The Taliban are modern, not medieval

A Graveyard of Clichés: the Taliban are modern, not medieval

Patrick Porter

Are we fighting aliens? Ralph Peters thinks so. The retired officer and polemicist dreads Afghans as savages who might as well come from another planet. The Taliban are ‘aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults.’ Our war with them is a ‘head-on collision between civilizations from different galaxies.’ Peters is no triumphalist. He fears militant Islamists are tough enemies, ferociously driven by an ‘angry god’ to wage war with televised beheadings, human shields and the wonder-weapon of the age, the suicide bomber. And to Peters, American soldiers are shackled by a hostile media, ignorant rulers and a detached populace, vulnerable in their affluence and liberalism. In American and contemporary idiom, Peters updates Rudyard Kipling. Kipling warned Victorian Britain that its costly, overstretched armies would be picked off by cheaper-trained ‘home-bred hordes.’ Afghanistan was the place where empires went to die.

President Barack Obama does not declare species war. But he does stress the ‘otherness’ of others, declaring that American ‘military strength will be measured not only by the weapons our troops carry, but by the languages they speak and the cultures they understand.’ The cultural turn to the exotic, as an answer to the complexities of warfare, transcends political divides. To embrace diversity is now a badge of intellectual respectability. The late Samuel Huntington’s prophecy of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ may not be fashionable in graduate lounges. But ethnocentrism has few takers. The notion that foreigners are ultimately like us is tainted by the Iraq war and the Bush project, to remake the globe in America’s image. The balance of opinion has tilted to stress difference. Somewhere, Huntington grins.

America’s wars today, as one General claims, are now ‘culture wars’ at the ‘edge of empire.’ To operate in strange lands, whether in stability missions or armed nation-building, its military seeks to reform itself and weaponise culture. We now see the rediscovery of colonial anthropology in the Pentagon’s ‘Human Terrain Teams’ programme, in the new counterinsurgency field manual FM3-24, and a revival of classic works on the ‘Arab Mind.’ Historically, imperial crisis such as the Indian Mutiny of 1857 stimulated a rediscovery of enthnography and tribal lore. In 1940, after wars with ‘strange people’, the American Marine Corps produced its Small Wars Manual, urging the study of natives’ ‘racial characteristics.’ It is an old reflex.

This is part of America’s own strategic debate. Culture is an antidote to the technological hubris of the 1990’s, where visionaries believed that precision munitions, information technology and satellite would give America not only unparalleled lethality but a panoptic gaze over the battlespace. This would dispel the fog of war and make the overdog invincible. Iraq and the resurgence of the Taliban of Central Asia brutally discredited these ideas. So the ‘cultural revolution’, the return to identity and blood, soil and faith as engines of conflict, is a rebuke against this fantasy.

But culturalism, like technologism, is open to error. The assumption of sameness may be dangerous. But so is a fixation with the bizarre. Arab ‘pride’, Islamic ‘honour’ and the culturally inflammatory effect of dogs underpinned US torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And the belief that we ‘know’ an enemy intimately, or generate systematic cultural knowledge, can generate false confidence and analytical failure. Who could forget the CIA’s seasoned Iran specialist in 1979, who praised the Shah’s stabilising rule six months before the revolution?

If there is a place rendered by outsiders as a culturally immobile nest of exotic enemies, it is the Pakistan-Afghanistan crucible where a US-led coalition now fights. Clichéd literature since 2001 mutters about the timeless ‘graveyard of empires.’ This ‘land of bones’ repelled past intruders, from the murderous rampage of Alexander the Great to Brezhnev’s Soviet lunge. The Taliban seemed unsmiling puritans who smashed televisions, killed homosexuals, flogged women and outlawed music. As America prepared for war in 2001, Time spoke of ‘one of the world’s most inscrutable regimes, fanatically loyal to one of the world’s most mysterious leaders’ that had seen off ‘every previous foreign invader.’ Commentators warn that the Taliban can only be understood in terms ‘alien to Western thinking.’ Observers saw the war as a culture clash between an archaic theocracy against a rich, hi-tech superpower. Overthrown in the autumn of 2001, the Taliban wage a revolt that many regard as a profoundly cultural act. For a special forces Captain, it was ‘the Flintstones meets the Jetsons.’

It is tempting to treat Afghans themselves as prisoners of their traditions. Some claim that Pashtun tribes who form the bulk of the Taliban are bound to a vengeful honour code of blood ties. As the Economist broods, ‘His honour besmirched—and here’s the problem for Americans—a Pushtun is obliged to have his revenge.’ Others present the Taliban as mystical Muslims from another world. When Taliban soldiers paused in their interview to pray, a journalist envied their ‘strength and purity’, their ‘transcendental sense of peace and purpose and closeness to death and God seldom experienced in the modern West.’ The chorus is clear: where we are strategic, modern and political, they are visceral, other-worldly and primitive. And it is not only Westerners who are gripped by a sense of radical difference. As one Afghan fighter boasted, ‘The Americans love Pepsi Cola, but we love death.’

But when we observe the Taliban, we find not aliens from other worlds imprisoned by custom, but realists of a kind, rewriting their rules as they go. They shifted their stance on poppy cultivation, turning from godly opponents into defenders of the narco-state and guardians of rural life. In Musa Qala, they relaxed strictures on social behaviour to win the population over, rescinding their demand that men grow beards, and their ban on music and movies. And they reshaped their view of suicide bombing. Previously some Taliban argued that wearing an explosive vest was cowardly. A Taliban faction placed an advertisement in a Kandahar newspaper promising to punish those responsible for a suicide bombing, an affront to Islam. Now, the Taliban do it. Their religious leaders re-interpret the Koran to justify it, with stories about willing martyrs in a seventh century Muslim army.

In the information war, the Taliban have adjusted to the broadcasting power of modern media with an agility that flies ahead of their enemies. They do television interviews, run computerised propaganda shops, sent representatives to Iraq to learn from Al Qaeda’s video production arm, and mimic Western practices with an embedded journalist. In government they outlawed depictions of the human form as idolatory. Now, they violate taboos on ‘image-making’, transforming into guerrillas of the information age. Ironically, this movement that banned music now enlists singers in its propaganda, creates cassettes with songs praising the Taliban’s martyrdom, damning infidels, and takes on a style similar to American rap music.

In their bid for the loyalty of Afghans, the Taliban fashion an alternative government or ‘counterstate,’ the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.’ They have a shadow system of courts, law enforcement and clinics, as well as an ombudsman’s office near Kandahar, where complaints can be lodged. They attempt to restrain vigilantes with codes of conduct that forbid house raiding, robbery, rapine, ‘vice’ such as smoking. As the Taliban and the US-coalition compete, they respond in comparable ways to the logic of civilian alienation. The Taliban study Western counter-insurgency doctrine with its emphasis on hearts and minds. Strategic interaction with the enemy is as important as cherished traditions.

While the Afghan insurgency has an ethnic base among Pashtuns, it is not reducible to tribalism. Traditional tribal loyalties in Afghanistan, and their agricultural power base, were disrupted and altered by the emergence of tanzims (roughly ‘political parties’ or groupings) as well as the qawm system of sub-national loyalties that includes religious sects and practical alliances. The Taliban themselves do not just operate tribally. Their leadership has both Durrani and Ghilzai members. They include rival tribes in their movement, including marginalised Hazara groups in Ghazni. They contain many Tajik and Uzbek clerics allied to their cause. And they have supply lines and communications in areas populated mostly by non-Pashtun ethnic minorities, and stage recruitment drives outside their regions of control. The emerging ‘neo-Taliban’ tries to expand its recruitment beyond its Pashtun base, by appealing to local grievances.

The Taliban’s attitude to modernity and its instruments is ambivalent. Like modern fascism, it loathes what it sees as the degenerate parts of modernity, but wants the benefits that its technology can deliver and presents itself as a modern provider. Paradoxically, an aggressively anti-modern movement exploits the tools of modernity. It is a child of the very process of globalisation that it claims to oppose. A culturally articulate actor preaches tradition, but practices change.

It is also tempting to see Al Qaeda as a medieval throwback, with its dream of an Islamic Caliphate or its mourning the loss of Spain in 1492. Or we can see them as strategic actors who use force as an end in itself, their sacred violence enacting their identity as martyrs raging against a fallen world. In this view, they wield warfare not as an instrument of politics, but stage a theatre of horror for religio-cultural self-expression. Our run-in with Bin Laden’s network seems like a radical meeting of opposites, like the Conquistadores encountering the human-sacrificing Aztecs of Meso-America.

Yet Al Qaeda is formed out of a worldwide marketplace of ideas and technologies. It may nourish itself on medieval dreams and reactionary nostalgia. As a network it struggles to control its violent, puritanical adherents who alienate Muslims from Algeria to Iraq. But this is far from a premodern movement, and is more than a nihilistic drive to wage terror for its own sake. Their communiqués contain classical strategic principles. When he declared war against the United States, Osama bin Laden justified his ‘guerrilla war’ tactics not only as an expression of sacred violence, but as a necessary method against the ‘imbalance of power’ created by America’s overwhelming military might. Al Qaeda’s chief theoretician Ayman al-Zawahiri cares about translating violence into political outcomes, writing that successful operations against Islam’s enemies will be wasted if they do not result in a ‘Muslim nation in the heart of the Islamic world.’ Far from waging terror for its own sake, or standing radically outside Clausewitzian traditions, Al Qaeda left behind annotated copies of the Prussian’s On War in their hideout in Tora Bora.

It adapts ideas from the infidel. Al Qaeda’s vision is inspired partly by Clausewitz and his ideas of the relationship of war and politics. Its training camps are full of Western literature. It plunders Western training manuals, revolutionary leftists, quotes contemporary ‘fourth generation warfare’ theory, and Mao’s ‘three stage’ concept of guerrilla struggle. Its ideas are a fusion of religious beliefs with classical and contemporary strategic thought. In its revolutionary imagination and pursuit of a new world through inspirational violence, Al Qaeda is a descendant of nineteenth-century European anarchists.

Culture matters. New attention to the social worlds of foreign societies has helped America’s military reform itself as more effective and humane. It helped depress the levels of violence in Iraq and to orchestrate the rout of Al Qaeda in the Anbar Awakening. If securing the population is the core idea of the renaissance in counterinsurgency technique, then knowing something about the people is a good step. And trying to grasp how the world looks from others’ perspective is a good intellectual and moral discipline. We should invest in language proficiency and study complex human terrain. And if our militaries, from design or folly in high places, again find themselves in a difficult war of insurgency, communal conflict or state breakdown, it will help to be prepared. Equally, because culture can be treated with many levels of sophistication, the word should always make us nervous.

War is more than a tableau on which we inscribe our identities. It is, in the pragmatic words of Sun Tzu, the ground of death and life, the way of survival and destruction. It is therefore vital to study culture in ways that are attentive to change as well as continuity, to the use and abuse of ideas, to the cosmopolitan as well as the tribal, and to ironies, where enemies teach each one another new ways. Modern anthropological work has shown that even societies deemed ‘simple’ are highly mutable, full of ruptures and power struggles, and made by borrowings from outside. This is so in Afghanistan. Skilful makers of war, like the Taliban, reinvent themselves as they pick their way through the chaos. Rather than being a continuum with native culture, they mutate in form, feed off global forces, and flout traditions.

We may never banish the mythologised Oriental from our consciousness. Like fear of death and darkness, it is too powerful to be fully exorcised and will remain a silhouette on our mental horizon. But we can be more conscious of its presence, more alert to its myths, and allow evidence and observation to subvert our preconceptions rather than the other way around. The fluidity and hybridity of the Taliban and Al Qaeda demonstrate that war, for all its wrenching divisions, jumbles and connects as well as polarises. No culture, however strange, is an island. Or as the novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote: ‘We hear a lot about the roots of the Iberian Peninsula and of places beyond. We hear about the roots of our societies and historical communities…But man is not a tree. He has no roots; he has feet, he walks.’

Patrick Porter is a Lecturer in Defence Studies at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Kings College London. He is the author of Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (Columbia University Press & Hurst, 2009)