In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER FOUR The Rise of the Taliban

IN APRIL 1996, Mullah Muhammad Omar orchestrated a propaganda coup that rippled across the mujahideen community in Afghanistan. Omar was the leader of the Taliban, an upstart band of Islamic students who began to conquer territory in the mid-1990s from their base in southern Afghanistan. By April, they had captured Kandahar and its surrounding provinces and were preparing their siege of Kabul. In order to establish his ideological credentials and attract new recruits, Mullah Omar turned to the legend of the Prophet Muhammad’s cloak. The cloak was supposedly in Kandahar, housed in a shrine with ornate walls inlaid with intricately crafted tiles of bright blue, yellow, and green. Referred to as the Khirka Sharif, the shrine was considered one of the holiest places in Afghanistan. Behind the shrine stood the mausoleum of Ahmed Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani dynasty and, for many Afghans, father of the modern Afghan state.

For generations, Afghans in Kandahar had passed down legends about the cloak and Ahmed Shah. According to one version, Ahmed Shah traveled to Bokhara, a major center of Islamic scholarship and culture, and now a modern city in Central Asian Uzbekistan. He saw the sacred cloak of the Prophet Muhammad and wanted to bring it home. Ahmed Shah asked to “borrow” the cloak from its keepers, who politely refused, suspecting that he might not return it. After pondering for a few minutes, he pointed to a boulder in the ground and made a promise to the keepers. He said: “I will never take the cloak far from this boulder.” Relieved, the keepers let him take the cloak. Ahmed Shah kept his word, in a sense. He had the boulder taken out of the ground and carried back to Kandahar, along with the cloak, which he never returned. And he built a pedestal for the boulder next to the shrine. While the cloak has normally been hidden from public view, it has been worn on rare occasions. For instance, King Dost Muhammad Khan wore it when he declared jihad against the Sikh kingdom in Peshawar in 1834.

In April 1996, Mullah Omar, who had limited religious education but had fought with the Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islam during the Soviet War, attempted to legitimize his role as a religious leader.¹ He removed the cloak from the shrine and perched himself atop one of the buildings in the center of Kandahar City. As a large crowd gathered and the cloak flapped in the breeze, he wrapped and unwrapped the cloak from around his body. An Afghan legend decreed that whoever retrieved the cloak from the chest would be Amir al- Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful). Others in the Muslim world, however, had adopted this title even without the cloak. Hassan II, for example, who ascended the throne in Morocco in 1961, claimed direct descent from the Prophet and adopted the title Commander of the Faithful.² For Mullah Omar, claiming the authority of the cloak gave him influence among some Afghans who would now support the Taliban as a legitimate Muslim entity. The cloak ceremony ended with a declaration of jihad against Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government, and those present swore bayat (allegiance) to Mullah Omar. For many Afghans and Muslims, however, it was an outrageous insult. Omar was a poor village mullah with no scholarly learning, no prestigious tribal lineage, and no connections to the Prophet’s family.³

Mullah Omar’s self-appointment as Commander of the Faithful was supported by a few other organizations, including al Qa’ida. In his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, al Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri warmly referred to Mullah Omar as the Commander of the Faithful.⁴ Zawahiri later wrote: “May Allah grant long life to the people of Jihad and Ribat in Afghanistan, and may Allah grant long life to the Commander of the Faithful, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who didn’t sell his religion for worldly gain.”⁵ When Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid was announced as al Qa’ida’s new leader for the Afghan front, he began by pledging his personal allegiance to Mullah Omar as the Commander of the Faithful. Even Osama bin Laden swore allegiance, stating that the Taliban “are fighting America and its agents under the leadership of the Commander of the Believers, Mullah Omar, may Allah protect him.”⁶ This was perhaps done to ensure that the insular and xenophobic Afghans saw the insurgency as being led by Afghan mujahideen, and not by foreign Arabs.

Roots of the Taliban

The Taliban’s roots go back to Deobandism, a school of thought emanating from the Dar ul-Ulum madrassa in 1867 in Deoband, India, just north of Delhi. In some ways, the Deobandi approach was similar to that of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Deobandism followed a Salafist egalitarian model, seeking to emulate the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad. It held that a Muslim’s primary obligation and loyalty were to his religion, and loyalty to country was always secondary. Some Deobandis also believed they had a sacred right and obligation to wage jihad to protect the Muslims of any country. The Deobandi madrassas were prominent and well established throughout northwest India, notably in the territories that would later become Pakistan.⁷ The Deobandis trained a corps of ulema (Islamic scholars) capable of issuing fatwas (legal rulings) on all aspects of daily life. The ulema would monitor society’s conformity with the prescriptions of Islam and rigorously and conservatively interpret religious doctrine.

Following Pakistan’s independence in 1947, a variety of religious factions campaigned for full Islamization of the new nation. One faction was rooted in the works of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, whose first book, Jihad in Islam, was published in the 1920s. His family had a longstanding tradition of spiritual leadership, and a number of his ancestors were leaders of Sufi orders. Maududi, born in India in 1903, was homeschooled and became a journalist, writing for Indian newspapers such as Muslim and al-Jam’iyat. Maududi favored what he called “Islamization from above,” in which sovereignty would be exercised in the name of Allah, and sharia law would be implemented in society. He declared that politics was “an integral, inseparable part of the Islamic faith, and that the Islamic state that Muslim political action seeks to build is a panacea for all their problems.”⁸ For Maududi, the five traditional pillars of Islam—shahada (profession of faith), salat (prayer), sawm (fasting during Ramadan), hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), and zakat (almsgiving)—were merely phases of preparation for jihad. To carry out jihad, Maududi founded Jamiat-e-Islami in 1941, which he saw as the vanguard of an Islamic revolution. The party envisioned the establishment of an Islamic state governed by Islamic law and opposed such Western practices as capitalism and socialism.

In addition to Jamiat-e-Islami, there were several political parties that gave expression to the special interests of their own professional groups and networks of pupils. One of the main groups was Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam, a Deobandi offshoot. Established in 1945, it was the largest Deobandi-based party. Its two principal factions were led for a long time by Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Maulana Sami ul-Haq. The radicalization of the Deobandi movements was later nurtured by Pakistan to support militant Islamic groups in Kashmir and Afghanistan, as well as to counter Shi’ites in Pakistan.⁹ The Deobandis also benefited from Saudi bankrolling since the Saudis were keenly interested in helping build madrassas. Prominent Deobandis embraced an impoverished younger generation with little hope of climbing the social ladder, and violence became their main form of expression.¹⁰

Deobandi madrassas flourished across South Asia during this period, but they were not officially supported or sanctioned until Pakistan President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a fervent admirer of Maududi, assumed control of the Pakistan government in 1977. He remained president until August 1988, when he died in a mysterious plane crash that also killed U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel and General Herbert Wassom, the senior Pentagon official in Pakistan.

Zia made implementation of sharia law the ideological cornerstone of his eleven- year dictatorship. One of his most significant steps was the creation of the International Islamic University in 1980 in Islamabad, where the leading Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood gathered. Zia promoted Islamism to the status of an official state ideology, and Jamiat-e-Islami was rewarded with ministerial responsibilities and significant aid. Zia adopted several Islamization measures, including an examination of all existing laws to verify their conformity with sharia, the introduction of an Islamic penal code that included corporal punishment, and the Islamization of education.¹¹ In addition, Zia’s government levied a 2.5 percent tax on bank accounts each year during Ramadan for zakat. This “legalized” almsgiving had previously been treated as a private matter in most Muslim countries. The funds raised by zakat served to finance the madrassas, which were controlled by the ulemas, many of whom were linked to the Deobandi movement.¹² Indeed, Zia encouraged the financing and construction of hundreds of madrassas along the Afghan frontier to educate young Afghans and Pakistanis in Islam’s precepts and to prepare some of them for