the limited acceptance of Wahabi influence despite decades of well-funded efforts from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to push their practices on Afghans.
The current government in Kabul is formally called the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The Taliban regime it displaced was called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Its 1992–2001 legal predecessor was called the Islamic State of Afghanistan. There is no doubt Afghanistan is Islamic in its nature and government. But its current form differs greatly from what was seen under the Taliban. The current conflicts will determine who will define what is Islamic and therefore what is Afghan.
Legitimacy
Today, Afghanistan has become a nation defined as much by its conflicts as its land, it peoples, and its faith. Conflicts in Afghanistan are fundamentally about legitimacy. Understanding what makes up legitimacy in Afghan terms—who can get, who lacks it—is as vital to understanding the conflicts as are maps to the terrain. A successful regime must be able to legitimate itself in Afghan and Islamic terms. Legitimacy has been the high ground on which the battle for the future of Afghanistan is waged.
“You can’t buy Afghans, you can only rent them” is a cynical view of Afghan politics. Yet there are two important qualifications to this: they do not stay rented, and not everyone can rent them. In the 1980s, all the Kremlin’s armed forces, gold, and political skills could not create a regime that worked in Afghanistan because of the widely held perception by Afghans of the ab initio illegitimacy of the Soviet presence.
The Soviets could never gain legitimacy. The pre-2001 Taliban was considered legitimate by most of Afghanistan’s Pushtuns—plus small numbers from other groups—and saw its legitimacy erode from a broad range of reasons, including their heavy-handed actions regarding Sharia law, gender relations and Islamic practice, their subservience to Al Qaeda, and their unwillingness to embrace the symbolic actions that legitimate Afghan governance and are important in a largelynonliterate society as a demonstration of intent and respect. The result was the collapse of 2001. Only cornered-rat foreigners fought to the end for the Taliban. The majority of their Pushtun supporters cut a deal with the new government in Kabul, whose foreign support seemed then to usher in a new age for Afghanistan. The suspicion of the Taliban and the lasting goodwill toward those that helped remove them have only dissipated slowly with the repeated policy failures since then; polling shows that 87 percent of Afghans thought the ouster of the Taliban was a good thing in 2005, declining to 69 percent in 2009. 18 They switched sides and went with the winners—the US-led coalition and the Afghan Northern Alliance—just as many had switched sides to join with the Taliban during their successes of 1994–96, when opportunistic advances brought them into occupation of Kandahar, Herat, Jalalabad, and eventually Kabul.
The dependence on Afghan perceptions of legitimacy to enlist and motivate supporters is critical to Afghan’s conflicts, kinetic and otherwise. The willingness to switch sides is a survival strategy, but it also reflects Afghan attitudes towards legitimacy. The importance of religion in Afghan daily life tends to accord success with the aura of a victory bestowed by the almighty. To try and regain this aura, Al Qaeda and the Afghan insurgents were, in 2008–10, recasting the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan as a conflict in which victory was bestowed for religious fanaticism and piety rather than earned through success and endurance. Similarly, the importance of patronage means that the Afghans will support a winner if it is thought that a larger patron is behind them. Afghans are hardly unique in that they like to follow and respect a winner. In resource-poor Afghanistan, political and military momentum is a powerful force, for there is likely to be little available to counter
The current government in Kabul is formally called the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The Taliban regime it displaced was called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Its 1992–2001 legal predecessor was called the Islamic State of Afghanistan. There is no doubt Afghanistan is Islamic in its nature and government. But its current form differs greatly from what was seen under the Taliban. The current conflicts will determine who will define what is Islamic and therefore what is Afghan.
Legitimacy
Today, Afghanistan has become a nation defined as much by its conflicts as its land, it peoples, and its faith. Conflicts in Afghanistan are fundamentally about legitimacy. Understanding what makes up legitimacy in Afghan terms—who can get, who lacks it—is as vital to understanding the conflicts as are maps to the terrain. A successful regime must be able to legitimate itself in Afghan and Islamic terms. Legitimacy has been the high ground on which the battle for the future of Afghanistan is waged.
“You can’t buy Afghans, you can only rent them” is a cynical view of Afghan politics. Yet there are two important qualifications to this: they do not stay rented, and not everyone can rent them. In the 1980s, all the Kremlin’s armed forces, gold, and political skills could not create a regime that worked in Afghanistan because of the widely held perception by Afghans of the ab initio illegitimacy of the Soviet presence.
The Soviets could never gain legitimacy. The pre-2001 Taliban was considered legitimate by most of Afghanistan’s Pushtuns—plus small numbers from other groups—and saw its legitimacy erode from a broad range of reasons, including their heavy-handed actions regarding Sharia law, gender relations and Islamic practice, their subservience to Al Qaeda, and their unwillingness to embrace the symbolic actions that legitimate Afghan governance and are important in a largelynonliterate society as a demonstration of intent and respect. The result was the collapse of 2001. Only cornered-rat foreigners fought to the end for the Taliban. The majority of their Pushtun supporters cut a deal with the new government in Kabul, whose foreign support seemed then to usher in a new age for Afghanistan. The suspicion of the Taliban and the lasting goodwill toward those that helped remove them have only dissipated slowly with the repeated policy failures since then; polling shows that 87 percent of Afghans thought the ouster of the Taliban was a good thing in 2005, declining to 69 percent in 2009. 18 They switched sides and went with the winners—the US-led coalition and the Afghan Northern Alliance—just as many had switched sides to join with the Taliban during their successes of 1994–96, when opportunistic advances brought them into occupation of Kandahar, Herat, Jalalabad, and eventually Kabul.
The dependence on Afghan perceptions of legitimacy to enlist and motivate supporters is critical to Afghan’s conflicts, kinetic and otherwise. The willingness to switch sides is a survival strategy, but it also reflects Afghan attitudes towards legitimacy. The importance of religion in Afghan daily life tends to accord success with the aura of a victory bestowed by the almighty. To try and regain this aura, Al Qaeda and the Afghan insurgents were, in 2008–10, recasting the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan as a conflict in which victory was bestowed for religious fanaticism and piety rather than earned through success and endurance. Similarly, the importance of patronage means that the Afghans will support a winner if it is thought that a larger patron is behind them. Afghans are hardly unique in that they like to follow and respect a winner. In resource-poor Afghanistan, political and military momentum is a powerful force, for there is likely to be little available to counter
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