Unpicking some of the myths about the Taliban

BOOK OF THE DAY: MARY FITZGERALDreviews My Life with the TalibanBy Abdul Salam Zaeef Hurst Company 331pp, £20

FOURTEEN YEARS after they seized power in Kabul and almost nine years into the war that followed their ousting in the wake of the September 11 attacks, remarkably little is known about the Taliban.

Is the Taliban one organised movement anchored firmly in religious ideology or has it become a loose constellation of militant groups with a nationalist bent? To what extent did Pakistani support figure in the Taliban’s rise and how much does it still inform strategy? What links do they have with al-Qaeda? And, as talk of “reconciliation” echoes in the corridors of Washington and London, is it really possible to speak of “moderate” Taliban or divide it into good and bad?

Those seeking answers might not find exactly what they are looking for in this autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, a high-ranking official in the Taliban regime later detained for several years at Guantánamo, but, as the only insider account in existence, it provides some valuable insights into the inner workings of a movement that defies easy categorisation.

Zaeef’s telling of a life shaped by war and faith unpicks much of the conventional wisdom about the Taliban and how it came into being. Countering the widespread narrative that the movement emerged from the chaos that followed the collapse of Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government in 1992, Zaeef notes that the Taliban already existed during the jihad against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, which he joined as the orphaned teenage son of a village mullah.

The way Zaeef tells it, revulsion at the lawlessness and anarchy that filled Afghanistan’s post-1992 vacuum helped propel to power the band of former fighters whose piety had set them apart from their fellow mujahideen. He is coy, however, when it comes to the key role played by Pakistan’s security apparatus in the Taliban’s ascent, and he makes no mention of the financial and material support it provided long after. He scathingly recalls his dealings with Pakistan’s wily intelligence service, the ISI, when he served as the Taliban’s ambassador in Islamabad from 2000.

I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out,” Zaeef writes, going on to describe how “the ISI extended its roots deep into Afghanistan like a cancer puts down roots in the human body . . . every ruler of Afghanistan complained about it, but none could get rid of it.”

He has little to say about al-Qaeda and the bond that grew between his former commander Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. He does reveal, however, that the reclusive Taliban leader believed there was “less than a 10 per cent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats” after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Zaeef, now living in Kabul under official protection, is one of the so-called “reconciled” Taliban involved in sputtering mediation efforts with the Karzai regime. Peace, he warns, cannot be imposed from outside. He disparages attempts to divide the Taliban into moderates and hardliners as “useless and reckless”, and insists that any accommodation must take account of religious values and Afghan traditions: “No one has the right to take this away from us.” Echoing what former Taliban minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil told me in Kabul last year, Zaeef argues that there is no military answer to his country’s turmoil. “The current conflict is a political conflict,” he writes, “and as such cannot be solved by the gun.”

Mary Fitzgerald is foreign affairs correspondent of The Irish Times