branch ofIslam(hence their support in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia), rather than
Shi‘a: members of this latter Muslim minority provided the most durable
resistance to the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.
The movement takes its name, sometimes translated as ‘the seekers’, from
the fact that they were originally students at various Pakistani Islamic colleges
(madrassas) run by the fundamentalist Jamiat-e-Ulema, on the border with
Afghanistan. When in power it was almost completely dominated by its
original theological and political leader, a Mullah Mohammad Omar. A much
larger body of religious leaders, the inner shura (council), based in Kandahar,
was required to be consulted on policy matters (its opinion was usually
accepted). Mullah Omar, who had previously assumed the religious title of
Emir of the Faithful, was formally head of state.
It is widely accepted that the Taliban were encouraged and helped in their
ascendancy, some would say entirely created, by one of the Pakistani military
intelligence services, the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI). The motivations for
this seem mixed: the ISI represents a distinctly fundamentalist faction amongst
the increasingly Islamicized Pakistani military. It was also very much in
Pakistan’s interest to have Afghanistan controlled by forces indebted to Paki-
stan, given the complexities of international politics in the area. The idea
common among critics in the West of Western policy towards Afghanistan,
that the USA itself created the Taliban to fight the Soviet Union, is simply false,
as should be obvious from the way the Taliban have persecuted theMujahidin,
whom the West did indeed support. Iffundamentalism, a much misused
word, ever has a valid descriptive role, it is to describe movements like the
Taliban. They were interested not just in Islamic purity, but they also essentially
rejected any intellectual or moral compromise with modernity and wished to
create a medieval Islamic society: they renamed Afghanistan the Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan, as the basis for what they themselves described as
Caliphate, ultimately to stretch over the whole region and totally opposed to
the secular West. The repression of women under the Taliban was almost
complete—they were forced to wear the restrictive traditional dress (the
burka), forbidden to work or to be educated, or to appear in public unless
accompanied by a male relative. The counterpart to this is that men are forced
to wear beards under penalty of imprisonment. The full-blooded version of
Shari‘acriminal law, complete with mutilations and blinding for non-capital
offences, runs throughout the society, and a body of religious police enforce
even minor moral teachings with street beatings or worse.
Inevitably Afghanistan became home to other groups of Islamic political
fundamentalists, and it was believed by Western governments to be deeply
implicated in international terrorism. Taliban Afghanistan was treated to a large
extent as outside decent international society, being recognized by only a
handful of states, and by no means by most other Islamic states. Its removal
Taliban