general they were neither of high social status nor central to day-
to-day politics.
In Pakistan, however, where the Taliban movement was nur-
tured, a process of distinct radicalisation had been occurring over
a number of years. The growth of sectarianism, both Sunni and
Shiite, is abundantly documented (Zaman, 1998; Nasr, 2000a).
From the mid-1980s, Sunni-Shia clashes became much more com-
mon. Sunni extremists such as the Sipah-i Sahaba(‘Army of the
Companions’) and the Lashkar-e Jhangvi(‘Army of Jhangvi’)
engaged in terrorist acts; in 1999, the Lashkar-e Jhangvi even
attempted to kill Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The key develop-
ment facilitating this was the growth of radicalised Deobandi
madrassas. One careful study reported that the number of mad-
rassa students in the Punjab increased ninefoldbetween 1960 and
1995 (Zaman, 1999: 322); and madrassa networks similarly
expanded in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province.
Nasr has argued that there ‘appears to be a region-wide radical
Deobandi resurgence in the making – something akin to the
Wahhabi explosion in the eighteenth-century Arabian peninsula –
extending in the form of an arc from India through Pakistan and
Afghanistan into Central Asia’ (Nasr, 2000a: 179). These networks
proved to be of use to the Pakistani state: as Nasr elsewhere
wrote, the government of Pakistan in 1994–96 ‘organized militant
Sunni seminary students into Taliban and Harakat ul-Ansarunits
for Pakistan-backed operations in Afghanistan and Kashmir’
(Nasr, 2000b: 179). Of critical importance as a supplier of these
students was a madrassa in the Northwest Frontier Province, the
Dar ul-Ulum Haqqaniyya, headed by Sami ul-Haq, leader of one
faction of the Jamiat-e Ulema-i Islam(Rashid, 2000: 90–2). It
was from madrassas such as these that the Taliban poured out in
their thousands (Abou Zahab, 1996).
The USA and the Taliban
There was one world capital that one might have expected to be
thoroughly alarmed by the Taliban’s rise to power and ultimate
226 The Afghanistan Wars