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BOOKS
Holy
Rage, Worldly Reason
At last,
a definitive book on the Taliban effect on geopolitics
By
Pamela
Constable
Taliban-Islam,
Oil And The New Great Game In Central Asia
By Ahmed Rashid
I.B. Tauris
Rs 900 |
 |
To
most outsiders, the image of present-day Afghanistan is disturbing but
simplistic: a barren country destroyed by years of war, ruled by a mysterious
Islamic militia that oppresses women, chops off thieves' hands and shelters
Islamic terrorists. Ahmed Rashid's book is essential reading for anyone
who wants to gain a more nuanced understanding of what motivates the Taliban,
how it rose to power, and the impact of its reign on the Afghan populace
and the surrounding region.
His descriptions
are both chilling and hilarious: a national treasury kept in tin trunks,
prisoners of war roasted alive in truck containers, and a radical Islamic
code that orders men jailed until their beards grow bushy, and women arrested
for washing their clothes in streams.
This extremism,
however, was not gratuitous, as the author points out. The students who
founded the Taliban were a generation of lost souls who clung to religion
in the chaos of war. With little knowledge of Afghan history, and an equal
abhorrence of western and Soviet modernism, they set out to build a pure,
orderly Islamic society-with tragic results. But the larger contribution
made by Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who spent two decades visiting
Afghanistan and understands it as well as any foreigner could, is to weave
a convincing tale of the international power struggles that have abetted
the emergence of Taliban rule. Contemporary Afghanistan, according to
his analysis, is an object lesson in the unintended consequences of foreign
policies based on cynical alliances, ignorance and opportunism-all played
out in the rapidly shifting vortex of the post-Cold War era. The villains
and victims of this international drama are one and the same-especially
the US and Pakistan, who joined forces in the 1980s to arm Afghan freedom
fighters against Soviet occupation.
The US,
losing interest once the Soviets were defeated, looked the other way as
the Taliban's Islamic regime developed. It was not until American feminist
groups protested in 1997, and a spate of terrorist bombings was linked
to Afghanistan in 1998, that US policy-makers changed their minds. Pakistan,
a close ally of Afghanistan for years, also refused to use its influence
to moderate the Taliban's crusade. As a result, Pakistan now faces multiple
spill-over problems at home, including religious violence and a vast smuggling
trade.
A fascinating
regional subplot to this cautionary tale has been the scramble by various
foreign interests to open up lucrative oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan
and the Central Asian republics that border it-a multinational quagmire
Rashid has dubbed "The New Great Game". He describes how various
self-interested players, including American oil firms and the government
of Iran, vied for economic advantage in a region that was aflame with
religious and ethnic rivalry, ideological hostility and the turbulent
legacy of the Cold War.
Rashid is
not the first writer to paint a critical portrait of the Taliban or to
discuss the foreign missteps that surrounded its rise, but his book does
an unusually skilful job of weaving these themes together. It is also
a valiant exercise in the hope that, with the benefit of unblinking hindsight,
the mistakes of history do not repeat themselves.
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