Some overdue advice from Edward Said

Edward Said is not someone whom I often quote approvingly. But the last paragraph of his piece in the London Observer on the Sunday after the terrorist attacks ("Islam and the West are Inadequate Banners," 9/16/2001; reprinted as "There are Many Islams" in the Guardian Weekly for 9/20-26 and in CounterPunch) actually had something valuable and important to say:

'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly. Some will run behind them, but for future generations to condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual enlightenment seems far more wilful than necessary.

I'll second that. But I was especially struck by the last two sentences:

Demonisation of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering.

Unfortunately, I suspect that too many readers will take this as simply another criticism of so-called western "orientalism." It is actually a crucially important message for the Arab world--and for Arab intellectuals, both in the Middle East and abroad, as well as their sympathizers in the west and the former Third World--if they make an effort to hear it. And I believe that Said intended for it to be heard this way.

Nor, although Said is a little ambiguous (or misleading) in this respect, does this message apply only to Islamic extremists (and their apologists). Said suggests in this article that "the secular consciousness has to make itself felt" in both the US and the Middle East. But the crucial fact, which I suspect that Said understands very well, is that for half a century the "demonization of the Other," above all of Israel, has been THE central unifying focus of politics and political discourse in the Arab world--"left" or "right," "secular" or religious, "progressive" or reactionary, nationalist or Islamist. (There have been some honorable exceptions, among whom I would not include Said.) I can understand the reasons why it's hard for them to give it up. (It's less forgivable when this is ignored, whitewashed, or even encouraged by sympathizers in the west, from naive journalists and foreign-policy Arabists to alleged "progressives" and reflexive anti-Zionists). Unfortunately, this world-view has been poisonous and self-destructive for Arab societies themselves (and especially disastrous for the Palestinians).

Said could start by taking his own advice ... but I will hardly be holding my breath. Earlier in this same article, there is a passage, which would be mind-boggling if it weren't so familiar, that speaks of "the influence of the oil, defense, and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East...." The Zionist lobby consolidating its "hold on the entire Middle East"? Aside from the totally ludicrous character of this drivel, the language here is, at best, just a shade removed from that of good old classical anti-semitic propaganda. (Similarly, in the ideological circles that Timothy McVeigh used to frequent, the general consensus is that the U.S. is ruled by something called the Zionist Occupation Government, or ZOG.) But leaving that aside ...

If we take Said's last paragraph at face value, the basic advice is excellent. For example, if the Arabs (and their sympathizers) could genuinely begin to recognize that "demonization of the Other is not a basis for any decent politics," this would certainly be a huge step forward--and not only for the Arab-Israeli conflict. I am not optimistic (and, in fact, the recent outrageous fiasco in Durban is just one sign that things are actually getting worse in this respect); but one can always hope.

Cheers,
Jeff Weintraub

Michael Rubin - Why The Taliban Aren't so Tough (New Republic)

(P.S. from 2005: The message below was written in response to an article by Michael Rubin in the New Republic. Rubin, who had spent some time traveling in Afghanistan, argued that the Taliban's control of the country was much more fragile and insecure than most people, including informed people, thought at the time, and that they would not be able to stand up to a serious military challenge. My own impression was that Rubin was probably exaggerating the vulnerability of the Taliban's position and was too optimistic about the prospects for an anti-Taliban war. As it turned out, Rubin was right and all the rest of us were wrong. After some pounding by US air power and some military pressure from the ground forces of the Northern Alliance, supplemented by the machinations of a very small number of US Special Forces spread across Afghanistan, the entire structure of the Taliban regime collapsed suddenly, completely, and irreversibly. The fact that this was accomplished almost entirely by Afghan forces--backed up by US airpower, but with a minimal presence of US ground forces in the country--almost certainly helped explain why there was so little in the way of a nationalist or xenophobic reaction against the US intervention. But the fact that the Taliban were so deeply hated by most Afghans helped, too. --Jeff Weintraub
-------------------------------------

An interesting piece. Rubin is clearly intelligent and very well informed, and a lot of what he says rings true. He also brings out a lot of important background from recent history. For example, his account of how the Taliban took over the country, which had less to do with military power than with the effective co-optation of regional warlords, against a background of overall popular exasperation with the squabbling ex-Mujahedeen factions and generalized chaos and corruption, is right on the mark. Everything I know about Afghanistan supports his contention that the Taliban do not enjoy broad or deep support, and that they're potentially vulnerable in all sorts of ways.

Unfortunately, I can't fully agree with the optimistic conclusions that he seems to draw from all this. For one thing, while he accurately brings out the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the Taliban, it seems to me that he exaggerates the strength and potential effectiveness of the opposition coalition (the so-called Northern Alliance). The fact remains that the Taliban did evict the opposition factions from Kabul in a head-on military fight, and they've managed to take over and largely hold about nine-tenths of the country, even after all the opposing factions unified against them, and despite the fact that (until recently) the Alliance had the best military commander in the country. This is not encouraging.

Furthermore, if the Taliban regime were to collapse tomorrow, there's no reason to expect that the different factions in the Alliance (and the rest of the country) wouldn't immediately start fighting each other again. Could the U.S. avoid making the same mistake it made before--i.e., letting the intermediaries in Pakistani intelligence find and promote the most poisonous and fanatical tendencies in Afghanistan, most likely to cause long-term trouble for Afghanis and the rest of the world and to foment international terrorism? Well, the same people responsible for the past political disasters stemming from the ways that the Iraqi and Afghan wars were concluded and followed up happen to be running the U.S. government now (Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest) ... so I have to admit I don't have a great feeling of confidence here.

Furthermore, I remain convinced that it would probably be a long-term disaster to put American troops in Afghanistan for any significant length of time. The history of Afghanistan is that it's an internally fractious and feuding society, generally close to ungovernable (so the precarious hold of the Taliban on the country is par for the course) ... but also a society that generates massive violent responses against intrusions from the outside.

So I applaud most of Rubin's analysis, which is very illuminating ... but I confess that I feel less hopeful than he does about the practical options available, certainly in the short term. (Of course, Rubin no doubt knows Afghanistan much better than I do; but everything I know from other scholars and historians of Afghanistan that I respect confirms my pessimism about the practical options.)

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. The TNR editors did Rubin a disservice: the title should clearly be "Why the Taliban AREN'T so Tough."
-------------------------------------------


Weakest Link: Why the Taliban Isn't So Tough
By Michael Rubin

New Republic, October 1, 2001 [Posted on-line September 20, 2001]

In the spring of 2000, I toured Afghanistan in an unusual way: freely. Normally, the Taliban tightly control foreign visitors. Journalists are quarantined in Kabul's former Inter-continental Hotel, forced to use government translators, and escorted by official guides. I was not. I had grown a beard and I can get by in Persian, which most Afghans understand. And one morning I simply checked out of the hotel, hopped in a taxi, and wandered for more than a week by myself, interviewing teachers, policemen, gravediggers, merchants, the unemployed, and the Taliban themselves. And I discovered something unexpected, something often overlooked in the strategizing of recent days: The Taliban are weak. They lack the military muscle, popular support, and internal cohesion to hold up under sustained attack.

Many Americans forget that the Taliban--unlike say, Saddam in 1990 or Milosevic in 1999--don't control their entire country. Despite the September 9 assassination of its leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance--which controls a chunk of northeastern Afghanistan--remains a fierce foe. The Alliance shelled Kabul in the hours after the World Trade Center explosion. And it is common knowledge in Afghanistan that the Alliance--the only military force never to lose a battle to the Soviets--boasts the most experienced, and most loyal, troops in the country. In fact, fear of the Alliance is probably the chief reason the Taliban shelter Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden controls a military brigade of perhaps 700 well-equipped fighters, and unlike most government troops, they can be relied on not to flee in the heat of battle.

One reason the government's troops aren't battle-tested is that, for the most part, the Taliban didn't take Afghanistan by force of arms. The movement did win one early battle, taking Kandahar in 1994, probably with the help of the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence (ISI) agency. But its subsequent victories resulted largely from co-opting the opposition: promising warlords, exhausted by years of fighting, positions in the new government if they turned over their territories without resistance. I was lecturing at Balkh University in Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan in May 1997 when the Taliban marched on the city. Up until I was evacuated, a few hours ahead of the Taliban troops, no shot had been fired. The Taliban simply bought the support of a neighboring military commander--reportedly promising he could keep his fiefdom so long as he adopted basic Taliban ideology and acknowledged the party's overall supremacy.

One reason the warlords proved so pliant is that the Taliban enjoyed widespread, popular support when they took over. During the civil war, the pitted and potholed road from Jalalabad to Kabul was the scene of extortions, rapes, and murders by more than a dozen warlords. And the Taliban promised to end the anarchy. As one merchant in Ghazni, a large town between Kabul and Kandahar, recalled, "We thought, How bad could a bunch of religious students be?"

But five years later, the Taliban have not ended the civil war, and they have not ensured security. Residents of Kabul told me that members of the Taliban burglarize homes at night and steal residents' life savings. Last year party guards allegedly cleaned out hundreds of thousands of dollars from locked stalls in the money changer's section of the Kabul bazaar. As a result, support for the movement among ordinary Afghans has waned dramatically.

As political disillusionment has grown, it has fueled ethnic resentment as well. Most of the Taliban are Pushtun, an ethnic group that makes up 38 percent of Afghanistan and which is also well represented in Pakistan. And the party's radical interpretation of Islam is heavily influenced by the Pushtunwali, the austere Pushtun social code. By contrast, most residents of northern and western Afghanistan, as well as Kabul, speak a dialect of Persian. In the capital, the cultural tension is clear. Not only do Persian speakers have greater cultural ties to Iran and its partially pre-Islamic culture, but two centuries of interaction with Europeans have made Kabul a relatively cosmopolitan city. Partly as a result, the Taliban have singled out the capital for harsh treatment. One day while I was drinking tea with friends in a Kabul merchant's shop, the Taliban came roaring down the street in pickup trucks, ordering everyone to mosque. The shopkeeper calmly locked the door, closed the shades, and cursed the "Pakistanis." He explained that the local religious students are not bad--"they know how to respect their elders"--but the Pushtun Taliban are arrogant and hard to deal with.

Even the Taliban themselves are not united. Afghans in Kabul and Kandahar estimate that only 10 percent of the movement are hard-line followers of the group's spiritual leader, Mullah Omar (though this faction, with the dynamiting of the Buddhas at Bamiyan earlier this year, may be resurgent). Perhaps an additional 30 percent believe in Mullah Omar's message--a return to the austere Islam they think was practiced in the time of Mohammad--but realize that its implementation requires compromise, for instance, on the question of women's schooling. The rest of the Taliban, Afghans say, do not strongly support the regime, but have pledged loyalty, and grown beards, to keep their jobs. And that is within the party. The vast majority of Afghans are not members of the Taliban at all.

So it's not terribly surprising that, in the last couple of years, anti-government resistance has grown. In February 2000, well-armed locals rose up near Khost, a town in the southwestern Taliban heartland not far from the August 1998 U.S. cruise missile strike. The locals were upset by the Taliban's decision to appoint a governor who was foreign to the region, and the party quickly appointed a new candidate. Later that year the Taliban narrowly averted a similar uprising in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, by firing an overbearing governor. Opposition has traditionally been strongest in the north, but last year an opposition commander escaped from a Taliban prison and set up another pocket of resistance, reportedly in the southwestern province of Nimruz, near the Iranian border. When Mullah Omar preached last year in Kandahar that Afghanistan's ruinous drought was God's punishment for too little faith, many Afghans later commented that perhaps the drought was punishment for Mullah Omar.

In fact, much of the reason the Taliban stay afloat is external--in particular, support from Pakistan. In 2000 Afghanistan produced three-quarters of the world's opium, much of which it then exported into neighboring Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Iran. The smuggling of other commodities is also vital to the Taliban economy--for instance, hardwood harvested from northern Pakistan's old growth forests and destined for villas in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. As the wood travels through Afghanistan, the Taliban extract tolls. The Taliban also receive weapons and money from Pakistan's ISI agency, which hopes that by engaging the Taliban it can blunt Afghan support for ethnic separatism in Pakistan's predominantly Pushtun Northwest Frontier Province. Pakistan also fears that if it surrenders its influence in Afghanistan, regional rival Iran may fill the vacuum.

But although the government in Islamabad cannot fully control the ISI, its support for the Taliban looks set to substantially diminish. In the coming weeks, Pakistan will likely open its airspace to the United States, break off its relations with the Taliban, and at least make a show of sealing its border with Afghanistan. (While Pakistan sometimes complains that sealing such a long border is impossible, the country's campaign against wheat smuggling has proved otherwise: Islamabad's 1999 crackdown on the cross-border trade sent bread prices skyrocketing in Kabul, demonstrating that control of the rugged frontier is possible.) Pakistan's moves will weaken the Taliban. And a massive U.S. bombardment could weaken it further--perhaps prompting the Northern Alliance to march on Kabul and to pressure former Afghan warlords and government officials, now in exile in Iran and Uzbekistan, to reopen new pockets of resistance in other parts of the country. In 1999, when the United States devastated Belgrade and humiliated Milosevic, the Serbs eventually ousted him. In 1991, when the United States devastated Baghdad and humiliated Saddam, the Kurds and Shiites rose up, and might have toppled the regime had the United States not abandoned them. Historical parallels, of course, are never perfect. But the Taliban are no stronger than those two previous U.S. foes; in fact, they are probably weaker. And, needless to say, toppling them would be every bit as worthwhile.

MICHAEL RUBIN is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.