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 ullah
Omar Mohammed, the Taliban's one-eyed leader, is, we are often told,
insane. A twitching, convulsing Cyclops in a turban, this lunatic
clergyman is, apparently, a standout kook even in a region famous
for its delusional and psychotic despots. Amazingly, however, he
might not be the craziest participant in the current crisis. That
distinction may have to be reserved for the urbane and superficially
more normal-seeming Colin Powell, a man who, according to press
reports last week, has expressed an interest in "reaching out"
to more "moderate" elements in the Taliban, a task about
as anchored in reality as an attempt to find Charles Manson's inner
sweetness.
The secretary
of state has subsequently attempted to "clarify" his position,
emphasizing that no such overtures will be made to the Taliban's
"leadership," a conveniently elastic term that does little
to disguise the bizarre nature of this whole initiative. To put
it bluntly, the idea of a "moderate" member of the Taliban
is no more plausible than the notion of a moderate member of the
Ku Klux Klan. Intellectually, if it is appropriate to use that term
in this context, the Taliban's teachings are not only a rejection
of Afghanistan's traditionally (relatively) tolerant religious heritage,
but they also go, in their absolutist contempt for the modern world,
many steps beyond the already hard-line Islamic fundamentalism that
inspired so many of the anti-Soviet mujaheddin. Drawn from
the ranks of the orphaned, the dispossessed, and the alienated and
inspired by the petty and vindictive certainties of barely educated
village preachers, the lopping, chopping, and murderous Taliban
are the extremist's extremists, the Khmer Rouge of the Khyber Pass.
It is also
worth remembering that their rule is a fairly recent phenomenon.
These are fresh-minted fanatics. Time and incumbency will eventually
reduce the fervor of even the most ideologically driven of dictatorships.
As the years pass, youthful enthusiasm (the Taliban gets much of
its support from young men) will evolve into paunchy middle-aged
torpor. What's more, as a regime endures, its very success will,
ironically, conspire against its core principles. The ranks of the
true believers will be diluted by the arrival of careerists and
other opportunists, just the sort of pragmatic people who a Colin
Powell might look for in his hunt for "moderates." There
has not been enough time for this to happen within the Taliban state,
and there is at least one good reason to think that it may take
a while before it could be expected to do so — the peculiarly
retrograde ambitions of the Taliban mean that they have comparatively
little dependence on the sort of skilled technocrats normally essential
for the smooth running of any society.
Traditionally,
even the worst dictatorships have adopted at least some ideas of
what we conventionally think of as progress: Trains ought to be
made to run on time, electrification must be brought to the countryside,
a civil service should function. To achieve such aims, any movement,
however despotic, must succeed in co-opting the help of just the
sort of technically qualified and, probably, relatively apolitical
specialists who might constitute a force for moderation. The Taliban
has no need of such people. Their objective, an Afghanistan transformed
into a replica of an imagined 8th-Century Arabia, is about destroying,
not building, a modern civilization and it is difficult to believe
that they will need the assistance of many engineers, scientists
or even administrators as they go about their grisly business.
This appears
to be true even in the armed forces. While Taliban troops do, undoubtedly,
include some trained, professional military, their numbers are fairly
few (apart, perhaps from some of bin Laden's own "Arab"
detachments), and there are unlikely to be enough of these career
soldiers to be worth appealing to as a potential source of opposition
to the regime's excesses. This should be no great surprise; brutal,
unstructured, and primitive, Afghanistan's civil wars have been
fought at a level that requires cunning and enthusiasm rather than
sophistication and a West Point style officer corps.
Also, the Taliban
military appears, by (admittedly low) Afghan standards, to be fairly
cohesive. Warfare in Afghanistan is typically characterized by shifting
alliances and repeated betrayals, but the rise of the Taliban has
varied somewhat from this familiar pattern. The ideological fervor
of Mullah Omar's movement (which was formed in a way that manipulated
ethnic — Pathan — identity and yet bypassed much of the
usual tribal power structure) and the speed of its early victories
mean that its forces are less of a cobbled-together coalition than
is normally the case in Afghanistan. The Taliban has, unfortunately,
had to absorb relatively few allies of convenience, those fickle
friends of a type that the U.S. might otherwise be able to tempt
away.
This is true
even outside the regime's Pathan heartland, where some degree of
coalition forming by the Taliban might reasonably have been expected.
Mullah Omar, however, is not really someone, to use a State Department
term, known for "reaching out." In non-Pathan areas of
the country, therefore, the Taliban have ruled more like an occupying
army than a government. Only limited attempts have been made to
win over the locals, who will be, by definition, unable to defect
from an administration that they never joined in the first place.
This quest
for "moderate" members of the Taliban is, therefore, not
only a long shot, but could also be counterproductive. It risks
confusing, antagonizing, or demoralizing just the sort of local
anti-Taliban forces, actual or potential, who could assist U.S.
efforts on the ground.
More importantly,
perhaps, these hints about the acceptability of some supposedly
moderate Taliban faction send out a terrible message elsewhere in
the region. The United States is never going to be loved in the
Middle East, but, if it is to succeed in this conflict, it must
at least ensure that it is respected. When bin Laden's disciples
want to attract followers they do so not with images of American
strength, but with the idea of American weakness. There is repeated
gloating over those outraged corpses in Mogadishu and, now, gleefully,
over the destruction of two tall buildings, sent tumbling to their
doom on a bright blue September morning.
The appeal
of such propaganda in a neighborhood already profoundly hostile
to the United States can only be met by the projection of American
power, and in a prolonged, tricky, and asymmetrical contest, that
is something that will take more than superior military hardware.
The U.S. will have to be seen to show uncompromising determination,
iron resolution and the unshakeable intention to see this battle
through, preferably with allies but by itself if necessary. It must
demonstrate to the Muslim world's many waverers that the United
States is loyal to its friends, but implacable towards its enemies,
that it is not, in other words, the sort of country ready to cut
a deal with members of a regime that is still harboring the killers
of so many Americans.
Domestically, the political impact of any overtures to elements
within the Taliban would be likely to be even worse. Within the
United States, American foreign policy is, at the moment, seen as
having an unusual moral clarity. After 6,000 funerals, there need
be no qualification or equivocation. Right is on our side. That
is what those flags, displayed, it seems, on every street are all
about. Americans realize that they have been attacked, and their
people butchered, by an evil and dangerous assailant. This nation
can see that bin Laden, the barbarians who harbored him, and the
ideology he represents must be "ended", and it knows that
this process may well be long, difficult and bloody. This country
understands, in fact, a great deal about the situation in which
it now finds itself, and that is why it is giving the administration
the very broad support that it needs to do the job.
It is, however,
support that could be quick to drain away if the response to the
al Qaeda onslaught comes to be muddled by the State Department's
familiar blend of cynicism and reflex internationalism, that sleazy
instinct for appeasement that comes disguised in the tough language
of realpolitik, and which even now, it appears, might be
prepared to sell us the concept of the Taliban's kinder, gentler
elements.
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