majority-Muslim world. Samuel Huntington provided a helpful summary of the situation in Afghanistan at the end of the Soviet occupation:
The war left behind an uneasy coalition of Islamist organizations intent on promoting Islam against all non-Muslim forces. It also left a legacy of expert and experienced fighters, training camps and logistical facilities, elaborate trans-Islam[ic] networks of personal and organization[al] relationships, a substantial amount of military equipment including three hundred to five hundred unaccounted for Stinger missiles, and, most important, a heady sense of power and self-confidence over what had been achieved and a driving desire to move on to other victories.88
Largely because of the policies of the United States and its allies, Afghanistan and the Pashtun areas of Pakistan became crucial areas for the training and support of a worldwide Islamist militancy.
Pakistan, the United States, and the Taliban
Even after the United States began its post-September 11, 2001 military activities in Afghanistan (under the name “Operation Enduring Freedom”), Pakistan maintained a strong alliance with the Taliban for some of the same reasons that it had supported that organization and Pakistan’s other proxies in Afghanistan, including the mujahideen, for many years already.89 During the period of Operation Enduring Freedom, various Pakistani governmental leaders have wanted to use the Taliban as a force that would form a bulwark against the real or potential influence in Afghanistan of other countries such as Iran, India, Russia, and various Central Asian states.90 While continuing to ally itself with the Taliban, the Pakistani government has also allied itself with one of the very countries that has sent tens of thousands of soldiers and spent over 300 billion dollars in its attempt to eliminate the Taliban – namely the United States.91 By aligning itself with the Taliban, the Pakistani government is making an attempt to use the Taliban to extend its influence in Afghanistan, and by aligning itself with the United States, the Pakistani government is attempting to place limits on the Taliban’s influence, because while members of Pakistan’s government want the Taliban to remain somewhat influential in Afghanistan (so that Pakistan can maintain a degree of influence in that country), members of the Pakistani government do not want the Taliban to become so powerful that it weakens or overthrows Pakistan’s largely secular government.92 After all, one of the Taliban’s many
goals is to overthrow Pakistan’s secular government and replace it with what members of the Taliban believe to be a truly Islamic state.93
At the same time, members of the Pakistani government want to limit the long-term influence of the United States in Afghanistan and nearby regions because they want to protect Pakistan from a variety of threats to Pakistan that a significant amount of American influence in the region could bring. One of these threats, from Pakistan’s perspective, would be the increase of India’s power as a result of a United States–India alliance. In the opinion of many Pakistanis, an increase in India’s influence as a result of such an alliance could have a damaging effect on Pakistan’s strength since many Pakistanis believe that the potential of Indian expansionism poses a direct military, political, and economic threat to Pakistan.94
Pakistani government officials also have profoundly mixed feelings about the United States’ drone attacks against Taliban positions in Pakistan. On the one hand, Pakistani officials want those attacks to be successful in that their effectiveness could reduce the Taliban’s power in Pakistan, which would make that organization less of a threat to Pakistan’s government. On the other hand, Pakistani officials know that every time the drone attacks kill non-Taliban civilians and children, this stokes the anger of many Pakistanis against their government and its alliance with the United States. At the same time, many Pakistanis are offended by the United States’ drone attacks because they view them as encroachments on Pakistani sovereignty, as direct manifestations of the brutalities of American colonialism, and as causing the deaths of many non-Taliban Pakistani civilians.95 Clearly, the Pakistani government is playing a series of double games between itself and the United States, on the one hand, and itself and the Taliban, on the other. In the midst of these circumstances, the Pakistani government is deploying an accommodationalist/oppositionalist approach to the Taliban. The Pakistani government is accommodating the Taliban in order to further its own regional interests while opposing that organization because an overly strong Taliban could overthrow the secular Pakistani government. In several respects, the Pakistani government’s accommodationalist/oppositionalist approach to the Taliban and other Islamist groups which oppose it is similar to the Saudi government’s accommodationalist/oppositionalist approach to the Islamists who oppose it, including the fact that both the Pakistani and Saudi governments are attempting to use the Islamists to their own political and religious advantage, while trying to contain the Islamist groups’ influence so that they do not overthrow those governments.
In any case, Afghanistan and Pakistan are two of several countries that are of crucial importance to the United States and its allies because if the Taliban and its associates, such as al-Qaida, are able to maintain stable and durable bases in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan, they could use them to launch multiple potentially devastating attacks against Western interests and to
spearhead their own militant and political activities against various governments in the region, including Pakistan’s government. Yet, it may be that the United States and its allies could find themselves in a lose-lose situation. That is, if the United States and its allies pursue the war in Afghanistan, they may continue to spend enormous of amounts of money while seeing thousands of their soldiers being killed and injured as those allies make little progress against the Islamists. Yet, if the United States and its allies withdraw from Afghanistan, a situation may emerge there and in Pakistan where the Taliban and its affiliates could regroup and launch large numbers of attacks against Western and regional interests for the foreseeable future, with the hope of eventually creating a global Islamic state. Given this scenario, the United States and other Western countries may be in a Sisyphean situation for which there is no viable long-term solution.
Notes
- Gus Martin, Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues, 3rd edn. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010), 289.
- Some Middle Eastern countries which received aid from the Soviet Union during the Cold War were Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; see Tarun Chandra Bose, The Superpowers and the Middle East (New York: Asia Publishing, 1972), 29–30.
- Jean-Luc Racine, “Pakistan and the Power Game,” in A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot, trans. Gillian Beaumont (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 106–7.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
6 Ibid., 107.
7 Ibid., 106–7.
- “Kayani’s Gambit,” The Economist, July 31–August 6, 2010, 28–9.
- Olivier Roy, “Islam and Foreign Policy: Central Asia and the Arab-Persian World,” in A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, ed. Jaffrelot, 139.
10 Ibid., 139–41.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Jeffrey Goldberg, “Inside Jihad U.: The Education of a Holy Warrior,”
New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2000.
- Ibid.; see also Dexter Filkins, “Right at the Edge (Talibanistan),” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2008.
- Olivier Roy, “Islam and Foreign Policy,” 141–5.
- Ibid.
- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), 211–22.
- Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 21.
- Ibid.
- Steve Coll, “Afghanistan’s Tribal Chiefs Struggle to Reassert Their Power,”
Washington Post, August 17, 1989.
- See “A Sample of Taliban Decrees Relating to Women and Other Cultural Issues After the Capture of Kabul, 1996,” in Rashid, Taliban, 217–19.
- Filkins, “Right at the Edge (Talibanistan).”
- Rashid, Taliban, 23.
- Suzanne Goldenberg, “Place Where the Taliban Began and Certainty Ends,”
Guardian, October 13, 1998.
- John Burns and Steve Levine, “How Afghans’ Stern Rulers Took Hold,”
New York Times, December 11, 1996.
- Ibid.
- Rashid, Taliban, 25.
- Frédéric Grare, “Foreign Policy Options,” Economic and Political Weekly, November 2–15, 2002, 4568–71.
- Rashid, Taliban, 26.
- Anthony Davis,“How the Taliban Became a Military Force,” in Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban, ed. William Maley (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1998), 43–73. See also Ahmed Rashid, “Pakistan and the Taliban,” in Fundamentalism Reborn?, ed. Maley, 72–4.
- Rashid, Taliban, 27–9. 32 Ibid., 29–30.
- See, for example, Ian Fisher, “Women, Secret Hamas Strength, Win Votes at Polls and New Role,” New York Times, February 3, 2006; and Omayma Abdel-Latif, “In the Shadow of the Brothers: The Women of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Middle East Center, Carnegie Papers, no. 13, October 2008.
- Philip Seib, “The al-Qaeda Media Machine,” Military Review 88, no. 3 (May– June 2008): 74–80; Victoria Firmo-Fontan, “Power, NGOs and Lebanese Television: A Case Study of Al-Manar TV and the Hezbollah Women’s Association,” in Women and Media in the Middle East: Power Through Self Expression, ed. Naomi Sakr (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 162–79.
- See, for example, Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14–15, 171–2, 204–5; and Jenny Steel and Sophie Richter-Devroe, “The Development of Women’s Football in Iran: A Perspective on the Future for Women’s Sport in the Islamic Republic,” Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 41 (2003): 315–22.
- Fitzgerald and Gould, Invisible History, 223–9; Rashid, Taliban, 31.
- Filkins, “Right at the Edge (Talibanistan).”
- Goldberg, “Inside Jihad U.”; Rashid, Taliban, 32–3.
- Mariam Abou Zahab and Olivier Roy, Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 51–3; Peter Marsden, The Taliban: War, Religion and the New Order in Afghanistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43–66.
- Rashid, Taliban, 40.
- M.J. Gohari, The Taliban: Ascent to Power (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2–5, 144.
- Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 121–4; Rashid, Taliban, 43.
- Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., s.v. “Umar (I) b. al-Khattab” (by G. Levi Della Vida and M. Bonner),
www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_
SIM-7707 (accessed September 14, 2009). - Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–80.
- Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., s.v. “Bay(a” (by E. Tyan),
www.brillonline.nl/
subscriber/uid=1357/entry?entry=islam_COM-0107 (accessed September 14, 2009). - Mullah Omar’s and Caliph Umar’s names are spelled the same in Arabic, for example, while they happen to be transliterated differently in English.
- Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1974), 197–211.
- Rashid, Taliban, 43.
- Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 40–1.
- Gautam Navlakha, “Afghanistan: ‘Great Game’ Renewed,” Economic and Political Weekly, November 2, 1996, 2913–15.
- Rizwan Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 208.
- Douglas Jehl, “Iran Holds Taliban Responsible for 9 Diplomats’ Deaths,”
New York Times, September 11, 1998.
- Alec Rasizade, “Entering the Old ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia,” Orbis 47, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 41–58.
- Rashid, Taliban, 54.
- Neamatollah Nojumi, Dyan E. Mazurana, and Elizabeth Stites, After the Taliban: Life and Security in Rural Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 15.
- Rashid, Taliban, 55–8.
- Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., s.v. “Mazar-i Sharif” (by W. Barthold), www. brillonline.nl/subscriber/uid=1357/entry?result_number=3&entry=islam_SIM- 5089&search_text=mazar&refine_editions=islam_islam#hit (accessed August 11, 2010).
- Ibid.
- Rashid, Taliban, 57. 60 Ibid., 58.
61 Ibid., 59.
- Fitzgerald and Gould, Invisible History, 223–39.
- Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, Afghanistan: A Country Study (Baton Rouge, LA: Claitor’s Publication Division, 2001), 108–9.
- The Library of Congress Country Studies, “Country Profile: Afghanistan,” August 2008,
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Afghanistan.pdf
(accessed September 12, 2009). - Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, Afghanistan: A Country Study, 108–9.
