What is the Taliban?
The Beginning – 1978-1996
The Taliban is a terrorist group that seized back control of Afghanistan’s government in August 2021.
The origin of the Afghan conflict dates back to 1978 when operatives of Afghanistan’s leftist/Communist Party assassinated the country’s president and set up a puppet government on behalf of the Soviet Union. One year later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support their new regime. To defend their Cold War interests, the United States supplied billions of dollars through a covert CIA operation based in Pakistan to support a resistance of Islamist-Afghan fighters who called themselves mujahideen, or “Soldiers of God.”
Over the decade of Soviet occupation, more than six million Afghans escaped to Pakistan and other countries. With few options for educating their children, refugees in Pakistan sent their boys, many of whom were orphans, to the Islamic seminaries, or madrassas, of Pakistan’s military government. The schools, with support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and several Gulf countries, offered room and board and fundamentalist instruction that framed the Soviet war in religious terms. Upon graduation, many Taliban students joined the mujahideen “in defense of Islam” to “remove infidel forces” from Afghanistan, with clandestine U.S. backing.
Seeking control over Afghanistan and influence in Central Asia against India, Pakistan moved to create a proxy force from the fundamentalist madrassas graduates, the fringes of Afghan society, the refugee camps, and the most radical remnants of the mujahideen.
The Soviets withdrew in 1989, and the United States then halted its aid too, declaring a Cold War victory. The resulting collapse of the remaining Afghan government in 1992 opened the way for a power struggle among the mujahideen – Afghan leaders who fought against the Soviet invasion – descended into civil war. The most extreme faction, the Taliban, emerged from the chaos of the civil war with the help of several countries, including Pakistan, and took power over Afghanistan in 1996.
The word Taliban means students in Pashto, and leaders of the movement were and are exclusively clerics, a majority of them not well educated in religion or non-religious subjects. All are noted for religious zealotry, links to terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, drug trafficking, and abhorrence of modern values and symbols. Many lack experience of the pre-war diverse culture of Afghanistan, having grown up in the all-male madrassas with women only existing as a remote presence in their lives.
With Pakistan’s generous cash support and training, the Taliban expanded its reach throughout Afghanistan, partly by denouncing corruption and took control of Kabul in September 1996.
While in power, the Taliban immediately closed schools for girls, banned women’s higher education, and set up a gender apartheid society. Violations were punished with public floggings, stonings, and executions. Afghanistan became a training ground for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, all bringing in significant resources and new energy to support the fundamentalist dictatorship. Worldwide condemnation ensued, and the only countries to recognize the new regime were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. After the Al Qaeda attack of the Twin Towers in New York City on 9/11/2001, the United States and its allies returned in force and ousted the Taliban at the end of 2001.
