Reverse order - first the need to fight is decided upon, then the justification for it being jihad is cooked up

What is puzzling to me is that Afghanistan is 100% Muslim and yet what the Taliban and its Pakistani foot soldiers were doing from 1995-2001 was fighting ’jihad’ against fellow Muslims.

Even long after the Soviets and Umrikans left, the Muslims who fought Pakistan’s clients ( first Hekmatyar then Taliban), never got to wage jihad despite being 100% Muslim. The prerogative to wage jihad was always with whoever Pakistan supported at the time.

So for example as long as Hekmatyar was Pakistan’s man(until 1994) he was waging jihad. When Hekmatyar fell out of favor of Pakistan, he ceased to wage jihad and his opponents the Taliban backed by Pakistan were the ones waging jihad against him. There was not a single infidel in the picture to decide at what moment Hekmatyar’s fighting ceased to be a legitimate jihad and his opponents’s fighting began be legitimate jihad, there was only the Pakistani government.

According to me the political or material impetus for conflict happens first, only after is the theology and the mythology of jihad then constructed to justify that conflict.

When the Iranian revolution happened, Zia Ul Haq was an American ally and Iranian influence had to be resisted. As a consequence, clerics were rallied to designate Shias as wajib ul qatal to justify anti-Shia activities by the state.

After the Soviets and Americans left Afghanistan, the need to fight the Shia Hizb e Wahadat and the Hazaras in various battles to obtain absolute military victory over mujahiddeen rivals decreed the need to declare Shias heretic and justify the jihad by the Afghan and Pakistani jihadi foot soliders.

So for example, the Hazaras were not fought because they were heretic, the Hazaras were declared heretic because of the decision to fight them.

When the Northern Alliance was to be fought by the Taliban post 1995 to avoid any compromises with such Afghans as were refusing to be Taliban or Pakistan puppets, then the Northern Alliance(mostly Sunnis), were declared as collaborators of the atheist Russians and heretic Iranians to justify the jihad against them.

Similarly in Iraq, given the already-declared need to fight the infidel U.S, first Shias and other ordinary Iraqis were targetted by Al Qaeda as collaborators of infidels to justify the jihad against them. Now that Shias have begun fighting back, Shias are termed heretics to justify the continuing conflict with them, when the real reason is that Al Qaeda wants territorial control.

So to reiterate, first the political or mercenary or material urge to fight happens, then the clerics are rolled out to construct the theology of the fight being a jihad, and the mythology of oppression surrounding it, even if the targets of the conflict are innocents and fellow Muslims.

The Pakistani government in particular has had an unrepentent propensity to do this, namely set up its own strategic aims and then find the clerics to designate their conflicts jihad. And to avoid even this much procedure, the state has had to be declared as implementing Allah’s will. This game was clearly revealed when the Taliban spent 6 years fighting fellow Muslims in the name of jihad, but not enough Muslims stood up and called their bluff pointing out that was not jihad in the classical sense, it was just the Pakistani govt doing what it wanted.

The advantage of terming one’s wars fought for one’s purely mercenary purposes as jihad is that it happily obscures one’s mercenary ambitions behind a pseudo-religious gloss. A whole array of romantics comes out of the woodwork to reverse cause and effect on one’s behalf. The romantics will not discuss if your jihad designation is theologically or ethically appropriate or not for your ruinous conflict and if you are perpetuating unjustice by your ’jihad’ but will instead provide unstinting defence of the fair name of Islam by saying how jihad is an organic struggle against injustice.

In other words just call anything one does a jihad and one’s coreligionists will not dare hold you accountable, whatever one does.

To be fair, one can’t really blame the Prophet for this choice of craven behaviour by our contemporaries because he died 1400 years ago.