America Has Been in Denial about the Taliban from the Start By Andrew C. McCarthy
For 20 years, some of us have been countering that you can’t defeat the enemy without understanding that they are the enemy, and what they believe.
U nless your name happens to be Andrew Cuomo, you can’t be happy about the headline-grabbing attention the Taliban have gotten over the last ten days.
Since they emerged a quarter-century ago, the Taliban have commanded the attention of Americans incessantly. They’ve probably never had it quite like they have it now, though. Even after the essential role they played in the 9/11 atrocities, our sights were mainly fixed on al-Qaeda — fixed on the hands-on terrorists, not the knowing and willing terrorist hosts.
And that’s the main problem: Our government and the commentariat, even now, continue to speak as if there were a difference.
No matter how much they’ve told us who they are over the years, we see the Taliban of our hopeful imagination rather than the Taliban who, through remorseless word and deed, have always proved exactly who they are.
Oh, we’ve condemned the Taliban’s “extremism” — though it is verboten to say just what it is they are so extreme about. The cruel hudud penalties that they so enthusiastically execute have been undeniably established in sharia law for a millennium . . . which is why the Taliban are far from alone in enforcing and justifying them.
Still, in our well-meaning way, we’ve been as dogmatic as the Taliban.
President Obama insisted that violent jihadism is not reflective of any authentic construction of Islam. President Bush insisted that freedom is the longing of every human heart. Neither of these things is true in principle, and the Taliban are demonstrative proof of their falsity.
The Taliban are scholars and students of sharia (Islam’s ancient law and societal framework). They know much more about the subject than Obama. And while it is obvious that many people long for things other than freedom, it is even more obvious that the Taliban know what is in what passes for their own hearts, and those of other fundamentalist Muslims, better than Bush ever could. As it happens, the Taliban abominate the Western ideal of freedom. It contradicts their basic conceit that the good life calls for perfect submission to sharia — the opposite of freedom.
Now, being wrong about basic things would not be such a problem if Obama and Bush had been expressing mere opinions. Alas, for them and the governments they superintended, their delusions were articles of faith, on which they were as implacable as the Taliban are about their own articles of faith. The bigger problem is that Obama and Bush — and, indeed, every American administration from Clinton through Biden — based U.S. government policy on their delusions, in essence saying, “Never mind what the Taliban tell us about themselves. We know better.”
Thus, the ludicrous foundation of American policy on Afghanistan for a generation has been that the Taliban are not what they are — jihadist enemies of the United States who are committed to a sharia-supremacist worldview, which holds that establishing sharia law and mores everywhere is the highest duty. The Taliban hewed to an interpretation of Islam that Obama refused to acknowledge as authentic, its support by 14 centuries of revered Muslim scholarship notwithstanding. The Taliban denied that there is a relentless human urge for freedom, maintaining, to the contrary, that the rejection of sharia is intolerably sinful. They were unabashed on these points.
Nevertheless, it became incorrigible American policy to say, “Don’t worry, they’ll come around.” Not, “Gee, the Taliban really seem to believe this stuff. Maybe we should check our premises — since, after all, we are making Taliban policy.” No matter which party was in charge, our position was that, eventually, the Taliban — and all of fundamentalist, tribal Afghanistan — were going to have an epiphany regarding the imperative of freedom, as well as society’s vital need for a legal framework that safeguards civil liberties and equality for every citizen.
Every citizen. So immovable are we in our enlightened beliefs and their presumed attractiveness to everyone that a quarter-century later, we don’t even know our enemies well enough to grasp that, very basically, sharia-supremacists don’t do “citizen” as we construe that concept. It is foreign to their understanding of how society works.
We persist anyway: We talk to fundamentalist Muslim societies about the nation-state, representative government, self-determination, the right to vote, legislators who advocate for their constituents’ interests. Understand: When we do this, we are speaking about our aspirations for them. It is not enough to say we’re not addressing their aspirations for themselves. We’re speaking in Western terms they find alien — even hostile.
Let me make two points, one philosophical, the other historical.
I observed earlier this week that, in its shameful 2020 agreement with the Taliban, the Trump administration submitted to the Islamists’ demand to be referred to as “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” This was a crucial concession, about which many in our government are clueless — though Trump’s envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, could not be. (Ambassador Khalilzad is an ethnic Pashtun who grew up in Kabul — and whose fascinating course on Middle East politics I was fortunate to take as an undergrad at Columbia, right as Iran was exploding in an Islamist revolution.)
In 2004, as Bush’s envoy, Khalilzad drafted the internally contradictory sharia-democracy constitution for what was denominated the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. A republic is a representative democracy, in which officials press the interests of citizens who elect them — their constituents. The Taliban, in stark contrast, want to be known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan because an emirate is a territory controlled by sharia, not self-determining democracy. It is led by an emir, who is not a representative but a ruler. The people ruled by the emir are not citizens but subjects. The subjects are not constituents; the emir does not press their interests.
In an emirate, the subjects’ only legitimate interest is that sharia is established and administered. As long as the emir faithfully administers the dictates of Allah’s law, the subjects’ obligation is to obey. Moreover, in sharia-supremacism, the ultimate aim is a caliphate — a global sharia authority that is eventually to be established by knitting together the emirates.
This is the Taliban’s philosophy. The Trump administration legitimized it, however unintentionally, by indulging the “emirate” designation. That is inexcusable, but this is not solely Trump’s dereliction.
When it comes to the Taliban, which were forged by Islamist elements of the Pakistani government in the mid ’90s, every American administration since Clinton’s has looked the other way. It has been the policy of the United States, since the Bush administration responded to 9/11, that the only practical solution in Afghanistan is one in which all significant factions in the country, the Taliban included, compromise on a political settlement in which they jointly decide the country’s future democratically.
But the Taliban do not accept the republican form of government. They don’t just oppose it. Their raison d’etre is to fight it and establish their fundamentalist construction of sharia. Completely heedless of this, our government’s policy, irrationally but immovably, has been that the Taliban must be negotiated with, and that they will ultimately see the good sense in joining a representative republic in which their concerns — just like the concerns of Afghans who want Western liberalism — will be heard.
That’s nuts . . . but the Bush State Department dreamily longed for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban nevertheless. Obama facilitated a Taliban presence in Doha based on the lunatic premise that this would forge a political solution in which the Taliban would join the U.S.-backed republic in Kabul. Trump struck an agreement with the Taliban based on the inanity that the Taliban would negotiate with the U.S.-backed government . . . despite the Taliban’s adamantine refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the U.S.-backed government (a refusal Trump indulged, in his haste to withdraw forces, by excluding the U.S.-backed government in making his irresponsible agreement with the Taliban).
The Biden administration is only the latest to spout the standard transnational-progressive pap that there must be a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan because (all together now!) there is no military solution. The Taliban, in the meantime, refused to negotiate with the Afghan government and methodically went about imposing a military solution, aided and abetted by Biden’s dismantling of the logistical support that the Afghan armed forces needed in order to function — precisely because of how they were designed by the U.S. military over the last 20 years.
Now some history.
Do you know why there’s an al-Qaeda? Like all Sunni jihadist organizations that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century, al-Qaeda was powerfully influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. It shares the same ultimate goal: the global implementation of sharia. But al-Qaeda and other Sunni jihadists separated themselves from the Brotherhood over important strategic differences.
For the Brotherhood, violent jihad is just one method out of many for advancing the cause. In most circumstances, the more effective method is to feign moderation for the purpose of ingratiating, negotiating with, and even infiltrating non-Muslim governments, making the latter more amenable to gradual acceptance of sharia.
The jihadist groups that separated themselves from the Brotherhood reject this strategy. It is not just that they are young men in a hurry, catalyzed by jihadist fervor. As a matter of principle, they believe it is doubly corrupting to negotiate with, strike compromises with, and join in hostile governments (particularly deemed “hostile” are Western governments and non-sharia regimes in Muslim countries). For these jihadist groups, to engage the way the Brotherhood does not only legitimizes non-sharia governments; it diminishes the Muslim resolve to fulfill the duty of establishing Allah’s law.
In this strategic divide between sharia-supremacist organizations, the Taliban come out emphatically on al-Qaeda’s side, not the Brotherhood’s.
“But wait a minute,” you may be thinking, “The Taliban negotiated with the United States.” Ah, but that’s a different kind of negotiation. Warring parties frequently bargain. Our government’s delusions on the subject notwithstanding, the Taliban did not negotiate with the United States on the future of Afghanistan. It bargained for prisoner exchanges and, especially, for the departure of our forces from their country. Under sharia, Muslims are required to drive occupying non-Muslim forces from Muslim territory and to obtain the release of Muslims detained by non-Muslims; but they are only required to do it by force to the extent force is necessary. If bargaining gets the enemy to surrender without additional fighting, you bargain.
The key here is that the Taliban never agreed to accept the U.S.-backed “Islamic republic” in Kabul. Never. That was why Trump, in order to strike that awful written agreement with the Taliban that he was desperate to have (so he could say he was “ending” the “forever war”), had to exclude the Kabul regime and recklessly agree to the release of thousands of prisoners. The Taliban were determined to establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. That was non-negotiable. The dismantling of the “republic” was non-negotiable.
For 20 years, American administrations of both parties made the objective of Afghanistan policy something that was never, ever going to happen — a negotiated political solution for an inclusive, pluralistic government. The core assumption of that policy was a Taliban that has never existed — a mere political group whose ostensible jihadism was just a posture, whose alliances with like-minded jihadists could readily be broken, and who could be bribed into farcical sharia-democracy by being given a seat at the table.
For 20 years, some of us have been countering that you can’t defeat the enemy without understanding a) that they are the enemy, and b) what they believe. Knowing the enemy is a basic requirement of national defense. It is not a step that can be skipped over because the prospect of critically examining an animating ideology with roots in a religious doctrine makes us queasy. Makes us fearful of offending. Makes us vulnerable to demagogic charges of racism and colonialism.
Our well-meaning government decided it could skip that step with the Taliban. We’re seeing the result.
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