Thoroughly Modern Militancy (Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia - Ahmed Rashid)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia - Ahmed Rashid
Date:	06/10/00 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Detailed history of the destruction of a nation and corruption of its neighbors.

Disadvantages: Read it and weep -- sometimes with laughter, if you enjoy black humor.

Like many things that achieve perfection, American foreign policy is, in essence, extremely simple. It is based on the maxim "My enemy's enemy is my friend", and with the aid of that maxim it has achieved perfection in region after region of the world for many years.

And its perfection is, of course, the perfection of sheer stupidity. This book is a detailed examination of the latest anti-triumph of American foreign policy, in the power now being enjoyed by a group called the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban - named after the Arabic for "Students of the Qur’an" - have received some publicity in the States recently, all of it, quite justifiably, very hostile. Rashid describes how the honey-voiced Madelaine Albright remarked of them on a visit to Pakistan that "We are opposed to the Taliban because of their opposition to human rights and their despicable treatment of women and children and great lack of respect for human dignity".

I wonder if Madelaine heard the laughter with which many must have greeted her selfrighteous denunciation of these Islamic demons? Perhaps readers of this review are laughing too. If you’re not, you should be:

"The explosion in heroin production began ironically not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. Pakistan became a major opium producer during the 1980s[,] producing around 800 metric tonnes a year or 70 per cent of the world's supply of heroin until 1989. An immense narcotics trade had developed under the legitimizing umbrella of the CIA-ISI [the Pakistan Intelligence Agency] covert supply line to the Afghan Mujaheddin. … As in Vietnam, where the CIA chose to ignore the trade in drugs by anti-communist guerillas whom the CIA was financing, so in Afghanistan the US chose to ignore the growing collusion between the Mujaheddin, Pakistani drugs traffickers and elements in the military."

My enemy's enemy is my friend, you see: the Mujaheddi
n were fighting the Soviets, the Soviets were America's enemies, so the Mujaheddin were American's friends. America, with the even more lunatic and inexcusably ignorant Pakistan, bear a huge share of the responsibility for the destruction of Afghan culture and civil society, with consequences in death and suffering that are continuing as you read this. The Taliban are the worst Western stereotype of Islam brought to life: among many other things, they smash televisions as instruments of Satan, beat women for daring to step outside their homes, and imprison men for not having beards or, if they do, beards that are long enough. And what was the US doing as the psychotic militarism of Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan gave birth to them and they began to grow?

"Between 1994 and 1996 the USA supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-Western. The US conveniently ignored the Taliban's own Islamic fundamentalism agenda, its suppression of women and the consternation they created in Central Asia because Washington was not interested in the wider picture."

Washington's volte-face came about because of a feminist campaign at home to highlight the "gender abuses" of the Taliban and because they were harboring Osama Bin Laden, the exiled Saudi terrorist leader responsible for the bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Almost inevitably, Bin Laden had also been helped by the US in his rise to power: an enemy of our enemy, therefore our friend, until we discovered that he wasn't the man we took him for. Anyone who remembers the ex-CIA agent Manuel Noriega should know how the story goes: Washington goes in, finds a thug, gives him lots of money and weaponry to keep the region safe for profiteering, loses control of him, demonizes him, and tries to assassinate or arrest him.
They got Noriega; they’re still waiting to get Bin Laden. Noam Chomsky has remarked that every American president since the beginning of the 20th Century (and some before then) should have been put on trial for war-crimes. This book is another part of the prosecution case and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand the recent history of Afghanistan and its new rulers.

Who are not, of course, "true" Muslims. Their despicable treatment of women (and lots of men too) is not sanctioned by anything the Qur'an but there's a big problem with pointing that out to them. If you're not a Muslim yourself, you obviously have no right to comment on Islam; if you are a Muslim yourself, you're obviously not a real Muslim, like them. People who say that Islam is nothing to do with the barbarities of the Taliban have the great problem of explaining why such a barbarous group have used Islam to justify their behavior, rather than secular humanism or Buddhism. Islam, like the other two Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Judaism, is an authoritarian, irrational religion, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that authoritarian, irrational people use to it justify authoritarian, irrational things.

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