Abstract:
The Taliban phenomenon is often studied through the prism of
fundamentalism, political Islam, and jihadism without
analysing the historical authority patterns of Afghan society.
The Taliban emerged from within a network of the Islamists
who resisted the Soviet occupation. It is also assumed that the
Taliban‟s Islamic ideology is deeply rooted in their Pashtun
culture. There may be a certain amount of accuracy in all of
these assumptions, but any single supposition is not sufficient
in trying to make sense of the „Taliban‟. The Afghan Islamists
and Taliban might have taken ideological and logistical
support from external actors, but their existence and survival
is based on their acceptability by Afghan society. It is argued
here that the Islamists and Taliban‟s desire to rule over Kabul
has been the outcome of a historic struggle of the religious
class for power. This article contends that suitable grounds for
Afghan religious leadership were prepared long before the
emergence of the Taliban. Giving an overview of Taliban
reforms briefly, it discusses that Taliban‟s dream, like the
earlier Afghan rulers, to establish a centralised Afghan
government could not be realised due to their dependency on
foreign assistance and because of the existence of strong but
inter-conflicting regional units.
