The Taliban Identity and Dream of National Cohesion: Establishing a Central Government in Afghanistan

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.