Taliban Dons - This Thing of Ours

[4est_4est_Gump]

Reports from Monday’s New York Times of the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) stepping up its ransom-kidnapping campaign are a reminder of one of the reasons we have failed to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and will continue to do so: Most of us believe that we are at war with a paramilitary outfit mainly inspired by a fundamentalist Deobandi interpretation of Islam. We are in fact engaged with a very different kind of entity: an organized-crime syndicate acting out of interests that are largely economic, rather than religious or ideological.

...

It is convenient to speak of “the Taliban,” though there is not one Taliban, but three distinct groups: the Pakistani Taliban and two Afghan Talibans, one a Kandahar-based organization under the command of Mullah Omar and the other a Paktia province–based organization under the less centralized command of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the latter group popularly known as the Haqqani network. Mullah Omar and his partisans claim that he is the undisputed supreme leader of all the Taliban, but many analysts describe the relationship between the groups as more of a loose affiliation, with the Pakistani and Haqqani networks having more diffused, less coherent leadership. The affiliation between the groups is in part religious, to be sure, but it is also strongly ethnic. Pashtunwali, or adherence to traditional Pashtun mores and habits (many of them pre-Islamic), is as much as part of the Taliban mindset as sharia, if not more so. The Pashtuns in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have never entirely accepted the legitimacy of any government in Kabul or Islamabad, and those governments have never given them strong reasons to do so, barely maintaining a presence in many of the tribal areas, entirely unable to provide basic public services or enforce law and order. Real governance of local affairs has long fallen on Pashtun tribal organizations, which provide security and dispense justice according to their own ancient (and lamentable) traditions.

A fiercely independent ethnic group, separated from a weak and distrusted central government by both culture and geography, united by tradition, language, religion, and tribal loyalties, and willing to use violence to have its way: Sounds like 19th-century Sicily.

...

The Taliban is an Islamic organization in much the same way that the Sicilian Mafia was a Catholic organization. Catholic Church authorities in 19th-century Sicily were at best ambivalent about the new unified Italian government, and for good reason: Its main activity in Sicily was expropriating church lands. In contrast, church authorities in Sicily had a relatively high level of trust and confidence in local institutions. By 1877, Gambetta reports, church-state relations were so strained that Pope Pius IX declared the Italian government illegitimate and forbade any Catholic from running for national office or voting in national elections, which had the effect of further elevating the importance of local political institutions, many if not most of of which were Mafia-controlled or Mafia-affiliated. The relationship between the Catholic Church and the Sicilian Mafia has long been a staple of bigoted anti-Catholic invective, but it is not without some factual basis. The two were bound by deep bonds of tribal loyalty, local tradition, and distrust of the remote central government — rather like today’s Taliban.

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In acting as a de facto local government, a crime syndicate, and an insurgent army simultaneously, the Taliban resembles another more contemporary organization, Colombia’s FARC. FARC’s commitment to revolutionary Marxism is in many ways similar to the Taliban’s commitment to revolutionary Islam, a mishmash of genuine belief, complex loyalties, common enemies, and pure self-interest. And both FARC and the Taliban (and other mujahideen remnants) are reminders to would-be nation-builders and great-gamers everywhere that once an apparatus of organized violence has been created, it has a tendency to far outlive its putative political or ideological purpose. Deprived of its original rationale, it will discover a new one. There is not going to be a Marxist takeover of South America, but FARC will continue its narcotics-trafficking operations (like the Taliban, it imposes a “tax” on illegal-drug production), its ransom-kidnapping operations, and its other purely economic activities. There isn’t going to be a worldwide Islamic caliphate, either, but the Taliban, like the Sicilian Mafia before it, will continue to engage in terrorism, political assassinations, and similar activities to support goals that are decreasingly political and increasingly economic (to the extent that a distinction can be made between the two).

The main alternative to the Afghan Taliban is the administration of Hamid Karzai, who runs the most successful mafia in Afghanistan, and whose reluctant godfather is us.

Kevin D. Williamson
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/291512

 

[Wat_Tyler]

What, only three families?


Omerta?


When's the movie coming out?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

After we declare victory and bug out...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

So, sometime in the 23rd century then?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

We will be out by the end of last year!





"As I said, we will be out of Afghanistan by the end of this year."
Barack Hussein Obama, January, 2011

 

[Wat_Tyler]

We will be out by the end of last year!





"As I said, we will be out of Afghanistan by the end of this year."
Barack Hussein Obama, Dictator-for-Life, January, 2311

fyp . . . .

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

A Hugo Chavez for a more hip-hop USA...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Even Iosef was slow to anoint himself as Generalissimo.


Molotov's nickname was Stone-Arse.