Dan Snow's History Hit - History of the Taliban

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

In August 2021 the Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan for the second time capturing Kabul and ousting the American backed regime, but where do they come from and what does their return to power mean for the region? To find out more about the history of the Taliban and the impact of them re-conquering Afghanistan Dan is joined by Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid. Ahmed was the first journalist to meet the Taliban in 1994 and has spent much of his career writing about them and their rise to power. He brings his unique perspective about this much-feared group and to the podcast and explores with Dan their history, path to victory, governing style and the implications of their takeover both for the people of Afghanistan and for neighbouring countries.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Here. On this podcast and elsewhere in the media, you'll have heard a lot of kind of basically middle-aged white guys like me pontificating about the Taliban, about Afghanistan. And we thought on this podcast we'd actually ask someone who knows Taliban at close quarters, someone who's hung out with them, been reporting on them for 30 years, spent time with them in Kandahar when they first really emerged onto the regional stage. And that person is Ahmed Rashid. He is a very distinguished journalist and author. After the 9-11 attacks in New York and Washington, one and a half million copies of his book about the Taliban were sold in the weeks that followed. And he's been called on by many politicians like Tony Blair for advice and instruction about the Taliban

and Afghanistan. I was very lucky to catch up with him. He gave History Hit some time, talked to him from his home in Pakistan. And I think this is a useful corrective or addition to what we've been hearing in the last few weeks and months about the Taliban. You can hear lots of other podcasts on Afghanistan. We go back and delve into the history, recent and ancient of Afghanistan. And by ancient, I really mean ancient. We go all the way back to Alexander the Great and beyond. If you go to History Hit TV,

which is our digital history channel, we've got audio on there without the ads. We've got hundreds of hours of TV shows and all of it is available for a very small subscription. Less than the pint of beer I bought in the pub last night when I was out with Team History Hit having a couple of beers. So if you go to historyhit.tv, you get 30 days free if you sign up today. And then for that tiny subscription, you get that wealth of podcasts, thousands of podcasts, and hundreds of hours of

history documentaries. So please go and check it out. But in the meantime, it's a great honour to have Ahmed on the podcast. Enjoy. Ahmed, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much. Where does the story of the Taliban begin? It begins in the early 90s with the horrendous civil war that erupted after the Soviets pulled out their troops. The Americans withdrew to Washington. Nobody was very much interested in Afghanistan and it descended into chaos and a multi-sided civil war with warlords

rampaging up and down the country. And at the same time, business came to a stop. And the big trucking industry in Afghanistan, carrying goods from Iran to Afghanistan to Pakistan to India, came to a stop because bandits and warlords were catching these truckers and imposing huge fines on them for giving them access to the roads. So it was a very bad situation. The Taliban emerged really as a pious group of young men, many of them students still in the madrasas of religious schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan,

and wanted to do something to improve their country and believe that as pious Muslims as belonging to the Deobandi sect, a very conservative strict sect of Sunni Islam, they have to do something and they have to launch a jihad to clean up and stop this rampaging going on. And the truckers funded them and supported them initially. And they formed about 20 of them, chose a leader who was Mullah Muhammad Omar, who died three years ago, four years ago. He was considered to be the most pious figure in the group. And their first act was to take over Kandahar, the second largest city in Afghanistan and part of the Pashtun belt. Most of the Taliban belonged to the Pashtun

ethnic group. And initially they fought other minority ethnic groups. So the Taliban emerged, they drove out the warlords in Kandahar and set up their own administration, which was very just and fair and much admired by the public and, of course, by the truckers also, so that economic business could flourish. And the Taliban then declared that they were not seeking government themselves. They wanted to clean up. They wanted to get rid of the warlords. They wanted to disarm the population. And this was all very much welcomed by the people. And in the beginning, they were extremely popular. And when they started moving out of Kandahar and started conquering other territories,

they met with very little opposition because even these warlords and bandits were very scared of taking on a movement that had such popularity. Emmett, there's a sense in the West that actually the Taliban are some sort of ancient expression of Afghan warriors and people who hate foreigners. Was there anything inevitable about the Taliban, or is this a kind of Orientalist reading of Afghan history? Are the Taliban in some way more Afghan than these competitor groups? Or was the Taliban just a faction of Afghanistan that was successful in seeking power? Well, certainly there was an element of that, that they were a faction who ultimately did seek power and got it.

The fact is that most Afghans thought the Taliban were really weird. I mean, when they emerged, they came out of the two most poverty stricken, neglected provinces in Afghanistan, Uruzgan and Helmand. And many of them, these young men, they've never seen a television. They had never been a part of modern existence, modern life. The only thing they knew was the Quran. And ultimately, when they joined the Taliban, they were given guns. When I went down, I had spent the whole, the last 10 years following the Mujahideen, the guerrillas who fought the Soviets. They were religious too, but they were happy-go-lucky.

They loved music. They chatted. They gossiped, told stories. And in contrast, and I was expecting that I'm going down to Kandahar to meet this group, they're probably just another Afghan faction. And I was struck by the fact that they were so biased and so anti any kind of entertainment. They banned radio, they banned music. The women issue, of course, was very important. But they banned almost every kind of entertainment and education that was not related to the Quran.

And then they banned photographs. You couldn't take pictures of them. And I mean, I remember the Mujahideen, they loved having their pictures taken with their rifles and being very cocky. And here were these Afghans not liking their pictures being taken. I couldn't believe it. And so this was something very different. And this is why even their religiosity and their piousness and all the rest of it, everything went down very badly with other Afghans who'd never experienced anything like it. Why were they so successful?

anything like that. Why were they so successful? Well, initially, they took the whole of southern Afghanistan literally without a shot being fired, because people were so fed up with the civil war and the warlordism. And then they seemed to change their mind when they reached Kabul, and they laid siege to Kabul for almost two years, trying to capture it, but couldn't. But they became very powerful outside Kabul, and then they expressed their political willingness to take power and wanting to rule Afghanistan. And that changed the whole equation between the rest of the Afghans who now consider the Taliban not as some sort of a bit weird student movement, but as some very serious warlordism which would affect them. And so we now have the Taliban becoming, as it were,

party to the conflict and wanting to capture territory and cities and rule over them. And eventually this is what happened when they took Kabul in 1996. They immediately imposed their way of life on the citizens of Kabul. Kabul was still a cosmopolitan city. The women were working, moving around. There were none of these restrictions that the Taliban brought in. People were terrified initially of the Taliban, just like they are today in Kabul. What kind of craziness will they bring with them? And they did. The first thing they did was to execute the former president, Najibullah, who was in a shelter at the United Nations office and had been there for several years, the Taliban just broke in, dragged him out and tied him to the back of a jeep and drove around Kabul with him and then hung him from a lamppost in the center of the city. And people were absolutely flabbergasted at this treatment of a former president, even though he had been a communist and was unpopular earlier on.

And then, you know, within weeks, they had these Taliban in the streets with whips and sticks who were whipping you if you didn't have a beard. And if you tried to explain, well, you can't grow a beard in one week, you need longer than that, they wouldn't listen. Of course, they were beating the women as well for showing hair or for not covering up fully. And people were just absolutely shocked. And of course, there were so many widows and orphans in Kabul because of the war. And these widows could no longer work. They could not go out into the street and work.

And unless they were accompanied by a male member of the family, but they didn't have male members of the family. They were widows and orphans. And so this whole kind of experience of the Taliban made people very scared and very angry. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Taliban. More after this. Hello.

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We hear a lot that actually the Taliban against the US-backed government in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, we have to layer that on pre-existing warlordism and factionalism in different regions like Helmand. How did the Taliban interact with these pre-existing competitions between regions or tribes or people within those areas? competitions between regions or tribes or people within those areas? Well, they wanted to conquer Afghanistan. They wanted to impose their interpretation of Islam, their interpretation of the Sharia, Islamic law. This was alien to most other Afghans,

especially those belonging to the minorities, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazaras. Hazaras were Shia, actually, and they were loathed by the Taliban because they believed that the Shias were infidels, as much as a Christian was an infidel. So they really were not liked at all by the minorities. And this led to, of course, the civil war continuing for many years until 9-11, basically. The civil war continued because they did not accept each other's lifestyle. They did not accept each other's version of Islam or interpretation of Islam. And they did not accept the means of governance. The Taliban said, we will impose Islamic law. And there's no need for a constitution or elections or anything like that, because Islam provides for everything. And the others said, no, I mean, we have to have some kind of constitution and some kind of democracy, although many of the warlords were not in favor of that. But there was this pretense that at least we had to pretend to be a modern government and we couldn't deny people their

rights. So when the Taliban finally took most of the country before 9-11, they had imposed their way of governance on the people. But what they utterly failed to do was to actually provide services for the public. They had no concept of being able to provide services. And that's why we have this present situation where the economy is in the doldrums. And we don't know if they're going to allow proper education to continue, especially at university level, etc. What about the Taliban's relations with the rest of the world, Pakistan and other outside sponsors? Well, Pakistan has always supported the Taliban because they disliked the government in Kabul

because they thought it was basically a Tajik government and they thought it was far too close to India and Pakistan's perennial enemy. And Pakistan has judged everyone by their loyalty to Pakistan and their dislike of India. And the Taliban had no truck with the Indians. India is largely a Hindu country, although there's a large Muslim minority in India. And this Deobandism, their particular interpretation of Deobandism, actually originated in India

in the 1860s. But the Taliban had very little to do with India. And Pakistan appreciated that and supported them all along. And that, of course, had led to, in the civil war, Iran got involved with the Shia Hazaras, supporting them. Central Asian states, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, got involved with their minority groups. The Turks were supporting the Turkic people in northern Afghanistan. groups. The Turks were supporting the Turkic people in northern Afghanistan. So there was a free-for-all with all these powers and influences providing money and weapons and training, etc., to their particular faction. And so there was very little chance, unfortunately, of anyone advocating peace. As you were watching the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan,

was there anything that went right? Well, I think, first of all, the Americans really messed it up. I mean, the overall decision was not wrong that America wanted to pull out its troops. But the short-term result was that the troops were pulled out before the civilians were, before the embassy was pulled out, and before other Americans and the troops were pulled out before the civilians were, before the embassy was pulled out and before other Americans and other foreigners were pulled out. And then because of the chaos that resulted, Biden had to send back 6,000. He pulled out 3,000 and he had to send back 6,000 to secure the airport and to allow these flights to take off. I think it was a very serious mistake made by the Americans. And of course, there should have been a staggered withdrawal

and not allowing for the morale of the Afghan army to collapse the way it did collapse. Biden blamed the army for not fighting. Well, the army suddenly saw that the Americans were leaving all in one go. Aircraft were leaving so that there would be no more bombing in support of the Afghan government. And there would be no more medevac, no more people wounded being flown into the hospital. There would be no support at all.

So why should they die and for whom? And the leadership in Kabul was corrupt. The president, Ashraf Ghani, ran away even before the Taliban had arrived. There were multiple factors. But I think overall, the blame must go to the Americans for doing what they did so quickly. What about previously? Could things ever have been different? There's a sense in the West that, oh, you can never go to Afghanistan and impose your

will. It's just an ungovernable place. They hate foreigners. Was there ever a point during the occupation of 20 years where things could have gone differently? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, the key to the breakdown was the war in Iraq, because the Bush administration arrived in Afghanistan, and they had very few troops to hunt down Osama bin Laden, never more than about 25,000 troops for the whole country to police the whole country. And already, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, and Paul Wilfowitz, his deputy, were planning for Iraq. And they started moving all the assets they had in Afghanistan, the satellites and the intelligence and the money and the reconstruction. They started moving all that to Iraq and leaving the Afghans really to

hold the fort. And it was during that time, I'm talking now about 2003 and 2004, that there was complete peace. There was no Taliban movement. The Taliban movement didn't erupt until 2004, 2005. So you had this incredible window of opportunity for peace. There was a lot of money. There was a lot of possibility of rebuilding, reconstruction, et cetera. But you needed the protection of the American intelligence abilities to make sure that nobody was going to bomb you or attack you. But there was a minimum of violence. The Taliban had all fled to their villages, all fled to Pakistan. And it was a wonderful opportunity. missed and lost by the Americans deciding they had to prepare for war in Iraq, which, of course,

we all know, turned out to be a dud because they had gone to Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. What does history tell us about what's going to happen next? People talk about a new different type of Taliban. What do you think this new administration in Afghanistan will be like? Well, I'm pretty convinced that we are going to see more unrest and serious chaos. I mean, already we've had all these demonstrations by women in different cities. We've had a massive demonstration against land grabbing by the Taliban in Kandahar. There's been an insurrection in the Panjshir Valley, north of

Kabul, which has been crushed but could erupt again. And there's complete lack of attention to services. The cabinet has now been announced. There doesn't seem to be any activity by the cabinet in actually governing and ruling. And this is what failed the Taliban last time, that they had no idea of governance. I mean, I remember the first time round, they would go to the office and sit there drinking many cups of tea and do absolutely nothing and then go home for lunch. And then you'd ask them, well, what have you done today? And they said, well, there's no work to do. So there's nothing for us to do.

And then the whole ministry would be left kind of without any purpose. And I fear very much that that's what we're going to see now. And the fact is that a lot of the money, the reserves of Afghanistan are locked up by the Americans. There is a shortage of funds. There will be humanitarian relief, I'm sure, by the Western countries and by the UN agencies and other NGOs. and by the UN agencies and other NGOs. But I don't know whether that is going to last long enough to help Afghanistan. There's been a terrible drought. So agriculture has really suffered this year very badly. And there's multiple crises which have to be addressed. And the whole Taliban way of performing

is to do very little and to just have their presence there and put the fear of God into everyone rather than actually perform. So it's chaos in Afghanistan. What's the greatest organized threat to Taliban rule at the moment in Afghanistan? I don't think there's a single threat, but I think the real threat is a very unhappy public who go hungry, who demand bread and jobs from the Taliban, and who won't

get it because nobody can afford to pay. I mean, the civil service, civil servants, who include teachers and health workers and bureaucrats, they haven't been paid for three months because of the chaos. And there's no sign that they're going to be paid in the near future. So it's going to be very difficult for them to continue living. That's why so many are fleeing. There's a refugee crisis now, which is going to erupt, I think, in a few weeks. Tens of thousands of Afghans are going to flee the country,

not because of fear so much as because of hunger, that there is insufficient food in the country. And people are going to be very reluctant to import it. I'll finish up by what does this mean for the region? What does it mean for Pakistan, where you are? We hear about China. What does Afghanistan's continued struggles mean for everybody? Why is Afghanistan that region?

Well, I think, you know, the region, first of all, it's very important that the regional countries, and remember, Afghanistan is landlocked, and it's surrounded by many countries. It's important that they don't repeat the past civil war, whereby each country funds its particular favorite warlord in Afghanistan. I think that should be the first political aim of the UN, the Americans, to bring everyone together, bring the neighboring countries together to adopt a common platform. And recognition to the Taliban government should

not take place until the neighboring countries have agreed to it, and that the Taliban show a greater willingness to be good at governance. So I think it's very important that the regional countries work together. Now, the fear is that Pakistan is supporting the Taliban. And the fear is that Iran and the Central Asians will once again start supporting their particular favorites. And really, I mean, that is what has to be avoided. The other thing, China, of course, is a great beneficiary of this because China has stayed out of the conflict. of course, is a great beneficiary of this because China has stayed out of the conflict. It has a small border with Afghanistan, and it's very keen to exploit the mineral wealth of Afghanistan, oil, gas, metals, minerals, which are in multiple profusion. And China is the only country there in

the region which has got the money and the technical abilities to exploit this. And they probably will. And the Taliban already are banking on China to bail them out. But the Chinese are not stupid. I mean, they're going to demand peace and stability, which the Taliban may not be able to provide. They're going to demand ability for the Chinese engineers to move around the country, to exploit these minerals. They're going to bring in Chinese workforce and all this they want to do. But it's still very doubtful as to how much the Taliban can accommodate all this and create a system of peace and stability. Well, Emmett, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and educating us all. Much appreciated.

Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've met Dindar on the episode.

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