Who are the "Taliban"?

Juan Cole has been making the point for some time now that the groups who are coded as "Taliban" in US government statements and in press reports on the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan are actually not the same group as the Taliban government and movement ousted from power in 2001 by the US and the Northern Alliance. In Negotiations in Afghanistan? Iran, Hikmatyar said to Be in Play Informed Comment 02/27/09, he explains:

What we now call the "Taliban" are actually 5 distinct groups and movements: 1) The Old Taliban of Mulla Omar, now based in Quetta, Pakistan; 2) the Hizb-i Islami [Islamic Party] of former prime minister and warlord, Gulbadin Hikmatyar; 3) the followers of warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani; 4) the Taliban Movement of Pakistan in that country's tribal agencies; and 5) disgruntled Pushtun villagers who object to foreign troops on their soil or whose poppy crops were forcibly eradicated, leaving them destitute. Hikmatyar and Haqqani at one time or another were opposed to the Old Taliban, but have now allied with them. According to the Pajhwok News Network, a joint US and Afghan patrol targeted a militant of the Haqqani group near Khost on Thursday, capturing 6 militants and some light arms.

Gulbadin Hikmatyar has been around for a while. Back in the 1980s, he was one of our allies in the fight of the brave, fiercely independent mujahideen (now known as Muslim terrorists) against the Soviet Union. He sided with the US-Northern Alliance war against the Taliban government. Now he's fighting against the US and NATO.

The American press and much of the pundit and even expert commentary on the Afghanistan War take it for granted that we are fighting a counterinsurgency war against the "Taliban" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it wasn't the Taliban that attacked the US on 9/11/2001. They were certainly allied with Al Qa'ida and refused to cooperate with the US in capturing Bin Laden and his group.

The mission in Afghanistan has gone from being a war to kill or capture Bin Laden and his Al Qa'ida fighters in their safe havens in Afghanistan, to being a war to oust the Taliban government in cooperation with the Northern Alliance (which the US and most of the world still recognized as the legitimate government of Afghanistan) to being a protracted, years-long counterinsurgency war against the Afghan "Taliban" (which as Cole says isn't really the same as what people knew as the Taliban in 2001), to a counterinsurgency war in both Afghanistan and Pakistan against the collection of groups that Cole identifies with a version of the "war on drugs" mixed in with it.

Bin Laden is still at large and presumed alive. But whether his Al Qa'ida organization as it existed in 2001 still functions is questionable. That's not to say that we shouldn't be pursuing Bin Laden, we certainly should. We should also be taking useful measures in both defense and in foreign policy to deal with the problems of domestic and transnational terrorism aimed at the US.

But what we're doing in Afghanistan now is worse than a dead end. The US needs to find a way to phase our troops and NATO's out of Afghanistan as quickly as we reasonably can. Right now, the Obama administration is escalating instead. But while I disagree with that approach, the statements coming out of the administration indicate that they haven't finalized their own strategic approach in Afghanistan.

That same post of Cole's discusses continuing reports of peace negotiations with some of the Pushtun guerrilla groups. And also on the common practical interest of the US and Iran in ending the conflict in Afghanistan. There seem to be some great possibilities here to start exiting Afghanistan and improve relations with Iran in the process. Unlike the Cheney-Bush administration, the Obama administration actually is approaching foreign policy as more than war and the threat of war.

Tags: afghanistan war, obama administration