What do you see as the future of Taliban-U.S. relations after the sanctions? The Taliban are going to defy the United States. They’ve already done that by showing the pictures of Osama at his son’s wedding in Kandahar [last week]. This was after 18 months where we hadn’t seen Osama, and a pledge by the Taliban that he would stay under wraps. They’ve defied Russia and Central Asian states by allowing [Uzbeki militant] Juma Namangani to cross into Tajikistan two weeks ago, and they’re encouraging Pakistan’s Islamic parties to tell General Musharraf to defy the sanctions. None of this is accidental. The mood is very belligerent.
How would you assess America’s bin Laden policy in the context of its broader regional policy? The U.S. focus on Osama has been so one-dimensional. The network of militancy in Afghanistan is huge, and it’s not all Osama-controlled. Militants there include Chinese, Central Asians, Arabs from 12 different countries, Filipinos, Indonesians, Burmese and Pakistanis. This is not simply a problem of one man. It has degenerated into a much bigger, more dangerous pan-Islamic movement. There’s another reason it’s one-dimensional: the root cause of the Osama problem is the continuing war in Afghanistan. As long as the war continues, Afghanistan will remain a base for Islamic militancy and drug and arms trafficking. The United States has not focused sufficiently on how to end the war. Nor has it put sufficient pressure on the region to stop arms supplies to both the Taliban and [opposition commander Ahmed Shah] Massoud. Catching Osama is the No. 1 item for U.S. foreign policy. Ending the war doesn’t even feature on the top 10 of American foreign-policy interests. All we have seen of U.S. policy has been punishment by the stick. What is needed is the carrot, to convince the warlords to end the fighting. You’re not offering the warlords or the devastated population anything in terms of reconstruction funding to end the war. Mediation without incentives for peace is utterly useless. U.N. negotiations have been totally stymied for a decade, because they have nothing to offer the Afghans.
You were recently in Washington, talking to people in Congress and the State Department. Any signs of a shift in strategic thinking on Afghanistan? There are only a handful of people in Washington who realize the real destabilization Afghanistan is creating across the world. There are very few people who are articulating this framework, rather than pounding on about “we have to catch a terrorist,” which is a very simple thing to say. There’s very little expertise on the links between groups, or on these new forms of Islamic militancy.
Earlier forms of Islamic fundamentalism were serious critiques of modernity. How are the current Islamic militants different? The new forms have very little to do with the Islamic militancy of the 1930s and 1970s. First, none of these current extremist groups are led by Islamic ulema, or scholars, as were previous movements. Islamic fundamentalism has a century of rich history–of scholarship, politics and debate. Those were serious intellectuals, steeped in the idea of how to create an Islamic state and an Islamic economy. This current group is basically the Lumpenproletariat of Islam. They know very little of Islamic history, morals or even the history of their own countries. This is the hip-hop generation of Islamic militants. They know nothing about nothing. Their aim is the destruction of the status quo, but they offer nothing to replace it with.
Osama bin Laden is the “guest” of the Taliban. How much influence does he have on their foreign policy? Theirs is a very schizophrenic relationship. The Taliban world view at the moment is the Osama world view. He has unprecedented clout in determining policies through his closeness to Mullah Omar and others in the movement. When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they did not have this world view. His influence over foreign policy has never been so high. They’ve recently made statements about a worldwide Muslim brotherhood that you would never expect from a bunch of rural Pushtoon peasants like the Taliban. But they have to take care with their own domestic credibility, and their ability to deal with economic crises. The Taliban are fundamentally divided. The moderates want Afghanistan to talk to America. But there’s an ideological lobby, which is heavily influenced by Osama, and they want Taliban-style revolution in other countries.
