The Taliban can always declare a global caliphate

Following the unconditional withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, the Taliban forcibly toppled the legitimate government of the country and announced the formation of an interim government towards the final achievement of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” At least half the members of this interim government are subject to prosecution by the US and international organizations on serious terrorist charges.

The current American administration, presumably under the impression that the Taliban have no wide-reaching ambitions whatsoever and are at odds with the more “globalist” Islamism of ISIS, cautiously welcomed the Islamist extremists’ takeover.

The United States is ostensibly content to have the Taliban’s reign of terror confined mostly to Afghanistan. However, the US might have committed a serious mistake by scrapping two decades of “War on Terror” and leaving no safeguards behind in Afghanistan.

A careful examination of the roots and origins of the Taliban demonstrates how Islamists, including the ones in Iran, with the pretext of “resistance to colonialism” and “return to one’s self,” in the last half a century have first established themselves in their native lands through a combination of totalitarian, anti-Western ideology and overwhelming violence, and then embarked upon a campaign of global terror that has mostly targeted the West.

The Taliban are an offshoot of the much broader “Deobandi Movement,” which is a Sunni fundamentalist movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in reaction to the British presence in the Indian Subcontinent.

After the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, during which Indian soldiers massacred their British overlords and were in turn harshly suppressed, Islamists founded the “Darul Uloom” seminary in the northern city of Deoband to push back against British colonialism through the spread of radical religious ideas.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the political arm of the Deobandis, played a major role in the Indian independence movement. For most of the first half of the twentieth century and preceding India’s independence, the Deobandis advocated the concept of “composite nationalism,” according to which Hindus and Muslims were considered a “single nation” that were supposed to fight the British and eventually expel them from India.

Later, a schism occurred among the Deobandis, and a group of them started to oppose the notion of the unity of Muslims and Hindus, and instead demanded full political recognition for the Muslim community of India. They finally formed Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam in 1945, and joined Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s more well-known “Muslim League,” which sought to establish an independent Islamic state in the Indian Subcontinent, which eventually became Pakistan.

Since Pakistan’s independence, the Deobandis have held sway in the nation’s politics. The movement grew significantly during the presidency of General Zia-ul-Haq, which largely coincided with the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The government of Zia-ul-Haq, himself a radical Islamist, supported the expansion of Deobandi seminaries in the country, and Pakistan’s security apparatus trained Deobandi militants to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and Indians in Kashmir.

The Taliban are largely the product of religious, political and social upheavals in Afghanistan and Pakistan during this era. Deobandi Islam is the most common form of pedagogy in the Pashtunistan region on both sides of the hotly disputed Durand Line in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the majority of the Taliban come from. Prominent Taliban leaders have studied or taught at influential Deobandi seminaries; and since their rise to power a quarter of a century ago, Darul Uloom Deoband has consistently supported them. The combination of these factors has led the opposition to the Taliban to regard them as a “proxy force” for Pakistan.

The Taliban, like other affiliates of the Deobandi movement, are authoritarian, intolerant, and violent; and their school of the Sharia Law is particularly draconian and exclusive. As fundamentalists who perceive their way as the only right path to God and the Hereafter, they look down on other Muslims as well as the followers of other religions as “misguided” souls, which in turn authorizes them to perpetrate atrocities against others and vandalize their holy places.

In the run-up to their first takeover of Afghanistan in mid 1990s, after crushing the resistance of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the Taliban massacred the Shiite Hazaras and the Sunni Tijiks and Uzbeks. By the time they had established their first “Islamic Emirate,” they blew up antique 1500-year-old Buddha statues of Bamyan as “idols.” As late as 2011, the Taliban assassinated Burhanuddin Rabbani, a prominent al-Azhar graduate and the leader of the Islamic Jamiat of Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s treatment of women is particularly primitive and inhumane. Under the guise of religious “zeal,” they violently curtail the individual freedoms of women and obstruct their social activities. The Taliban’s recent interim government abolished the modern “Ministry of Women’s Affairs” and replaced it with the medieval “Ministry of Enjoining Good and Forbidding Evil.” The Taliban are also accused of committing genocide against and imposing forced migration upon those they consider undesirable elements, as has been reported about the residents of the Panjshir Valley that resisted the Taliban’s takeover.

So far, the hirsute Islamists have been busy reclaiming their native land, and as such have pragmatically refrained from making bold claims as to the desirability of an Islamic Emirate beyond the borders of Afghanistan. Unlike their previous rule, they have even expressed interest in establishing amicable relations with the civilized world. However, true to their Deobandi roots, the Taliban are bound to expand once they are fully established in Afghanistan.

Although less notorious as “troublemakers” in the West as, for example, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the regime in Iran, the Deobandis are a major source of Islamist radicalism around the world, and they maintain a considerable presence in the Indian Subcontinent (hence India’s anxieties), Central Asia (hence China and Russia’s careful outreach), the Middle East (hence Iran’s calculated support and the Arabs’ apprehension), and Western Europe and North America. As such, it is only a matter of time before the Taliban declare their own global caliphate, and when they do so, the United States will have to recalibrate its security policies towards Islamists once more and reconsider its War on Terror.