Human Rights Violations by USA throughout its history.

 Always the Aggressor

In recent times, a UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) report has harshly criticized the United States, citing a laundry list of human rights violations both on American soil and in countries around the world. The report detailed rampant violations by the US government of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The U.S. stands accused of enforced disappearances, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that had been committed in the context of the CIA secret rendition, interrogation and detention programs.

 U.S. policies have created a worldwide system of illegal prison camps, where the U.S. and foreign personnel carry out torture against supposed terrorists and other enemies of the American state. There is clear evidence that the U.S. is still continuing to hold detainees without a legal trial in its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that at least 45 prisoners are being held on an indefinite basis without charges or trial.

 The United States of America is described as a ‘flawed democracy’ and is ranked as the 25^th most democratic country in the world as of 2020. The United States performs worse than average for Quality of Life, Safety from the State, and Empowerment rights.

 Much of the criticism is directed at the existence of systemic racism, weaker labor protections than most western countries, imprisonment of debtors, criminalization of homelessness and poverty, invasion of its citizens' privacy through mass surveillance programs, police brutality, police impunity and corruption, incarceration of citizens for profit, mistreatment of prisoners, the highest number of juveniles in the prison system of any country, some of the longest prison sentences in the world, continued use of the death penalty despite its abolition in nearly all other western countries, abuse of both legal and illegal immigrants  (including children), the facilitation of state terrorism, a health care system favoring profit via privatization over the well-being of citizens, the lack of a universal health care program unlike most other developed countries, one of the most expensive and worst-performing health care systems of any developed country, continued support for foreign dictators (even when genocide has been committed), forced disappearances, extraordinary renditions, extrajudicial detentions, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and black sites, and extrajudicial targeted killings (e.g. the Disposition Matrix).

The Disposition Matrix, informally known as a kill list, is a database of information for tracking, capturing, "rendering", or killing suspected enemies of the United States. Developed by the Obama administration beginning in 2010, it goes beyond existing kill lists and is intended to become a permanent fixture of U.S. policy. The process determining criteria for killing is not public and was heavily shaped by National Counter-terrorism Director and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John O. Brennan.

Though White House, National Counter-terrorism Center (NCTC), and CIA spokespeople have declined to comment on the database, officials have stated privately that kill lists will expand "for at least another decade", if not indefinitely. One official stated "it's a necessary part of what we do”. Paul R. Pillar, the former deputy director of the CIA's counter-terrorism center, has stated, "We are looking at something that is potentially indefinite".

In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence announced that the Thirteen Colonies of settlers in what is today the North-Eastern USA, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. The Declaration stated "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787 through ratification at a national convention and conventions in the colonies, created a republic that guaranteed several rights and civil liberties. However, it did not extend voting rights in the United States beyond white male property owners (about 6% of the population at that time). The original Constitution sanctioned slavery and through the “Three-Fifths Compromise”, where it counted slaves (who were not defined by race) as three-fifths of a Person for purposes of distribution of taxes and representation in the House of Representatives (although the slaves themselves were discriminated against in voting for such representatives).

Post the American Civil War [1861-1865], where over 620,000 men were killed in the first mass effort towards genuine civil rights for all inhabitants, the U.S. Constitution was amended to prohibit slavery and to prohibit states' denying rights granted in the Constitution. Among these amendments was the 14th Amendment, which included an Equal Protection Clause which seemed to clarify that courts and states were prohibited in narrowing the meaning of "Persons". After the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted, Susan B. Anthony (champion of temperance, abolition, the rights of labor, and equal pay for equal work), encouraged by the equal protection language, voted in the 1872 elections in New York state. She was prosecuted for this, however, and ran into an all-male court ruling that women were not "Persons".

On paper at least, the U.S. Constitutional amendments have been enacted as the needs of their society evolved. The 9^th Amendment and 14^th Amendment recognized that not all human rights were enumerated in the original United States Constitution. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 are examples of human rights that were enumerated by Congress well after the Constitution's writing.

Racial discrimination and Human Rights abuses started in what was to become the United States of America, from the time of the “Pilgrims”. This was a group of about 100 people many of them seeking religious freedom in the “New World” (as the North American continent was referred to then), who set sail from England on the Mayflower in September 1620. That November, the ship landed on the shores of Cape Cod, in present-day Massachusetts, and in late December the group landed at Plymouth Harbor, where they would form the first permanent settlement of Europeans in New England. These original settlers of Plymouth Colony are known as the Pilgrim Fathers, or simply as the Pilgrims.

Many early 17^th century European settlers died, in the first few years of colonization, due to starvation and disease. Turkey, pumpkin and Indian corn are three traditional foods of Thanksgiving were actually introduced to the Pilgrims by the Algonquians (the North American native tribes). Initially, some of these foods were foreign to the struggling European colonists. However, over the course of several years, the colonists learned how to survive in their new environment with the help of their Native American neighbors. The first Thanksgiving was a three-day harvest festival, with ninety-one “savages” in attendance. The Pilgrims viewed their Native American neighbors as “savages” due the hierarchy of a Eurocentric philosophy placing the white man as superior and other races, such as, Black, Asian and Native American as inferior.

Over half of the passengers aboard the Mayflower, were Puritan (English Protestant Christians), those who believed the Catholic Church could not be redeemed and true believers should separate themselves from it. The Puritan worldview consisted of two parties: God’s party being white; Satan’s party being dark, heathen and doomed.  The New World was a spiritual battleground, with war being the primary vehicle of God’s deliverance and justice, in the Puritan mind.

The Pequot War, fought in 1636–37 by the Pequot people (members of the group of North American native tribes) against a coalition of English settlers from the Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Saybrook colonies, eliminated the Pequot as an impediment to English colonization of southern New England. It was an especially brutal war and the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and Europeans in the North – Eastern part of what was to become later as USA. The Pequot War was considered by the Puritans as a war of misunderstandings and natural law, in which the Puritans were righteous and justified, while the Pequot were heathens, soldiers of Satan, and inhuman. The defeat of the Pequot in this relatively short, small-scale conflict served to justify the killing of Native Americans by creating an image of untrustworthy savages that were plotting to destroy those doing God’s work in the New World. This has become the bedrock of American cultural and political strategy from those days to the present.

After the defeat of the Pequot, it was the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags, once friends of the English in the early 17^th century, which both discovered, before the end of that century, that the Puritan conception of God’s providential plan for New England left no room to assert Native American autonomy. Such assertions were an offense to the Puritan sense of mission. As the population ratio between the English and the Native Americans in New England shifted in favor of the English, the Puritans authorities became increasingly overbearing in their dealings with their Native American counterparts. The Puritan's policy for the original natives, from its inception, was driven by the conviction that if Puritans remained faithful to their covenant with God, they were destined to replace the natives' as masters of New England.

This intolerance towards other cultures reflected the essential elements of the Puritan worldview as a struggle between heathen savagery and Christian civilization. Puritan ideology was founded on three premises, which later translated into vital elements of the political strategy of the American West. The first was the image of the Native American as primitive, dark and of evil intent. The second was the portrayal of the Puritan as an agent of God and of progress, redeeming the land through righteous violence. And finally, the justification of the expropriation of local tribal resources and the extinction of Native American sovereignty as security measures necessitated by their presumed savagery.

By the 19^th century, this political ideology began to reflect itself within United States governmental policy, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Around 1828, the native Cherokee tribes were forcibly expelled from their ancestral homeland and relocated to the Oklahoma territory, by the sovereign state of Georgia which was attempting to abolish the Cherokee Nation and incorporate the Cherokee land under its own laws. The Cherokee tried to prevent this and maintain their sovereign “nation” by adopting a constitution, based on that of the United States, to govern their own land under laws and elected officials. Andrew Jackson became president in 1829 and one of his first priorities was to resolve this issue.

Jackson, being a slave owner and a legendary fighter against indigenous natives of the Western frontier, sided with Georgia, supporting states’ rights to supersede treaty rights. The issue was brought before the Supreme Court twice, once in 1831 in Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia and again in 1832 in Worchester vs. Georgia. Chief Justice John Marshall described the Cherokees as “a domestic, dependent nation” and he proclaimed the unconstitutionality of Georgia’s laws, asserting that federal authority overruled states’ rights regarding Indian treaties. However, Jackson had already persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act in 1830 that made it virtually impossible for any indigenous tribe to escape ceding its land and moving to “Indian territory”, west of the Mississippi River. It is worth noting that, in modern times, these acts would be violations of U.N. Charter, Article 1.2 which asserts, “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace”.

Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American people through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government. These governmental policies have resulted in the alienation and marginalization of Native American peoples throughout American history. A likely total of 100,000-500,000 Native Americans in the U.S. have died since 1776. The high end would be around a million.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to America during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women. The slave owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted. Many white masters raped enslaved black women and children, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

“Lynching’s were a method of social and racial control intended to terrorize black Americans into submission, and into an inferior racial caste position that was widely practiced in the U.S. south from roughly 1877 through 1950.” Because lynching’s were typically executions outside the scope of official court proceedings and without any formal tracking system, most historians and scholars have little doubt that the true number of lynching’s in that country have been dramatically under-reported. Nonetheless, most of the more than 4,400 documented victims of racial terror lynching who were killed between 1877 and 1950 were killed in the 12 Southern states, with Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana among the deadliest. Several hundred additional victims were lynched in other regions, with the highest numbers in Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. However, it is significant to note that there are countless other victims who were undocumented and remain unknown.

On September 22, 1862; the then President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but these provisions of Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping.

The anti-literacy laws after 1832 contributed greatly to the problem of widespread illiteracy facing the freed men and other African Americans after Emancipation and the Civil War, 35 years later. The problem of illiteracy and need for education was seen as one of the greatest challenges confronting these people as they sought to join the free enterprise system and support themselves. Consequently, many black and white religious organizations and wealthy philanthropists were inspired to create and fund educational efforts specifically for the betterment of Black Americans. Blacks held teaching as a high calling, with education the first priority for children and adults. Some of the schools took years to reach a high standard, but they managed to get thousands of teachers started, and "in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South" and "wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of black people in the land".

Regardless of the formation of an educated black American section in society; the ever existing “Puritan white supremacy” mindset led to the segregation policies in the U.S. federal government in early 20th century that has harmed Black Americans for decades. Soon after his inauguration in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson ushered in one of the most far-reaching discrimination policies of that century. Wilson discreetly authorized his Cabinet secretaries to implement a policy of racial segregation across the federal bureaucracy. This policy, based on the demand for whiteness in government, imposed a color line on American opportunity and implicated Washington in the economic limitation of its Black citizens for decades.

In Baltimore in 1910, a black graduate of Yale Law School purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting Black Americans to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Baltimore's then mayor proclaimed: "Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority."

Thus, began a century of federal, state, and local policies in USA; to quarantine black population in isolated slums-policies that continue to the present day, as federal housing subsidy policies still disproportionately direct low-income black families to segregated neighborhoods and away from middle-class suburbs. It was not a vague white society that created ghettos but government-federal, state, and local-that employed explicitly racial laws, policies, and regulations to ensure that black Americans would live impoverished, and separately from whites. Ghettos were not created by private discrimination, income differences, personal preferences, or demographic trends; but by purposeful action of the U.S. government in violation of the 5^th, 13^th, and 14^th Amendments of the American Constitution, constitutional violations that have never been remedied till date.

Black Americans were prevented from moving to white neighborhoods by explicit policy of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which barred suburban subdivision developers from qualifying for federally subsidized construction loans unless the developers committed to exclude Black Americans from the community. The FHA also barred Black Americans themselves from obtaining bank mortgages for house purchases even in suburban subdivisions which were privately financed without federal construction loan guarantees. The FHA not only refused to insure mortgages for black families in white neighborhoods, it also refused to insure mortgages in black neighborhoods-a policy that came to be known as "redlining," because neighborhoods were colored red on government maps to indicate that these neighborhoods should be considered poor credit risks as a consequence of African Americans living in (or even near) them.

Violence against black men and women at the hands of white authority is foundational to the United States, and continues to influence its policing culture to this day. Precursors to modern-day American police departments include violent slave patrols utilized in southern states before the civil war, then the legal enforcement of racist Black Codes, followed by the Jim Crow laws. Early municipal departments in growing US cities were overwhelmingly white, and brutalized vulnerable communities routinely. Thousands of lynching of black Americans by white vigilantes went unpunished by the judicial system. And during the civil rights era and well beyond, peaceful protest has been harshly suppressed by officers sworn to protect and serve. 

In recent times; in Ferguson town, in the American state of Missouri; Mike Brown’s body lay lifeless on the street for four hours after he was killed by a white officer. Witnesses claim that he had raised his hands in surrender before he was shot dead.

In New York City, Eric Garner told a white officer who placed him in a banned choke-hold that he could not breathe, before he died. He repeated the phrase 11 times and yet there was no reprieve for him from his white captor.

In Cleveland, Ohio, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing in the snow on a winter morning with a toy gun before he was shot dead by a white officer.

In 2015 it would be Tony Robinson (a bi-racial teenager shot dead by white police officers in his home) , Eric Harris (44 year old unarmed black man shot dead by a 73-year old white reserve deputy who claimed that he had intended to use a Taser), Walter Scott (an unarmed black man shot 8 times by a white police officer in North Charleston), Freddie Gray (25 year old black man who died under suspicious circumstances inside a police van) , William Chapman (18 year old unarmed black man who was shot dead by a white police officer), Samuel DuBose (43 year old unarmed black man shot dead by a white police officer in Cincinnati, Ohio). Since 2015 to January 2021, mostly white police officers have shot dead 135 unarmed black men, women and children, aged from 07 years to 54 years old.

“We lied, we cheated, we stole … It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” said the then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a speech on April 15, 2019. The remarks of U.S. politicians have completely exposed their hypocrisy of adopting double standards on human rights issues and using them to maintain hegemony.

Abuse of children, abuse and rape of women, abuse of the elderly, discrimination on basis of skin color, race, religion and sexual orientation and other human rights abuses have been and are a normal part of life in the United States of America. 

In 2001, the then President of USA, George W Bush announced a ‘war on terror’, which led to the invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and armed aggression against Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia and the Pakistan–Afghanistan border region. When the number of direct and indirect deaths in the above war zones is added-up over the last 21 years, the total reveals that at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died due to the War on Terror.

The United States claims to be founded on human rights, touting itself as a world human rights defender. Following a framework of its own narrow understanding of human rights and using its core interests of pursuing global hegemony as a yardstick, the United States released annual reports on other countries’ human rights every year by piecing together innuendoes and hearsay. These reports wantonly distorted and belittled human rights situation in countries and regions that did not conform to U.S. strategic interests, but turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the persistent, systematic and large-scale human rights violations in the United States itself.

 

 

Compiled by: 

Sardar Sanjay Matkar

sanjaymatkar@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

Taliban 2.0

 

 Currently, the government of Taliban in Afghanistan is coherent to a high degree of governance over the lives of most of the Afghans living under their rule. Well defined committees govern the sectors of finance, education, health, taxation, law and order, justice and enforcement of religious edicts, with clear chain of command from the leadership in Kabul down to the villages.

When international governments and aid agencies attempt to provide life-line goods and services, the Taliban co-opts and controls them. Even prior to taking official power in Afghanistan, the Taliban exerted influence in almost every area of governance; from monitoring health care delivery, to regulating the education system, utilities, communications and imposing their own taxes. The reach of the Taliban governance system that operated in parallel to the Western Nations backed proxy Government of Afghanistan (before its fall) demonstrated that the Taliban did not have to formally occupy a territory to influence what happened within it. For the Taliban, governance preceded the actual capture of territory. Their influence on everyday life extended far beyond areas that they had control over. Today, the Taliban is the official government of Afghanistan, and sets the rules that govern 85% of that country, a reality with which very few countries are willing to engage with.

Origins of modern Taliban:

Creation of the modern Taliban can be traced to the early years of the Afghan-Soviet Union [USSR] war. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to support the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a communist party which ruled the country at that time. The Soviet invasion was resisted by the Afghan mujahidin, who were anti–communist and committed to strict Islamic beliefs. The mujahidin fought the Soviet Union’s forces for most of the 1980s with the generous help from the United States of America which supplied them with money and weapons. In 1989, the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving a country that was fragmented across tribal and ethnic divides. Different tribal leaders and war-lords began fighting among themselves for control over the nation. In 1994, the Taliban militia emerged victorious.

‘Taliban’ is the plural of the Pashto word “talib”, a student of Islam; literally, ‘one who seeks knowledge’. These students of Islam have been present across the Afghanistan society since the earliest days of Islam through the network of madrasas, the Islamic religious schools. The disruptive nature of the Taliban is not new. A British intelligence report of 1901, described them as the ‘talib-ul-ilm’, the ‘men who contemplate religion as a profession’.

The report goes on to state that, ‘their number far exceeds those required to fill up vacancies in village mullahships and other ecclesiastic appointments. They are at the bottom of all the mischief in the country, the instigators and often the perpetrators of the bulk of the crime. They use their religious status to live free on the people, who are too superstitious to turn them out, even when they destroy the peace of the family circle.’

While sponsoring the mujahedin in their fight against the Soviet invaders, the USA, with the help of Saudi Arabia, and with Pakistan as the coordinator; formally declared the Afghan–Soviet Union war, as a jihad against the godless communists; which led to thousands of madrasa students joining the fight against the USSR. By the late 1980s, most such students assimilated into fighting units and were defined in general as the Taliban. They were easily distinguished by their turbans, in emulation of the headgear worn by descending angels who, according to the Quran, came to Prophet Muhammad’s rescue during one of his battles.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the country descended into chaos, with the disparate ethnic and religious leaders, who had comprised the mujahedin, brutally fighting for power. In 1994, thousands of civilians were killed during the fight for the control of the capital city of Kabul. The utter chaos lead to a failing economy and a power vacuum due to the lack of a central government. It was during these chaotic times, during the latter part of 1994, leaders of the Taliban fighting units gathered at the White Mosque in Sangsar (25 kms outside Kandahar), to unite as a single entity that became known as the ‘Taliban Movement’. The movement nominated and accepted Mullah Mohammed Omar as the leader (Emir) of Taliban and the transformation of Afghan political landscape was initiated.

From obscurity as a minor commander of the mujahedin to the undisputed leadership of the extremist Taliban movement, the rise of Mullah Omar was meteoric. His largely unrecognized Islamic Emirate controlled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until the invasion by the U.S. and its allies in late 2001; after which Omar was not seen in public. An Islamic fanatic and a recluse who hardly met any outsiders and had little knowledge of the world outside his Emirate, was infamously known as the man who gave asylum to Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda. The planning and instructions for the 11 September 2001 attack on USA by the al-Qaeda, was supposedly from this safe haven of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The retaliation by USA through massive bombings, reinforced by its troops and Afghanistan’s own Northern Alliance fighting alongside US troops, led to the collapse of the Taliban regime in November 2001. Omar and his senior aides fled to Quetta in Pakistan, where the Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Intelligence wing (the ISI) gave them sanctuary and helped them to rebuild the Taliban. In 2006, when 3,000 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops entered the Helmand province, they encountered a massive, Pakistan backed insurgency. Their ensuing battles with waves of Taliban fighters were vicious beyond expectations.

The leader of this Pakistani rebuilt Taliban was Mullah Omar. Born into the Hotak tribe of Ghilzai Pashtuns, he was a village mullah who ran his own madrasa (Islamic religious school) and fought as a member of Yunus Khalis’s Hisb-i-Islami mujahedin party; first against the Soviet invaders, and later against the pro-USSR Najibullah regime. Mullah Omar would most probably have returned to anonymity after the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992; had it not been for the total breakdown of law and order in his home province of Kandahar. When a local commander kidnapped and raped two teenage girls, Omar felt obliged to take action and created a force of 30 young religious students (the Talibs) and attacked the commander’s base, rescued the girls and hanged the commander as punishment. Whether this happened in reality or is just a folk tale is a matter of speculation. What is a matter of record is that Omar and his Talibs went on a rampage against the region’s warlords and took control of the Kandahar region. Their message was ruthlessly simple; surrender to us and accept our leadership or suffer the consequences. The Taliban imposed draconian rules and regulations which it claimed were sanctioned by the Koran. The Taliban banned television, music, dancing, and almost every other pastime, from kite-flying to cinema-going. Public executions, the stoning to death of women for adultery and the amputation of thieves’ hands became commonplace.

In 1995, the Taliban achieved its first big success outside the Pashtun area with the capture of Herat. When Omar turned his attention towards the capture of Kabul, it was clear that he had ambitions to rule the whole of Afghanistan. For a year his Taliban troops tried to capture Kabul, without any success. However, in the summer of 1996, in an attack planned and supported by the Pakistani Army and financed by Saudi Arabia, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and then the strategic cross-roads of Surobi, 60 kms East of Kabul. They entered and captured Kabul in September 1996 from Ahmed Shah Masud, the Tajik guerrilla commander and leader of the Northern Alliance.

Masud, who had captured Kabul in 1989 after the departure of the Soviet forces, withdrew to his base in the Panjsher valley, and over the next five years his Northern Alliance prevented the north-east territories of Afghanistan from falling into the hands of the Taliban. Omar’s forces conquered the rest of the north, massacring thousands of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. All pretence at restoring law and order and governing with popular consent had long been abandoned. Then, two days before 9/11 (2001), while still undefeated, Masud was assassinated by two Arab suicide bombers posing as television journalists, sent by Bin Laden.

In its prior history, two significant events took place in Afghanistan in 1996. One was the arrival of Osama bin Laden into Afghanistan, after his expulsion from Sudan. In return for the hospitality that he received from Mullah Omar, he helped finance the Taliban and encouraged their quest for creating a pure Islamic State.

The second event was the rare public appearance of Mullah Omar in Kandahar, where he donned what was claimed to be the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed and was proclaimed ‘Amir-ul-Momin’, Commander of the Faithful, which basically was broadcast as the leader of all Muslims, worldwide. Both these events committed Afghanistan to becoming the home country for al-Qaeda and a haven for terrorists to be recruited and trained there.

 The Taliban Leadership Structure

Any description of the Taliban leadership must begin with a set of caveats. Among the senior Taliban officials, there are subtle differences in how these individuals saw the movement being controlled and operated. The status of a reporting system (who reports to whom) and who influences which policy or decision, are all open to interpretation. With a functional government in power in Afghanistan, the movement has become more organized and coherent; but still has vast elements of flexibility to accommodate a variety of preferences and differences. Security and secrecy being prime motivators, the structures within the Taliban are fluid in practice. Some roles exist only in theory or are ad hoc in nature, though many roles are clearly defined as required for governance. Individual personality of key figures matters immensely, but are dependent on the context of the situations in which they are involved.

 The current Taliban leadership began to re-organize since 2002. By 2003, they had established governing commissions for military operations, political affairs, culture, and finance; all during their exile in Pakistan, and under the guidance and tutoring of Pakistani military’s ISI wing.  Until 2006, these commissions existed only in name, since the control of the organization in the initial stages was haphazard and order was established only over a period of time. As the military wing became cohesive, it helped to bring the civilian aspects of governance into workable structures. The first evidence of the Taliban shadow government inside Afghanistan was the presence of provincial military commanders and shadow provincial governors. Some early military positions transformed into hybrid military-civilian roles. Judges were the first functional service of the Taliban, being established around 2006. It is estimated that by 2010, there were approximately five hundred judges of the Taliban who were delivering justice in Afghanistan. Other officials who were charged with the responsibilities of finance, health, education and media; emerged during this same period in time.

In the early stages there were set-backs for these roles to function as intended; due to US-led military operations and targeted assassinations of mid and high-level commanders. During 2012–16, most Taliban governors could not stay in their assigned provinces for fear of being killed and their governance was severely limited. However, by 2018, Taliban shadow governors had taken up residence in majority of the provinces. This led to a change in their governance posture as they gained more control over larger territories. The earlier attacks of the Taliban on aid–organization workers, schools and medical clinics; had made the Taliban look disorganized and volatile, and led to negative global media coverage.

In 2006, the Taliban published its 1^st edition of the ‘Layha’, the Taliban code-of-conduct. It sought to deliver the impression that the Taliban could impose order on its troops. It defined a concise list of 30 rules, designed to instill discipline and a coherent policy of behavior among its members.  As the Taliban evolved into an armed political force with substantial influence across vast territories of the East and South, editions of layha in 2009 and 2010 detailed the governance structures in an elaborate manner, which included the roles of district and provincial governors and local committees. The motive of these details in Layha was to show that the Taliban would be accountable and that they could form a government that would be acceptable across social and international boundaries, based on this accountability. As such these editions of 2009 and 2010 were more than rule-books. They were the tools to communicate the aspirations and values of the movement to local and international observers.

By 2011, the Taliban leadership had signed agreements with multiple aid organizations and established a clear central policy for negotiating with NGOs. However, the adherence to this policy by the local, on-ground Taliban was uneven and the cooperation with aid agencies was frequently disrupted over suspicions that aid agencies might be spying on the Taliban and also acting against them. There were other high-level incidents that added to their suspicions. One was the killing of Mullah Akthar Mohammed Mansur; who was the de-facto Emir from 2010 and then officially the Emir following the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death from July 2015 till his death in May 2016. Mansur had been credited by various credible sources as having transformed the insurgency into a political movement, and into a ‘government in waiting’.

 As international forces withdrew, the Taliban gained more territory and expanded their influence dramatically. With international forces leaving, the Taliban could reduce their war activities and focus on governance. They seemed to be more prepared than in the 1990s, being confident in their analysis that the western supported Afghan government would disappear and they would have to be ready with their own system of governance for an easy takeover. A British survey in January 2018 placed the Taliban as ‘openly active’ in 70% of the country’s districts; while estimates from the U.S. led Operation Resolute Support, stated that the Afghan government controlled just over 50% of the districts in Afghanistan in October 2017. Even this modest estimate was indicative of the Taliban influence, particularly due to the virtually non-existent government presence in the rural areas.  

 Taliban of the 21^st century:

 The Taliban’s agility and ability to adapt has been remarkable. Their gradual acceptance to the fact that unrestricted violence would hurt their quest for popular support, transformed into sophisticated policy planning and implementation of developmental activities. Step-by-step, they revived and re-started parts of their governance, and invented other systems through trial and error. Much of this process appears to be from the ground-up and influenced by popular demand and local experiences.

Their leadership also proceeded to correct many of the flaws and shortcomings that undermined their rule in the 1990s. The ban on women and girls attending school has been removed, though most Taliban officials claim that no ban ever existed, and have publicly stated that women should have access to education. The ban on opium cultivation and its trade, which was a disaster during their earlier government times is clearly no longer in place, but the Taliban do not publicize this shift in policy and down-play the opium connection in public. Other subtle differences are their stated respect for other ethnic groups and their embrace of technology, limited as it may be.

 Circumstances have radically changed for the Taliban since 2001, and their policies and goals have shifted accordingly. Far from being a revolutionary movement of the 1990s, they now consider themselves as a deposed government and the main armed opposition fighting the pro-Western government supported by foreign soldiers. The Taliban leadership itself has also been transformed. Circumstances have forced them to travel outside their villages and also outside the country at times, and they have learned from their travels.

The simple fighters of yester-years are worldly trained politicians today; transforming themselves from being traditional conservatives into modern Islamist. They have also become better at managing external perceptions, having realized that educated people are an advantage and its helpful in manipulating the media. They have become sophisticated; with professional-standard glossy publications, a website in several languages, videos made of high-quality production and highly capable spokesmen that respond rapidly to questions and criticism across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Whats App; even though what is publicized on the social media is vastly different from the ground reality in Afghanistan. What exactly do the changes in Taliban policy means for Afghans and the future of Afghanistan will depend on the critical study and analysis of their on-ground actions.  

 The Taliban are led by the Emir ul-Mumenin (leader of the faithful), currently Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada. The scope and complexity of this position varies according to the person who occupies it, and the current Emir’s functions are more spiritual and political, than as an operational military commander. He is assisted by two deputies, as well as the leadership shura. At the provincial level there is a governor, appointed officially by the leadership shura. The Taliban now has a quasi–professional core of individuals who have served for several years across multiple provinces. These governors and local councils / commissions are not completely ‘civilian’, and the governors may serve in military capacity to varying degrees depending on the context and broader requirements of the office for local governance. Provincial ministers are appointed by the leadership of the relevant council, viz: education, health and finance; in consultation with the governor of the province. The system has grown more comprehensive over the years, with a dozen committees, some with multiple departments covering a multitude of issues. Significant autonomy is granted to province and district level officials within the overall framework of the policy.

 This flexibility is intentional, in order to accommodate different views and reducing dissent to as little as possible. It also helps to prevent the Taliban from splitting into different factions; since local politics and preferences based on history play a significant role in governance. Some areas might have a higher demand for health services than others, while others might want to give priority to education. The extent to which services have been available in the past also matters.  Areas where customary structures of governance are influential and respected, are in a stronger position to bargain for amenities from the Taliban officials. Individual relationships also influence policies, although the Taliban does not generally welcome individual opinions, since such interactions could be perceived as corruption.  In practice however, the Taliban rely on relationships in every aspect of their governance, due to a lack of trust in general and the widespread suspicion of their motives by the locals and the international interlocutors. Arrangements between the Taliban and civilians are based on a mutual yet unequal exchange, leading to an informal social contract that renders to the Taliban a legitimate authority, and strengthening its credibility as an acceptable form of government; even though it is not a government based on the choice and free will of the people of Afghanistan.

Governance by the good, the bad and the committed:

 Distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban is one way in which civilians make sense of seemingly random differences in policy implementations; which are heavily influenced by personality of the people involved, the historical precedence and the common objectives that need to be attained. Those Talibs who have blood ties with the community, who keep people safe from the violence and crime, and do not interfere where Taliban values are unwanted are considered as ‘good’ Taliban. The ‘bad’ Taliban are those who are considered to be heavily influenced by the Pakistani Intelligence services or those whose origins are not from Afghanistan.

 The implementation of policies across the Taliban governed lands are not uniform, and are influenced by the degree of Taliban control over that area and local socio–political dynamics. While there is more coherence in Taliban activity than in the past, policies are still subject to modifications or outright rejections by local commanders. Given this fragmented sovereignty, wherein the Taliban exercises limited control, there are areas of violent competition from breakaway factions of the Taliban or the Islamic State affiliates and al-Qaeda factions. The local Taliban implement policies on-ground according to their own beliefs or self–interests. Most of the variations are from governors who enjoy a strong personal power base and are respected for their military exploits, while others may intentionally violate a Taliban directive to demonstrate their autonomy. Such dissent is actively discouraged by the leadership shura and any acceptance of internal differences is considered as disloyalty to the movement.

 As in any government, ignorance of governance requirements and incompetence also affect outcomes. Officials are often appointed based on their loyalty and service in the Taliban movement, rather than expertise in any sector or sphere.

During the 1990s Taliban government, the appointed officials had no technical qualifications and were regularly rotated, usually as they were beginning to understand their portfolios, to discourage corruption. The Taliban officials do not receive training on how to govern the society that they rule over. Unless ordered by their leadership to take specific action, they rely on their experience, counsel from their colleagues and own judgement, poor as it might be.

 The Taliban leadership is realistic about its capabilities to implement policies in a uniform manner on the ground. Long-standing social order cannot be simply overcome by the presence of the Taliban, be it through coercion or dialogue. They accept that what might work in conservative, rural areas may not be accepted in more educated areas, or areas dominated by other local militia. Much of the Taliban policy is structured according to Islamic law, with an emphasis on total obedience to the Emir, and disagreements to the policy is considered un-Islamic.

Conclusion:

 Currently, there are limited discussions within the international community, to determine a pragmatic response to the predicament of working with the Taliban to deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan, and lack of clarity on how to negotiate and engage strategically with the Taliban government. They remain hesitant to engage, worried that any diplomatic or political outreach might legitimize the Taliban. Whether to engage is not the real dilemma. The Taliban is using humanitarian access for political and military ends and this has enabled it to decide the rules of engagements and parameters of negotiations, and the world powers are being forced to react to this reality. The challenge is how to engage with the Taliban in a politically acceptable and strategic manner.

 

References:

o     Giustozzi, A. (2009) Koran, Kalashnikov, and laptop: the neo-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, 2002–2007

o    Gopal, A. and van Linschoten, S. (2017) Ideology in the Afghan Taliban.

o    Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (2006) ‘Jihadi Code of Conduct (Layha)’

o    Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (2009) ‘Code of Conduct for the Mujahedin (Layha)’

o    Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (2010) ‘Code of Conduct for the Mujahedin (Layha)’

o    Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (2017) ‘Percent of country under the control of Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate’,

o    Ludhianvi, R. (2015) Obedience to the Amir: an early text on the Afghan Taliban movement.

o    UNAMA Human Rights (2018 & 2020) Afghanistan Annual Report: Protection of Civilians in armed conflict.