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Review EssayThe Taliban’s Enablers

by A.J. Caschetta

Since the 9/11 attacks, numerous books have been written about the Taliban, docu-menting its history and resurgence. Many writers fault the United States for failing to turnAfghanistan into the Shangri La that it could be, claiming that beginning with the Bonnconference in December 2001, the Afghanistan war has been a disaster punctuated byone missed opportunity after another, guided by a hubristic new imperialism.

Some recurrent themes pervade this literature. To begin with, it is believed that theTaliban is not as bad as is commonly thought and that its actions should be equated withthose of others, thereby implying that bad behavior is the norm. It has likewise beenargued that the Taliban can be coaxed into behaving better if only Washington will pro-vide the right combination of carrots and sticks, and that isolating the movement, andholding it accountable for its atrocities, will only embolden it. Finally, there is the viewthat the West in general and Washington in particular must excuse the Taliban’s “ex-cesses” as just another way of life: This requires treating Pashtunwali (the tribal code ofbehavior traditionally governing Pashtun society), Shari‘a, and democracy as merelydifferent approaches to living, none better, none worse than another.

Through often learned prose, plenty of repetition, and the kind of authorization con-ferred by academic presses, these placating chroniclers have greatly burnished the Taliban’simage in the West. As U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan shifts from surge to surgicalstrikes to peace talks, Americans had better get to know the real Taliban.

A.J. Caschetta is senior lecturer in English atthe Rochester Institute of Technology. He canbe reached at ajcgsl@rit.edu.

TALIBAN: MILITANT ISLAM,OIL AND FUNDAMENTALISM

As a correspondent for the Far Eastern Eco-nomic Review, Ahmed Rashid reported on the rise

of the Taliban as it happened. Taliban: MilitantIslam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,first published in 2001 prior to 9/11, now in itssecond edition (2010),1 was among the first book-length examinations of the Taliban. Rashid’s workis best known for the section, “The New GreatGame,” which outlines a new colonialism in which

1 Yale University Press.

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Iran, Russia, China, theUnited States, and even Ja-pan control the fate of theregion. He faults Washing-ton for the rise of the Talibanbecause it failed to provide the proper circum-stances and funding that could have preventedits resurgence. As Rashid puts it: “The pipeline ofU.S. military aid to the Mujahedin was never re-placed by a pipeline of international humanitarianaid that could have been an inducement for thewarlords to make peace and rebuild the country.”

In a chapter for the new edition—“TheTaliban Resurgent 2000-2009”—Rashid arguesthat excluding the Taliban from the Bonn con-ference was a disastrous oversight but fails toacknowledge that the Taliban would certainlyhave opposed its goal—to create, in Rashid’swords, “a broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative government.” Hegoes on to blame the Taliban resurgence on U.S.failure to commit adequate forces to the coun-try in its “rush” to move on to Iraq: “even a fewmore U.S. troops could have made a huge differ-ence.” What he neglects to mention, though, isthat even if the Bush administration had decidedto commit every person, dollar, and piece ofequipment that went to the Iraq war to Afghani-stan, much of it would have spent years sittingat Bagram Air Base, awaiting transportation overAfghanistan’s nonexistent infrastructure.2

While Rashid acknowledges that Pakistan’sInter-Services Intelligence has provided safe ha-ven and intelligence to the Taliban since itsfounding, he downplays those efforts, puttingthem on equal footing with “problems withinNATO and lack of U.S. focus.” These problems,however, are not on equal footing. Nothing shortof a full invasion of Pakistan could have pre-vented the Taliban from resurging.

Rashid’s solution has always been to negoti-ate with the Taliban, bringing it into the civilizedworld, in part, by honoring it. He argues that the

Taliban of the 1990s was“essentially a peasant armyrather than an internationalterrorist organization. Thisis what they still are … not

a monolithic organization, but one in which there[are] several interest groups, some of which couldbe won over.” Here Rashid makes the same errorof omission made by many of the Taliban’senablers: He pretends that Washington has nevertreated the movement with the same kind of diplo-matic engagement it treats genuine governments.In fact, from 1995 until January 2001, the Clintonadministration negotiated with the Taliban.3

Michael Rubin has documented the steady streamof U.S. diplomats (Thomas W. Simons, RobinRaphel, Warren Christopher, John Holzman,Madeline Albright, Donald Camp, William B. Milan,and Bill Richardson4) who negotiated with theTaliban.5 Clinton administration insiders DanielBenjamin and Steven Simon claim that KarlUnderfurth, then assistant secretary of state forSouth Asia, met with “Taliban representatives atleast twenty times between the August 1998 [Af-rican Embassy] bombings and the end of theClinton administration.”6 The Japanese govern-ment negotiated with the Taliban in an attempt toremove and purchase the fourth-century twin stat-ues of Buddha overlooking Hazara before theirdestruction in March 2001.7 Those negotiationstoo came to naught. And what is a diplomat tomake of the fact that Mullah Omar will not meetface-to-face with non-Muslims?

In 2011, the Karzai government set up theHigh Peace Council (HPC) to pursue diplomacy,naming as its leader Berhanuddin Rabbani, theclosest thing Afghanistan had to an elder states-

2 For information on Afghanistan’s infrastructure, see “SouthAsia: Afghanistan,” World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency,Washington, D.C., July 10, 2013.

3 Jayshree Bajoria, “Backgrounder: The Taliban in Afghani-stan,” Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., Oct. 6,2011.4 For background on Richardson’s discussion with the Taliban,see Bruce O. Riedel, “Islamism Is Not Unstoppable,” MiddleEast Quarterly, Dec. 1999, pp. 51-60.5 Michael Rubin, “Taking Tea with the Taliban,” Commentary,Feb. 2010.6 The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002),pp. 272-3.7 Reuters, Mar. 5, 2001.

Nothing short of a fullinvasion of Pakistan couldhave prevented the Talibanfrom resurging.

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man. U.S. ambassador RyanCrocker marveled at the monu-mental accomplishment of gettingthe Taliban to the negotiatingtable. But soon the Taliban be-gan behaving like the Taliban: OnSeptember 20, 2011, one of its “ne-gotiators” detonated a bomb hid-den in his turban, killing Rabbaniand four other HPC members.When former “moderate Taliban”Arsala Rahmani succeededRabbani, he too was murdered,gunned down on the way to work.As might be expected, no one iscurrently clamoring to fill the jobof chief HPC negotiator.

THE TALIBANSHUFFLE

In The Taliban Shuffle:Strange Days in Afghanistan andPakistan,8 Kim Barker, former for-eign correspondent for The Chicago Tribunecovering India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, de-scribes her love affair with Afghanistan and Pa-kistan as “more all consuming than any relation-ship I had ever had.” If this kind of glib, collo-quial prose, adored by Rolling Stone and NewYork Magazine, was her book’s only fault, itwould not be so bad. Unfortunately, readers learnmore about Kim Barker—what she eats, drinks,wears, or with whom she flirts, travels, and hassex—than about the Taliban.

Barker only shallowly explores the damagedone to the image of the West caused by thecollection of journalists who invaded first Kabuland then the rest of the country after the Talibanwas toppled in November 2001. She describestoga parties, trampoline orgies, rooftop raves, andgeneral drunken revelry at journalist hangoutsbut never speculates that such behavior may

have presented the West in the most negativelight possible to the Afghan people. Instead, sheis quick to blame George W. Bush, the U.S., Brit-ish, Canadian, German, and Dutch militaries, theCIA, and frequently India, for the woes of Af-ghanistan and Pakistan. To her mind, Westernaid is never quite enough. (Even the non-West-ern Chinese government is faulted for its insen-sitivity in including pigs as a gift to the KabulZoo.) After complaining about the deplorablestate of clinics built by U.S. Agency for Interna-tional Development contractors all over Afghani-stan, some of which had no medicine and no doc-tors, Barker blames Washington for the deficien-cies rather than the Taliban who prevented thefemale half of the Afghan population from be-coming physicians, regularly destroyed clinicsbefore 9/11, and made life in Afghanistan gener-ally miserable and unsafe for foreign physicians.

Alongside an explanation of the concept ofjihad that is embarrassingly shallow, Barker hasan astonishing penchant for tolerating shortcom-

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8 New York: Doubleday, 2011.

In 2011, the Karzai government set up the High Peace Councilto pursue diplomacy, naming Berhanuddin Rabbani—theclosest thing Afghanistan had to an elder statesman—itsleader. U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker marveled at themonumental accomplishment of getting the Taliban to thenegotiating table. But soon the Taliban began behaving asalways: On September 20, 2011, one of its “negotiators”detonated a bomb hidden in his turban, killing Rabbaniand four other HPC members.

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ings, including outright predatory sexual behav-ior, among the native peoples. She notes the ironyof the situation of “Islamic clerics [who] forced meto wear a black abaya showing only my eyes, butthen privately asked to see my face and hair,” butis unwilling to label it hypocrisy. After a lengthydescription of the tendency of Pakistani men toengage in frequent “ass-grabbing free-for-all” ses-sions, she explains: “An ass-grab was about hu-miliation and, of course, the feeling of some menin the country that Western women needed sexlike oxygen, and that if a Pakistani man just hap-pened to put himself in her path or pinched herwhen the sex urge came on, he’d get lucky. I blamedHollywood.” But why not blame Pakistani men?This condescending and infantilizing tendency towrite about Afghans and Pakistanis as dependenton others, unable to think or act critically or curb

their impulses, makes Barker’s book auseless exercise in West-bashing.

CAPTIVE: MY TIMEAS A PRISONEROF THE TALIBAN

A more insightful look into theTaliban comes in Captive: My Time as aPrisoner of the Taliban9 by Jere VanDyk, student, chronicler, and former pris-oner of the Taliban. Having first venturedinto Afghanistan in the 1970s on the so-called “hippie trail,” Van Dyk returnedafter the Soviet invasion, living and trav-eling with warlord Jalaluddin Haqqaniand his followers. Those years weredocumented in his book In Afghanistan:An American Odyssey.10 In 2008, believ-ing he could get inside the new Haqqaninetwork (now run by Jalaluddin’s sonSirajuddin) with the right fixers, he re-turned. In search of a group of Pashtunsidentifying themselves as members ofthe Taliban who were to take him to meetup with the Haqqanis, he and his fixerswere captured shortly after crossing intoPakistan and eventually released only

when CBS paid a ransom. In preparation for the mission, Van Dyk grew

his beard, dressed like an Afghan, and wanderedthe streets of Kabul studying and imitating themannerisms he observed. His one handicap? Aninability to speak Dari, Pashto, or Nouristani. Thewhole enterprise smacks of Gonzo journalism andextraordinary naiveté:

I wanted to find out what the Taliban werereally like, to see how different they were fromthe mujahideen. I wanted to learn what theythought and what their goals were. I wanted togo to their training camps. I wanted to explainthe Taliban to the outside world. I wanted to

9 New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010.10 New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983.

As part of the current trend of whitewashing the Taliban,past atrocities are forgotten or explained away. In2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan buddhas,including the one seen here, despite internationalpleas to spare the statues. The monumental sculpturesin central Afghanistan were built in the sixth centurywhen the practice of Buddhism was well-established.

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go deep into the heart ofTaliban country, to get totheir leaders, men I knewfrom the 1980s, andthrough them perhaps evenOsama bin Laden himself.I felt that with my contacts, my history withthe mujahideen, and my knowledge of Pashtunculture, I could do what no one else could do. Iknew these people. We had once been friends.

Van Dyk’s love of Afghan culture blindshim to its horrors as when a description ofPashtun tribal code ends with the blithe obser-vation: “Under Pashtunwali, a rumor can end awoman’s life.” His jailer Gulob promises freedomand safety if he will convert to Islam. Van Dykcomplies in order to save his skin, leading to ef-fusive passages of admiration for his captors andtheir culture and a refusal to condemn the Talibanfor what it did to his beloved Afghanistan.Stockholm syndrome overtakes him, and he soonbegins to pray, speak, wash, eat, and even think(or so he says) like a Pashtun.

Nonetheless, there is a good deal of infor-mation to be gleaned from Van Dyk’s consider-able experience in the region, and he commentson his own situation with humor and insight. Inretrospect, the most interesting bit of informa-tion has to be Gulob’s comment that “Osama andal-Zawahiri are not in the tribal zones. They arebeing protected by institutions. Pakistan willnever give them up.” It would appear that VanDyk did get the inside scoop after all.

TALIBAN:THE UNKNOWN ENEMY

Scottish journalist James Fergusson’sTaliban: The Unknown Enemy11 incorporates ev-ery element of the pro-Taliban-anti-U.S. agitproptemplate. The title bespeaks the book’s thesis—we in the West do not really know the Taliban.

Fergusson even questions the validity of the

term “Taliban,” or as oneunnamed British specialforces officer put it: “In2006, when the fightingstarted, we called everyone

who resisted us ‘Taliban.’ But they really weren’tnecessarily. They were just the community’s war-rior class who had always defended their commu-nity against outsiders and were bound to do soagain. The ‘Taliban’ in that sense were an enemyof our own creation.” The anonymous officer maybe correct in the sense that the Taliban has grownbeyond the original Pashtun warlords whopledged loyalty to Mullah Omar between 1994 and1996. But the term has not lost its significance orits usefulness. “Taliban” has become somethingof an umbrella term capable of signifying a move-ment of diverse characters sharing the same goals.Arguing whether those loyal to Hekmatyar,Haqqani, or Lashkar-e-Taiba are “genuine” Talibanis a bit like arguing whether al-Qaeda in the Ara-bian Peninsula, Ansar al-Islam in Iraq, the Soma-lian al-Shabab, and Nigerian Boko Haram are“genuine” al-Qaeda. Their goals, enemies, tactics,and beliefs are the same. Taliban fighters may beKashmiri or Punjabi; they have even been knownto admit Americans like John Walker Lindh.12

Fergusson’s revisionist history of theTaliban portrays the regime as not quite as badas the West has painted it. Women were not re-ally treated as badly as was believed—deniededucation, barred from working, or forced to hidethemselves. Fergusson reassures us that “womenwere not always automatically beaten for show-ing their faces,” which must come as quite a re-lief to all.

This intentional whitewashing of one of themost destructive regimes of modern times coversall bases. Fergusson underreports well-knownTaliban atrocities like the (literal) poisoning of thewells on the Shomali plains in 1997. On the de-struction of the Bamiyan buddhas, Fergussonquotes (but does not document) a decree fromMullah Omar to protect the statues as a source of

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Fergusson intentionallywhitewashes one of themost destructive regimesof modern times.

11 Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2011.12 Peter A. Olsson, “Homegrown Terrorists, Rebels in Search ofa Cause,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2013, pp. 3-10.

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tourist revenue but is unable to explain how thedecree was ignored. As the “first Western jour-nalist in more than two years to interview thefugitive warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,”Fergusson essentially becomes a cheerleader forthe terrorist leader and his group by promotingwhat might be called the “wing theory” of terror-ist organizations, whereby a group poses as abicameral enterprise in which its “political wing”promotes an agenda peacefully while a “militantwing” promotes that same agenda violently.

Ameliorating the guilt of the Taliban requiresplaying up someone else’s to explain Afghani-stan, and there is a long list of guilty parties inthe book. Hamid Karzai bears the brunt of thescorn reserved for Afghans. Karzai’s greed andhis government’s corruption are now well-known, but Fergusson goes too far in describingit as no better and perhaps worse than theTaliban’s. Offering no evidence, he refers to thecurrent National Directorate of Security as “thesuccessor to the KHAD,” the much-feared Af-ghan iteration of the KGB secret police run bythe Soviet puppet Muhammad Najibullah.

But Washington is the true villain inFergusson’s telling. Beginning with the cliché

that after 9/11 the “internationalcommunity” was sympatheticto the United States, he pro-ceeds to lament that “Ameri-cans failed miserably to exploitthis tide of goodwill.” And thenit gets absurd when he writesthat “with just a little more pa-tience from the U.S., bin Ladenmight have ended up in a court-room, al-Qaida might have lostits figurehead, and 9/11 and theentire War on Terror mightnever have happened.” The“U.S.’s reliance on proxy localforces” is faulted on one pageand the U.S.’s excessive milita-ristic footprint on another.

So what should Wash-ington do according toFergusson? Invest in Afghani-stan and coerce further invest-

ment from the “international community.” As hisfriend Mullah Abdul-Basit told him in 2007, hadU.S. forces arrived in Afghanistan unarmed,solely to rebuild the country, “you would havebeen our guests … If your engineers and agri-culture experts had come to us and explained whatthey were trying to do, we would have protectedthem with our lives.” Perhaps such an idea wouldnot seem quite so absurd had the Taliban no his-tory of (and penchant for) kidnapping and killingaid workers.

As a result of Fergusson’s partisan revi-sionism, in which the group is more sinnedagainst than sinning, the real Taliban remains“unknown.”

INSIDE AL-QAEDAAND THE TALIBAN

Unlike Van Dyke, who was ransomed fromhis captivity, Pakistani journalist Syed SaleemShahzad paid the ultimate price for his inside con-nections. Nearly everyone, the U.S. governmentincluded, believes that Pakistan’s Inter-ServicesIntelligence killed Shahzad for his reporting on

Author Jere van Dyk went searching for the Taliban, convincedthat his love of all things Afghan would bear fruit. Instead, hewas captured by his intended subjects and was eventuallypromised freedom and safety if he would convert to Islam. Wisely,he complied and now serves as a consultant for CBS News.

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the close and growing tiesbetween it, the Taliban, andal-Qaeda.

But Shahzad’s posthu-mously published book,Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond BinLaden and 9/1113—the go-to source for all theminutiae on the post-9/11 Taliban—is no anti-dote to the reflexive anti-Western tracts reviewedabove. For Shahzad, the word “terrorist” onlyrefers to the U.S. government as he prefers theterm “militants” or “Commanders” (always capi-talized) for the Taliban he befriended. Likewiseal-Qaeda is “a resistance movement against West-ern Imperialism,” fighting the “occupation forces”of the “U.S.-NATO-led war machine.”

Inside Al-Qaeda does have some value, out-lining in stunning detail the post-9/11 Taliban,comprised of extremist Taliban, malleable Taliban,Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, tribal Taliban,Taliban affiliates, and al-Qaeda-Taliban affiliates.He painstakingly explains the various rivalriesthat divide the tribal Taliban and seems to haveknown (and liked) everyone involved. Ignoringthe pre-9/11 connections between al-Qaeda andthe Taliban, Shahzad insists that the U.S.-led in-vasion of Afghanistan drove them to collabo-rate, rather than the other way around.

While still alive, and in this postmortembook, Shahzad gave credibility to the assort-ment of Taliban fighters, mullahs, and “Com-manders” who spoke freely to him. Though theycertainly said things they wanted the world tobelieve, stretching the truth in the process, ifeven half of what they told him is accurate, theWest is still greatly underestimating the dan-gers posed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban in alltheir iterations.

TALIBAN LIFE,POETRY, AND MYTH

Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehnhave become the Taliban’s most generous sup-

porters and most prolificapologists. The two movedto Afghanistan in 2006, set-tling in Kandahar, wherethey set up the now-inac-

tive blog, AfghanWire.com. By running cover forthe Taliban, minimizing atrocities, and deflectingblame elsewhere, they ingratiated themselveswith Mullah Mohammed Salem Zaeef and be-came the editors of his self-pitying and evasivebiography My Life with the Taliban.14 This workpromised the ultimate insider’s history of theTaliban but delivered little more than an anti-U.S.polemic, peppered with passages of execrable(and unintended) irony: “The Taliban had alsostarted to implement shari‘a law: Women wereno longer working in government departments,and the men throughout the city had started togrow beards. Life in the city was returning tonormal.”

Another piece of Van Linschoten andKuehn’s charm offensive on behalf of the Talibanis an anthology titled The Poetry of the Taliban,15

the goal of which is to humanize the Taliban fight-ers. The poems themselves are inconsequential,neither great nor terrible by today’s admittedlylow standards. As one might expect, there arepoems about killing, waging jihad, confrontingthe enemy, glorious Shari‘a, and so on. What isperhaps most interesting (and ignored by VanLinschoten and Kuehn) is that among the list ofpredictable Taliban obsessions (Bush, Obama,Karzai, Guantanamo Bay) emerges the true en-emy: the Western invention of human rights and,collaterally, the nongovernmental organizationsthat oversee their implementation and report ontheir absence.

But far more important than the quality of thepoems themselves is their utility in selling the ideathat the Taliban is morally and culturally equal tothe West. Take, for example, the back cover blurbwhere Harvard’s Michael Semple writes that theTaliban is not “culturally backward” but is in fact

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14 New York: Columbia University Press, 2010; see, also,“Brief Reviews,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2011.15 New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Van Linschoten and Kuehnhave become the Taliban’smost generous supportersand most prolific apologists.

13 London: Pluto Press, 2011.

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“inspiring a people to resista dull global plan to mod-ernize them.” The bulk of thisrhetorical salesmanship isfound in Van Linschotenand Kuehn’s introduction.One of their tropes equates poetry written byBritish combat veterans who fought the Talibanwith examples of Taliban verse: “Both sets ofpoets take leave of their mothers before they leavefor the front, both are in turns thrilled and fearfulwhen the moment of battle arrives, and both grieveat the death of friends and family.” The sales pitchmay convince some, but it fails on the follow-through: When their war is over, returning Britishsoldiers will not try to close girls’ schools, compelnon-Anglicans to join the Church of England, andforce everyone to eat, work, and play as they do ina coordinated effort to efface and annul the veryidea of human rights.

Van Linschoten and Kuehn’s latest effort isan academic revisionist history, An Enemy WeCreated: The Myth of the Taliban-Al QaedaMerger in Afghanistan,16 which tries to dispelthe “popular discourse” that al-Qaeda and theTaliban have merged into a singular entity theycall “Talqaeda.” The first problem is the failure toconvince that such a discourse is popular; evenShahzad did not suggest a merger so much as asymbiotic convergence of interests leading tocooperation. Aside from its thesis, the book hasserious methodological flaws. Nearly every im-portant assertion hangs on a footnote that readsmerely: “Interview,” followed by a location anddate. While anonymity may be acceptable for ajournalist’s fixers, drivers, and perhaps eventranslators, it has no place in “for-the-record”sources. It is simply impossible to gauge the ve-racity of the work without being able to assessthe credibility of the sources. Ironically, the au-thors reject sources like the 9/11 CommissionReport as being unreliable, along with informa-tion “extracted under duress from Khalid SheikMohammed.” The cumulative effect of this work

of pseudo-scholarly jour-nalism renders the projectlittle more than a book ofrumors cloaked in a veneerof academic paraphernalia.

Van Linschoten andKuehn’s primary goal is to disassociate al-Qaedafrom Mullah Omar’s movement, but history is noton their side. By their account, the Taliban leader-ship was completely unaware of bin Laden priorto 1996, and they even fatuously claim that theRabbani-Massoud government invited bin Ladento Afghanistan. In seeking to absolve the Talibanof all guilt relating to the 9/11 attacks, theyunconvincingly argue that its leaders neither knewthe attacks were coming nor approved of themafter. Even the assassination of Ahmad ShahMassoud on September 9, 2001, when he wasleader of the Northern Alliance (and therefore theTaliban’s number one enemy in the region), caughtthe Taliban by surprise according to the authors.Their insinuation that al-Qaeda’s desire to restorethe caliphate and the Taliban’s desire to restoreAfghanistan to some kind of Qur’anic Khurasanare incompatible is based on scant evidence.

Finally, the book closes with what reads likean opaque threat: Unless “serious negotiations”conducted “on multiple levels” about the futureof Afghanistan include the Taliban, the “esca-lated levels of conflict ... will increasingly resemblethe violent civil war of the 1990s.” Work with theTaliban, or else.

CONCLUSION

In Taliban lore, the indigenous Afghanmujahideen defeated the Soviet Union with verylittle help from the outside just as earlier genera-tions of Afghans defeated a steady stream of for-eign invaders from Alexander the Great to the Brit-ish, each bent on enslaving them. The myth ofAfghan invincibility endures today with the UnitedStates portrayed as the latest invader, no differentthan the Soviet Union. The myth-makers’ adher-ents are confident that history will repeat itself. Inthe April/May issue of Azan, Taliban propagan-dists push the U.S.-U.S.S.R. comparison by blend-

The myth of Afghaninvincibility endures todaywith the United Statesportrayed as the latestinvader.

16 New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2012.

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ing the names Obama andGorbachev into Obamachev,“meant to draw parallelsbetween ... the USSR underthe leadership of MikailGorbachev on the eve ofSoviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 withthat of the United States under Barack Obamaamid the upcoming U.S. troop withdrawal fromAfghanistan in 2014.”17

This facile equalization of all foreign invad-ers, especially the Soviet Union and the UnitedStates, is understandable from Taliban sources,but far too many Taliban experts are complicit inthese gross misrepresentations. Washington’sinvolvement in Afghanistan has always been mo-tivated by the desire to oppose enemies (Soviet,Iranian, al-Qaeda) and to ameliorate the lives ofthe Afghan people. The Soviet Union, by con-trast, sought to own Afghanistan. In the post-Kennedy era of U.S. largesse, so much aid wentto Helmand province that it became known as“Little America.”18 In the 1980s, Moscow’s topscientific minds devised bombs resembling toysso as to attract and maim children.19 In contrast,in the days between 9/11 and the October inva-sion, U.S. planes dropped untold tons of foodalong with leaflets explaining to the Afghan peoplethat better days were coming. Perhaps the Talibanleaders really cannot see the difference betweenSoviet perfidy and U.S. attempts to wipe out al-Qaeda and make life better for all Afghans, butWestern scholars and journalists know better.Rather than lending credence to Taliban propa-ganda, they ought to admit that were Washingtonto adopt Soviet-style tactics, Afghanistan wouldnever stand a chance.

As we enter a new era in which the Taliban isseen as a legitimate political force, there can belittle doubt that it will eventually take over Af-ghanistan. From Vice President Biden’s claim that

“the Taliban, per se, is notour enemy”20 to the ongo-ing rewriting of history, itsenablers, apologists, andadmirers assist the takeoverin big and small ways by

denying that the era of Taliban rule was a trav-esty of governance during which abominablecrimes were committed. And though the constantdrumbeat of “negotiate, negotiate, negotiate”finds a willing audience in the Obama adminis-tration, the Taliban is interested in negotiationonly to gain, not to compromise.

So when the announcement of three-way ne-gotiations in Qatar between Washington, theKarzai government, and the Taliban were ap-plauded this spring in the usual circles as positiveprogress, the Taliban immediately showed its truenature: On June 16, Mutasim Agha Jan of theTaliban praised the upcoming talks as “a majorstep in formulating a channel for talks betweenKabul and the Taliban,”21 but on June 18, theTaliban office in Doha opened bearing a plaqueand the banner of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghani-stan”22 (the name used under Mullah Omar from1996-2001) and publicly denounced Karzai as aU.S. puppet (implicitly likening him to Najibullahand predictably prompting the Karzai governmentto pull out of the negotiations). As DavoodMoradian of the Afghan Institute for StrategicStudies recently put it: “A peace that is ‘Made inPakistan,’ promoted by London, sold by Wash-ington, and financed by Qatar is doomed to fail.”23

As of this writing, the diplomatic enterpriseappears to be on hold, but it will surely be re-started. And if Mullah Omar is allowed to emergefrom hiding in Quetta and revive his atavistic,seventh-century utopian fantasy, the world willsee just how unregenerate the Taliban is. Onlythis time around, no one will be able to claimignorance.

With the Taliban seen as alegitimate political force,there can be little doubtthat it will eventually takeover Afghanistan.

17 The Jihad and Threat Monitor, no. 5329, Middle East MediaResearch Institute, June 6, 2013.18 All Things Considered, National Public Radio, July 5, 2010.19 CBC News (Can.), Oct. 28, 2000; M. Siddieq Noorzoy,“Afghanistan’s Children: The Tragic Victims of 30 Years ofWar,” Middle East Institute, Apr. 20, 2012.

20 ABC News, Dec. 19, 2011; Fox News, Dec. 19, 2011.21 Tolo News (Kabul), June 17, 2013.22 The New York Times, June 19, 2013.23 “Taliban Guns Send a Message about Obama’s Peace Pro-cess,” The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2013.