The Year's Trends

OTHER STORIES Radical Islamism American Will Indian Politics The Economy The Art Of War Bollywood Indian Fashion Sports

It was mid-morning and the valley of Maidan Shah was
full of sound and fury. Kabul, 30 miles to the north, had been captured 10 days earlier and now it seemed the Northern Alliance was set for a big push south along the road to Kandahar, the Taliban's stronghold 300 miles away. In north Afghanistan the hardline Islamic militia had crumbled with surprising rapidity. Now the Northern Alliance was trying to fight in its heartland. Since early morning, rocket launchers, tanks and mortars had been pounding the ridge lines where the Taliban fighters were dug in. The rattle of automatic fire and a steady counterpoint from heavy machine guns filled the air. It looked like a full-scale set-piece battle, but in fact, as so often in Afghanistan, reality was far more complicated.

FALL AND FREEDOM: Retribution is bloody for this Taliban fighter; (right below) an Afghan woman having a haircut

As casualties mounted and trenches were captured and recaptured, negotiations continued between Ghulam Mohammed, the Taliban commander of Maidan Shah, and his Northern Alliance counterpart Sher Alam. After 48 hours, an uneasy peace descended, and a new political reality emerged; not just for this scrappy roadside town but for the country as a whole. For what happened at Maidan Shah was about to be repeated, with a few local variations, across much of central, eastern and southern Afghanistan. Ghulam Mohammed had done a deal with the Northern Alliance. After he surrendered a token tank or two, his fighters came down from their positions and embraced their counterparts. In a matter of minutes, Ghulam Mohammed's nominal allegiance was suddenly to Kabul, not Kandahar. Another chunk of territory had been stripped from the Holy Warriors of Kandahar.

For observers, the battle of Maidan Shah was an object lesson in why the Taliban crumbled so fast. The first stage had been the rout in the north. There-in Mazar-e-Sharif, Shibergan, Taloqan, Kunduz, the Bamiyan Valley and the Shomali Plain-the Taliban was never going to be able to put up concerted resistance. The Pentagon may crow about the efficacy of the Daisycutter bomb and their Special Forces spotter teams but all those who know Afghanistan are aware that the Taliban presence in the north was a military, cultural, ethnic and political anomaly that was always fragile.

When the Taliban (most of its militiamen are Pashtoons from the south-west) conquered the north in 1998, it met with little resistance. Judicious payments to the right commanders at the right time, combined with more than the usual infighting among the opposition, allowed the Taliban to take the key city of Mazar-e-Sharif without much of a fight. The Panjshir itself, despite a short-lived incursion in 1998, remained securely with the Northern Alliance.

RADICAL ISLAM

TERRORLINE Origin: The Taliban started in 1994 in Pashtoon-dominated south-east Afghanistan, when Mullah Omar, a veteran of the war against the Soviets, fought bandit warlords. 1996 onward: Consolidates position in Afghanistan. Becomes home of radical Islamism, shelters people like Osama bin Laden. Sept 11: Incurs US wrath as two planes crash into and destroy the WTC. Another plane hits the Pentagon. US President George Bush blames bin Laden and promises to "hunt" him down. Oct 7: The US launches air strikes in Afghanistan. Nov 9: Northern Alliance troops capture the strategic Mazar-e-Sharif. Nov 12: The Taliban troops abandon Kabul. Dec 6: The Taliban troops surrender Kandahar, their last stronghold.

But the Taliban's regime in the north was built on sand. When they arrived in Mazar-e-Sharif three years ago, the new governor of the city made his views clear: the Shia Muslims who predominate locally were unbelievers and worse than animals, he said. It did not endear him to the locals. "The Taliban in the north was an occupying power and seen as such," said one western diplomat in Islamabad last week. "Any hold it had in the region was entirely dependent on the goodwill and financial greed of some local commanders. It had no hinterland." It is now clear that the decision to try to defend the Taliban's occupied territory beyond the Hindu Kush was the gravest strategic error made by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive one-eyed cleric who ran the movement from Kandahar.

For months it was predicted that the Pashtoon heartlands of Afghanistan would rise up behind the Taliban. Ethnic, religious and nationalistic motives would combine, and the US-led coalition's campaign would bog down in a morass of guerrilla warfare and religious extremism. "Had the Americans come up in force against Taliban ground troops, all things may have been different..." said one senior British army officer in London last week. "But that wasn't the war they wanted-with good reason-and that wasn't the war they fought. So the Taliban collapsed through its own internal weakness."

FORGOTTEN JOYS: At a bathhouse (above); swinging free

To understand why, you have to analyse the Taliban and what it is-or was. Though its origins are shrouded in myth, there is no doubting that the original impulse came from a semi-retired mujahideen fighter from Oruzgan province who was earning a poor living as a mullah in a small village near Kandahar in 1994. Mullah Omar and a small band of followers gathered their forces and set about cleaning up their neighbourhood. From those small ambitions and beginnings, the Taliban was born.

Over the next seven years, a body of ideologically aligned fellow travellers coalesced around the core group in Kandahar. At first these were Afghans attracted by Mullah Omar's message and his personal charisma. Soon they were joined by a strong Pakistani contingent-the madarsa nexus, which brought thousands to their fold. Lately, Al Qaida elements began to build a stronger presence. Osama bin Laden himself and his chief ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri became more influential and their fighters more militarily significant.

But most important of all were the hundreds of local Afghan warlords who decided that the clever choice was to join the Taliban, or at least not to resist it. And this is where the almost feudal nature of Afghan politics played into the Islamic milita's hands. "A good leader (in Afghanistan) looks after his fighters. That means not getting them killed and keeping them sweet with handouts so they are loyal to him," explained Sher Abdullah, a former Taliban commander in Jalalabad last month. "That means being on the winning side."

As the Taliban began its drive across Afghanistan, scores of local commanders made their calculations-and suddenly became Mullah Omar's men. By last September, the Taliban had a fighting strength of around 50,000 (including foreign fighters numbering 5,000), large stocks of ammunition, fuel, weapons, and several hundred tanks and armoured personnel carriers. But it was all for nothing. For what allowed the Taliban to spread so quickly, allowed them to fall apart even faster.

The collapse was in spite of the hard core, not because of it. Mullah Omar is now a fugitive and his close associates have not surrendered. The Pakistanis and other foreigners fought on after the Taliban pulled out from the north voluntarily. The men who held out for some time in the eastern cave complex of Tora Bora, where bin Laden is believed to be sheltering, were certainly in no mood to surrender, and of the 2,000 Pakistanis who entered Afghanistan from Malakand, 1,100 are unaccounted for-either in prison or dead. What basically caused the collapse of the Taliban was the failure of support in the Afghan countryside as a whole. President George W. Bush's idea was to drain the swamp that aids terrorists. This swamp spat them out voluntarily.

That happened even though the Taliban was welcome when it first took over many cities because it brought order. Basically the Taliban was defeated-like every other power that overreaches itself in Afghanistan-by the traditional structure of Afghan rural society. The Taliban was never more than a superimposition on the social structure in rural areas, on the local ruling councils, shuras, on hierarchies established over centuries. The primacy of the mullah-the foundation of Taliban rule-was always an anomaly and a reversion to earlier hierarchies favouring the malik or the syed or the alim (religious scholar) an inevitability. Couple that with the traditional mendacity and venality of your average post-Soviet era Afghan warlord-the other pole of local power-and, once its back was to the wall, the Taliban never stood a chance.

Some things might have staved off collapse. Much depended on money and the Taliban received a lot in its early days from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden and Pakistan. It also received substantial military support from Pakistan. But the changes in the regional geopolitical map in the past three months left the Taliban high and dry. The conjunction of regional factors that had facilitated its emergence had disappeared.

For the moment, the Taliban is effectively gone. It is, however, far from forgotten. In Pakistan, former Taliban ministers and officials have formed a new party, a Taliban Mk 2. What exactly their intentions are is not clear yet.

(The author is the chief reporter of The Observer, London, and was its South Asia correspondent from 1998
to 2000.)