Ideology in the Afghan Taliban

[khushal]

Ideology in the Afghan Taliban: A new AAN reportAfghanistan Analysts Network | Afghanistan Analysts Network

Ideology in the Afghan Taliban: A new AAN report
Author: Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten Date: 29 June 2017 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Print
Kherqa-ye Sharif (the shrine of the Holy Cloak) in Kandahar. The cloak belonged to the Prophet Muhammad and was displayed to a crowd by Mullah Omar when he was declared amir ul-mumenin in the spring of 1996.
Kherqa-ye Sharif (the shrine of the Holy Cloak) in Kandahar. The cloak belonged to the Prophet Muhammad and was displayed to a crowd by Mullah Omar when he was declared amir ul-mumenin in the spring of 1996.

The Taleban’s ideology has transformed over the past two decades. While the movement once typified a ‘traditionalist’ Islam – that is, it sought to articulate and defend a particular concept of Islam found in southern Pashtun villages – it is now, in its insurgency phase, closer to forms of political Islam espoused in the Arab world. This does not mean that the Taleban are less conservative or authoritarian, rather that the objects of their repression and the way they frame their mission have shifted in important ways. In a major new report, AAN guest authors Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten examine the changes as well as the continuity in the Taleban’s ideology from the 1980s to the present day. The report is the product of years of interviews, fieldwork in Afghanistan, as well as their time working with the Taliban Sources Project archive, a significant collection of documents relating to the Taleban movement.

Outsiders have been trying to understand the Afghan Taleban for over two decades. Most of the members of the movement’s leadership have avoided interviews and public appearances, and the ongoing conflict has made tracking them down for a wider ethnographic study extremely dangerous. Until recently, this left researchers with few options. Over the past seven years, however, an archival project took shape, culminating in the Taliban Sources Project. It has been tremendously challenging to collect, digitise and translate the Taleban’s written output over the years. The authors’ initial motivation was that it would stimulate new research into the movement’s history. As the authors collected more, they thought it was worth trying to examine the ways in which the Taleban’s ideology had changed over time.

The documents and interviews challenge three conventional notions of Taleban ideology:

That the Taleban’s ideology is a mechanical, literalist interpretation of Islam that has not changed in over thirty years.
That the Taleban’s ideology was born in Pakistani refugee camps, and represents a phenomenon alien to Afghan society.
That the Taleban’s ideology represents a form of Deobandism (or, in some variants, Wahhabism) that stands in opposition to Sufism and other religious tendencies prevalent in Afghan society.
The main conclusions drawn in the paper are that the Afghan Taleban’s ideology is a) the result of a sophisticated internal logic that has changed in subtle but important ways over the years, b) the origins of the Taleban’s ideology lie in the southern Pashtun village, not the Pakistani refugee camp, and 3) their thinking is heavily infused with Sufism.

Recently, however, the Taleban have seen a shift towards a more ‘modern’ type of Islamist reasoning found in groups ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda. The key transformation in Taleban ideology has been a shift from an emphasis on outward conduct – the knowledge of rites, bodily comportment, a Prophetic lifestyle, prayer techniques and schedules and other aspects of everyday rituals – to behaviour that today focuses more on internal beliefs and loyalty. This shift is strongest in sections of the leadership – while the rank-and-file in some cases may still be espousing traditionalist viewpoints.

Revolutionary Islamism, however, does not necessarily translate as transnational jihad. In fact, what continues to unite all wings of the Afghan Taleban movement is a commitment to Afghanistan’s sovereignty—which is, in effect, a form of nationalism.

Publication date: 29 June 2017

The full report can be downloaded here.

[khushal]

The full report here.

https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/201705-AGopal-ASvLinschoten-TB-Ideology.pdf

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1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Taleban’s ideology is historically rooted in
the world of the pre-1979, southern Pashtun
village. The village contains various and
competing ethical traditions, one of which laid
the basis for the future Taleban movement.
Key features of Taleban repression, such as
restrictions on women or banning music, have
their antecedents in the southern Pashtun
countryside.
More than half of the Taleban senior
leadership – including nearly all the key
ideological influencers – were born before
1965, which means that they received their
primary education and formative childhood
experiences prior to the 1979 upheaval.
The classic theory of the Taleban states that
the movement is the product of extremist
Pakistani madrassas, but data presented here
suggests that at least 60 per cent of the
leadership received a significant portion of
their education inside Afghanistan.
The education of the core of the senior
leadership took place in hujras, informal
guestrooms in village mosques, and featured a
curriculum that was far more eclectic and
irregular than the Deobandi curriculum found
in major Afghan and Pakistani madrassas.
Through links to Deobandism and indigenous
religious practice, the Taleban leadership,
particularly supreme leader Mullah
Muhammad Omar, were deeply influenced by
Sufism.
The Taleban’s ideology has transformed over
the past two decades. While the movement
once typified a ‘traditionalist’ Islam – that is, it
sought to articulate and defend a particular
conception of Islam found in the southern
Pashtun village – it is now, during its
insurgency phase, closer to the form of
political Islam espoused in the Arab world. This
does not mean that the Taleban are less
conservative or less authoritarian, but rather
that the objects of their repression, and the
way they frame their mission, have shifted in
important ways.
The Taleban’s ideology is based on a particular
epistemology, a theory of knowledge, in their
case, religious knowledge. In the past, this
epistemology was intimately linked to certain
rural Pashtun traditions of virtue, but in the
present, it is more similar to the ‘modern’ type
of Islamist reasoning found in groups ranging
from the Muslim Brotherhood to al Qaeda.
This shift is largely a reflection of the
pragmatic concerns of statecraft and
especially of running an insurgency. A study of
the foundations of this epistemology suggest
that the group’s beliefs and practices were
never simply a mechanical imitation of a
literalist reading of texts or a blind attempt to
recreate the early days of Prophet
Muhammad, but rather were the result of a
AAN Thematic Report 01/2017
2 Gopal and Strick van Linschoten: Ideology in the Afghan Taleban
sophisticated internal logic that was deeply
tied to notions of honour, virtue and
repressive power among Pashtun villagers.
The key transformation of Taleban ideology
was a shift from an emphasis on exterior
states– through the knowledge of rites, bodily
comportment, the Prophetic lifestyle, prayer
techniques and schedules, and other aspects
of everyday ritual– to one that today
emphasises interior states of belief and
loyalty. The distinction is between act and
intent as the objects of Taleban repression.
This shift, which is strongest in sections of the
leadership, helps explain the movement’s
embrace of once-forbidden items such as film
and photography. The pragmatic exigencies of
waging an insurgency spurred this ideological
shift.

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Basically this report confirms what I and a few other have been saying since the beginning. Most people here are robotic and simplistic minded people that just repeat what they hear instead of thinking for themselves logically to see the reality.

[khushal]

some interesting excerpts:

When the
communist government in Kandahar fell in 1992,
the mujahedin groups captured and distributed the
important spoils among themselves, including key
military and government instillations, but awarded
the taleban the relatively unimportant old Soviet
family barracks on the edge of town.68
Uninterested in state power, the talebs retreated
to their home villages or moved to Pakistan to
continue their studies.69 As the province
descended into internecine bloodshed, they
remained neutral. The old ways of life appeared
gone forever, and the country was plunging into
moral collapse. The markers were apparent not
only in the behaviour of checkpoint commanders—
who robbed travellers, raped women and boys,
and generally terrorised the roads of Kandahar—
but also by their very appearance. Zaif, for
instance, recalls when
[A]t Meel bridge we arrived at Shah Baran’s
checkpoint. He was an infamous thief and conman,
and Meel bridge was where all the thieves from
Zangal refugee camp had come together under
Shah Baran’s banner to rob travellers and
merchants. They looked rough—even not quite
human—with long unwashed hair falling across
their faces, black with dirt and their thick brown
lips and teeth stained from tobacco, hashish and
snuff. Enveloped in huge woollen cloaks, they
squatted in the road with a large chelam [pipe for
smoking hashish]. Each would take his turn,
walking over to the pipe to take long deep drags.
Their gaze would lose focus and they soon started
to talk gibberish.

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As one can see that the hunger for some sort of law was being established before the Taliban started to sweep through Afghanistan:

Importantly, it was not only the taleban who took
offence at this state of affairs, but village society in
general. Among the non-taleb mujahedin, too,
there were prominent commanders who reacted
strongly to the breakdown in society and sought to
restore virtue. For instance, the ‘district governor’
of Panjwayi, a mujahedin commander named
Ma’alimFeda Muhammad, succeeded in
eliminating thieves and pederasts in his area by
monopolising force and enacting harsh judicial
measures.71 In Arghandab, a journalist visiting the
territory of mullah Naqib, a major non-taleban
commander, wrote that
In an indication of what may unfold in Afghanistan,
two elderly maulavi judges appointed by the
mujaheddin have sent out edicts to rebel
commanders urging them to exercise more control
over civilians by curbing such excesses as ‘the
playing of tape-recorded music.’ Music, like murder
and theft, is ‘un-Islamic.’ One rebel commander in
Helmand province seized more than 700 tape
recorders and radios and destroyed them.72

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Many US allied majahadeen commanders like Ismail Khan had banned many of the things that the Taliban are only blamed for:

Herat under Ismail Khan was a city in a state of
deep austerity, although the economy was
booming with the return of wealthy businessmen
from exile in Iran. Senior religious figures had an
important say in how the city was run, and an
‘Office for the Propagation of Virtue and the
Prevention of Vice’ was established. Various edicts
affecting the day to day lives of ordinary people
were issued. For example, Heratis were keen
pigeon fanciers and many men kept pigeon lofts on
the roofs of their houses in the old city and would
fly their flocks of birds as a hobby, catching them
again with large nets. This activity was banned, on
the grounds that it could lead to men spying into
the courtyards of their neighbours’ houses and
observing their womenfolk unveiled. When the ban
was announced on local television the point was
emphasised by several pigeons having their necks
wrung in front of the camera: a warning of what
would happen to the birds of anyone apprehended
indulging in this illicit sport. Likewise, there was a
ban on flying kites from the rooftops in case young
men were on the lookout for girls.73
Herat authorities significantly curtailed the
performance of music. Baily writes that:
[A] great deal of… music, such as love songs and
music for dancing, could not be performed. The
license also stipulated that musicians must play
without amplification… Music could be performed
by male musicians at private parties indoors, but
professional women musicians were forbidden to
perform and several were briefly imprisoned for
transgressing this regulation.

[khushal]

And so on and so on........

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Ideology in the Afghan Taliban: A new AAN reportAfghanistan Analysts Network | Afghanistan Analysts Network

Ideology in the Afghan Taliban: A new AAN report
Author: Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten Date: 29 June 2017 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Print
Kherqa-ye Sharif (the shrine of the Holy Cloak) in Kandahar. The cloak belonged to the Prophet Muhammad and was displayed to a crowd by Mullah Omar when he was declared amir ul-mumenin in the spring of 1996.
Kherqa-ye Sharif (the shrine of the Holy Cloak) in Kandahar. The cloak belonged to the Prophet Muhammad and was displayed to a crowd by Mullah Omar when he was declared amir ul-mumenin in the spring of 1996.

The Taleban’s ideology has transformed over the past two decades. While the movement once typified a ‘traditionalist’ Islam – that is, it sought to articulate and defend a particular concept of Islam found in southern Pashtun villages – it is now, in its insurgency phase, closer to forms of political Islam espoused in the Arab world. This does not mean that the Taleban are less conservative or authoritarian, rather that the objects of their repression and the way they frame their mission have shifted in important ways. In a major new report, AAN guest authors Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten examine the changes as well as the continuity in the Taleban’s ideology from the 1980s to the present day. The report is the product of years of interviews, fieldwork in Afghanistan, as well as their time working with the Taliban Sources Project archive, a significant collection of documents relating to the Taleban movement.

Outsiders have been trying to understand the Afghan Taleban for over two decades. Most of the members of the movement’s leadership have avoided interviews and public appearances, and the ongoing conflict has made tracking them down for a wider ethnographic study extremely dangerous. Until recently, this left researchers with few options. Over the past seven years, however, an archival project took shape, culminating in the Taliban Sources Project. It has been tremendously challenging to collect, digitise and translate the Taleban’s written output over the years. The authors’ initial motivation was that it would stimulate new research into the movement’s history. As the authors collected more, they thought it was worth trying to examine the ways in which the Taleban’s ideology had changed over time.

The documents and interviews challenge three conventional notions of Taleban ideology:

That the Taleban’s ideology is a mechanical, literalist interpretation of Islam that has not changed in over thirty years.
That the Taleban’s ideology was born in Pakistani refugee camps, and represents a phenomenon alien to Afghan society.
That the Taleban’s ideology represents a form of Deobandism (or, in some variants, Wahhabism) that stands in opposition to Sufism and other religious tendencies prevalent in Afghan society.
The main conclusions drawn in the paper are that the Afghan Taleban’s ideology is a) the result of a sophisticated internal logic that has changed in subtle but important ways over the years, b) the origins of the Taleban’s ideology lie in the southern Pashtun village, not the Pakistani refugee camp, and 3) their thinking is heavily infused with Sufism.

Recently, however, the Taleban have seen a shift towards a more ‘modern’ type of Islamist reasoning found in groups ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda. The key transformation in Taleban ideology has been a shift from an emphasis on outward conduct – the knowledge of rites, bodily comportment, a Prophetic lifestyle, prayer techniques and schedules and other aspects of everyday rituals – to behaviour that today focuses more on internal beliefs and loyalty. This shift is strongest in sections of the leadership – while the rank-and-file in some cases may still be espousing traditionalist viewpoints.

Revolutionary Islamism, however, does not necessarily translate as transnational jihad. In fact, what continues to unite all wings of the Afghan Taleban movement is a commitment to Afghanistan’s sovereignty—which is, in effect, a form of nationalism.

Publication date: 29 June 2017

The full report can be downloaded here.

Best post of the week. Thanks for this. The majority of the NDS/Urbanite narrative comes from those who have minimal familiarity with rural/village life back home. Their views are often suspect to secondary gain as well. Most of their conclusions were dismissible from the get go.

Gopal and van Linschoten are beyond reproach and have spent more time in the rural country side (often without protection) then 99.99999% of the dog washers.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Ideology in the Afghan Taliban: A new AAN reportAfghanistan Analysts Network | Afghanistan Analysts Network

Ideology in the Afghan Taliban: A new AAN report
Author: Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten Date: 29 June 2017 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Print
Kherqa-ye Sharif (the shrine of the Holy Cloak) in Kandahar. The cloak belonged to the Prophet Muhammad and was displayed to a crowd by Mullah Omar when he was declared amir ul-mumenin in the spring of 1996.
Kherqa-ye Sharif (the shrine of the Holy Cloak) in Kandahar. The cloak belonged to the Prophet Muhammad and was displayed to a crowd by Mullah Omar when he was declared amir ul-mumenin in the spring of 1996.

The Taleban’s ideology has transformed over the past two decades. While the movement once typified a ‘traditionalist’ Islam – that is, it sought to articulate and defend a particular concept of Islam found in southern Pashtun villages – it is now, in its insurgency phase, closer to forms of political Islam espoused in the Arab world. This does not mean that the Taleban are less conservative or authoritarian, rather that the objects of their repression and the way they frame their mission have shifted in important ways. In a major new report, AAN guest authors Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten examine the changes as well as the continuity in the Taleban’s ideology from the 1980s to the present day. The report is the product of years of interviews, fieldwork in Afghanistan, as well as their time working with the Taliban Sources Project archive, a significant collection of documents relating to the Taleban movement.

Outsiders have been trying to understand the Afghan Taleban for over two decades. Most of the members of the movement’s leadership have avoided interviews and public appearances, and the ongoing conflict has made tracking them down for a wider ethnographic study extremely dangerous. Until recently, this left researchers with few options. Over the past seven years, however, an archival project took shape, culminating in the Taliban Sources Project. It has been tremendously challenging to collect, digitise and translate the Taleban’s written output over the years. The authors’ initial motivation was that it would stimulate new research into the movement’s history. As the authors collected more, they thought it was worth trying to examine the ways in which the Taleban’s ideology had changed over time.

The documents and interviews challenge three conventional notions of Taleban ideology:

That the Taleban’s ideology is a mechanical, literalist interpretation of Islam that has not changed in over thirty years.
That the Taleban’s ideology was born in Pakistani refugee camps, and represents a phenomenon alien to Afghan society.
That the Taleban’s ideology represents a form of Deobandism (or, in some variants, Wahhabism) that stands in opposition to Sufism and other religious tendencies prevalent in Afghan society.
The main conclusions drawn in the paper are that the Afghan Taleban’s ideology is a) the result of a sophisticated internal logic that has changed in subtle but important ways over the years, b) the origins of the Taleban’s ideology lie in the southern Pashtun village, not the Pakistani refugee camp, and 3) their thinking is heavily infused with Sufism.

Recently, however, the Taleban have seen a shift towards a more ‘modern’ type of Islamist reasoning found in groups ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda. The key transformation in Taleban ideology has been a shift from an emphasis on outward conduct – the knowledge of rites, bodily comportment, a Prophetic lifestyle, prayer techniques and schedules and other aspects of everyday rituals – to behaviour that today focuses more on internal beliefs and loyalty. This shift is strongest in sections of the leadership – while the rank-and-file in some cases may still be espousing traditionalist viewpoints.

Revolutionary Islamism, however, does not necessarily translate as transnational jihad. In fact, what continues to unite all wings of the Afghan Taleban movement is a commitment to Afghanistan’s sovereignty—which is, in effect, a form of nationalism.

Publication date: 29 June 2017

The full report can be downloaded here.

The closest I have seen an outside academic (besides Scheuer) brush past the idiocy of the Barnett Rubin, Cheryl Bernard (Khalilzad's retarded wife) type narrative of the ISI somehow commanding an army of Zombies is by Aaron O Connell from Texas:

Yes. Well, the war in Afghanistan is actually part of a number of wars — five, to be exact. And three of them predate American involvement in the country. The most crucial of these is a three-century-long fight inside the Pashtun tribe between Kabuli elites and Kandahari elites and then people from the rural areas of Afghanistan. So, that’s been going on for a long time, and nothing we can do is really going to change it.

Criticizing Trump, McCain proposes new Afghanistan strategy | PBS NewsHour

The moment one hears those fools of the aforementioned ilk start talking, its best to understand you are either talking to someone who has been A) influenced by their parents who had a stake or an agenda B) someone with secondary gain (e.g. a relative making a lot of money of the war) or C) someone who is too dumb to understand that by perpetuating a false narrative - they are only prolonging war and suffering.

[khushal]

Dont forgot the retardness of Ahmed Rashid.

The mainstream view of Taleban ideology
is perhaps best suggested by the following
passage, from Ahmed Rashid’s influential and
seminal work Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia:
2
“Many of [the Taleban] had been born in Pakistani
refugee camps, educated in Pakistani madrassas
and had learnt their fighting skills from Mujaheddin
parties based in Pakistan. As such the younger
Taliban barely knew their own country or history,
but from their madrassas they learnt about the
ideal Islamic society created by the Prophet
Mohammed 1,400 years ago and this is what they
wanted to emulate.”3
The implication is that the Taleban are, in essence,
a phenomenon alien to Afghan society. Their vision
articulates an ideal found in Pakistani madrassas,
not in the southern Pashtun village. They are a
result of the politicisation and radicalisation of
Islam under Pakistani General Zia ul-Haq and Saudi
patronage. This strand of thought has found a wide
echo in academia and the policy sphere. Some
authors link the Taleban to Wahhabism, the
austere version of Islam in Saudi Arabia that seeks
to strip the religion of ‘innovation’ (bid’a) and
return it to the (imagined) practice of the time of
the Prophet. Indeed, the identification of the
Taleban with Wahhabism is perhaps the most
enduring characterisation of Taleban ideology in
policy research and the media.

It turns out that both of these and many other
widely-held conceptions are false. To take one
example: if most Taleban were born in Pakistani
refugee camps—which only came into existence in
1979—it would mean that they would have been
between the ages of 14 and 20, at most, during the
period of rule of the Islamic Emirate (the Taleban’s name for their government). While this may have
been true for foot soldiers, it was unlikely the case
for commanders, and was certainly not the case
for the Taleban leadership.