Humanizing the Monster

Humanizing the Monster
Book Review: My life with the Taliban

The Statesman
http://statesman.com.pk/opinion/op11.htm

By Dr.Mohammad Taqi



March 2,2010

In his foreword to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s book, Professor Barnett Rubin of the New York University - and an employee of the US Department of State but not writing in that capacity- sets the stage for the launch, ostensibly, as a refreshingly authentic work of this inaccurate and revisionist take on contemporary Afghan history.

“My Life with the Taliban” by the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, has been praised across the board by the media “Afghanologists” as Ahmed Rashid and Peter Bergen to academics like Antonio Giustozzi of the London School of Economics, without any critical evaluation. Some like Christina Lamb have gone as far as calling it a must read.

To those of us who grew up in the NWFP or Afghanistan at the height of US-Saudi-Pakistani anti-Soviet war, the crude lies presented in the account are all too apparent from the get go, as is the translators-cum-editors’ - Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten - shallow understanding of the local languages and culture.

From the outset, the village prayer-leader (Imam) is presented as a religious scholar and mosque madrassah as almost the counterpart of the Notre Dame University. The basic Arabic text-booklet - Quaida Baghdadi - which all Muslim children from Kabul to Kolkata read as an Arabic primer, is mentioned as “Al-Quaida” only to be differentiated from the terrorist group in a tedious footnote - of which there is no dearth in the book. Frivolous and superfluous information is dignified by stuffing such footnotes with it, as is the glossary and an initial biography section. A flurry of names and events - as insignificant as a pinprick on the skin of Afghan history - have been deployed to bloat the work to roughly 300 pages.

Zaeef has taken serious liberties with the truth, which to their discredit the reviewers and endorsers have failed to point out. He confabulates that the Taliban were a distinct group during the anti-Soviet Mujahideen wars and operated as such, under their own identity and leadership.

While there is no doubt that the sundry madrassah students i.e. Talib-ul-ilm (pl. Taliban) were part of the Peshawar-based Mujahideen groups and were also included in the fold of the field commanders like Abdul Haq and Jalaluddin Haqqani, there is no evidence that the Taliban operated then as a distinct entity.

The Mujahideen, PDPA, Pakistani or international media and literature - including Ahmed Rashid and Peter Bergen’s books - have made no mention whatsoever of any anti-Soviet group fighting as the Taliban until their first appearance on the scene in the second half of 1994.

In doing so Zaeef - though making periodic anti-Pakistan whimpers throughout the book - glosses over and indeed suppresses the role of the Pakistani security agencies in conceiving, creating, training, arming, financing and letting loose the Taliban monster on Afghanistan.

Among the key historical developments in Afghanistan during the Taliban era, Zaeef makes no mention of the major international crimes committed on their watch. He does not mention, even in passing, the killing of the former president Dr. Najibullah, who was murdered by the Taliban and their handlers in utter disregard for any human, Pashtun or international conventions. That’s how the Taliban rule was ushered in, in Kabul in 1996.

Similarly, he skips over the genocide of the Shiite Hazaras and the ethnic cleansing of the Tajiks in Mazar e Sharif while remembering this much that the Pakistani interior minister Moinuddin Haider was supposedly a Shia.

According to the Amnesty International, in 1998 the Taliban slaughtered more than 4000 people in Mazar e Sharif alone. Amazing that a book which drops names like My Lai massacre in its opening pages would not mention the war crimes of this magnitude.

Zaeef and his editors make it a point to criticize and condemn the PDPA for its land reform policy and allege that the party systematically eliminated the traditional power brokers like the tribal chieftains, landlords and indeed the petty Mullahs.

In his selective amnesia, Zaeef makes no mention of a much more vicious version of the same strategy deployed by his regime, through which wholesale killing of the teachers, middle-class employees, politicians and tribal elders took place - on both side of the Durand Line. In fact the Afghan Taliban and its Pakistani counterpart commissioned and conducted the bombings of whole Jirgahs (assembly of tribal elders) creating a power vacuum that the militants themselves would subsequently fill.

There is complete silence in the book about the finances of the Taliban regime. It does mention its diplomatic recognition by three Muslim states including the Saudis but does not touch upon their massive financing of the Taliban regime. It completely ignores the military and technical expertise, oil and gas supplies, food items and human cannon fodder that the Taliban received from its three patrons.

The book’s author and his editors have taken pains to construct a positive image of the simple and pristine Afghan village life in building a narrative of Kandahar and Zaeef’s childhood spent therein. They attempt to project this early down-to-earth image of the author - and by extension of the whole Taliban regime- throughout the book.

This quasi-romantic interplay of the village life, characters like the author’s widower father -a Spartan prayer-leader, mention of music and Pashtun dance Atan, is a blatant attempt to put a humane face on members of a fascist regime which inarguably remains the most brutal phenomenon of the late twentieth century.

That Mullah Zaeef, his editors and academics like Professor Rubin have attempted to humanize a monster is clear. But the question is why?

Zaeef in this book emphatically criticizes and condemns the notion of hard vs. soft Taliban. However, ever since his image holding an iPhone appeared in the US a couple of years ago, he has been a focus of attention of the regional and world players involved in Afghanistan. Faced with an economic crunch and running against an election clock, the US is clutching at straws to bolster its flawed plan for the endgame in Afghanistan.

While Obama had his Gorbachev moment on December 1, 2009, the nuts and bolts of the withdrawal were not clear. In their quest to turn failure into at least a perceived success, the US policy-makers are now scrambling to resuscitate, retrofit and rehabilitate such dubious characters as Abdul Salam Zaeef.

My life with the Taliban is a poor narrative by a tainted and poor historian (raavi e zaeef). The glorification of the book by authors of repute, impugns their credibility too.

Hardcover: 360 pages
Publisher: Hurst/Columbia University Press (January 31, 2010)
Language: English
Price: US$ 29.99 / £20




(Author teaches and practices Medicine at the University of Florida and contributes to the think-tanks www.Politact.com and Aryana Institute. Email:mazdaki@me.com)