Throughline - Afghanistan: The Rise of the Taliban (2021)

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

How did a small group of Islamic students go from local vigilantes to one of the most infamous and enigmatic forces in the world? The Taliban is a name that has haunted the American imagination since 2001. The scenes of the group's brutality repeatedly played in the Western media, while true, perhaps obscure our ability to see the complex origins of the Taliban and how they impact the lives of Afghans. It's a shadow that reaches across the vast ancient Afghan homeland, the reputation of the modern state, and throughout global politics. At the end of the US war in Afghanistan we go back to the end of the Soviet Occupation and the start of the Afghan civil war to look at the rise of the Taliban.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey everyone, it's Rand. And Ramteen. This month, we're super proud to bring you our Peabody Award-winning series, Afghanistan, the Center of the World. Released at the 20th anniversary of 9-11, right after the U.S.

withdrew troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control, this series puts Afghanistan and its people at the center of a centuries-old narrative. We're so proud that this is the kind of work we get to bring you every week. So listen, re-listen, tell a friend about us. Today, episode two, Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban. The year is 2001. Ahmad Shah Massoud is in northern Afghanistan, commanding his soldiers.

Ahmad Shah Massoud is a legend in Afghanistan. He's the most important commander of the opposition to the ruling Taliban. Known as the Lion of Panjshir, Massoud was tall and thin with an angular face. His curly hair always poked out from under his pakul, the iconic brown wool cap that he made famous. He kind of looked like an Afghan Che Guevara. It was a Sunday, and for weeks prior, a pair of journalists had pushed hard to get an interview with him. They set up what they purported to be a television interview with him. Today was the day of the interview.

When the journalists showed up with their camera gear, they got searched by a guard and then walked into the building where Massoud sat. Assalamu alaikum. Walaikum assalam. How are you, Asad? Alhamdulillah. The cameraman fumbled with his equipment, seeming to aim the lens at everyone's knees. Massoud leaned over and asked his friend why the cameraman didn't seem to know what he was doing. Then... didn't seem to know what he was doing. Then.

Turns out they'd loaded explosives into their camera, and they blew themselves up. Today, though, his fate is uncertain. He was hurt in an explosion yesterday in the north... Ahmed Shah Massoud was a threat to the Taliban. He represented resistance and a more moderate alternative to the Taliban's extreme form of Islamic rule. And for several years, they'd been unable to take the Panjshir Valley he defended.

It is a very difficult place to attack. And the valley was very well defended. And the population was very loyal to him. It would take nothing less than a suicide mission to get him. And there was an organization in Afghanistan with the ability to do it. An organization that the Taliban provided safe haven for, and an organization that Ahmad Shah Massoud had warned the West about months earlier. Osama bin Laden's organization, Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda figured out how to infiltrate a couple of assassins disguised as journalists into the Panjshir Valley. Ahmad Shah Massoud initially survived the attack,

but he soon died of his injuries. On September 9th, 2001. September 9th, 2001. Two days before 9-11. When I die, when my coffin is carried out, you must never think I am missing this world. Do not shed any tears. Do not lament and feel sorry. For I am not leaving.

I am arriving at eternal love. When you leave me in the grave, do not say goodbye. Remember, a grave is just a curtain for the paradise behind. Jalal Ad- Mohamed Rumi. The assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud in 2001 barely made a dent in the international news. But for many in Afghanistan, his death represented the end of a vision. A vision of an Afghanistan that is both modern and Islamic, both open to the world and rooted in its cultural traditions. In the 1960s and 70s, it seemed like the country was

getting closer to that vision. It was slowly modernizing. Education was improving. And for many, especially in the cities, life was getting better. Then it descended into a 40-year process of violence, chaos, and exile. Like one of its most famous natives, the poet Rumi, millions of Afghans have been forcibly displaced by war. In this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're going to go back and tell the story of how the Taliban originally came into power in 1996. And in the process, we'll see what happens when geopolitics and proxy wars rip out the soul of a country. How the delicate web of human connections developed over centuries gets destroyed and leaves in its wake confusion and trauma. This is a story about how foreign invasions and civil war and corporate economics sabotaged the hopes of many Afghans for a better country and birthed a generation who wanted to turn back the clock. When we come back, the death of a dream and the rise of the Taliban.

Hey, this is Fontaine from Lynchburg, Virginia, and you're listening to ThruLine with the magnificently talented Rand Abdel-Fattah and Ramteen Arablui on NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. A Place Apart I think like a lot of visitors to Afghanistan, I found it quite a magical place.

Really a place apart. This is Steve Cole, a staff writer at The New Yorker and dean of the journalism school at Columbia University. First, there's the landscape. This remarkable set of very high mountains, beautifully irrigated valleys and gorges and desertscapes and just an extraordinary variety of landscape and then equally of people. Steve has spent years reporting in Afghanistan and has written two books on the country.

The reason people like myself who travel there become so drawn to the place is because of the people. Afghans are among the most hospitable people you can find, even in a relatively hospitable part of the world. Afghan mores and attitudes towards visitors, towards travelers, is the beginning point of a culture that is just rich in human connection. The other thing about Afghanistan I think is hard to understand if you haven't spent some time there, is that there really is a national culture. And what is that culture made of? It's made up of language, of poetry, of song, of,

you know, of a sense of spiritual awareness. You can't separate an experience of Afghanistan today from its suffering over the last 40-plus years. And this is a benighted country. This is truly an unlucky country. That bad luck might be rooted in Afghanistan's location. It's landlocked, but sits in a prime spot between the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. It also has a massive reserve of oil, natural gas, and valuable minerals underneath its ground. A blessing and a curse.

I think there's a habit of blaming Afghans for their own misery, and it's not right. It's not right because this was not a war that they started. The so-called Afghan situation. In 1979, there was a communist government ruling Afghanistan. They faced widespread opposition for their brutal tactics, and they were losing control of the country. An all-out rebellion from the people was taking place. This long war that Afghans have been caught up in,

of course they have helped to author it, and they've had terrible leaders and terrible warlords to accelerate some of the violence and suffering that the country has endured. But this was a war that started with an outside invasion. The General Assembly of the United Nations continued debating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan today. Moscow's ambassador to the UN... The Soviet Union stepped in to keep Afghanistan communist. They launched a full-scale military invasion of the country.

It began one of the most brutal occupations of the 20th century and on paper, one of the most uneven military matchups. On one side was the Soviet military, equipped with tanks and attack helicopters. And on the Afghan side was a loosely connected collection of Afghan militiamen called the Mujahideen or those who fight in the way of God. Despite the Soviet Union's superior arms, the Soviets were up against the fierce independence and fervent religion of the Afghan people. The war was proclaimed a holy war. Afghanistan has many ethnic groups, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Turkmens, and Baluches. In response to the Soviet invasion,

many of these groups united under the cause of Islam and Afghan nationalism. Many believe that the Soviets, effectively an atheist state, wanted to get rid of the country's religion and tradition. So for the Mujahideen, this wasn't just a religious war. It was a war for the survival of the nation. And they fought with that sense of determination and desperation. The Soviets entered Afghanistan completely unprepared for the conflict that developed with the wrong organization and unsuitably heavy weapons. The Soviets grew frustrated,

so they resorted to some extreme, twisted tactics to break their resistance. The fighting is brutal, and Afghan civilians suffer a lot. In many cases, they were intentionally targeted. There were reports that the Soviet military would drop toys containing hidden bombs near villages. When children picked them up, they would explode and in many cases permanently maim the child. It was a cold, calculated strategy. A family that had to care for a disabled child might not be able to participate in the resistance. For the sake of God, we have suggest to all Mujahideen to follow the same path.

We will never lay down our weapons until an Islamic government is established in Afghanistan and the law of the Quran is applied. The voice of a Mujahideen fighter. In early 1980, the popular outrage at the invasion provided more volunteers than they could arm. This is the voice of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the guy who was assassinated by Al-Qaeda at the top of this episode, talking about the Mujahideen resistance to the Soviets. This is where he made his name for himself, as a leader in the Mujahideen.

He and his fellow fighters were relentless. No matter what advanced weapons the Soviets used against them, the Mujahideen kept coming and coming. But in order for the Mujahideen to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan, they would need help. And this is where the U.S. gets involved. First, under President Jimmy Carter, and then President Ronald Reagan. So the CIA certainly had a lot to do with the Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation. They ran a covert action to arm and fund the rebels who were fighting against the Soviets who occupied Afghanistan. And the reason was Cold War related. Soviets had undertaken this unwise invasion of Afghanistan. The CIA saw an opportunity to raise the cost that they would pay.

And it was payback for Vietnam very explicitly in the minds of some of the CIA officers who had served in Vietnam and were still in the service when the Soviets came into Afghanistan. This is Afghanistan. Alexander the Great tried to conquer this country. Then Genghis Khan. Then the British. Now Russia. But Afghan people fight hard. They never be defeated.

This is from the 1980s action movie Rambo 3. It says, may God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan. You understand what this means? That you guys don't take any shit. In the film, a special forces veteran of Vietnam, played by Sylvester Stallone, somehow ends up in Afghanistan and fights against the Soviets with the Mujahideen. It paints the U.S.'s involvement as righteous.

It's one of those outrageous action movies where one guy defeats an entire army. The only thing realistic about the film is that the Mujahideen did have help, a lot of it, from countries like the U.S., China, France, Italy, Iran, and many others. And as a result, they were fighting the Soviets to a stalemate. And eventually the CIA thought we might actually succeed. And by the way, these Afghans deserve the money and the arms to see this fight through. So then they started to provide weapons like stingers. The Stinger missile. Capable of hitting a moving target five kilometers away, it represented a massive threat. Shoulder-fired, ground-to-air missiles that could knock Soviet helicopters out of the sky.

The most dangerous time was around 1986. We lost a third of our men and a half of all our helicopters. It did tip the balance of the war, or help to. The Mujahideen wore down the Soviet army. And by 1989, the Soviet Union threw in the towel. They pulled the last of their soldiers out of Afghanistan, ending a decade of occupation. If anyone seriously believed 10 or 8 or even 5 or 6 years ago that the Soviets might be forced out of Afghanistan again, theirs were lonely voices indeed.

The Mujahideen had achieved an improbable victory with help from their American friends. However, most of that help didn't come directly from the United States. It came through a country that will continue to be a part of this story until the present day. Pakistan. So much of the aid was funneled through the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. That's Esfandiar Mir. He's a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace and is affiliated with Stanford University. He specializes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and South Asia. And the ISI who we refer to is the name of the Pakistani Intelligence Service, kind of like their CIA. The ISI became the lead organization

in managing these resistance forces. To do the training and to do the liaisons and the political massaging and that sort of thing. And the CIA would stand in the background, write big checks. That's Steve Cole again. You know, these forces were based in Pakistan. They had bases, they had houses, safe houses. A lot of their fighters were living in Pakistan and parts of northwestern Pakistan. Pakistan was the middle person between the U.S. and the Mujahideen. And why would they take on this role?

Why would they get involved? Well, one reason is simple. Since the founding of Pakistan, they had issues with Afghanistan over their borders. So for decades, they had tried to exert some influence over Afghan politics to ensure that the borders wouldn't be challenged and that they wouldn't be sandwiched between two hostile states, India and a communist-led Afghanistan.

But then once the Soviets invaded, I think there was a genuine fear or concern on the Pakistani side that perhaps we are next. The military alliance between the United States and Pakistan was highly effective. It helped the Mujahideen throw out the Soviets. But most importantly for our story, it created a deeply complicated relationship between Pakistan's ISI and Afghanistan's armed fighters.

A relationship that would play an important role in what was to come next in Afghanistan. Hey, everyone. This is Ammar Alam, and I'm from Alka City, Maryland, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast.

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also known as madrasa. And those schools often included curriculum designed to indoctrinate children in the ideology of jihad, holy war. There was a lot of militarism starting at very young ages. This is Asfandiyar Mir again. Both teachers and the actual content itself would refer to say, you know, A for Allah. When they wanted to say, indicate quantities, you know, instead of saying two apples, they'd say two guns. Jai is for Jannah, the garden of paradise. Hai is for Hajjji The blessed pilgrimage And all of this was done to support this war that was going on next door. You know, a lot of madrassas, seminaries were constructed

in support of this particular effort with Saudi money. Saudi Arabia had played a big role in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the early 1980s and the beginning of the Soviet war. It poured money into the war effort. But Saudi clerics also started preaching about the importance of the holy war against the Soviets. Young Saudi and other Arab men heeded the call and went to Afghanistan to fight.

The contingent of these foreign fighters became so large that they were referred to as Arab Afghans. Many of these so-called Arab Afghans fought alongside the Mujahideen. Osama bin Laden, he was one of these Arab Afghans. He was one of the young foreign fighters, rich foreign fighters. But he came really towards the tail end of the fighting. And he himself didn't take part in a whole lot of fighting. Bin Laden came from a rich Saudi Arabian family. And he used his money to set up bases for Arab-Afghan fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's when he founded the organization, which we now know as al-Qaeda, in 1988.

Other than money and soldiers, the Saudis also started sending over ideas. The interpretation of Islam taught in Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, puts out ideas about Islam that are extreme in their strictness. It sets harsh punishments like amputation for stealing or flogging for drinking alcohol. It restricts women's ability to be financially independent or get an education or travel. And it encourages jihad or holy war. During the 1980s, Wahhabi philosophy made its way into the education of children in Pakistan. The ideological content of the curriculum at a lot of these madrassas

had a very strong Wahhabi slant. But here's the thing. Even though Wahhabism was a foreign ideology for most Afghan and Pakistani people, there was a certain Islamic ideology native to South Asia that provided a nice landing pad for Wahhabism. It's called Diobandism. And one of the striking things about the Diobandi school is that it is full of rules and interpretive rules. Now, if you read the Quran, the Quran is quite a remarkable body of law. It has a lot of specifics in it, but the Diobandi rules, in order to create a community that resembled that which might have existed in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, had to be prescriptive about lots of things the Quran couldn't contemplate, like, are tape recorders okay? Are cameras okay? Are kites okay?

Very interpretive and very prescriptive. This new mishmash of Islamic schools of thought were being directly injected into the minds of many young Afghan refugees in Pakistan. And as these boys grew into men, they would return in waves to fight against the Soviets and eventually remake the country in their own image. Poetry from a Taliban fighter. If I am put in danger, I don't care. If my body is split into pieces, I don't care. They turned our maiden's hands into soil and ashes.

If my head is cut from my body, I don't care. I leave my property and head for Islam. If my muscles are fried in the fire, I don't care. Oh, my God, accept my prayers. If I spend my life in jail, I don't care. I won't depart from God's love. If this love bursts into flames, I don't care. After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, a power vacuum emerged. The Afghan central government was still standing, and it was still communist and allied with the Soviet Union. But now, without backup from Soviet troops, the government was facing a massive Mujahideen force that wanted to remove all communism from Afghanistan. And so... What happened was a devastating civil war

that developed out of a stalemate between the Soviet client government in Kabul and the rebels who were themselves fractious and divided along a number of lines, ideology, ethnicity, region. The Mujahideen all wanted to get rid of the remaining Afghan communist government. They agreed on that. But once it became clear that the central government would eventually collapse,

the Mujahideen started looking at each other and saying, well, which one of us is going to be the next government? And that's when they started to turn their guns on each other. Ethnic and regional conflicts broke out. And that triggers fighting in the heart of Afghanistan. A lot of atrocities are committed in Kabul, not just in the countryside. Leaders on all sides of the conflict were accused of war crimes.

Even Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was by this time considered a legend for his leadership during the Soviet war, had accusations of violence against civilians directed at his forces. The conflict was brutal and once again caused millions of deaths and displacements. Because that war became such a multi-sided and violent stalemate, the country devolved into a period of warlordism and local powers who could be terribly abusive. People recall it as a time of sort of checkpoints, where power was literally expressed by what intersection on a road you could control and what you could extract from the people who tried to pass through your checkpoint.

Lawlessness has an especially adverse impact on basic needs like food. You'd tax them, you'd strip them of any goods they had in their truck. Sexual predators would use these checkpoints as places to abduct and abuse girls and boys, women and men. What we know is that women were being victimized by the different warring sides. There were cases of, you know, systematic sexual violence. In some ways, they're weaponized during the course of the war.

They're targeted. What they're talking about is rape as an act of war. It was true on the streets of Kabul. It was true on the streets of Kandahar. It was true on the major highways. By 1994, the situation had really deteriorated. And so it's a terrible time. The civil war was a very bad time. There was no government, effectively.

The Afghan civil war had created a situation There was no government, effectively. The Afghan civil war had created a situation in which there was a kind of the experience of a political vacuum in the country, the experience of ordinary people, and on the other hand, an economic collapse. This is Fatima Mujaddidi. Assistant professor of anthropology at UC Davis. Fatima's parents are Afghan, and she's conducted a lot of her research there. And the other thing happening at the same time, of course, was the fall of the Soviet Union. And so there's a kind of synchronicity between these regional events and really these international events. It wasn't just Afghanistan's resources. It was its

location. Many companies were looking for ways to transport natural resources from countries in Central Asia, like Turkmenistan, to South Asia. One of the ways to do it was through Afghanistan into Pakistan, which had ports where the resources could be exported. And so Afghanistan was kind of catapulted, I think, into the attention of companies and global oil and gas companies that wanted to begin tapping into some of these resources, which are, you know, in the hundreds of millions of barrels, if not more. Running a pipeline through Afghanistan would allow companies to avoid working with Russia or Iran, which the West generally considered unfriendly. But it could only be built if Afghanistan had a stable, secure government. And during the chaotic civil war, that didn't exist. Some entity needed to come along and bring order to the country so corporations and governments

could do business. And it is at this time that you see, you start hearing grumblings about this new movement of young students who are being referred to as talibs. The children of exile had returned to Afghanistan. Their new vision for Afghanistan would reshape it for decades and usher in a new age of international war. When we come back, the Taliban rise out of the ashes of Kandahar. Hello, my name is Jake Stern. I live in Olympia, Washington, and you're listening to ThruLine. Part 3. The Curtain. Poetry from an Afghan woman in Herat, Nadia Anjaman.

There is no joy for me to describe. What shall I sing of? Me, I am hated whether I sing or not. There is no one in this world who will hear my voice, whether I speak, whether I laugh, whether I die, whether I survive. By 1994, Afghanistan had been through a 10-year-long occupation and then a brutal civil war. Thousands had been killed and millions had fled into exile. In Kabul, there was a central government made up of former Mujahideen fighters, but it was very shaky. There was lawlessness. Different parts of the country were controlled by militia leaders and warlords,

mostly along ethnic lines. Ethnic violence continued. Life was dark for most Afghans. And it's in this world that a new group emerged. The word talib means student. They are students of madrassat. They started modestly as a group of young men who volunteered to fight the Soviet occupation and who had been educated in seminaries. Others are said to have had training in seminaries in Pakistan.

They were very poor men, very devout. Some of them were itinerant preachers, others farmers and laborers. They became well known for their honorable service in the war in the regions where they retired around Kandahar. Kandahar was one of the places where things got bad. Kandahar, the second largest city in Afghanistan, became a hotbed of warlordism. Different strongmen controlled different parts of the city.

Crime and violence were rampant. Scams were everywhere. Many of the early Taliban leaders weren't living under these conditions. One thing that distinguished this group was that they weren't in the rackets. They were pious breachers. They were living poor lives. They were credible. Steve Cole says some local residents came to them. And they said, can't you do something about this?

They began talking amongst themselves and decided they were going to do something about it. They raised the flag of Islam and organized themselves as a justice force in the name of religion. And their goal really is to rid Afghanistan of the instability, violence, and the impunity of warlords.

And they started attacking some of the checkpoints and making examples out of the warlords that they captured, interrogated. They strung people up. They executed people. As they gained more territory in Kandahar, more followers joined their movement. Soon, they were controlling most of the city. It turned out that this boss land of Kandahar City,

with all of these racketeers and factions, was weaker as a political force than it appeared. And I imagine, to their surprise, they entered into central Kandahar, straight into what was effectively City Hall, and took power without a lot of resistance that they might have expected. The Taliban were now in charge of the second largest city of Afghanistan. They'd become more than a local vigilante group. They'd restored order to an entire city.

And that caught the attention of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. Remember them? They were the ones who'd done the groundwork to support the Mujahideen in the 1980s. Now, in 1994, the ISI was looking for new partners in Afghanistan. And they saw potential in the Taliban. As early as 1994, November 1994, they're providing the Taliban with material aid, fire cover. They're hoping that this will restore order. Primarily because Afghanistan is a big and destabilizing, at times, neighbor of Pakistan.

They've seen the Taliban a faction, a group that they can have more influence over compared to some of the other factions that they had been supporting. Pakistanis basically make a bet on them. Initially, I think a hedging bet, and then eventually an all-in bet, like this is our solution for Afghanistan. I don't think the Taliban would be the factor in Afghanistan or on the world stage that they are if Pakistan did not support them. They are a proxy of Pakistan's desire to exercise political influence in Afghanistan. As their legend grew and they forged new alliances, the Taliban decided they could take over all of Afghanistan. This probably would have seemed impossible.

Afghanistan had a complex web of militias and warlords. It still had a central government of militias and warlords. It still had a central government made up of former Mujahideen fighters, and most cities in the country were fairly chaotic. But with Pakistan's military and financial support, they had the wind at their backs. So they have trucks and they have communications and jeeps and weapons and cash. By the spring of 1995, they're on the march militarily. Often, they didn't have to fire a shot. They would roll into town flying their flags, wearing their signature black turbans,

and they would urge people to join them. And often, these exhausted militias around the country, they just switch sides. And what about the civilians, the noncombatants? You know, if you've ever been in a place that's conquered by an incoming guerrilla force or revolutionary force, you see that people just try to protect themselves. So they'll wave flags and they'll put out flowers.

Maybe they really are celebrating the incoming force, but maybe they're just being clever and wary. I think there was a lot of wariness. Wariness. Why? We are unhappy the Taliban have come here. This is an Afghan woman talking about the Taliban in 1996. One day I went to the city to do some shopping. I was wearing my hijab.

A Taliban hit me in the back with an AK-47. I asked him why. He said because you aren't covering your face. The Taliban's mix of Diobandi and Wahhabi Islam meant that wherever they went, they instituted some extreme

laws. They dealt harsh punishments for everything from petty theft to adultery. They held public executions. They banned music and most forms of art. They required men to grow beards and women to wear veils that covered their faces. They basically cut women out from public life altogether. And this, the oppression of women, is a human rights violation that the Taliban are most known for. The bottom line is, the Taliban were trying to completely remake Afghanistan. Afghanistan had always been a conservative society, but the Taliban bring in some ideas of conservatism that are alien to Afghanistan.

So some, you know, Wahhabi ideas that they had probably picked up in a lot of these madrassas in Pakistan. To the extent to which local people lived under some form of Islamic law varied from place to place. There were conservative rural sections of the country for whom the Taliban's strictures were kind of a minor adjustment. There were other parts of the country that resisted them entirely because they didn't want to submit to what they would have seen

as a violative, almost imperial form of Islam that they didn't recognize as legitimate. So in that sense, they present a new vision that, at least at the elite level, people had not experienced before. By September 1996, the Taliban had taken over Kabul and seized control of the country. You might be wondering, what did the world think of all this? Well, remember those gas and oil resources Fatima Mujaddadi mentioned earlier and the pipeline companies wanted to build?

The only way for that to happen would be if there was a stable government. Turkey was supportive of the Taliban. Saudi Arabia has long been a supporter of the Taliban. Pakistan and its intelligence services have long been backers and supporters of the Taliban. As for the U.S., the State Department's spokesman in the Clinton administration, Glenn Davies, said that the U.S. found, quote, nothing objectionable about the Taliban's application of Islamic law. And when pressed by reporters, he said, I'm not going to prejudge where we're going with Afghanistan. The United States, as soon as the Taliban effectively a competition between, for example, an Argentinian company, Brides, and the American company, Unical.

This is the voice of Wakakeel Mutawakeel. He was the foreign minister of the Taliban, talking about their negotiations with the American oil and gas company, Unical. He's explaining that the Taliban were negotiating with Unical while they were in power to build a pipeline through the country. For UNICAL, the motivations were clear. Whoever got the rights to build this pipeline could potentially be cashing in on billions of dollars. And the Taliban knew that if they could enforce security in the country, they'd also generate revenue from the pipeline. And in a poor, traumatized country like Afghanistan, money and security could potentially bring legitimacy.

And so the kind of first period of the first iteration, if you will, of Taliban rule was in a sense determined and overdetermined by these economic interests and these corporate interests and really by the nature of global capitalism. In 1997, an economic crisis started in the big Asian markets who were driving demand for oil and gas. And a pipeline no longer seemed like a good bet. A lot of those projects became either unviable or became economically unattractive. The United States launched an attack this morning on one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It is located in Afghanistan and operated by groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden, a network not sponsored by any state, but as dangerous as any we face. And that's when we see a kind of political shift, a discursive shift in the way that the

Taliban was, on the one hand, sort of spoken about by that same administration, but also in the interest that the United States had in Afghanistan from that point kind of moving forward. We should note that al-Qaeda, who was allied with the Taliban, bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Terrorists must have no doubt that in the face of their threats, America will protect its citizens and will continue to lead the world's fight for peace, freedom, and security. Fatma says that the U.S.'s public turn against the Taliban,

which included calling out human rights violations and the oppression of women, and even bombing terrorist sites, wasn't just about those things. I think these were ideological and kind of political glosses that were attached, if you will, to this sudden change that the United States had in terms of how it saw the Taliban. But I do think the kind of underlying decision-making factor, if you will, was that these projects were no longer economically viable. In Islam, there is no extremism and there is no fundamentalism. I do believe that Islam is a moderate religion and I am a moderate Muslim.

That was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legend of the Soviet resistance. Here he is talking about how Afghan women must play a role in every sector of society. With regards to the progress of women in work and women's ability to better themselves, not only are we not in opposition to those things, we support them fully. Let's be clear here. There are many people in Afghanistan who see Massoud as one of those responsible for the suffering caused by the Afghan civil war, specifically killing civilians. His forces destroyed some parts of Kabul in the process of trying to wrestle back control of it from his rivals.

Still, in the face of the Taliban's rise to power, Massoud's legendary status as a guerrilla fighter and the more moderate form of Islam he espoused made him an attractive alternative for many people in Afghanistan, especially those in the north. It's not as if Ahmad Shah Massoud was fighting in the name of anything other than Islam. It's just that his interpretation and his political and cultural setting in the north of Afghanistan was quite different from the conservative rural Kandahari world that the Taliban came from.

And in 1996, Massoud was serving as the defense minister of the Afghan government when the Taliban arrived in the capital city of Kabul. He leaves the capital, Kabul, when the Taliban take it over, and he goes into his redoubt, the Panjshir Valley. The Panjshir Valley is just about three hours north of Kabul. And from there, Ahmad Shah Massoud would organize a resistance to the Taliban from 1996 to his assassination in 2001. The force he helped organize would come to be known as the Northern Alliance,

and they aided the United States during the early days of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. When for the last time I close your mouth, your words and soul will belong to the world of no place and no time. When the Taliban retook control of most of the country, another resistance formed in the Panjshir Valley. It was headed by the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud. In early September, the Taliban violently took control of the Panjshir Valley, dealing a severe blow to the resistance. The sound here is from a protest in Kabul

in support of the Panjshir resistance. The crowd chants, freedom, and we support our brothers in Panjshir. The last 40 years in Afghanistan have been perhaps some of the most difficult in its history. The continual waves of war and tragedy have battered its soul and spread its people around the world. But Afghanistan has always been its people around the world. But Afghanistan has always been the center of the world. It has always balanced newcomers with tradition, fierce independence with extreme hospitality. And that has resulted in one of the most richly layered and diverse cultures on earth. Afghanistan, like all countries, including our own, is defined by its complexity.

The beauty and ugliness that can come from the same source. The Taliban rose out of this complexity just as poets like Rumi or Nadia Anjuman did. It is with a true appreciation for that depth and history that we can, as non-Afghans, even begin to understand this place and where it might go. That's it for this week's show. I'm Rondal DeFatta. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Lawrence Wu.

Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ibeez. Craig Valdespino. Yolanda Sanguini. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Anya Grunman, Tamar Charney, Miranda Mazzariegos, Adriana Tapia, Greg Myrie, Jerry Holmes, and Aida Purasad. Thanks also to Coleman Barks for his translation of Rumi's poetry in the book

The Essential Rumi, published by Harper San Francisco. This episode was inspired by the book Taliban, Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmad Rashid. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes

Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. Thanks to Alex J. Wenskis for mixing the episode and to Zadran Wali for being the voice of Rumi. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR.

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