Taliban now coming to a guerilla war theatre near you

For America’s cold warriors, Sunni Muslims were ideal allies in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution.

Ahmed Rashid’s 2001 book, The Taliban, meticulously details how the jihad continued following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and parallel developments responsible for the Mujahideen’s “Afghan Arab” friends morphing into Al Qaeda.

Dr Abdullah Azam, a Jordanian Palestinian teaching in the University in Peshawar, initiated the recruitment of the volunteers who became known as the Afghan Arabs.

Their base was the Peshawar offices of the Muslim World League and the Muslim Brotherhood, Azam’s residence serving as a dormitory for volunteers en route to Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, who had met Azam at university in Jeddah, was one of the visitors.

Azam’s recruitment campaign brought in some 35,000 radical Muslims from 43 countries who either fought or worked in a support role with Mujahideen between 1982 and 1992. As Rashid reports, none of these Afghan Arabs were Afghans and many were not Arabs but Filipinos, Uzbeks, Chechens, Uighur Muslims from China, and an estimated 60 volunteers from East Africa.

Bin Laden and Azam split over the focus of the continuing jihad after the Soviet defeat. Azam was killed by a car bomb several weeks later.

Bin Laden used his wealth to support Afghan Arab widows and children, was exiled after quarrelling with the Saudi interior minister over the American presence during the Gulf war, ending up in Afghanistan, where several thousand Aghan Arabs joined him.

A number of these agents, including the infamous Fazul Mohammed and several of the sleepers implicated in the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998, circulated back to their home regions and other nodes in the expanding Al Qaeda network.

As the war among Mujahideen warlords escalated, Osama fell out with the Tajik resistance hero Ahmed Shah Masud, while maintaining a close relationship with the Abdul Rassul Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar factions whose militias later fought Masud in Kabul.

In 1992-93, Egypt and Algeria advised Washington to re-engage in Afghanistan in order to end the war and the presence of Afghan Arabs. The advice was ignored. Instead, Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright tilted from ostensible neutrality to diplomatic support for the Taliban.

The Taliban were an exclusively Pashtun Afghan movement. Their name derives from students educated in Deobandi madrasas established to care for the millions of Afghans swelling the refugee camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The Deobandi is a reformist movement originating in India during the early 1900s and advocating a literal interpretation of Islamic sources that is in many ways more extreme than Wahhabism.

These students provided 30 per cent of the rebels who wrested control of the country from Hekmatyar and the fractious coalition of Mujahideen warlords ruling post-Soviet Afghanistan.

Pakistan, with support from the CIA and Saudi funding, played the crucial enabling role in their rise to power.

Like post-Barre Mogadishu, their ethnic capital, Kandahar, had been looted under Mujahideen rule; everything of value was sold to Pakistanis.