Nir Rosen - Aftermath

The Shiite belief that succession to the Prophet Muhammad should run through his bloodline through his cousin and son-in-law Ali is viewed by the Saudi clergy and royal family as a threat to their power. Shiites in Saudi Arabia are considered subhuman, an official view that is promoted in state schools; they are not allowed to practice their religion in public. During Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, leading Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdallah bin Jabrin banned support for Hizballah. In December 2008 Saudi security forces fired rubber bullets at crowds of Shiites demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza. In 2009 the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca attacked Shiite clerics, calling them heretics. Even ordinary Shiites had no excuse for the ignorance and error of their beliefs, he said.

In Lebanon nothing has been resolved; the crisis has been merely further postponed. The 2009 elections were a slight setback for Hizballah’s Christian allies, but Hizballah lost no popularity, and all its candidates were elected. Although Hizballah’s Christian allies, led by Aoun, received the most votes among Christians, they were defeated thanks to some clever gerrymandering, which allowed Sunni voters to tilt the balance in favor of March 14 in Christian districts. But when the time came to apportion ministries, the Aoun movement received five, while Hariri’s Christian allies received only three.

In June 2009 Saad Hariri was sworn in as prime minister. The Syrians supported his election. The Saudis, who had begun their rapprochement with Syria earlier that year, pushed Hariri to visit Damascus and reconcile with the man he accused of killing his father. Hariri was now head of a national unity government, with Hizballah as his partner. But although Lebanon’s elites were governing together and even playing football matches, their constituency had not reconciled and remained at odds with one another. Sunnis, in particular, were still feeling humiliated and resentful. After the elections Dai al-Islam, Future’s main Salafi ally, expressed disappointment with the disrespect and neglect they felt Hariri was showing them.

The country’s volatile sectarian structure remained, as did its underlying social and economic injustices. The sectarian leaders who profit from the system—which forces these injustices to be expressed in sectarian and xenophobic language—remained too. The Palestinians remained without rights or hope. Nahr al-Barid remained under siege. No Palestinians had returned to the original old camp, while up to twenty thousand returned to the new one. The camp was now run by Lebanese army intelligence, which still arrested people and accused them of Fatah al-Islam membership. Humiliations and harassment continued at the checkpoints. Lebanon’s Sunnis remained bitter, though the state did begin taking aggressive action against my friends in Majd al-Anjar. Meanwhile, people waited for the next war with Israel.

ZE TALIBANO MILMAYAM: I AM A GUEST OF THE TALIBAN—IMPORTANT words to remember in Afghanistan. One Saturday afternoon in August 2008, two Taliban commanders met me in Kabul to take me to the Ghazni province, south of Afghanistan’s capital. The plan was to spend a week with various Taliban groups in areas they controlled. A well-connected Afghan friend I trusted had made the introductions. He knew many groups of fighters in Afghanistan, he said, but he would trust my security only with a group who knew that if anything happened to me, then they and their families would be killed. Contact had been made through a well-respected dignitary from Ghazni who connected us with Mullah Abdillah, a midlevel Taliban commander, who then contacted Mullah Baradar, the Taliban defense minister, and approved my trip.

Mullah Abdillah was a thin man with dark skin and a wispy beard that was long and tapered beneath his chin. He was quick to smile and looked like Bob Marley. He walked with a limp and was bandaged from a recent injury. He had come to Kabul to meet me a week earlier. I explained what I wanted to do. He promised to submit the request to his defense minister, but he was then called away on a mission to the north. I waited impatiently and nervously in my Kabul hotel to receive word about my trip, contemplating the many dangers and trying to ignore the admonitions of friends with more experience working in Afghanistan. Journalists had been able to access armed groups in the 1980s and ’90s, but now it was more dangerous. Afghan journalists were killed by the Taliban or arrested by the government if they succeeded in meeting the Taliban. In 2007 an Italian journalist was arrested by the Taliban; he was released at a price, but his driver and fixer were both murdered. In 2008 a British filmmaker, Sean Langan, was held for three months with his fixer, but both were eventually released. David Rohde of the New York Times also spent seven months in the company of the Taliban. Lack of access meant that very little was known or understood about the Taliban, one of the most important groups resisting the U.S. occupation.

The origins of the Taliban are in the jihad against the Soviets, who invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan backed seven Sunni Islamist parties who fought the Soviets. Many of these mujahideen were extremists, but there was a preference for radical Muslim groups over nationalist groups. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami (Islamic Party) received the most backing. Jalaluddin Haqqani was another commander who received backing from the West. Both were now fighting the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. The mujahideen were eventually successful, after the Soviets withdrew support for their quislings, and then the West forgot its proxies, who took to fighting among themselves and preying on the population. Into this postwar chaos stepped the Taliban.

The Taliban came from religious schools set up across the border in Pakistan. These schools provided a free religious education to millions of Afghan refugees and Pakistanis. Many of them helped to spread a radically strict form of Sunni Islam combined with Pashtunwali, the Pashtun tribal and social code of behavior. From a small core of devout religious students with rudimentary military skills, the Taliban grew into a vast state and military movement that controlled all but a fraction of Afghanistan. As the warlords were busy fighting one another and terrorizing Afghans, the Taliban seized their first town in 1993. Three years later they took Kabul. In 1998 the Taliban took the last major city in the north, Mazar-i-Sharif. The Pakistanis abandoned Hekmatyar in favor of the Taliban when they saw how successful the movement was. By 2001 less than 10 percent of Afghanistan remained in the hands of the Tajik Mujahideen, who continued a losing struggle against the Taliban until the Americans came to their rescue.

The Taliban have been portrayed as coming out of nowhere and rescuing a war-weary population that welcomed them because they were terrorized by warlords. In truth, most of the country was not in an anarchic state, although Kandahar and its environs were. In much of the country the Taliban had to fight its way into areas that were already at peace and where local services were better than anything the Taliban could provide. The Taliban even engaged in rape, murder, and massacres to conquer some areas. Some of their violence was ethnically motivated. In some places they violated Islamic laws of war with a scorched-earth policy. They even had a sex trade in Tajik girls. And while Kabul was not at peace, residents of the capital certainly did not welcome the arrival of the Taliban, who also bombarded the city. According to Afghan expert William Maley, “While the Taliban attempted to legitimate their power by reference to their provision of ‘security,’ with the passage of time it became clear that . . . they had made a wilderness and called it peace.”