Read Part 1 of the series here

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When Mullah Omar first rose to prominence, Kandahar was slowly devolving into a dystopic wasteland. Omar’s Robin Hood-like origin stories are largely apocryphal. The most popular account goes that, in 1994, a warlord in Singesar—where Omar was preaching—abducted and raped two girls. Omar and a group, according to the story, freed the girls and hung the perpetrator publicly. Similar retaliatory incidents and uprisings were associated with Omar, who was slowly becoming a popular figure, marking the first Taliban uprisings. The Taliban made their first mark by capturing the Spin Boldak border crossing adjacent to Pakistan, recovered a convoy for Islamabad, and was rewarded with arms and resources by the latter. By October 1994, Taliban had moved on to Kandahar, where they dislodged the warlords, and took control of the crucial city and the massive shipments of arms, ammunitions and resources that came along with it. They moved on to Helmand, Urozgan, and deeper into the Pashtun-dominated South, which did not put up much resistance.

The support from Pakistan was surging for the Taliban, both directly from the state and otherwise. The Pakistan establishment, which had most of their eggs in the Hekmatyar basket, was watching the brash newcomers with fascination. Recruitment to the Taliban surged, mainly on the back of waves of graduates from the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JuI) madrassas in Pakistan helmed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman; a lot of the top leadership of Afghan Taliban found their ideological roots from JuI religious schools, writes Rashid in his Taliban.

In the areas where Taliban came to power, strict Sharia rules were implemented. Women were restricted from going to work, schools and colleges for females were shut, full body veils were made mandatory, men were required to maintain full beards, and lashings, amputations and stonings to death became quite commonplace for the mildest crimes. There was to be no more radio, or sports, or games, or even kite-flying.

This begs the question. How do we quantify the Taliban problem? Is it fundamentally an ethnic issue? A religious one? A social question? The answer lies in the complex religious, linguistic and tribal dynamics that exist in Afghanistan. Pashtuns form a plurality with over 45 per cent of the population. The Tajiks account for around 25-30 per cent. Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen follow in numerical count and political clout. Persian-origin Dari is the most used language in the country, spoken by Tajiks, Hazaras and some Uzbeks, while Pashto is an Indo-Persian language used by the Pashtuns. There are also Turkic-speaking tribes in the North.

Then there are the Sufi pirs. Sufism in Afghanistan has always flourished [though it faced its most trying periods in the Taliban rule] through three main sects—Naqshbandi, Qadriya and Chishti. The Sufi saints had connections and disciples that spanned religious and tribal affiliations—as a result, they were often consulted for dispute resolution, acting as an unofficial bond even between the most insular of communities. The pirs, for instance, helped mobilise support, breaking tribal and ethnic barriers, against the Soviet occupation.

The geography of the country is very rugged. The Hindu Kush mountain ranges divide the country into the closest approximations of the northern and the southern regions. The southern portions, and the eastern regions bordering Pakistan, are dominated by Pashtun tribes.

Pashtuns, predominantly Sunni Hanafis, believe themselves to be the “patrilineal descendants of one founding father with close associations to Prophet Mohammed”, as ethnologist Bernt Glatzer noted in his study, The Pashtun Tribal System. The common ancestor goes by many names—Qays Abdurrashid, Daru Nika, and Khalid bin Walid. The latter was a general in the prophet’s army. “The name of the common ancestor is less important than the Pashtuns' belief of belonging to one huge kinship group or family. From all the sons and grandsons of Qays Abdurrashid or his aliases sprang the thousands of tribes, subtribes and local lineages of the Pashtuns,” according to Glatzer. They live by the secular code of Pashtunwali, within a very egalitarian—although highly patriarchal—tribal structure.

The Pashtuns are concentrated main in the South’s Loy Kandahar region—comprising mainly of Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan and Farah—and east’s Loy Paktia region, with provinces, Paktia, Paktika and Khost. Some of the major tribes in Loy Kandahar region include the Barakzai, Nurzai, Hotak and Popalzai. Ex-president Karzai is the son of the chief of the Popalzai tribe. Taliban’s Mullah Baradar is also a Popalzai.  Some of the major tribes in the Loy Paktia region include Ahmadzai, Kharoti, Suleimankhel (all three from the Ghilzai confederation), Zadran, and Wazir.

There will be the very powerful khans or the commanders. The most important decisions concerning the tribe, though, will be reached in village councils or jirgas. Anybody who is male can attend a jirga, and make his voice heard. To enforce the decisions of the jirgas will be tribal militias called arbaki or lashgar, comprised mainly of young, strong men. There will be maliks in villages who will act as a representative of the community to the government.  The tribal system is very decentralised, almost as if it was intentionally designed to disincentivise the rise of strongmen and populist leaders who could hijack the structure for personal power. As Glatzer notes: “Whereas tribes and their divisions are innately stable and dependable, tribal leadership is not. Political leaders can hardly build their power on the tribal structures alone because that is egalitarian. They need continuously to convince their followers and adversaries of their superior personal qualities [to prevent frequent challenges to their power].”

And this where one of the many internal contradictions of Afghanistan lies. While the traditional tribal rural structure exists and thrives, is it capable of holding together an ethnically diverse, restive territory on a national level? That is a question the Americans pondered hard over after taking control of the country post 2001. According to some reports, at one point of time, an idea was mooted to co-opt the tribal system as a bulwark against extremists coming to power, but every historic precedent argues against such an approach. Take the case of Durrani, the founder of the nation. He learned well from the mistakes of his Ghilzai compatriot Hotak, whose rule of Persia was very short-lived, lasting only till 1729. As Glatzer argues in the study, it was so shortlived mainly because the Ghilzais lacked any organisational basis to sustain an imperial rule. “The Durrani, on the other hand, could not rely on their own tribal organisation, but, from the beginning (1749), had to base their rule on state institutions which they found in the former Safavid and Mughal provincial centres of Herat, Kandahar, Kabul and Peshawar. The higher the tribal chief Durrani rose to royal power, and the more successful he was in conquering neighbouring territories, the more he got estranged from his tribal basis,” writes Glatzer. The current Constitution of Afghanistan, ratified in 2004, is a document better fit for a monarchy than a democracy. There is a tremendous centralisation of power in Kabul, with the president personally appointing governors and other localised rulers; little of that decision-making power trickles down to the masses. There is also the irony that the monarchy years, especially the four decades of Zahir Shah, have been the most peaceful in modern Afghanistan history.

In the centre of the nation, the Hindu Kush is largely populated by Tajiks and Hazaras. The northern regions extending till the Central Asian steppes are dominated by Turkic tribes like Uzbeks and Persian speakers. The mostly Sunni Tajiks, who make up the wealthy mercantile and scholarly class in Afghanistan, are the Dari-speaking elites—their community does not have tribal (qawm) groupings like the Pashtuns, but maintain strong regional affiliations.

Hazaras, believed to be an admixture of the Mongols who arrived with Genghis Khan and indigenous Turkic people, are one of the most persecuted people in Afghanistan. Predominantly Shia, and with East Asian facial features, they are targeted by almost every other ethnicity, and have received the raw end of the stick in whatever be the latest conflict that Afghanistan gets embroiled in. Taliban repeatedly targets them, both for their faith and their race.

Are the Taliban views representative of the Pashtuns? Is Taliban a Pashtun problem? Quite the opposite, as many analysts have argued. The Pashtun morality is governed by Pashtunwali, a secular tome which stresses on the egalitarian tribal way of life, where jirgas are used to reach consensus in decisions, with stress on virtues like honour, forgiveness, valour, and respect to women. “The Taliban have displayed deep antipathy to [all] of these institutions which are seminal to the Pashtun way of life. The Taliban have systematically sought to target jirgas [banning them as un-Islamic] and eliminate tribal leadership, supplanting them with mullahs trained in Pakistani seminaries and who have a privileged, myopic, Wahabi interpretation of Sharia,” writes Bilquees Duad in The Diplomat. As multiple writers have since pointed out, one of Taliban’s main priorities in Pashtun regions was to replace all tribal councils with Islamic qazi courts.

Ideologies aside, there was also a very real practical split among the Pashtuns when it comes to the Taliban.

There were splits along linguistic lines. As French political scientist Olivier Roy wrote, a large section of Nurzai Pashtuns from Southwest Afghanistan snubbed the Taliban to join the Tajik-dominated Jamiat Islami as they considered themselves Persian speakers first and foremost.

There were splits along political lines. Abdul Haq, one of the tallest Pashtun leaders, had taken up arms along with Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks against the Islamist militants.

There were also splits along regional lines. The 1990s Taliban was a strictly Loy Kandahar movement—its leaders were almost exclusively from the SouthWestern greater Kandahar region. There was little to no representation from the eastern Loy Paktia region. “Loy Paktia was never a stronghold of the Taliban movement. As a movement that had emerged from Greater Kandahar, it was alien to [the east]. Furthermore, the leadership around Mullah Omar had jealously protected its superiority in the movement, only allowing a few token non-Kandaharis into their inner circle that really takes the decisions,” wrote Afghanistan scholar Thomas Ruttig, in a study on eastern Pashtuns in Afghanistans. Loy Paktia is controlled largely by Mansur Network, headed by former agriculture minister Abdul Latif Mansur, and the Haqqani Network, now helmed by Sirajuddin Haqqani. Both groups co-exist in a wary state of truce. Both have deep connections in NWFP in the Pakistan, and are also closely associated with the ISI.

In 2021, the trend seems to have reversed. As Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary noted on Twitter, Loy Paktia and Sirajuddin Haqqani seems to have taken over the movement, as indicated by the absence of Qayum Zakir, Sadr Ibrahim and Daud Mozamil from the major power centres. There are numerous implications if that is indeed the case. As Ruttig writers, Haqqani Network has “always stood outside the Taliban chain-of-command”, with a fighting force comprising Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Chechens, and foreign Arabs, making it more of a trans-national jihadi body that transcends the mainly national orientation of the Kandahari mainstream Taliban.

There are crucial differences between Taliban 1.0 and Taliban 2.0, which could be a point of concern for neighbouring nations, especially India. While the first iteration of the Taliban, under Mullah Omar, was by no means a Pakistani puppet—there are more than enough occasion when the Kandaharis figuratively told Islamabad to stay in their lanes—Taliban 2.0 looks a much scarier proposition. Haqqani is ISI’s golden boy, Hassan has links to the intelligence apparatus, and the top decision-making posts seem to be dominated by Pakistan’s hands.

All the points mentioned above are internal contradictions within just the Pashtun tribes. If you take the Afghan landscape as a whole, which would range from the Nuristanis to the Ismaelis and the Heratis, the sheer complexity would automatically disqualify any attempt to make a sweeping, big picture analysis. In any other part of the world, there would be rules, and there would be exceptions to the said rules. In Afghanistan, there were exceptions, and there would sometimes be rules within those exceptions.

Eschewing Euro-centric comparisons of Afghanistan to ethnic strife in regions like Balkans, anthropologists like Thomas Barfield have advocated a much more fluid, segmentary structure as an analysis of the way the different communities interacted with each other. “You cannot compare the situation in Afghanistan to areas like Balkans, where the Serbs, the Croatians, the Bosnians all wanted to secede into their own different nations. You won’t find such a thing anywhere in Afghanistan. There is absolutely no secessional threat anywhere. [To put it quite simply] Afghan society coalesces in the face of external danger, and immediately degrades into mutual rivalry when they leave. People organised on ethnicity for practical purposes, and it was completely decoupled from the [Western] idea of nationalism,” Barfield writes in Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. The result is a loose anthropological equivalent of the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—it was literally impossible to predict who were allies and who were rivals were at any given point of time.

Take the case of the 1995-96 Taliban blitz into Kabul. By March, the Taliban had moved into Wardak and Maidan Shehr, on the doorsteps of Kabul, and also had their eyes set on Herat in the West. Hekmatyar, caught in an unenviable position between the surging hordes of Taliban and the implacable Tajiks in Kabul, jettisoned his position. By June 1996, Hekmatyar the ‘Pashtun whisperer’ had done a U-turn and allied with Massoud and the Tajiks in return for the post of the prime minister. Dostum, around the same period, shifted allegiances for the third time and allied with the Rabbani government.

The most illustrative case of the ethnic card-swaps were the Hazaras—the Hezb-i-Wahdat had aligned with Hekmatyar in the siege of Kabul, but once he deserted his positions with the arrival of the Taliban in 1995, the Shias made a rapid pact with the Sunni Islamists. The Hazaras were under merciless bombardment by Massoud’s forces; the latter had decided to pick off his enemies one by one, and had turned all his might on the Wahdat in the southern suburbs. As Rashid notes in Taliban, In the hectic exchange of positions between Taliban and the Hazaras, the latter’s foremost leader Abdul Mazari was killed. The Hazaras, who strongly believed that Mazari was duped and then killed by the Taliban, never forgot the betrayal, wrote Rashid.

Historically, there has always been bad blood between the Pashtuns and the Hazaras—in the time of the ‘Iron Amir’ Abdur Rahman Khan, the Pashtuns were patronised while the Hazaras were brutally repressed and sold openly on the streets as slaves. Anti-Hazara sentiment had carried through in the monarchy and even in the communist regimes. However, the ‘killing’ of Mazari would spark two massacres in Mazar-i-Sharif in the following years—Hazara-on-Pashtun violence and vice versa—which would set the tone for the next three decades of previously unseen Pashtun-Hazara and Sunni-Shia enmity in Afghanistan.

In August 1996, Taliban finally took Kabul. After a series of military setbacks, they had captured Herat, moved into Jalalabad and captured nearby provinces—in essence, they had Kabul surrounded from all sides. Massoud and his forces beat a hasty tactical retreat into his trusty citadel in the Panjshir Valley.

Panjshir has always served Massoud well. In his mujahideen years, Massoud was able to fight back the Soviet Red Army from the valley. Throughout the 1900s, Panjshir remained impregnable to the Taliban, a virtual thorn on their side. In September 2021, under a sustained Taliban assault, the valley fell. Casualties included top rebel leaders like Fahim Dashti, a long-time associate of Massoud, and General Abdul Wadud, nephew of Massoud. The whereabouts of Massoud's son Ahmad Massoud, and ousted vice president Amrulla Saleh are, at the time this article was published, unknown.

Read Part 1 of the series here

Read Part 3 of the series here