By Ankit Panda
The “Taliban” label no longer applies to a single, monolithic entity in Afghanistan.
A recent Washington Post report on Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgency highlighted a fact about the nature of the Taliban that should have been obivous for some time. The group has, for a considerable amount of time now, lost its monolithic identity. Not all members of the Taliban in 2015 resemble the caricatured ultra-religious fundamentalists the world came to know in the late-1990s and early-2000s. The report, for example, begins with a portrait of Taliban in the northern areas of Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province, where the leadership “allows girls to attend school” and the “fighters are not Pashtun.” “The Taliban here are against the ideology of the Taliban in the south,” notes one former Taliban member. WaPo hits home the point by noting that this former member “has a Facebook page, tweets regularly and wears a beanie emblazoned with ‘NY.’”
In fact, the dynamic identified in the report has long been at play in Afghanistan. In particular, it is one of the major reasons initial attempts at a U.S.-brokered peace process in Doha, Qatar between the Afghan government and the Taliban failed. The Afghan government at the time, furious at the Taliban’s attempt to portray itself as a “government-in-exile” in Qatar, wanted guarantees that no attacks would occur. This was something the Taliban “leadership” in Qatar could not grant even if they wanted to, simply because the hierarchical chain-of-command within the Taliban that existed up until the late-2000s at best had broken down in favor of localized factions identifying as “Taliban.” To be sure, these groups maintained their overarching allegiance to Mullah Omar, the group’s patriarch and spiritual leader, and also resisted Afghanistan’s governance. Nevertheless, in areas where these groups maintained control, there was no standard practice in terms of social or economic order.
Read the full story at The Diplomat