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Literary Review
Ground realities
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The strength of these two books lies in the fact that there is no attempt to slot the Taliban and the United States into polarised roles of the devil and the saint respectively, says ACHIN VANAIK.
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TO cash in on the new interest in Afghanistan following September 11, 2001, Penguin has reprinted these two books. Unholy Wars appeared in 1999, its second reprint with a brief new preface came in 2000, and this has now been reprinted for the third time. Afghanistan and Taliban first appeared in 1998 and has now been republished with a new preface making reference to September 11. Yet, in both cases, the very fact that these texts appeared a few years before the attacks on Washington and New York is precisely what gives them their strength. Absent are any temptations to make the picture they paint more dramatically Manichean with the Taliban and the United States cast in their now widely publicised roles (post-September 11) as devil and saint respectively.
Cooley's book is probably the most detailed account we have anywhere of how the U.S., Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, with more limited but still important contributions from Israel, China and the Shah's Iran, nurtured the rise of Islamist forces in Afghanistan (including the elements of what were later to become the Taliban) in the "holy war" against the Russians in Afghanistan. Money, weapons and training, all flowed into Pakistan, the main conduit, to enable the Mujahideen to carry on their fight. Irrefutable evidence is provided that the help began even before the Russians invaded with their troops in December 1979. Indeed, the help was intended to provoke the Russians to invade and thus create Moscow's own version of the "Vietnam quagmire". In the process, Afghanistan became a deeply militarised and faction-ridden society, where the culture of guns and drugs flourished as never before, and where Islamic extremism in various guises also became stronger than ever before.
We learn of the Safari club, the coming together of the intelligence services of the U.S., France, Egypt, the Shah's Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia in the beginning of the 1970s to coordinate covert anti-Communist activities in the third world, and which actually set the precedent for subsequent CIA behaviour vis-à-vis Afghanistan. And of how delighted, indeed thrilled, President Reagan was about a plan to help operators (who would be organised by the French secret service) to use the drugs confiscated by the US government in its anti-drugs campaign (and otherwise burnt) to sell and make available these drugs to Russian soldiers and officers, thereby undermining their fighting abilities in the same way American soldiers became drug addicts in Vietnam. Reagan gave his assent to the plan but the French eventually backed out and it remains unclear (but quite likely) that the U.S. covertly carried it out with help from other shadowy figures and groups.
Cooley's book, however is not just about the U.S. promoting Afghan Islamism but as much about how all the countries which played a role in this, found to their dismay that it turned back on them. Rising Islamic fundamentalist forces caused havoc in Pakistan, China's Xinjiang region, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, in Chechnya in Russia, even in the Philippines, and of course through terrorist actions in the U.S. in the 1990s, even before September 11. Along the way, there is the story of governments and business interests making cynical alliances in pursuit of money-grubbing deals to exploit the oil and gas wealth of Central Asia. Of states geo-politically outflanking, perceived as opponents in a modern version of the "Great Game". Nothing could be more remote from the concerns of the various actors, from the neighbouring countries to those farther afield, than the well being of the Afghan people undergoing continuous civil war.
The second book is a compilation of essays by different well-known experts, which focuses more specifically on Afghanistan under Taliban rule, and is divided into four parts, each having two to four chapters. The themes covered range from detailing the rise of the Taliban, its ideology and practice, to an investigation of its relations with other countries, most notably the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and the other neighbouring countries, to the plight of women and others under Taliban rule, to assessments of the future of Afghanistan and the prospects of the Taliban government. This useful compilation will enlighten both the general and the specialist reader, but it is the essay by Oliver Roy, Director of research at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientific in Paris on whether Islamism has a future or not in Afghanistan, that is perhaps the most interesting.
Roy makes a distinction between Islamism, which entails a revolutionary transformation of state and society according to interpreted precepts of Islam, and a more conservative neo-fundamentalist approach concerned to implement the Sharia as the legal basis of state rule: between the Iranian example, and the Saudi one. He suggests that the Taliban belongs to the second category and will not have lasting impact on Afghan society because as befitting a tribal and segmented society, its "ruling apparatus is light and flexible". The Taliban is not anti-Western in any strategic-political sense as distinct from cultural sense. So it will not brook interference internally, and Islamic solidarity will prevent it from turning over wanted terrorists like Osama. But like the Saudis, it can certainly work with the West and U.S. and was very comfortable in dealing with UNICOL, the U.S.-based consortium of oil companies. However, since the Taliban "mean what they say", they cannot be manipulated by anyone. There is no danger, though, of a Taliban spill over (even in Pakistan they have links to the Jamiat-e Ulema-i Islam which is not anti-Western and not as extreme as the Jamiat-e Islami), and it should be understood as the expression of a "maverick fundamentalism" strictly Afghan, Pushtun and tribal rather than some inspirational movement capable of ideological-political influence across national boundaries. In short, things could have turned out very differently in respect of evolving future relations between the Taliban and the U.S. and the West, were it not for September 11 and the specific American response.
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, John H. Cooley, Penguin India, paperback, 2001, p.299, Rs. 295.
Afghanistan and Taliban: The Rebirth of Fundamentalism? Edited by William Maley, Penguin India, paperback, 2001, p.253, Rs. 295.
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