[Reader-list] Who are the Taliban

[asad abbasi]

Dear All,

Interesting article, about the the term Taliban. As it is a habit to term everything pseudo fundamental as talibanization. Sabrina Tavernise tries to understand this term


Regards.
Asad 


 

 
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/who-are-the-taliban/


“It was the Taliban,” stuttered the young Christian man, trying to explain who had killed seven family members. “The Taliban came and killed them.”
We were standing in his broken house in central Pakistan, next to a collapsed bird cage. The day before, an angry mob had swept through his neighborhood like a storm, pillaging and burning houses belonging to Christians.
Little was known about the attackers. They did look like members of the Taliban. Many had beards. Some had wrapped scarves around their faces. Others were brandishing weapons.
But as easy as it would have been to think of them that way, the fact was, they were not the Taliban. We were in central Pakistan, far from the western mountains where the Taliban hold sway. They were part of a local sectarian group, Sipah-e-Sohaba.

But the man’s assumption raised an interesting question, one that had been nagging at me. As a journalist writing about the war in Pakistan, I thought I should know: Who are the Taliban?
The answer used to be easy: Islamic militants. Men who brought tyranny (and order) to Afghanistan. Shelterers of Al Qaeda. Targets of America’s “War on Terror.”
But eight years on, the question has become difficult to answer. The Taliban once seemed as smooth and monolithic as a piece of marble, organized and hierarchical with every foot soldier marching toward a single-minded, ideological battle.
But the closer I looked, the more diffuse it became, a fractured landscape of shifting allegiances that ebb and flow with tribal, ethnic and personal rivalries.
In the western mountains of Pakistan, the Taliban are divided by tribe, distinct groups of ethnic Pashtuns who have fought one another for centuries. A saying in Pashto, the local language, says if a member of the Mehsud tribe walks into a room and finds a snake and a member of the Wazir tribe, he will kill the Wazir first, and snake second.
In Afghanistan, the struggle is utterly local, changing from valley to valley, in what feels sometimes to Americans fighting there like a dozen different wars, each one requiring its own calibrated response.
“It’s not red, blue and green anymore,” said an American military officer in Wardak province, just south of Kabul, the Afghan capital in May. “You’ve got a big blob of grey now.”
The word “Taliban” has become a catch-all phrase that means Islamic bad guy. It is a brand — the McDonald’s of miltants — that seems to have been rendered almost meaningless from overuse.
People project their own meanings onto it. When a public schoolteacher in Southern Punjab began to lecture me about how Muslims were more pious than other faiths, her husband shouted: “Don’t do Talibanization on her!”
It was not the Taliban who attacked the United States on 9/11, but our army invaded Afghanistan in response to strike at the terrorists they harbored — Al Qaeda. Each military intervention produces its own resistance, and now we are embroiled in a conflict with age-old rivalries we are only beginning to understand.
Many American officers now have a far more sophisticated approach. Soldiers in Wardak knew tribes and ethnic pockets, and had cellphone numbers for important leaders, far different from the insulated attitudes on the megabases in Iraq. During my visit in May to a plywood office at a small base, three military officers talked for two hours about the war without once using the word “Taliban.”
“We have to think differently about the Taliban,” one officer said afterward. “It’s like they’re selling franchise rights. It’s worth considering an alternative hypothesis of the nature of the enemy.”
But even the most sophisticated approach is likely to fall short. War is a constantly changing kaleidoscope of motivations and circumstance, infinitely complex, and it could turn again at any moment. 
It may have earlier this month in Pakistan when when Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was believed to have been killed in an American airstrike.
What will happen next?
In the words of a police officer who was talking about links among militants he’d been investigating for years, “The truth is, only God knows.”


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