Today, Explained - Taliban 2.0

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

The Taliban last controlled Afghanistan 20 years ago. They may be more pragmatic now, but their ideology hasn’t changed. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah. Today marks Afghan Independence Day, and the Taliban is celebrating by claiming their victory over the United States. But some Afghans want independence from the very militants who took control of Kabul this week.

In just the last 24 hours, reports of protests in Kabul started trickling in. As this all unfolded, we got on the phone with CNN's Clarissa Ward, who is in the capital city. And you've probably seen her face if you've been following this story. She's been covering the situation in Afghanistan nonstop. We decide to leave and head for our car. The fighter takes the safety off his AK-47 and pushes through the crowd. Stay behind him. Stay behind him.

When we talked to her last night, gobble time, she said for a city that had just been taken over by the Taliban, things were actually pretty calm. They know that the world is watching them right now Taliban, things were actually pretty calm. They know that the world is watching them right now, and they want to get it right. And they're very proud of the fact that they were able to take this capital city of millions of people in a matter of hours without hardly a shot being fired. The one caveat to all of that is that the situation at the airport, of course, is anything but calm. Afghans convinced the promise of a flight out was their only life ahead.

Clambering over walkways and tarmac the US spent billions on to maintain its presence. The images that we've all seen now of people flooding the runway. One of the US's largest cargo planes taxiing laden with Afghans who did not want to be left behind. And we were actually there earlier outside the airport. And it's this bizarre contradiction that the Taliban is now guarding America's last foothold in Afghanistan. So they've created a perimeter around the airport.

And it's very chaotic and quite dangerous around those checkpoints on the edge because there's so many people trying to get in. Just ahead of us is the gate into the airport, and this is the panicked scene. And the Taliban is using very harsh tactics to crowd control. So we witnessed them whipping people.

We saw them firing rounds. It's a very frantic situation for, you know, even if you have your paperwork, I'd say if you're an Afghan, it's really difficult to get into that airport right now. Clarissa, you have covered this country for over a decade. You have witnessed Afghanistan and multiple chapters of its political history. What does it feel like to be witnessing this Taliban takeover? It feels utterly surreal. I think everybody understood that it was somewhat inevitable at some point, but I don't think anybody could have predicted quite how quickly it would happen,

quite how quickly Afghan forces would just melt away. And I started to get a sense of that when I was in Ghazni province, we drove through an Afghan forces checkpoint and there was a small base attached to it and the Taliban were firing at this base. And we just saw suddenly all these Afghan forces, soldiers pouring out of the base, running down the hill, hailing down a civilian vehicle and jumping in it and speeding off. And that was a real moment for me of like, okay, if this is how Afghan forces are responding to being fired upon, then this really does not bode well in terms of expecting them to hold their ground or even push the Taliban back. What are you hearing from some of the Afghan people who you're talking to

who are still trying to get out? What are their options on the table right now? of desperation of people who worked with the U.S. military or the embassy or international organizations or news organizations who thought that they might have months to prepare for this moment and then found that they had days, hours. And now they're frantically trying to get their paperwork together. And you know, it's a complicated thing applying for this SIV, right? This visa that allows you to get to the US. It's a huge amount of bureaucracy. I have spoken to so many people whose applications have been rejected and they don't know why. They have to go and find HR letters often for jobs that they had four years ago, and that company may not even be here anymore. And it's just endless layers of paperwork. And in this moment, with things as frightening

as they are for people, and especially people who worked closely with the US in any number of ways, no one really has the bandwidth to sit down and do all that paperwork. And no one's getting any guidance, certainly not from their government, but even from the U.S. government as to how they should go about doing this, how they need to fill in that paperwork, what their recourse is

if their application is rejected. Have you tried to apply? Yes, yes, of course. And what happened? They tell us we have to bring the HR later update for the 2021, but it's impossible. So what happened? They tell us we have to bring the HR later updates for the 2021. But it's impossible. So what's your message to America right now?

It's our message to America. We help the American people. So that's their job to help right now here. Wow. It sounds like seriously a situation of just chaos and desperation. What are you hearing from women and girls in particular? It depends where you are in the country. And I do think that's an important distinction to make. Here in the cities, you talk to just countless women who have worked so hard, who have shaped

incredible careers for themselves and, you know, gone to school and gone on to do higher education. It is not easy for a person to work a lot with international organization. And now no one of them helped me. They're the ones who are just so petrified. I'm thinking about my future, my daughters. What will happen to them if they kill me, two daughters without mother? The Taliban says that they're going to guarantee women's rights, but the devil is in the detail. They won't allow women to wear a simple headscarf.

They want them to wear a full facial veil and gloves. The reality is they won't allow men and women to work side by side. This is what a Taliban commander told me the other day and so if you're a female reporter at a news organization in Afghanistan how does that work you're going to have a women's newsroom and a men's newsroom I mean it just very quickly you start to see the writing on the wall that it's almost logistically impossible so there's a huge amount of heartache and bitterness and sadness and deep fear with so many women around this city. really having much hope that they are going to have many rights. Do you have any indication that the Taliban's promise that they will be less brutal than when they were in the 90s will bear out? Is this period of time going to look anything different than the Taliban's first regime?

I think that's the really important question, and it's a really tough question to answer right now, but most people do not have a lot of optimism. The Taliban has been telling me again and again during the last couple of weeks that I've been covering them that they have learned from the mistakes of the past, that they don't want to be international pariahs, that they can be more pragmatic, that they will allow women's education. But then when you listen to the press conference that the spokesperson, Zabiullah Mujahid, gave. I have already told you about our stand against women.

He was very quick to couch all these things in within the realms of what Islam allows. I can do anything according to within the frame of Islamic principles. And even when he was asked, has the fundamental ideology changed, he said, no, not really. And so you ask yourself, well, if they're this committed to this sort of medieval interpretation of Sharia, where you're talking about an issue like niqab, the full facial veil, which, you know, I mean, I'm not an expert, but I think that the majority of Islamic scholars agree that a full niqab is not wajib, right? It's not essential. It's not essential. It's not required. And so if the Taliban is not willing to be flexible on issues like this, where we see all over the Muslim world, women wearing a simple headscarf, women becoming prime minister at Bangladesh, Pakistan, I mean, their version or vision of Islam is one that is very specific to them, let's say. And if they openly say that that hasn't changed,

that hasn't adapted in any way, then how can one really expect to see meaningful change from how they used to be? Clarissa Ward is CNN's chief international correspondent. She spoke to us from Kabul yesterday. Coming up, it's not the 1990s anymore. How will the Taliban operate in 2021? That's in a minute on Today Explained. Support for today.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with The Taliban has returned to power, a moment they've been waiting for for the last 20 years. The group is older, made of more seasoned fighters, and now even doing press conferences with international media. So we reached out to Vali Nasser. He's a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University. And I asked him, is the Taliban the same group they were two decades ago?

Yes and no. I mean, there definitely is a younger generation that is doing the fighting on the ground. A lot of these soldiers, commanders that we're seeing on television today were not even born then. But the older generation, the person who will be likely the president or the amir, whatever they call him, those are basically the early generation or the first generation of the Taliban. But they are different in the sense that, first of all, they've aged. They're not the young hotheads that they were back then. So I think they're a bit more worldly-wise, and therefore they're not necessarily in the same mold that they were.

And if I can give a quick example, they captured Kabul without a single battle, which they accomplished by negotiating, wheeling, dealing, and compromising. And that's not the Taliban that we saw in the 1990s, which was completely uncompromising and demanded total victory and then ran roughshod over the people they defeated. Americans have been living with this idea of a war with this group for a very long time, but I imagine many don't know much about the Taliban beyond that. What is their origin story? So before the United States ended up going to Afghanistan, there was another war.

Since 1979, the Soviet Union has tried to impose its will on the people of Afghanistan. Despite the death and destruction brought by the Soviets, the Afghan struggle for freedom continues. It did not go very well for the Soviets. Dawn on a February morning in 1989, a 14-mile convoy winds over the northern plains of Afghanistan as the final Soviet troops depart. As Vietnam was for us, Afghanistan has been a sobering experience for the Soviet Union.

When the Soviets went Soviets left Afghanistan, the Mujahideen, the Islamic fighters that pushed them out, could not agree to form a government. They broke into a civil war. Afghanistan collapsed into total chaos and mayhem. Kabul, Afghanistan, once a city of roses and minarets, now a scene from hell. And it was in that context that Mullah Omar, who was a sort of, at that time, a low-ranking cleric and had fought in the war in Afghanistan,

was disgusted at the level of chaos, corruption in his hometown around Kandahar. And he resorted to organizing these people who had originally been young orphans of the war, who had been taken into seminaries in Pakistan and had been reared in an environment in which there were no women, there was no regular family life, there was no regular village life, and schooled in a very hardened jihadi view of Islam.

And he organized them into a fighting force. And the Taliban proved extremely effective. And they were welcomed by people in southern Afghanistan at the very, very beginning because they brought order. And what do you mean when you say order? Was someone finally like picking up the trash and collecting taxes? Well, not so much trash and taxes, but actually stopping the banditry, stopping the shakedown, stopping the abuse of the population by anybody who was a gun-toting person. That obviously at the beginning was appealing and was one of the reasons why they were able to grow

those very first roots in the Pashtun areas of the south. Can you talk about how the Taliban, you know, under the control of Mullah Omar, made up by this group of orphaned, politically disaffected, religiously extreme young men, even ruled when they were first in control of Afghanistan? Rule was extremely rudimentary. The Taliban in the 1990s, for all practical purposes, remained a conquering army on the move that never quite settled down into governance. But where they did, and particularly initially, let's say in 1994-95, it was extremely rudimentary. I mean, jokingly, but there's some truth to it, is that their treasury or Afghanistan's treasury under the Taliban in Kandahar constituted of a chest of cash under Mullah Omar's bed.

And people would go to him and get money. Gradually, they began to develop an economy, like they learned how to tax drugs. Opium is by far the most valuable crop Afghanistan produces. In each area they have conquered, the Taliban have imposed a 10% tax on the proceeds of opium sales. They learned how to tax trucking. Elements of state behaviour, ironically, was sprouting from below as they found themselves in locations. Like, if you're going to judge people for Islamic issues or land disputes or divorce, et cetera, you need to create somebody who's a judge, et cetera.

So they were learning on the go and they were establishing governance as they conquered territory and moved forward. And it was by and large, a pretty unhappy experience. In other words, the population at the beginning was seeing some order, but very quickly came to see them as a menace. Armed with the Koran and the Kalashnikov, they then introduced their own harsh brand of Islam to the people of Kabul. Not just closing down movie theaters, but torching the film. And when does the Taliban let al-Qaeda set up shop in Afghanistan?

The war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, the so-called jihad of the 1980s, attracted a large number of Arab youth who saw this as not a fight against the Soviet Union just in Afghanistan, but as a global jihad. Osama bin Laden first went to Afghanistan when he was barely in his 20s. When the war in Afghanistan ended, many of them thought, okay, the jihad is over. They went back home, including Osama bin Laden, who went back to Saudi Arabia and for a very brief period tried to join family business. But in many ways, they had spent too much time in war to be just settled back into civilian life back in their countries. So they began to congregate around causes that would take them back to jihad.

They all decided to go back to Afghanistan, where it all had begun. You have declared a jihad against the United States. Can you tell us why? The U.S. government has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal. And the Taliban didn't see this as a problem. They thought these are fellow jihadis. They had fought against the Soviet Union together. They shared the same ideology, which was to promote jihad and establish Islamic order.

And so they got a situation in which they could establish bases. And that would really go on until 9-11, when the United States basically saw these bases as a problem, saw the Taliban being accepting of these bases as a problem and also wanted to punish and capture and kill those who were responsible for 9-11. So that's when basically the entire operation and setup came undone. America strikes back. Afghanistan is pounded with bombs and missiles from the air and sea. And what happens to the Taliban's leadership in that time? So now it becomes a resistance movement in exile. The Taliban gradually begin to abandon the fight. Large numbers of them, including their leadership, escaped to northwest frontier of Pakistan. They may have had foot soldiers who were in different villages in Afghanistan, but for a period, the Taliban were decimated. Bang in 2001, 2002, the Taliban looked

to have been finished. Thanks to our military and our allies and the brave fighters of Afghanistan, the Taliban regime is coming to an end. So obviously the Taliban were not finished. They persisted and now they're back in charge. Who is leading them now? So unlike the earlier time period where there was a single leader, Mullah Omar, who was charismatic, who had a complete domination over the movement, and you could identify them is Mullah Berader, who was in prison in Pakistan for many years during the Obama administration. The Trump administration got him released so that he could lead the talks in Doha.

We asked former Taliban commanders about their new frontman. He's a very honest and good man. I think he can help the peace process. But he's not Mullah Omar. He doesn't have the same kind of control. One of the open questions about Taliban is that how will a movement that has now different nodes of power within it and is not bound by a single authoritative leader function. What about this second generation that is in positions of power that weren't even alive in the early 90s? What is their outlook? I think the Taliban as a whole is still a very conservative organization. Its interpretation of Islam is very conservative. It comes from the hardline seminaries that emerged during the Afghan war.

But also they hold on to rural, local Pashtun customs, which are themselves also highly tribal and highly conservative. So these are provincial village young men who've been recruited to fight and have risen in the ranks. Now they've arrived in a major urban city with a sophisticated economy. So there's an element of that provincialism that comes with them. Their attitudes towards women is not just Islamically conservative. It's conservative in the sense of what Pashtun culture in rural areas in southern Afghanistan demands of gender relations. And so they bring that baggage with them. It seems like the Taliban is trying to show the world that it's starting to assemble a government. And it also seems like Afghans are trying to resist them with some of these recent protests. So what do you think we're going to see over the next few months as the Taliban actually

tries to govern? Well, what we were first of all seeing is that they're savvy enough to understand and absorb U.S. and Western media. They're seeing our obsessions of what are we actually zeroing in right now, which is, is this the same movement and what is it going to do to the women in particular? And so they basically are trying to address that to calm the nerves in the West. But I think beyond that, the most serious challenge they face is to govern. They have won. They have won bigger than they did in the 1990s. They're controlling the whole country. They made deals with everybody to accept them coming into Kabul.

The Afghan army is gone. So now they have an opportunity to establish their rule. So I think they're trying to send not just a message that we're different. They're trying to send the message that we are interested in creating a stable government in Afghanistan. Now, that does not mean that it's going to be nice to women or is going to be tolerant of a lot of cultural openings, but that's the message they're sending, that we don't want to continue being a guerrilla army. Now that the war is over, we want to govern. So I think they're trying to grapple with how do they bring their own imprint, but yet be able to govern over a sophisticated society. I think they understand that they cannot right now with 70,000 fighters assert full Islamic rule over the country. That's just not possible.

They don't even have the manpower to do that. And so they are leaning more on compromise and assurance than on use of the gun. Even if that's a ruse, it does suggest that they're more pragmatic in their thinking than they were in the 1990s. Vali Nasser is professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University. In 2019, he also served as senior advisor to the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. I'm Halima Shah. It's Today Explained. Thank you.