Taliban : An Analysis

The politics of Cold War played a very significant
role in revolutionary movements before it ended. Movements, be they freedom from colonialism, against foreign domination or for social reforms were either
supported or opposed by the West or the Communists. Despite clear inclination to either side, everybody was not completely taken in by the two opposing
ideologies due to ethnic particularism, cultural differences and historical backgrounds. Many rightists supported leftist movements and vice versa. For
example, the support for clearly left-leaning African National Congress, Sandanistas and certain elements of PLO, as well as clearly communist Vietcong, was not limited to leftists and Communists only. Similarly, extreme communist movements like Khmer Rouge were vehemently opposed by the rightists and leftists alike, except for a few diehards like Noam Chomsky who disagreed with the general characterization of Khmer Rouge as a brutal and evil force. Instead he implicated media controlled propaganda for creating a certain image of the Khmer Rouge regime. From the rightists' point of view, the end of the Cold War confirmed the superiority of western civilization and capitalism. Thomas Sowell went even further in his analysis by suggesting that western civilization was benevolent to the people of the third world even during colonialism, and that slavery actually benefited blacks in the USA. Writing at a moment when Communism was everywhere in retreat, it was hardly surprising for Francis Fukuyama to proclaim the end of the Cold War and "unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism."


Early on in The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama claimed, "We cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present
one, and at the same time better. Other less reflective ages also thought of themselves as the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy." He concluded that liberal democracy was the best conceivable social-political system for fostering freedom and therefore -- because "the ideal will govern the material world in the long run" -- he also claimed
that a better or "higher" form of government would not supersede liberal democracy.


However since the end of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington's article, The Clash of Civilizations and later his famous book by the same title attracted a
lot of attention. He stated in his article that democracy is limited to Western cultures, and that America must accept Asian authoritarianism as a good thing. This was an emphatic denial of universalism of liberal democracy. The universality of human rights was replaced with the parochiality of ethnic rights. In his book, The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington extended the question of ethnicity to a global scale. He argued that the world is made up of seven major civilizations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, and Latin American. The post-Cold War world is divided along rigidly
civilizational-ethnic lines and therefore is inhospitable to liberal democracy.


In Huntington's view, democracy is a Western creation that cannot be transplanted to the inhospitable environments of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. One of the main themes of The Clash of Civilizations is that Western arrogance has blinded the West to the true nature of world politics. While American politicians indulge the naive fantasy of a coming liberal universalism, Asian countries are girding themselves to fight off American intrusions into their spheres of influence. Besides Huntington, many other
foreign policy thinkers also doubted the universality of American democracy. Fareed Zakaria wrote that we should distinguish between political democracy and constitutional liberalism, arguing that countries such as Russia and Argentina are "illiberal democracies."


Robert Kaplan and James Schlesinger took a far more saturnine view, highlighting the rise of ethnic particularism, and bemoan what they regard as American liberals' naive and foolish penchant for interventionism. Samuel Huntington concluded that the clash of civilizations will be the major source of conflicts in the future. Most foreign policy pundits like Kissinger, Brzezenski and James A Baker III disagreed with his prediction but current events appear to be supporting his thesis. Although Islam is not a civilization any more, the names given to the current conflict -- 'War against Islam', 'Operation Just Cause', 'Fight against Terrorists', etc -- show that
the civilizational differences are certainly a peripheral factor. A clear indication is the widespread opposition to US actions against Saddam
Hussain and now against the Taliban from Muslims all over the world. From lukewarm to strong support, for a terrible regime like that of the Taliban even by most Muslims' standards, is an expression of loathing of Western civilization among Muslims that existed much before the creation of the Taliban.


Post-Cold War, the Taliban symbolized what Khmer Rouge represented during the Cold War. Taliban was to Islam what Khmer Rouge was to Communism. Khmer Rouge was detrimental to Communism and to its own people more than anybody else; the Taliban ended up harming the Afghan people more than anybody else and,
conceiveably, doing a disservice to Muslims in general. Khmer Rouge was a runaway, egregious communism variant just as the Taliban represented an
extreme, orthodox, obscurantist and medieval variant of Islam. Both Khmer Rouge and Taliban were obsessed with their ideologies to a level completely
eliminating any objectivity.


In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and instituted what was arguably the most radical experiment in social engineering of the twentieth
century. In an effort to 'purify' the 'Khmer race' and create an absolutely classless utopian society, they emptied all Kampuchian (Cambodian) urban centers of their population, abolished banking, finance and currency. They outlawed all religions, thereby reorganizing traditional kinship systems into a communal order, and eliminated private property so completely that even personal hygiene supplies were communal. The cost in human life was high in the traditionally peasant Buddhist society. Of the total Kampuchian population, which was 7 to 8 million in 1975, between 1.5 and 1.8 million perished from execution, disease, starvation and overwork. The Khmer
Rouge believed that cities were living and breathing tools of capitalism in their own right -- KR cadres referred to Phnom Penh as "the great prostitute of the Mekong." It didn't matter if you were a teacher, a tailor, a civil servant or a monk: urbanites were the embodiment of capitalism and the enemy of communism, their personal political ideologies irrelevant.


In 1996, the Taliban succeeded in capturing Kabul and started displaying their true colors right away by dragging opponents out of their homes and recognized
sanctuaries and summarily executing them by hanging them in public. They created a huge organization, 'Preservation of Virtue and Elimination of Vice',
whose job was to create a moral society according to the Taliban ideology. On any given day, the agents of this organization could be seen enforcing an endless list of edicts and absurdities. From the day they marched into Kabul, the Taliban were infatuated with the idea of eradicating women from public life. In a land where the women have had to work while the men fought, the regime barred females from taking any job outside the home or even leaving their houses without a male relative accompanying them. Girls were thrown
out of school. Foreign-aid agencies were forbidden to offer any of their services or assistance directly to females. Women were forbidden to wear high heels or white socks because they were considered a sexual lure. Music was banned: cassettes were often snatched out of cars, the tapes stripped out and hung on signs as a warning. Kite flying was made illegal, and most forms of public entertainment, like movies, were not permitted. Their first duty after capturing any new territory had been to create terror by executing large number of new subjects -- they killed large number of Shias and Uzbeks in Mazar-e-Sharif and in Yakaolang and Bamyan. In Bamyan they destroyed their own heritage by demolishing old Buddha statues. After setting the example of what a pure Islamic society must look like, they embarked upon a journey to spread the 'good news' to Muslims of Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao, Xinjiang and even Pakistan through abetting sectarian violence. They invited the wrath of the West by harboring terrorists like Osama bin Laden, ignoring or not realizing the repercussions of such foolish policies.


For the Taliban, time stopped some time during the seventh century and restarted during 1995; everything that happened in between really did not happen because time was stopped. Like the mindset of most Islamists, the Taliban ideology was a deadly concoction of moral codes and ethical behavior of seventh century Arab culture, accepted in the name of religion and fortified with delusions of grandeur and superstitious confidence in invulnerability and invincibility. The Taliban vagaries over the last five years might not be as deadly as Khmer Rouge's brutalities. Nevertheless both represent bizarre human behavior when backed by irrational exuberance about their ideologies. One came out as an egregious form of a failing political-economic ideology near the end of the Cold War and the other came out of another failing social-moral ideology at the beginning of the 'clash
of civilizations'. One wanted to create an ideal agrarian society and the other an ideal Islamic society. Both Communism and Islamic ideology practices
in the public sphere do not offer adequate model for successful living in the material world but they might not be as terrible as the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban made them appear. Such vagaries should not have been possible in the first place had there been inherent strength in these competitors of the West during the Cold War and the post-Cold War period, respectively.


The absence of appropriate checks and balance has become a hallmark of Islamists. With such tendencies, gains of decades or even centuries could be lost in a few years of Taliban-style domination. Communist Vietnam eradicated Khmer Rouge in 1979 but Muslims countries have remained indifferent to the
Taliban until forced to take sides recently. Post-Taliban Afghanistan has followed the example of Kampuchea with the Taliban being replaced by the
moderate Hamid Karzai in the first step; perhaps it will be taken over by a more acceptable unifying figure like Prince Sihanouk later, or will develop
institutions of democracy. While Communist ideology did not lack intellectual
backing even in the West, Islamic ideology is barren of intellectual backing anywhere on earth. The music of Islamic system and Islamic civilization is really the noise from beating an empty canister with delusions of grandeur. Most Communists and leftists did not support Khmer Rouge but Muslims did not openly oppose the Taliban because of their religion or because their civilization was in a clash with the Western Civilization. For countries like Pakistan, their interests are better served by distancing from the core of so-called Islamic civilization. It was a blunder by the Pakistani military establishment to transplant the core next door in the form of the Taliban. For Pakistanis, their interests are better served by an amalgamation of rich native cultural heritage with only a sprinkle of Islamic civilization.


Most Muslims complain about the materialism of the Western civilization that borrows anything and any ideology from anywhere as long as it increases its
material gains. Yet they fail to explain the resistance of the West to accept the Islamic model, since it is believed by Islamists to be most beneficial in all aspects of life and afterlife. The West comes running after innovation, intellect, raw material, cheap labor and markets, and runs away from
Islamic philosophy because it does not provide them any of the above.
They would have come running if the likes of Averroes and Aveccina were to be present in Islamic civilization. If Islamic ideology of fundamentalists or Islamists is not really for the material world, then they can never win any election anywhere on the face of the earth. No wonder they abhor the idea of
liberal democracy and individual freedom. Moreover, they will always be poorer and backward than civilizations that value material well-being. Like Communism before it, the Islamic system as a model in public sphere is likely to fail also against the rational and more material West because rational is
real, the rest is worthless in the public arena. Muslims in general and Afghanistan in particular need to clean and open up their minds. Like Communism and Khmer Rouge, Islam's and Afghanistan's problems are their own creation. The inherent problems arising from literal exegesis of religious texts and weaknesses of the Islamic societies, Afghan society in particular,
is to be challenged forcefully for any hope for change in the future. The topics of past perfection, delusions of grandeur and superstitious confidence in invulnerability must be limited to Islamic Bollywood only.