The Taliban - Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group - Podcast

Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security. We begin with Chapter One: The Landscape, The People, and Islamism.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE TALIBAN IN DEFEAT
            Chapter three was a brief portrait of Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule from 1996 to 2001. Chapter four will cover the Taliban after their expulsion from Afghanistan, when the group was revived, armed, and once again lethal.
             The US Prepares to Attack
            The Taliban expected the United States to retaliate for hosting bin Laden, but they were optimistic about their prospects. As mujahedin, many of the Taliban’s senior leaders had engaged Soviet armor and artillery in the 1980s, and some would storm through Afghan cities as Taliban leaders in the 1990s. In autumn 2001, the Taliban were emboldened by religious zeal and nationalist hubris and challenged the United States to deploy to Afghanistan. US Special Forces would soon oblige. Al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, disparaged the fighting qualities of American men. He airily asserted, “The American soldier is not fit for combat. The Hollywood promotion will not succeed on the real battlefield.” Other Muslims shared this disdain because the United States had left Somalia and Lebanon in defeat. Islamist élan had defeated Washington and could do so again.
            Jingoism, religious fervor, and the prestige associated with battle drew young Afghan and Pakistani men to swell the ranks of the Taliban, literally by the busload. Trickle, then pour, through the open borders, Pakistani volunteers came to Afghanistan to fight America in a holy war. Caravans of buses, cars, motorcycles, and harlequin-colored jingle trucks ferried aspiring fighters from the Pakistani town of Quetta and the Chaman crossing to points north into Afghanistan. Much of “Pashtunistan” held solidarity with the insurgents as America prepared to invade Afghanistan in 2001.
            In Pakistan, public opinion, particularly among the clergy and intelligentsia, was loudly opposed to US military action against Afghanistan. The streets of Pakistan’s cities teemed with placard-wielding protesters railing against American intervention. Many screamed for battle. An al Qaeda leader clarified, “The mujahedeen gathered from all countries…to fight this new global Crusader alliance and their hypocritical lackeys, mercenaries, and highway bandits…The proud Afghan people fights for its (sic) faith.” 
            Some were clamoring for battle, but not all Afghans had an appetite for war. Many were drained and war-weary, and they remembered well the devastating effects of the Soviet and civil wars. Middle-aged men and women recalled the privations they endured as youngsters and, a generation later, now feared for the safety of their own children. Some were mystified as they should brace for an American invasion in response to attacks perpetrated by unwanted Arab guests who had long overstayed their welcome.
            Furthermore, some Afghans detested the Arabs they knew. The Arab-speaking cadre who came to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets often did not learn the local customs or language, made little effort to socialize, and seemed overweening and patronizing toward indigenous Afghans. 
            As in Afghanistan, there was divided opinion in America about hastening to war. Muslim and left-oriented university student groups deprecated what they considered President Bush’s chauvinism. At a venue long associated with utopian pacifism and multiculturalism, more than 2,500 demonstrators on the University of California-Berkeley campus cautioned against a military response. As an example, one student pleaded, "You don't want the hand of the United States killing innocent civilians. Send them food rather than bombs.” Afghans would get both.
            There were echoes of the 1960s in the media, intellectual circles, and academia, as many opinion-makers counseled against war. But there was little smash-mouthed, anti-Americanism of the earlier, radical era. The rhetoric was more dispassionate. Gary Sick, who advised President Carter on the National Security Council, recommended stringent sanctions to force the Taliban’s hand, and Steven Zunes warned that military attacks would enrage and embolden Muslims around the world. Richard Falk of Princeton put the onus on the Bush administration to comply with the Taliban’s demands to provide evidence that bin Laden was culpable for the attack. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) took out magazine ads decrying US military action in Afghanistan.
            Critics in Congress voiced early concerns. Representative Cynthia A. McKinney accused the U.S. media of disseminating only “white noise.” She said in late October 2001, “I don't think anybody is supporting the Taliban, except maybe some elements of the State Department and the CIA” while, in her view, the military was contaminating the nation’s moral hygiene with its push to war. She also accused the Bush administration of having received advance warning of the September attack and intentionally failing to act.
            But most Americans were resigned to, and many were eagerly anticipating, meting out punishment against those culpable for attacking America. And they were convinced that this would be a just war. When the fighting started, the United States did send food, as well as clothing, medicine, and basic provisions, to the Afghan non-combatants. But the US Air Force also dropped bombs to kill the Taliban who would not surrender.
            At this time, President Bush pledged to eradicate the terrorist networks in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He famously declared, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." He underscored that these demands were not negotiable and that individuals and groups that collaborated with al Qaeda were subject to attack.
            As this was happening, the Pentagon organized for war. Veteran B-52 bombers, a workhorse in the Southeast Asian war, were prepped for action in Afghanistan. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen were readied, as war planners looked to history for lessons on how to fight in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was determined not to repeat the mistakes of other invaders of Afghanistan. He pledged to use the full spectrum of military power, but it was unclear whom the United States would be fighting. Not all of bin Laden's forces and training camps were co-located with Afghanistan’s military rulers. The United States needed more intelligence.
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening

Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
 
Sanctions and Hostilities
            Imposing sanctions on the Taliban was an intermediate response between rhetoric and war.  International organizations and individual states applied financial and military sanctions of Afghanistan. Many governments restricted travel by Taliban officials and downgraded their diplomatic missions abroad.
            Either through miscalculation or with the unexplained intention of being provocative, the Taliban unchained bin Laden, allowing him to be interviewed by Western journalists.  Once again, he claimed the right to use large-scale weapons against Western targets. After he did so in September 2001, he became the most-wanted man in the world by American authorities.
            American leaders demanded his extradition, but the Taliban balked, offering rococo explanations of Islamic mandates and Afghan customs. Gratuitously, the Taliban’s foreign minister boasted that the Taliban would never deport bin Laden. “We will not hand him to an infidel nation.”  True to their word, the Taliban never did yield him, continuing to cavil and balk. But US authorities were determined to kill or capture him.
 
            President Bush and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld swore to destroy the Taliban unless they surrendered bin Laden immediately.  In stormy discussions, US Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin bluntly expressed to Pakistani President Musharraf “that the September 11 attacks had ended the debate about the Taliban, who were now considered an enemy of the US.” Secretary of State Colin Powell cautioned the Taliban end their torpor and “think properly.” Pakistan was cooperating with the United States, and the Central Asian states were offering Washington staging grounds. The Iranians were quiet on the issue. Only Iraq “didn’t find what happened to us a tragedy.”  President Bush offered to spare the Taliban from war if they extradited bin Laden. They declined, scuppering the talks.
 
Chapter Summary
            The Taliban took advantage of a late 20th century power vacuum in Afghanistan to expand their areas of influence quickly. The Taliban have four, basic, defining characteristics. They are Salafists, which refers to their illiberal view of Islam; they are Pashtuns, which refers to their ethnicity and social code; they are isolated, which helps to explain their philosophy, ethnic supremacy, and xenophobia; and totalitarian, they intend to monitor all aspects of human behavior.
            Taliban’s domestic policies from 1996-2001 would likely be replicated should Omar seize power again.  The rule of the Taliban threw the Afghanistan into a miasma of mullah-imposed viciousness.  The few economic and social gains of the 1970s, which were sincerely pursued by a relatively progressive head of state, were eliminated. The status of women declined; there was economic entropy; the civil service was stripped of all elements of professionalism; fewer Afghans could move or communicate; standards in education and health plummeted.  Much of life was dreary, and Afghans were dispirited.  Nonetheless, most of the country was secure, and the mass killings ended with the cessation of the civil war. 
            The attacks of September 2001 galvanized America, but the Taliban continued to be nonchalant under American threats.  An obliging host, Mullah Omar refused to surrender Osama bin Laden. In consequence, President Bush prepared America for war.
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
                                                                     

            Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
               If there is any human development sector in which the Taliban’s tenure was not an unmitigated catastrophe, it is the security sector. The Taliban’s victory ended the civil war in 1996. In this sense, they increased security in Afghanistan. The mass, unregulated killings were stopped. But this came at a cost of fear-induced social paralysis. The Taliban offered only the eerie and sullen calm of effective autocracy.  
            Despite the misery and forced conformity, the Taliban made the streets safer. Ironically, in the early days of their rule, the Taliban promised stability, reform, and economic recovery. In wildly optimistic accounts of the Taliban’s early days in Kandahar, the Taliban’s bellwether, some Western journalists described the Taliban as moderate reformers. This seems shocking in retrospect, but the Taliban restored a sense of order. Fun was outlawed in Afghanistan, yet crime was low.
            The Taliban’s rule of law was marked by a wide range of draconian measures that permeated all aspects of daily life. They criminalized any activity that led men to neglect religious study. The legal system segregated women, banning them from schools and most workplaces and effectively imprisoning them at home. Taliban authorities targeted men suspected of trimming their beards, and men who had difficulty growing the required 4 inches of facial hair sometimes wore false beards to avoid harassment. Those accused or convicted of crimes were at the mercy of Islamic courts. Amnesty International reported that 1,000 people were arrested within a month of the takeover, and that many disappeared. 
            Particularly notorious were the legally sanctioned and internationally broadcast public revenge killings and amputations. As in Saudi Arabia, Afghan Sharia courts administered Koran-mandated single and double amputations, often in public. At the Kabul Sports Stadium, sedated criminals, usually punished for stealing small amounts, had their right hands amputated by Taliban physicians before the main attraction, the shooting of more serious offenders. Women were often whipped vigorously before the crowd. One woman was flogged 100 times for being with a man to whom she was not related. Women in the stadium wept as she was lashed. After the killing and torture, a soccer game, often modified with Islamic rules, would be played. As one Afghan said in 1998, “In America, you have television and movies- the cinema. Here, we can only have this.”
Profile 4: Zarmina’s Hammer
            “Zarmina should never have been killed. She had a hard life. She was not educated. She wasn’t aware of Islamic law. All she knew was that her husband beat her.” Rana Sayeed, an Afghan policewoman and detective
            Some pictures of Afghan women have become iconic: the 1984 National Geographic photo of Gula, the ragged girl with haunting green eyes; Time’s cover photo of Bibi Aisha, whose husband slashed her face and cut off her nose; and the killing of Zarmina, the woman without a face.
Unlike Gula and Bibi Aisha, Zarmina’s face was obscured from the world by her burqa, which she wore to her death. Accused of killing her husband, the mother of seven children was transported in the back of a Toyota pickup, dragged to Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, forced to kneel between the goal posts of the soccer field, and shot in the head by a Taliban member.
            Raised in northern Kabul and described as pretty and feisty, Zarmina was wed at 16 to Khwazak, a Pashtun policeman and part-time proprietor of a small general store. Khwazak’s personality began to sour as the Taliban solidified power. “He had been a mild man, but slowly he became a monster.” Some neighbors speculated that the trauma of the killings, rapes, and bombings warped his mind and turned him into a brute. Others saw his descent into cruelty as consistent with his solidarity with the Taliban.
            Khwazak regularly beat Zarmina and their children. He became a policeman for the Taliban and harassed and tormented girls and women. His moods were unpredictable, and neither Zarmina nor her children could anticipate what would send him into a ruthless rage. Zarmina decided to kill Khwazak. She may have drugged him by lacing his food with opiates, then clubbed him with a 10-lb mason’s hammer. It may have been an elder daughter who delivered the lethal blow and then staged a scene of a burglary that turned violent.
            The Taliban police were suspicious immediately, and Zarmina and her two youngest children were imprisoned for 3 years. Zarmina confessed to the murder, claiming she acted alone. She was kept alive in prison by the compassion of fellow inmates, who gave her bits of food and a blanket. Zarmina’s elder children were placed in the custody of her Taliban brother-in-law, who told Zarmina, 2 months before she was executed, that he had sold her two elder daughters into prostitution. According to an investigator, the brother-in-law told Zarmina the price he received for each of her daughters. It is not unusual to sell unwanted girls and women. Prices typically range from $530.00 to $3,200 for more nubile and attractive models.
            On November 15, 1999, the Taliban told Zarmina that she would be killed in 2 days. The Toyota, in which Zarmina was captive, circled the soccer field twice, which was caught on video and posted on YouTube. She was forced to kneel between goal posts, and Zarmina prepared herself.  But men and women in the stadium began to jump, and shout, and begged the Taliban to show Zarmina mercy. “Let her live,” many cried. This startled but did not deter the Taliban. Bracing herself, Zarmina raised both arms and pleaded for somebody to hold them, to help her steady herself. The Taliban then shot her in the head.
            Her body lay unclaimed for weeks because no one wanted it. Her mother avowed, “She brought shame. She deserved what she got. She is not even a memory to me.” She is buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and several of her children were living as beggars in 2002. The whereabouts of her other children are unknown. A policewoman who investigated Zarmina’s death in 2002 sighed, "At last Zarmina's story can be told. It is the story of one woman. But it is also the story of Afghan women under the Taliban…brutes who turned our country into a zoo and our women into dogs.”
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
           

            Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
Towards War
The Taliban, Foreign Relations, and the United States 1996-2001
            The Taliban’s domestic plans floundered and most failed, and their foreign relations were no more successful. They had warm relations with elements of Pakistan and the Pakistani intelligence. But they did not enjoy close relations with other neighbors. The governments of Iran and Afghanistan were often at odds and sometimes came near blows during the Taliban’s reign. Part of this is explained by sectarian differences – the Taliban are Sunni and the Iranians are Shia. But the frosty diplomatic relations cannot be understood by religious division alone. 
            The 1998 killing of Iranian diplomats was followed by the Taliban’s accusation that Iran was funding its enemies.  Early in the Taliban’s rule, the mullahs made enemies with principals in Teheran.  Iranian leaders criticized the destruction of the Buddhist statues as barbaric.  Several times, Iran and the Taliban came close to war.   The Taliban army threatened to deploy medium-range missiles, which may not have been serviceable, to any Iranian attack.  The Taliban also accused Iran of harboring Shia enemies.
            After the September 2001 attacks, Afghanistan’s foreign relations suffered a significant blow when its two Arab links severed diplomatic relations. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut their relations shortly after the attack.  Pakistan, the only other nation recognizing the Taliban government, withdrew all staff from its Kabul embassy.  After Pakistan cut its relations in November 2001, Afghanistan became completely diplomatically isolated.
            Well before September 2001, the Taliban had a significant image problem that could not be easily prettied-up. It would be challenging to create a government whose political philosophy, state craft, and social mores were more antithetical to US values than those of the Taliban. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke for many elites with her full-throated attack of the Taliban's treatment of women and children as ``despicable.''  This was important in Democratic Party-led Washington, where women’s issues were loudly trumpeted.
             Hollywood stars, led by Meryl Streep, Geena Davis, and Sidney Poitier joined the Feminist Majority to lobby the White House and the State Department to torque-up sanctions on the Taliban cut off aid to countries that recognized and traded with them. They also entreated Washington to increase humanitarian assistance to Afghan women refugees. In a “Dear Abby” column, Mavis Leno claimed partial victory by quoting a woman in Kabul who whispered, “Let me call you the angels of mercy. Your love is our hope.”  
            Ms. Leno scored successes. The Department of State admitted more Afghan refugee women to the United States. American conservatives and liberals saluted the pro-woman, anti-Taliban agenda of Ms. Leno. She was applauded by the popular television host Bill O’Reilly as being a “patriot.” Nonetheless, there is no evidence that the Taliban were concerned with, or even took note, of Hollywood’s efforts.  
            Washington’s smart set saw Taliban leaders as primitive, patriarchal, heartless, and vulgar. To the extent to which he was known, Mullah Omar was loathed by political leaders and opinion makers in the nation’s capital. First Lady Hillary Clinton denounced the servitude in which all Afghan females subsisted. Any positive image of the Afghan fighting spirit against the Soviets was largely forgotten.  Washington’s embrace of the zealous and self-sacrificial anti-Soviet Afghan mujahedeen of the 1980s had long waned by the mid-1990s.
            Western media became incredulous as the Taliban revived the darkest imagery of the Nazi era. Statesmen and journalists registered disgust and alarm at the Taliban’s plans to force all Hindus in the country to wear identity tags. In turn, the Taliban were openly contemptuous of the United States. A reclusive Omar did not show interest in warming relations with the United States, and his only verified direct contact with US officials took place in August 1998, 2 days after President Clinton ordered a missile strike to blast bin Laden’s training camps.  In response to the attack and fear of more strikes, Omar tried to assure State Department officials that bin Laden was leashed. But Omar refused to extradite him.
            The Taliban explained that mandates of Afghan culture, particularly the requirement to give guests protection, or melmastia, precluded yielding bin Laden, who was their honored guest. The Taliban leadership claimed that they could not relinquish him to the United States without weakening the Taliban’s global prestige.
      However, the US State Department was not swayed by this argument. Senior leaders proffered evidence that bin Laden was directly tied to many terrorist activities and plots.  Diplomatic cables revealed bin Laden’s imprimatur in other high-profile plots, including a plan to blow up US airliners in the Pacific. In response, the Taliban underscored they “have always and always will condemn terrorism, including hijacking."
      Though the August 20, 1998, missile strikes quieted, if only temporarily, Mullah Omar, it had no such effect on his most infamous guest.  Ever loquacious, Bin Laden continued to inveigh against Americans, Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims. He became particularly vocal after the missile strike, and reiterated his fatwa (religious ruling), urging Muslims to kill American, British, and Israeli citizens, and he also reserved the right to use weapons of mass destruction.
      According to declassified State Department cables, Mullah Omar hoped to open a dialog with State Department officials in August 1998.  In October 1999, the Taliban suggested a trial by a panel of Islamic scholars by the Organization of Islamic Conference or the United Nations.  The White House was not persuaded.
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
 
A New Dark Age -Life under the Taliban 
The Economy Declines
            The Taliban’s conquest of Kabul ushered in a new, if reactionary, era in Afghanistan. By almost all measures of living standards, the quality of life for Afghans, already poor, deteriorated. It is unlikely that any influential Taliban leader had a sophisticated understanding of contemporary market-based economic theories. Several modern Islamic countries, particularly Malaysia and Turkey, have enjoyed sustained economic development in recent years without significant petroleum exports. Yet the Afghan economy withered because the Taliban did not promote sustained economic growth. They subordinated economic growth to cloying religiosity across all of Afghanistan.
By any credible economic standard, Afghanistan was a failed state. Failed states have several defining characteristics, including the inability to control the state’s physical territory; to provide basic social services, such as electricity, potable water, emergency services, and police services; to collect adequate tax revenue or combat corruption; to sustain adequate levels of economic growth, employment, and job creation; to mitigate the effects of social and sexual discrimination and group-based inequality; and to prevent the erosion of the environment. Afghanistan, during the Taliban’s rule, failed on all counts.
In 1998 and 1999, agricultural production increased; livestock herds rose sharply, taking advantage of unused grazing lands; and horticulture improved with the expansion of orchards and vineyards. But this economic uptick was misleading. The recovery was concentrated in areas of the country conquered relatively early by the Taliban. Economic growth occurred because the peace prompted Afghans to invest. When investment stopped, the economy began to crater.
            The Taliban impoverished more than the lives of their Afghan citizens from 1996-2001. The effects of their botched programs seeped into the larger South and Central Asian neighborhood. The consequences of the failed Afghan state's political, economic, and social instability had spillover effects on neighboring countries. Among those effects were vast problems with refugees, public health, and sanitation. 
            In governance, the Taliban preferred a small government to an expansive administration. This neglect of large-scale infrastructure development soon degraded the quality of public services. Deterioration in basic social services – public administration, health, communications, and education – took root and was exacerbated by the Taliban's inchoate policies, which largely excluded women from work and girls from employment and education. The already shambolic Afghan civil service largely collapsed under Taliban rule. While a primary goal of most civil services is to provide essential services, the Taliban’s priority was to prevent moral corruption. Religious police sometimes beat those who did not conform to the Taliban’s norms. This led to a hemorrhage of educated talent from many public bureaucracies.
               Communications and education that did not promote the expansion of Islam were neglected or prohibited. In a country with very limited print, radio, and electronic communications, it became very difficult for men and women to communicate at all, except within the immediate family. Women could not leave the home without a male guardian. The Taliban heavily regulated content on the radio and television. The only European pop singer regularly broadcast was the Greek-Anglo crooner-turned-Salafist Yusuf Islam, better known as Cat Stevens. Other Western pop and movie stars were declared menacing to Afghan values. The movie Titanic and its song were banned, as was the then-fashionable Leonardo DiCaprio floppy haircut, which was declared foppish and sacrilegious. By January 2001, the Taliban imprisoned 22 barbers for offering this hairstyle, citing the puzzling reasoning that the long bangs impede the ability to bow and pray.
               The country’s health care, already poor, began to decay. As in all other sectors of human development, girls and women suffered disproportionately under the Taliban’s restraints. The Taliban drastically limited access to medical services. The State Department's 1998 Human Rights Report described “the Taliban's devastating disregard for the physical and psychological health of women and girls.” Women and girls who were starving were not allowed to beg. The deprivations of girls and women were publicized in the United States by celebrities. First Lady Hilary Clinton publicly protested.
            The melancholy and despondency endured by Afghans during the Taliban era were revealed in a 2002 study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It found, unsurprisingly, that approximately 70% of Afghans showed signs of clinical depression and anxiety. Rates were even higher among women and the disabled. After the Taliban were ejected, the collective mental health of the Afghan people, particularly women, improved, though unevenly and not everywhere.
            As with the Afghan people, the economy of Afghanistan was brought to its knees by the Taliban’s farrago of religious edicts. Despite opportunities for foreign investment in the post-civil war peace, few investors, domestic or foreign, were eager to risk capital that could be easily expropriated at the whim of a mullah. Commercial transactions that did not conform to the Taliban’s standards of virtue could be nullified by civil servants on the basis that they promoted vice and evil. International lending agencies were kept at bay, as were many non-governmental organizations.
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 

Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
Chapter Three: The Taliban in Power
            Jihad in the path of Allah is greater than any individual or organization.” Ayman al-Zawahiri
 
            Chapter Two traced the Taliban’s ascent to power. It examined the ideological bond between a preening bin Laden and a reclusive Mullah Omar, as well as the general template for insurgencies. It offered a three-stage model for insurgencies and analyzed the Taliban’s rise to power within that framework. Chapter Three will discuss the Taliban’s agenda and policies during their rule from 1996 to 2001.
The Taliban Builds its Base
            During its rise to power, the Taliban relied on boys and young men to fill its periodically depleted ranks. Recruits were largely drawn from slums near refugee camps in Afghanistan and adjacent areas in Pakistan. They were often chronically unemployed, with low levels of education and limited skills. Many were drifters or dead-enders, or were very young, alone, and searching for parental figures. Some were religious zealots seeking a community. Religious schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to serve as sources from which the Taliban’s leadership drew foot soldiers.
The Taliban is determined to erase any hint of humanity from their boys. Boys and young men were indoctrinated and hardened to ensure they would kill their enemies without mercy or hesitation. A brutal example was captured on video, showing a pre-adolescent boy slit the throat of a blindfolded man. The victim was accused of being an American spy. As the child hoisted the severed head in the air, he cried, “God is great!" Boys who resisted this hardening were whipped or sometimes killed. Those suspected of disloyalty were hanged with dollar bills shoved in their mouths. This indoctrination continued during the Taliban’s exile. The Taliban tapped into the boys’ innate aggression and unrelieved sexual frustration. Celestial harems of nubile virgins, or houris, await Muslim men who fall in battle for Islam.
            Beyond their malice, the Taliban were totalitarian. Bin Laden and the Arabs, along with other international fighters, fused the Islamism of Qutb and Azzam with the Deobandi philosophy of Afghan elites. All human activity was to be channeled toward replicating the time of their Prophet. In this spirit, music, dancing, kite flying, and chess were banned. Soccer matches were permitted, but spectators could only legally cheer "Allahu Akbar” to rally their teams. The games themselves had sadistic elements reminiscent of Caligula’s Rome, as those convicted of crimes were publicly whipped, clubbed, and killed. Limbs were amputated while Taliban leaders exhorted the audience to shout approval. The cruelty was vast, frequent, cavalier, and often morbid. As a result, morale plummeted among the educated and relatively secular, and those who could flee often did so.
            Taliban agents monitored how people behaved and thought; how they raised their children; how they spoke to their spouses; how they engaged in civil society; and how they practiced religion. Fear was pervasive. There was a shared communal responsibility to expose those who did not conform to political and economic orthodoxy and to eliminate any contagion of deviationism. Villagers would notify the secret police of neighbors’ transgressions. Often, the accused would be hauled to prison.
            Life was difficult for Muslims in Afghanistan and even more so for the relatively few non-Muslims.  The Taliban demanded that non-Muslims subordinate themselves to Muslims. Life was particularly onerous for Hindus, who, during the Taliban’s tenure, were required to carry badges identifying themselves as non-Muslims.
             Back to the Prophet
            Mullah Omar’s spokesman explained, "We want to recreate the time of the Prophet." It would have been more accurate to say that the Taliban intended to regress to an era in Arabia that they imagined. The life and customs of Mohammad’s world have long been obscured by hagiography, legend, and literary embellishments. There are no extant, accurate accounts of the life of Mohammed. But the Taliban believe that living in the world of the first-generation Muslims requires purging elements of modern society that are contrary to the Koran.
            The worldview of the Taliban was also shaped by the interplay of isolation and poverty. The Taliban were cloistered from modernity and wanted to keep Afghanistan safe from globalization. To further tighten this insulation, Mullah Omar tried to ban the Internet, a task made easier by the country’s primitive communication systems. What few international organizations remained in Afghanistan were heavily monitored, censored, and muzzled.
            In July 1998, the Taliban gave Afghan families 15 days to rid themselves of television sets, videocassette recorders, and satellite dishes. For many Afghans, the decision was irrelevant because there was no television available. Many villages also had no access to electricity. The electrical grids in much of the country had long ceased to function. Afghans didn’t need electricity to sing folk songs. But the Taliban banned them too. Unless the songs promoted Islam, they were not to be sung. An enforced silence would give more Muslims more time to pray.
            Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 

Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
The Taliban and the General Template of Insurgency
Omar would lead his insurgency to victory. He would face many of the same strategic challenges, leading the insurgency in exile after 2001. An insurgency is a type of small war that varies in intensity, duration, and levels of success and failure. Insurgencies seek to undermine a government’s legitimacy and impose their political agenda on the country. There are many definitions of insurgency, but most good ones include at least four elements:
It is an organized movement with leadership, command, and control. A food riot or mob attack does not qualify as an insurgency.
It aims to destroy the current government and replace it with a new, usually fundamentally different government. Insurgents are not reformers who intend to modify existing political conditions, such as the civil rights marchers in the US during the 1960s.
It is a protracted struggle. There are a few week- or month-long insurgencies.
Tactics are directed at weakening the government’s control and legitimacy. For this reason, propaganda is used extensively. Doctrine defines insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.” This definition certainly applies to the insurgency in Afghanistan.
            A US Army analysis of 20th-century insurgencies identified prerequisites for success. First, the population needed to be vulnerable to either the insurgents' coercion or their soft power. If the insurgents effectively intimidated villages, as the Viet Cong did in Vietnam, the villagers' will could be worn down. Sometimes, insurgents could successfully tap into common dissatisfaction with the government and widespread resentment of living conditions. In Afghanistan, there was certainly a vulnerable population segment. Because Afghanistan was only nominally a unitary state in the early 1990s, the Taliban could bully many villagers, and they did so. But they also controlled criminal syndicates and brigands.   
            Second, competent insurgent leadership was needed, and Omar was certainly capable. A third prerequisite was a lack of government control over substantial portions of the country.  The greater the government's control, the lower the chance of insurgent triumph.  Afghanistan was largely in disarray in the early 1990s.  From 1992-1996, the frailties of the Rabanni government were exploited by the Taliban’s propaganda element.
            The Taliban and the General Template of Insurgency
            The insurgency followed a well-established historical pattern. Insurgencies evolve from a small nucleus into a recognized and persistent threat to the government. Most insurgencies, including the current one in Afghanistan, follow a general chronological template. Mao, long considered the most successful practitioner of modern insurgency, developed his three-phase model in the 1930s. US intelligence produced a template very similar to Mao’s that integrates elements of guerrilla and conventional warfare. There are three phases:
            In the first phase, leadership emerges. Secret cells are created, supplies are gathered, and propaganda is produced, but direct conflict is generally avoided. This is a building phase that often focuses on developing, not destroying, infrastructure. Mao also articulated a set of principles to avoid alienating potential comrades. Violence is generally shunned, and killings are highly selective and rare. Insurgents speak in a vocabulary and cadence that win the confidence of villagers.
In their first surge to power in the mid-1990s, the Taliban won the confidence of local Afghans. They came to attention when they intervened to protect a young woman who had been sexually assaulted. They built legitimacy among clerics, who in turn legitimized the Taliban. Clerics praised the Taliban in their sermons. Clerical support is essential to justify violence. 
            In this first phase of the Afghan insurgency, as in the second, Arabs came en masse to swell the Taliban’s ranks. By the time the Taliban consolidated power, Arab Jihadis were noticeable in key cities. Arabs, particularly those affiliated with al Qaeda, brought enthusiasm, financing, and technical expertise. But there is no evidence that any major Taliban victory was determined exclusively by Arab fighters. The Taliban demonstrated military acumen and uncanny intelligence capabilities that persist to this day. They cultivated a vast network of informants and sympathizers and bought off enemies with money supplied by foreign powers. They also learned from mistakes and innovated.
            The Taliban, perhaps as well as any Afghan political cohort, understood the significance of the mullah in South Asian culture. Becoming a mullah offers Afghan social mobility; the individual is no longer constrained to his father's occupation. Mullahs can travel freely across Afghanistan and are treated respectfully and hospitably by village commoners and grandees. They can also establish their own madrassas. In Afghan culture, only a mullah can declare jihad with any credibility.
Omar understood that building ties with mullahs would enable the Taliban to enter the second phase of their insurgency. In this phase, insurgents take military action to dislodge the government. This can include attacks, assassinations, sabotage, or subversive activities. This is the “organizational phase,” in which the group builds its infrastructure, recruits and trains cadre, and acquires supplies. The Taliban pursued this from 1994-1996, fighting rival groups of different ethnicities, sometimes in pitched battle. They also settled scores with rival ethnicities and clans. 
            The third and final phase of insurgent warfare is conventional warfare. In the final phase of the war in Vietnam, armor, artillery, and massive infantry power conquered Saigon. If the transition is properly timed, the government has been sufficiently weakened to succumb to an onslaught of insurgent forces. Many insurgencies never reach this stage. The Taliban reached this point during their final drive to Kabul in 1996.
            Many killings across all three evolutionary stages were driven by military necessity.  Some of the Taliban’s brutality, however, stemmed from revenge or gratuitous sadism. For example, in 1998 in Mazar-I-Sharif, after wreaking bloody vengeance on civilians, the Taliban rounded up 11 Iranian diplomats and shot them dead.  In Mazar, the Taliban’s mass suffocations, executions, and torture stunned UN observers, who estimated that 4,000 to 5,000 people were slaughtered.
            The Taliban continued to harass men and displace women and children after 1996. As late as 1999, the Taliban swept across the Shomali Plains north of Kabul, arresting, killing, and driving women and children onto buses bound for remote destinations. There, they would suffer, and some would die from privation. The United Nations estimated that up to 20,000 women and children were evicted from their homes and forcibly relocated.
            Killing was common, and many Afghans did not see the Taliban as liberators. After the Taliban concluded the third phase of the insurgency, they blocked aid to starving villagers caught in a war they could not escape, hoping only to survive. One example occurred in Hazarajat, in the mountainous regions of central Afghanistan, in 1998, when 1.5 million began to starve after the Taliban blocked supply routes. Afghans died of starvation, measles, and other diseases brought on by weakened immune systems. Blockades are common in war, but this one was directed at the Hazaras, whom the Taliban loathes for religious and racial reasons. 
The Taliban’s ascent to power followed a standard insurgency pattern. The first phase is building and organizing. The second phase begins with violent attacks; the third is one of maneuver and pitched battle. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden shared a Salafist view of Islam and held contempt for the West. The prickly Omar revealed a soft-spoken charisma, while bin Laden exhibited more sizzle and braggadocio. The Taliban took power through a standard three-stage insurgency. They promised to create a self-contained Islamic state. They certainly tried to do just that under a suffocating theocracy, which is the subject of the third chapter.
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Hello and Welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
By September 2000, the Taliban controlled 95% of the country and were fighting mainly against the Tajik Ahmed Shah Massoud, Prime Minister Rabbani's former defense minister, who defended parts of the north. This was the remaining part of the country not controlled by the Taliban.
Profile Omar 3 "Commander of the Faithful” Consolidates his Power
From the beginning, Mullah Omar demonstrated political acumen and military savvy. His political charisma resonated with his Pashtun constituency, and he drew and held people even in the most difficult times. Omar developed a powerful hold on his followers, and his magnetism served as glue when the Taliban’s fortunes were dire. He gave Kandahar’s poor a sense of value and belonging in a great Muslim family. Initially, Omar lived frugally in a mud-brick home. One journalist described him as a “simple man unaccustomed to the perks of power." When the Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996, Omar remained in his Kandahar cocoon, along with a small coterie of Taliban leaders. He established a skeletal bureaucracy in Kabul.
Born in the mid-to-late 1950s, Omar endured an impoverished childhood and learned early on self-reliance and leadership. As a young man, he showed an aptitude for religious study. After studying in a madrassa in Pakistan, he opened his own religious school and then fought in the anti-Soviet Jihad from 1989 to 1992. On the battlefield and in the mosques, he delivered dulcet sermons that resonated with the more pious. In the anti-Soviet fight, he lost an eye but gained tactical military skills and religious standing, which he would exploit several years later.
Omar made little attempt to converse with non-believers in almost any circumstances. Even among his closest congregants and political operatives, Omar was a recluse. He held extended conversations with no more than a handful of Westerners. His taciturn behavior is still seen as humble by many Afghans, which boosts his image. His knowledge of the Koran, much of which was self-taught, fighting skills, soft-spoken self-confidence, and aptitude for bringing peace and rule of law cemented his power. This autodidact became legendary when, in 1996, he donned a cloak reputed to have belonged to Mohammed and pronounced himself "commander of the faithful." His followers in the audience began to swoon, weep, and faint.
Most men who could have deserted Omar during the Taliban’s nadir in 2002 did not, despite grueling living conditions. Nor were there any known, well-coordinated conspiracies to unseat Omar. Under Omar’s leadership, the Taliban recruited, rebuilt, and quickly re-engaged Coalition Forces in battle. His charisma also had a mesmerizing, twisted quality. Omar persuaded many Taliban to commit vicious crimes, including mass murder, throwing acid in girls’ faces, summary executions, and amputations for trivial offenses. Afghans are seen as tough people, but they do not have a reputation for being sadistic. The Taliban committed unbounded cruelty far beyond Afghan tradition. Nothing like that had happened in the memory of modern Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, Mullah Omar attracted both Afghans and non-Afghans. It was not by coincidence that bin Laden was given refuge in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia expelled bin Laden in 1991 and revoked his citizenship in 1994. He declared war on the West in 1998. In Afghanistan, bin Laden, who was wanted by U.S. authorities, continued his screeds against Americans, and Mullah Omar continued to offer him refuge.
The Afghanistan of the Taliban was a natural refuge for bin Laden. Bin Laden and Mullah Omar shared charismatic traits that resonated with segments of the Islamic world. Both leaders presented their messages and agendas as authentically Muslim, though from different Sunni legal schools. Both were ascetic and contemptuous of modern comforts. Bin Laden left the wealth and fortune to which he was heir to toil among the Afghan poor. This cultivated an image of a stoic Muslim hero committed to austere self-discipline, which garnered international prestige. Mullah Omar espoused a more local, Pashtun-focused vision of Islam.
Today, years after Omar was pushed into exile, he holds the enduring loyalty of his still-smitten constituents. The devotion continues despite his absence. Few Taliban have seen him since he scurried on the back of a motorcycle from Kandahar in late 2001. Even when he was in power, he rarely made public appearances and ventured to Kabul only once from his home in Kandahar.
There were two primary differences that distinguished Omar’s and bin Laden’s style of charisma. First, there was bin Laden’s fillip. Bin Laden, despite his protestations to the contrary, reveled in celebrity status until the last few years of his life. He held court in his tent encampments, where he self-reverentially lectured Arab and some Western journalists about the impending wrath of his sword. Bin Laden was very comfortable in front of a camera. During the anti-Soviet Jihad, he commissioned a 50-minute video displaying him in manly pursuits, such as bareback riding on horses and firing weapons. Omar remains shy and retiring, preferring to be closeted with his staff.
Finally, their charisma appealed to distinctly different audiences. Bin Laden’s audience was global, as were his ambitions, while Mullah Omar’s remains markedly provincial and Afghan. Their leadership styles were dissimilar, but they shared a common goal of global Islamic supremacy. They were also united in their hatred of the United States.
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening. listening.
 

Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
The Taliban Builds Roots
            Afghanistan’s government was never strong and was usually tenuous during the reign of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who held office from June 1992 until 1996. He never had a durable base, lacked charisma, was not a Pashtun, and proved incapable of uniting Afghanistan. Another civil war was underway, and 1 year later the forces of Mullah Omar entered the fighting.
            The reclusive leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, led the Taliban to gain control of one-third of the country within 2 years, two-thirds within 3 years, and nine-tenths within 5 years. In the summer of 1994, Omar pushed his small band of seminary students into the general Afghan fracas. He killed local warlords in Afghanistan’s south who were connected to the rape of a girl. During the next several years, he expanded his power base to control 90% of the country.
            The Taliban’s leader was young by the standards of a society that venerated age, associating it with wisdom, political acumen, and survival skills. Unlike some of his rivals with university training, the canny Mullah Omar was largely self-educated. He rarely traveled outside Kandahar. In keeping with Islamic tradition, he took several wives, some accounts say three, and fathered 13 children. He joined the jihad against the Soviet invasion of 1979 and lost one eye in an artillery battle.
            The fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul, to the Taliban militia in September 1996 marked a distinct break from the politics of the preceding decades. Both the communist regime and the Soviet-aligned government tried to modernize the country within the confines of Afghan culture and the country’s resources. But the Taliban had no such ambition. Instead, Taliban leaders were content to have their countrymen subsist on the margins of absolute poverty. While the Taliban’s victory ended a protracted civil war, it did not halt all the violence. The Taliban began to mete out their cruelty immediately after they took control in September 1996.  They proclaimed Afghanistan to be the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the law of the land to be Sharia. A first target of the Taliban was former communist President Najibullah, whom the Taliban murdered and whose corpse, along with that of his brother, was horrifically displayed as a war trophy (see profile five).      
            In keeping with revenge, or badal, the Taliban settled tribal scores when they seized power. For example, in the spring of 1997, the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif was contested between the Taliban and non-Pashtun, Uzbek and Hazara civilians. When the Taliban controlled the city, they killed many Uzbeks and Hazaras. Later, when the Taliban lost control of the city, the ethnic groups they had persecuted took revenge on the now-weakened Taliban. This reversal of fortune continued as towns and villages changed hands, and former victims became victimizers.
            On their way to Kabul, the Taliban butchered Hazaras in well-planned, ruthless attacks. In 1998, Human Rights Watch’s Asia division wrote, “We are talking about the systematic execution of perhaps 2,000 civilians.” Hazaras are often identifiable by a distinct Mongoloid appearance and live in concentrated areas. According to verified reports, the Taliban would go house to house, dragging out men, women, and children, and shooting them in killing pits or along the roads. Survivors reported, “The Taliban shot at anything that moved.”
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
Chapter Two: Enter the Taliban
            Chapter One explored the geographic, cultural, religious, and ideological underpinnings of the Taliban. Chapter Two focuses on the Taliban’s origins, victory, tenure, temporary destruction, and rejuvenation.
            The Setting
            The Taliban’s ascent to power follows an ancient Afghan tradition of clan-tangled struggles for supremacy. In this perennial drama, ethnic and political factions vie to seize control of Kabul and eliminate rivals.
            The Taliban trace their origins to the mujahedeen of the Afghan-Soviet war. In the 1980s, Afghanistan was inhospitable to ruling communist leaders and their sympathizers. Some Afghans supported the Communist Party, which promised to modernize and, to some extent, communize the country. The Soviets found partners among Kabul’s small, well-educated elites, who saw themselves as stakeholders in Afghanistan’s development.
            But Marxism-Leninism never resonated with Afghans. Soviet atheism and communist contempt for religion, no matter how well disguised for an Afghan audience, became tropes of the anti-Soviet insurgency. Socialist, state-oriented planning panicked many Afghans, who saw the Soviet-led agenda as an attack on Islam. As a result, civil war erupted, the Soviets intervened, and the United States began supplying the mujahedeen. The Saudis, too, provided aid to the mujahedeen.
            Pakistani leaders played a strong role in training, equipping, provisioning, guiding, and leading mujahedeen. The relationships forged during this period would be rekindled. A leading and flashy figure is the former Pakistani intelligence chief Hamid Gul (see profile 24), who worked closely with several major mujahedeen fighters who today are battling U.S. troops and trying to topple the Afghan government. Some of Gul’s former cohorts are insurgent leaders today. They include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is not an associate of the Taliban, and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who is connected to the Taliban.
            The war against the Soviets was over, but there was no peace. In the 1990s, Afghanistan remained a magnet for jihadists and zealots worldwide. It attracted Islamist ideologues, romantics, adventurers, and those trying to escape the routine and despair in the Middle East’s failed states. Religious zealots who wanted to uproot corruption, secularism, and cronyism in the Middle East could not do so in the Middle Eastern states in which they lived. In many of the region’s authoritarian states, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the domestic intelligence and security services were very strong.
            Islamic states, particularly Arab countries, began to take the threat posed by the Brotherhood seriously in the 1990s. In Arab countries, security and intelligence personnel purged the civil service, the military, and, to the extent possible, seminaries of Islamists. There was an unwritten understanding that Islamism would be tolerated as long as it did not target existing local governments, such as the Saudi monarchy. For this reason, in the second half of the 1990s, many malcontents and Islamic dogmatists, often opulently funded by wealthy Arabs, moved to Afghanistan and Western states. Liberal constitutions in Europe protected many doctrinaire Muslim preachers, and Afghanistan was a wide-open country.
            Foreign fighters in Afghanistan came from many countries, including Chechnya, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Uzbekistan, as well as the Arab Middle East. Some stayed in Afghanistan, took local wives, built families, and became known as “Arab Afghans.” By 2001, over 2,000 Arab combatants, many of whom were apparently affiliated with and financed by bin Laden, were actively supporting the Taliban. Pakistanis living near the Afghan border had strong sympathies for the Taliban.
            From the Taliban’s earliest days, neighboring Pakistan played a major role in Taliban affairs. The Jama`a Islami party of Pakistan provided material and logistical support to the Taliban in the early 1990s. Wealthy Saudis financed a vast network of madrassas, or religious schools, largely in Pakistan. These madrassas indoctrinated young people with a martial spirit. With Saudi largess, the number of madrassas grew from 245 in 1947 to 6,741 in 2007.
            The Taliban were developed, to some extent nurtured, by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), sometimes referred to as ISID. Afghanistan and Pakistan share a long border, and Pakistan views Afghanistan’s security concerns as its own. Between 1997 and 1998, Pakistan provided the Taliban with an estimated $30 million. Bonds between Pakistani officials and the Taliban grew very strong. Some observers of the Pakistani scene said that ISI officers had become "more Taliban than the Taliban." The ISI introduced Osama Bin Laden to the Taliban.
Thank you for listening to this reading from “The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group.” If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and liking it. Nothing in this book reflects the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.