Another Different View of the Taliban

This article argues that the Taliban succeeded mainly because it was for resistance to foreign occupiers. With the US gone it has to fall back on its clerical command and control structure which raises the possibly of internal civil war among all its the various tribal, linguistic and communal identities not all of which have the same religious views as the Taliban clerics. 

Like this author I have a great deal of skepticism about the reality of the Afghan "nation state" beyond the few people who cooperated with Western allies. Once we pulled out and the phantom national army evaporated, there is little left to the "national state" other than a bunch of Westernized people whom most Afghans view as collaborators.

The coming collapse of the Taliban

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn\

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The Taliban should savor its triumph while it can, for it is unlikely to survive much beyond this fleeting moment of victory. And those countries in the region that are similarly disposed to celebrate America's defeat should also enjoy the moment while it lasts, for the coming collapse of the Taliban is likely to be more a curse than a blessing.

That the Taliban is unlikely to outlive the now-defunct Afghan national government (ANG) by much might seem a far-fetched claim. But the history of the movement - and that of the mujahedeen, which defeated the Soviets and their puppet regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s respectively - strongly suggests that this will almost certainly be the case.

Since its inception, the Taliban has been more a constellation of factions and tribes, drawn from different ethnic and linguistic groups, than the unitary rational actor it is often portrayed to be.

In this, it is no different than either the coalition of warlords that governed Afghanistan directly from 1992 to 1996 or the one that governed Afghanistan through the "state" created by the U.S. in the aftermath of the 2001 invasion. But it has always had two advantages over those two ruling coalitions.

To begin with, the Taliban has always had a clerical command-and-control infrastructure that transcended - without displacing or effacing - the tribal, linguistic and communal identities of its constituent elements. But perhaps even more importantly, since 2001 the Taliban has been able to exploit one of the defining elements of Afghan national identity - resistance to foreign occupiers - to override factional differences and maintain a robust political coalition.

These two unifying factors have always given the Taliban a clear advantage over an Afghan national government that was similarly divided but never able to tap into the religious or nationalist sentiment to anything like the same degree. They gave the Taliban a decisive advantage in 1996, when it took control of most of the country, and again after it reconstituted in the early 2000s and began challenging the newly minted ANG beginning in earnest in 2006.

Now, however, one of those unifying factors has evanesced. With the withdrawal of the American "occupier" and the defeat of its Afghan client state, some of the glue holding the Taliban together will soon dissolve.

And that prospect - of division leading to dissolution - has several implications for Afghanistan's regional neighbors 

First, it raises the prospect of civil war.

Second, should this happen, it raises the prospect of several disasters that are likely to spill over Afghanistan's borders - all to the detriment of its regional neighbors. These include a number of humanitarian crises, all culminating in destabilizing refugee flows that will be most unwelcome in Pakistan, Tajikistan and Iran, among others.

Third, if the Taliban splinters in the post-victory scramble for advantage, it raises the prospect of a single Afghan state being replaced by a patchwork of regional statelets overlaid with pockets of ungoverned or contested spaces.