According to the New York Times, resurgent Taliban forces now control daily life in the Swat Valley in Pakistan to such an extent that they make radio broadcasts in the evening to more than a million people, warning them not to engage in such “un-Islamic” activities as shaving their beards, selling DVDs or allowing girls to go to school. Although heavily outnumbered by Pakistani troops that are supposedly securing the area, the Taliban act with complete impunity. They can afford to do so because government authority has all but disappeared from large parts of Pakistan’s tribal areas. During 2008 more than 200 police officers in Swat were attacked and killed, some were even beheaded. So when the local Taliban leader, issues prohibitions or broadcasts a list of people targeted for “un-Islamic” conduct, he knows that he is speaking, quite literally, to a captive audience.
It is easy to ascribe this surreal development to the incompetence or corruption of Pakistan’s shaky civilian leadership, but in neighbouring Afgha-nistan the government seems just as powerless against its own band of mediaeval extremists. Last year a journalist accused of blasphemy — for circulating an Internet article on the Prophet Mohammed’s attitudes towards women — was sentenced to death by a provincial court. Mercifully, a higher court in Kabul commuted this to 20 years in prison, but this zealotry was just one of many political embarrassments that suggest the Karzai government’s authority extends little beyond the capital.
In October, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan, warned the British public not to expect a “decisive military victory” against the Taliban but to ready themselves for a possible deal. His comments came shortly after a leaked memo from a French diplomat claimed the British ambassador in Kabul believed “the current situation is bad; the security situation is getting worse; so is corruption and the Government has lost all trust.” The French memo also claimed that the ambassador feared that “[Nato’s] forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them… They are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis, which will probably be dramatic.”
This is a long way from the swift US-led military campaign that unseated the Taliban after the September 11 attacks in 2001. At the time Washington’s neocons had felt so confident of decisive military victory that they rushed into Baghdad before taking stock of possible future perils in their first war of choice. The Obama administration, by contrast, seems perhaps too willing to re-emphasise the conflict in Afghanistan as a front-line in the war on terror, despite repeated warnings from friend and foe that over-ambitious military engagement there could easily turn into a “quagmire” like Vietnam.
Last year, the neoconservative intellectual Robert Kagan argued persuasively in his book The Return of History and the End of Dreams that the importance of tenacious autocracies like the Taliban, and their more sophisticated counterparts in China and Russia, lay in the challenge they offered to Western complacency after the end of the Cold War. Instead of the “end of history” famously conjectured by Francis Fukuyama, Kagan warned that the immediate future is more likely to re-enact the political and ideological tensions of the nineteenth century – when emergent democracies struggled against entrenched autocracies – than it is to settle into a generally liberal vision of the world. In the new realpolitik, Kagan warned, “Chinese officials may chide Burma’s rulers, and they may urge the Sudanese government to find some solution to the Sudan conflict… But the rulers in Rangoon, Khartoum, Pyongyang, and Tehran know that their best protectors − and in the last resort, their only protectors − in a generally hostile world are to be found in Beijing and Moscow… In the great schism between democracy and autocracy, the autocrats share common interests and a common view of international order.” But even with this loose alliance of tyrants, Kagan concluded that the Islamists’ dream of purging whole cultures of modern accretions like democracy, would likely become a “protracted struggle” because “neither the United States, nor Europe, nor Russia, nor China, nor the peoples of the Middle East have the ability or the desire to give them what they want.”
Kagan’s analysis comes heavily freighted with neoconservative views that two terms of George W. Bush have made deeply unappealing, but it is difficult to fault his overall diagnosis. The restoration of the Taliban currently underway in Pakistan and Afghanistan makes sense when seen as part of a larger ideological tug-of-war between the Enlightenment project of establishing universal principles, values and rights and the darker energies of the Romantic contradictions to this worldview. One significant difference, however, is that while a return to nineteenth century nationalism and tribalism is daunting enough, the Taliban movement has set its sights on the creation of a society that pre-dates modernity altogether. Given the sharpness of this contrast, it is hard to imagine that either side will manage to negotiate a solution to this emerging crisis unless both have reached the sobering conclusion that however close at hand they may appear to be, decisive military victories, for either side, are essentially unattainable.
