Alex Strick van Linschoten - The Taliban Reader: War, Islam and Politics in their Own Words

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Alex Strick Van Linschoten Felix Kuehn 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alex Strick Van Linschoten Felix Kuehn.

Title: The Taliban Reader: War, Islam and Politics / Alex Strick Van Linschoten Felix Kuehn.

ISBN 9780190908744 (print)

ISBN 9780190934835 (updf)

ISBN 9780190935054 (epub)

For Scharlette

We can divide the things we may never know about the Talibans Islamic Emirate of 19962001 into two broad categories: that which we wont know because we dont have the information, and that which we wont know because the Talibans experiment was cut short by international intervention in late 2001.

As a project in the making, there is no solving the mystery of Taliban intentionality. Not only were they engaged in a serious internal conflict until the very end of the Emirate, but the movement itself was in a state of flux. Capturing their goals and intentions in hindsight will only ever reveal a partial picture, one perspective on a set of opinions and processes that had not yet developed or consolidated. Anyone who claims to be able to tell you what the Taliban wanted and what their ultimate goal was during their rule should be viewed with great caution. Similarly, while it is important to understand the history of the Taliban, attempts to deduce what the post-2001 Taliban want(ed) based on what they wanted pre-2001 will in most cases lead to a deeply flawed perspective on the movement and its goals.

Analysts and journalists often consider much of the Talibans thinking and policy to be static; policies implemented pre-2001 thus must be the same post-2001. Instead of a blueprint, the past offers a roadmap. Groups change as they face challenges, evolve in size and organisational structure, seize power and lose it, and interact in a complex system with other groups. New norms form and old ones dissipate.

The Taliban, much like any other group, is subject to the same processes. Had they continued to rule Afghanistan, instead of being ousted and starting an insurgency, their evolution arguably would have looked different. The movement was removed before it matured. Today it is hard to imagine alternative trajectories that the Taliban could have taken at the time. Reconstructing the past becomes increasingly difficult as senior figures associated with the movement pass away or are killed. This makes the gathering of oral histories and testimony harder, especially in the given context of the continued conflict where even the not-so-recent past remains a matter of political debate. Individuals who share their recollections about the past have to consider the possible repercussions. Still, memoirs are being written and others gather the remnants of their past in other archival projects. They offer small windows into Afghanistans history and the history of the Taliban.

The Taliban Reader is a collection of statements by those associated with the Taliban movement. The vast majority were published on outlets run by the Taliban, whether newspapers controlled by them in the 1990s or websites in their insurgent guise post-2001. This collection of primary source material fills a hole in the literature and is intended to serve as a reference work for scholars, students and practitioners alike. The material is sorted into broad chronological periods and then, inside each of those, is organised thematically.

In an environment where rumour and supposition often take the place of fact, this collection of Taliban statements is a first step in constructing the foundation on which scholars, academics and students can build their understanding. Reports, articles and even books that rely purely on secondary source materials are commonplace for Taliban studies. Fieldwork is often an afterthought or skipped entirely. This might have been less of a problem if the body of primary source materials was rich and mature following years of collection, but unfortunately this has not been a priority.

A researcher who decides to seek out proactively the kinds of materials assembled in this book will have to overcome several hurdles. The Talibans website is frequently taken offline, and old articles get purged from the indexes. This means that many statements or online magazines live on only in the private archives of individuals. Books and memoirs are written by members of the Taliban (or those who came into their orbit) but they are sometimes hard to find and rarely make it into university collections, with only a very few (mostly private collectors) purchasing all of them. The language barrier also poses a formidable challenge.

We will return to the need for primary-source-based research, but it would seem self-evident that a rigorous study of history requires such materials in order to begin useful analysis, to begin sifting through the meaning of complex patterns of events. Viewing the full swathe of Taliban output during their most recent activities also allows for the perception of continuities and differences that would otherwise have remained imperceptible. This is particularly the case for highly-politicised subjects, where skipping the commentary might save one from falling for a commonly-held myth. Primary source work should be where research work begins.

We first began our formal work in Afghanistan in 2006 with a project that sought to provide access to primary source materials. AfghanWire was a media translation service, a daily newsletter filled with English-language versions of articles published in local media outlets. During that process, we read of the publication of Mullah Zaeefs Guantnamo memoir in one of Kabuls newspapers and began the long process of researching, editing and working with translators to bring that material to a wider audience. Part of that led us down to Kandahar, where the paucity of materials relating to the 1980s war against the Soviets saw us begin a kind of oral history project. We gathered dozens of testimonies from participants, many of whom had never told their stories before.