by MICHAEL SEMPLE
“Mawlvi”, a veteran Taliban commander, shares insights into the movement’s thinking, relations with Pakistan and Hamid Karzai’s future, in this exclusive interview from behind Afghanistan’s “iron curtain”.
“Mawlvi”, a veteran Taliban commander, shares insights into the movement’s thinking, relations with Pakistan and Hamid Karzai’s future, in this exclusive interview from behind Afghanistan’s “iron curtain”.
Of all the militant groups waging insurgencies in the Muslim world, the Afghan Taliban movement is the only one that has experience of forming a national government. The memory of the Taliban wielding state power has helped them and their backers to sustain their protracted armed struggle against the new state structures put in place in Afghanistan after the Bonn Agreement of 2001. But two other aspects of the Taliban’s political practice are remarkable. First, they have maintained their internal cohesiveness for approaching two decades. Second, they manage to operate from behind an iron curtain, with tight central control over communications between the movement and the non-Taliban world.
The Taliban’s compunction to trade on their status as a former governing party helps ensure that there is a certain corpus of political thinkers within their ranks. However, because of the movement’s shyness, those studying it from outside only get to hear a carefully controlled message, delivered by authorised spokesmen, through the movement’s propaganda websites and in its periodic set-piece communiqués from Mullah Omar. Yet understanding Taliban politics is as important as ever. Afghanistan still matters and despite a protracted international intervention the prospects of the country lapsing back into civil war are great.
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Does the Taliban movement hope for military victory over the Afghan government? Does the movement think it can capture Kabul?
It is in the nature of war that both sides dream of victory. But the balance of power in the Afghan conflict is obvious. It would take some kind of divine intervention for the Taliban to win this war. The Taliban capturing Kabul is a very distant prospect. Any Taliban leader expecting to be able to capture Kabul is making a grave mistake. Nevertheless, the leadership also knows that it cannot afford to acknowledge this weakness. To do so would undermine the morale of Taliban personnel. The leadership knows the truth – that they cannot prevail over the power they confront.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)