Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
Yale University Press, US & UK, 2000
ISBN 0-300-08340-8
USD 27.95
How did a ragtag bunch of madrassa students, largely reared in Pakistan, come to dominate over 80 percent of Afghanistan and essentially create the world´s most bizarre, brutal and backward Islamic state? Ahmed Rashid, who has covered Afghanistan for over 20 years, expertly recounts just how the Talibs, or religious students, were catapulted into the Afghan void of ethnic cleansing and religious persecution–and quickly proceeded to carry out their own ethnic cleansing and religious persecution.
With their one strategic victory after another, largely backed by Pakistan´s ISI (Inter Services Intelligence), the Taliban set about establishing a state that to date has none of the trappings of a state. Rashid illustrates how the Taliban, largely ignorant of Islamic and Afghan history, knowledge of the Sharia, the Quran or the modern Islamic world, are "caught between a tribal society which they try to ignore and the need for a state structure which they refuse to establish".
We learn, for example, that Afghanistan´s treasury is run out of tin trunks which the supreme leader, Mullah Omar, apparently keeps under his bed. The Taliban´s capture of Kabul, punctuated by the violent humiliation, castration and execution of the former puppet president Najibullah, led to the rapid transformation of the large, multi-ethnic city into an underdeveloped terrorised village. By replacing the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara bureaucrats with mostly unqualified Pashtuns, Rashid notes how government ministries largely ceased to function. Meanwhile, the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, under a variety of charismatic and equally brutal commanders, continued to forge, break and re-forge alliances against the Taliban. As the battleground shifted to Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997, then to Bamiyan in the ensuing years, the grisly details of battle, and the slaughter of soldiers and innocent civilians alike are retold in harrowing detail.