Posted on by L&R Forum

Jessica Wright on Dark Days in Afghanistan

Former CLR Fellow Jessica Wright ’14 began her legal career in Kabul, Afghanistan where she worked with a team of local and international lawyers on Afghan commercial and tax law matters, as well as Rule of Law Initiatives. She also served as a legal advisor to the Office of the President, and was an adjunct professor of law at the American University of Afghanistan. Now a litigation associate at DLA Piper in New York, Jessica reflects in this important post on the dire events unfolding in Afghanistan, and what the return of the Taliban means for the Afghan people.

* * *

“It’s nearly spring again, and I’m still in Afghanistan, almost inexplicably. American airstrikes in the provinces are shifting Taliban sights on the cities, they say, and foreigners are advised to leave. Progress in law and institution building ebbs and flows, as do the foreign monies for projects, as do the people who run them in short, detached tours. Life is cyclical for almost everyone, turning in tedium or tragedy depending on whether one’s aim is a project benchmark or simply reaching home across town, unscathed.”

I wrote those words in the spring of 2018, just before I left Afghanistan for the last time.  The Taliban’s spring offensive was about to begin, and I faced a direct threat from the ISI-backed Haqqani network.  In truth, though, even then, Kabul didn’t feel like a war zone for more than a few days or hours at a time, and I always knew that if things went south, I could be on the next flight out.  Expats are privileged to live with a sense of detachment in places like Afghanistan – we can view everyday life with its bomb blasts and security threats as a story to tell instead of a reality to live.  Still, proximity to war changes the way we understand conflict – it personalizes the fight and deepens the relationships forged with a place and a people. 

The speed at which the Taliban has advanced across Afghanistan in the last week has shocked nearly everyone I know, from seasoned journalists to well-connected Afghan politicians.  Ten provincial capitals were seized by the Taliban in just six days: Shebergan, Sar-e pul, Kunduz, Taluqan, Aybak, Pul-e Khumri, and Faizabad in the north, Farah in the west, and Zaranj and Ghazni in the south.  Understanding that the war in the provinces had definitively moved to the cities, Afghan friends began sending panicked messages asking for advice and visa references and Embassy contacts, hoping that with a little luck they could still make it out.  Then, on August 13, two major cities fell: Herat, a vital cultural and economic hub on the border with Iran, and Kandahar, an important city in the southern Pashtun heartland.  In quick succession, Mazar-i Sharif, the last holdout in the north, fell on August 14, and on Saturday, the Taliban took Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, cutting off Kabul from the east.  Entire Afghan units surrendered to the Taliban, knowing that without U.S. support they could no longer continue to fight.  Others laid down their arms in protest, unwilling to risk their lives on the battlefield for a hopeless cause and a government in shambles. 

Colleagues on the ground in Kabul have reported a massive influx of refugees from the provinces.  They tell stories of families weeping outside embassy gates and passport offices, desperately seeking a way out of the country.  Many others have set up mattresses and makeshift tents in the local parks knowing they have nowhere else to run.  As the weekend wore on, locals rushed to stock up on food and other necessities, and all the while American Chinooks and Black Hawks flew overhead at constant, regular intervals, serving as a brutal reminder that as foreigners escaped to safety, Afghans were trapped on the ground to face their fate alone.

On Sunday, as the Taliban continued its advance toward Kabul, President Ashraf Ghani and Vice President Amrullah Saleh relinquished power and fled the country, signaling the collapse of the Afghan government.  In a post on his Facebook page, Ghani stated, “To avoid bloodshed, I thought it would be better to leave.”  Shortly thereafter, Dr. Abdullah, the former Chief Executive Officer of Afghanistan, who remains in the country, sent a message to the people of Afghanistan asking them to stay calm.  He assured them that “God will make [Ghani] accountable.”  Former President Karzai, who also remains in Kabul, posted a photo of himself and his daughters with a message to the Taliban, asking them to provide security and safety for the people.  The Taliban said they would not take Kabul by force, but when they reached the outskirts of the city on Sunday evening, they began making their way in to “prevent lawlessness.”  Judging by the messages from my Afghan friends and colleagues, the mood had shifted from quiet panic to stoic resignation.  They told me that the American flag at the U.S. Embassy had been taken down, and that the massive Afghan flag atop Wazir Akbar Khan hill was removed by the Taliban shortly thereafter.  They sent pictures of Taliban leaders inside the Presidential Palace – once a serene fortress – and reported that groups of fighters were milling about on the streets carrying their distinctive white flag bearing the shahadah: “I bear witness that none deserves worship except God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”  It felt as if everyone was holding their breath, expecting the bloodshed to start at any moment but still hoping, desperately, for some other outcome.

It is not yet clear what a Taliban regime will mean for the people of Afghanistan, but according to analysts, the insurgent group, ousted from power 20 years ago by a U.S.-led invasion, has been growing stronger for the last two decades, and the methods they employ to govern will likely be as brutal as they have been in the past.  The Taliban has run a shadow state for years in the southern provinces, and residents of those areas report that gruesome beatings and executions remain commonplace.  Researchers point out that the Taliban’s leadership has become savvier, which may in part account for its ability to seize the Afghan capital, but they caution that such change does not necessarily translate to more lenient rule.

*          *          *

Islam has always been at the center of the lives of the Afghan people.  In fact, a form of Sharia or Islamic law governed the legal process in Afghanistan until 1925.  Traditional Islam in Afghanistan meant minimum government with little interference in people’s lives; everyday decisions were carried out by elders in the tribe and the community.”  It was not until 1925 that King Amanullah introduced the first civil legal code, and not until 1946 that a Sharia faculty was set up at Kabul University, allowing an integration of traditional Sharia with modern law.  “Another moderating factor for Islam in Afghanistan was the enormous popularity of Sufism, the trend of mystical Islam,” which is built on prayer, contemplation, music, and a “permanent quest for truth” (Ahmed Rashid describes Sufism and Islam in Afghanistan in his book, Taliban, from which the quotes in this section are taken).

The “austere Wahabbi creed of Saudi Arabia,” which opposed mystical Sufism, gained some traction in Afghanistan, but Islamic extremism had never flourished in earnest before the Taliban.  There were indeed several traditional political Islamic movements, some of which sought a type of Muslim internationalism that would unite the ummah or Muslim world, and to achieve their political ends, “parties like the Pakistani Jamaat and Hikmetyar’s Hizb-e-Islami set up highly centralized modern parties organized along communist lines with a cell system, extreme secrecy, political indoctrination, and military training.”  These movements were led by radical Islamicists, but they could be considered rather modern and forward-looking in comparison to the Taliban.

The Taliban’s interpretation of Islam, jihad, and social transformation echoes none of the Islamicist trends in Afghanistan.  Rather, the Taliban’s particular interpretation of Islam stems from the teachings of semi-educated mullahs in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), who trained generations of Afghans in rural madrassas.  Their interpretation of Sharia is heavily influenced by Pashtunwali, the tribal code of the Pashtuns, and the madrassas themselves were funded and influenced by Saudi Arabian Wahhabists.  The Taliban are not advocates of learning or reform, and they accept “no concept of doubt except as sin and consider debate as little more than heresy.”  In addition, the Taliban tend to be “poorly tutored in Islamic and Afghan history, knowledge of the Sharia and the Koran and the political and theoretical developments in the Muslim world during the twentieth century.”

When the Taliban first entered Kabul in 1996, the religious police beat men and women in the streets for not having long enough beards and for wearing the burka improperly.  An intelligence agency was formed and staffed with thousands of professional spies and paid informers.  Anyone who questioned the Taliban’s edicts were said to have questioned Islam itself and were punished severely.  The Taliban massacred ethnic and religious minorities, and its subjugation of women was total.  Their regime was built entirely on what amounted to myth: particularized beliefs, fears, and ideologies that had nothing to do with Islam itself or with Afghan cultural norms.  The Taliban’s ban on every form of entertainment, for example, was based on the belief that entertainment, particularly music, strained the mind and hampered the study of Islam.

In recent years, the Taliban have sought to project a more moderate image and have shown some flexibility in their application of Sharia.  In an Eid holiday message in May, the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada stated, “The Islamic Emirate seeks cordial and positive relations based on mutual respect and good conduct with all neighboring, regional and world countries.”  Many caution, however, that while Taliban leaders have become more adept politicians, they have not changed their goal of reinstating an Islamic emirate with the repressive laws and retrograde policies the world has seen before.  As it currently stands, foreign powers have little to no leverage when it comes to ensuring that international humanitarian law is followed and that the rights and freedoms of the people are protected.

*          *          *

What is happening in Afghanistan feels deeply personal to me.  I have taught and worked with and come to know the vibrant younger generation of Afghans who desire peace and have worked, relentlessly, for a stable democracy.  What will become of them now?  Will they be able to study at university and operate businesses and run for office?  Will Afghan journalists be able to publish stories, unfettered, or will the press become a propaganda arm of the new regime?  And what about the women and girls?  Will they be relegated to the home and denied an education and a livelihood?  Will those intelligent, driven women who became law firm partners and political activists and influential artists be silenced and made to live a life in the shadows?  These questions haunt me, and I struggle to imagine the Kabul I knew transformed into the bastion of a merciless Taliban state.

It is difficult to connect to tragedies from which we are far removed, but it is important to look to Afghanistan now.  All of us would do well to remember that the Afghan people have suffered generation after generation of warfare and humanitarian crises, all at the hands of foreign powers.  And there are dark days ahead.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on the Islamic State

The Islamic State (or ISIL, ISIS, or Daesh) had a meteoric rise in 2014 and at one point controlled a sizable territory in Iraq, in which it attempted to reimpose classical Islamic law, including dhimmi restrictions on Christians and other non-Muslims. The group has lost its territory since then, but no doubt plans a comeback. A new book from Stanford University Press, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, assesses the group. The author is journalist Abdel Bari Atwan. The publisher’s description follows.

Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) stunned the world when it overran an area the size of Great Britain on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border in a matter of weeks and proclaimed the birth of a new Caliphate. In this timely and important book, Abdel Bari Atwan draws on his unrivaled knowledge of the global jihadi movement and Middle Eastern geopolitics to reveal the origins and modus operandi of Islamic State.

Based on extensive field research and exclusive interviews with IS insiders, Islamic State outlines the group’s leadership structure, as well as its strategies, tactics, and diverse methods of recruitment. Atwan traces the Salafi-jihadi lineage of IS, its ideological differences with al Qaeda and the deadly rivalry that has emerged between their leaders. He also shows how the group’s rapid growth has been facilitated by its masterful command of social media platforms, the “dark web,” Hollywood blockbuster-style videos, and even jihadi computer games, producing a powerful paradox where the ambitions of the Middle Ages have reemerged in cyberspace.

As Islamic State continues to dominate the world’s media headlines with horrific acts of ruthless violence, Atwan considers the movement’s chances of survival and expansion and offers indispensable insights on potential government responses to contain the IS threat.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Popular Sovereignty in Islam

We start the week with an interesting-looking book from Harvard on how Islamist movements have adopted popular sovereignty–an idea unknown in classical Islam–as a main element of their political programs. In classical Islam, Islamic law was the domain of scholars, who had authority to guide the ruler, or caliph, in governing the umma. But many contemporary Islamist movements distrust, or at least diminish, the role of scholars. Instead, these movements argue that the Muslim people have the authority to instantiate God’s law and govern society in a godly way. This is a real transformation in Islamic thought, with major implications. The book is The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, by political scientist Andrew March (University of Massachusetts-Amherst). The publisher’s description follows:

A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change.

The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East.

This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory?

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

MacEachern, “Searching for Boko Haram”

9780190492526

Remember the Chibok girls? In 2014, the African Islamist group, Boko Haram, kidnapped hundreds of girls from their school in Chibok, Nigeria, instigating a world-wide campaign to prevail upon the group to “Bring Back Our Girls.” Four years later, half the girls are still missing. The world’s attention span, sadly, is very short.

A new book from Oxford University Press, Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa, by Bowdoin College anthropologist Scott MacEachern, traces the history of the group, which, he argues, has centuries-old roots. The publisher’s description follows:

For the past decade, Boko Haram has relentlessly terrorized northeastern Nigeria. Few if any explanations for the rise of this violent insurgent group look beyond its roots in worldwide jihadism and recent political conflicts in central Africa.

Searching for Boko Haram is the first book to examine the insurgency within the context of centuries, millennia even, of cultural change in the region. The book surveys the deep history of the lands south of Lake Chad, richly documented in archaeology and texts, to show how ancient natural and cultural events can aid in our understanding of Boko Haram’s present agenda. The land’s historical narrative stretches back five centuries, with cultural origins that plunge even deeper into the past. One important feature of this past is the phenomenon of frontiers and borderlands. In striking ways, Boko Haram resembles the frontier slave raiders and warlords who figure in precolonial and colonial writings on the southern Lake Chad Basin. Presently, these accounts are paralleled by the activity of smugglers, bandits (coupeurs de route–“road cutters”), and tax evaders. The borderlands of these countries are today places where the state often refuses to exercise its full authority because of the profits and opportunities illicit relationships afford state officials and bureaucrats. For the local community, Boko Haram’s actions are readily understandable in terms of slave raids and borderlands. They are not mysterious and unprecedented eruptions of violence and savagery, but–as the book argues–recognizable phenomena within the contexts of local politics and history.

Written from the perspective of an author who has worked in this part of Africa for more than thirty years, Searching for Boko Haram provides vital historical context to the recent rise of this terroristic force, and counters misperceptions of their activities and of the region as a whole.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Amanat, “Iran”

eb374ed35a2bef6b09d45e9c84080a42Looking back from the perspective of forty years, the Iranian Revolution appears more and more as a turning point in world history. The Shia political resurgence encouraged similar Islamist movements in the Sunni world as well; and those movements have shaped the politics of the Mideast, and the world, ever since. A new history from Yale University Press, Iran: A Modern History, discusses the Revolution and other aspects of Iranian culture and history since the 16th century. The author is Yale historian Abbas Amanat. Here’s a description from the Yale website:

A masterfully researched and compelling history of Iran from 1501 to 2009

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years. The book covers the complex history of the diverse societies and economies of Iran against the background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars, foreign occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

Abbas Amanat combines chronological and thematic approaches, exploring events with lasting implications for modern Iran and the world. Drawing on diverse historical scholarship and emphasizing the twentieth century, he addresses debates about Iran’s culture and politics. Political history is the driving narrative force, given impetus by Amanat’s decades of research and study. He layers the book with discussions of literature, music, and the arts; ideology and religion; economy and society; and cultural identity and heritage.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Salazar, “Words Are Weapons”

7750a0573a62c46fce179f78d9b48006A bishop once explained to me the rhetorical appeal of Islam to the Christians of late antiquity this way. “Think of the Nicene Creed,” he said. “It goes on for paragraphs and is so complex that it takes years of study really to understand it. What does it say to the average person?” Whereas the Islamic profession of faith, the Shahada, is powerfully concise — only a sentence long. “Think how appealing that must have been to Byzantine Christians tired of theological dispute.” A forthcoming book from University of Cape Town scholar Phillipe-Joseph Salazar, Words are Weapons: Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror (Yale) addresses the power of words, including the Shahada, in the appeal of the Islamic State today. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

 The first book to offer a rigorous, sophisticated analysis of ISIS’s rhetoric and why it is so persuasive

ISIS wages war not only on the battlefield but also online and in the media. Through a close examination of the words and images ISIS uses, with particular attention to the “digital caliphate” on the web, Philippe-Joseph Salazar theorizes an aesthetic of ISIS and its self-presentation. As a philosopher and historian of ideas, well versed in both the Western and the Islamic traditions, Salazar posits an interpretation of Islam that places speech—the profession of faith—at the center of devotion and argues that evocation of the simple yet profound utterance of faith is what gives power to the rhetoric that ISIS and others employ. At the same time, Salazar contends that Western discourse has undergone a “rhetorical disarmament.” To win the fight against ISIS and Islamic extremism, Western democracies, their media, politicians, and counterterrorism agencies must consider radically changing their approach to Islamic extremism.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Karagiannis, “The New Political Islam”

15749This looks like an interesting book. In The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy, and Justice, Emmanuel Karagiannis (King’s College London) argues that political Islam, notwithstanding its monolithic reputation in the West, is actually a multi-faceted phenomenon. Islamist groups, he maintains, take concepts that are current in contemporary globalist ideology, like human rights and democracy, and adapt them to local conditions. The result is a political movement with a recognizable core but different local expressions. The book will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press this coming December. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

Islamist political parties and groups are on the rise throughout the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the West. Owing largely to the threat of terrorism, political Islam is often portrayed as a monolithic movement embodying fundamentalism and theocracy, an image magnified by the rise of populism and xenophobia in the United States and Europe. Reality, however, is far more complicated. Political Islam has evolved considerably since its spectacular rise decades ago, and today it features divergent viewpoints and contributes to discrete but simultaneous developments worldwide. This is a new political Islam, more global in scope but increasingly local in action.

Emmanuel Karagiannis offers a sophisticated analysis of the different manifestations of contemporary Islamism. In a context of global economic and social changes, he finds local manifestations of Islamism are becoming both more prevalent and more diverse. Many Islamists turn to activism, still more participate formally in the democratic process, and some, in far fewer numbers, advocate violence—a wide range of political persuasions and tactics that reflects real and perceived political, cultural, and identity differences.

Synthesizing prodigious research and integrating insights from the globalization debate and the literature on social movements, The New Political Islam seeks to explain the processes and factors leading to distinctive fusions of “the global” and “the local” across the landscape of contemporary political Islam. Examining converts to Islam in Europe, nonviolent Islamists with global reach, Islamist parties in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia, and militant Shia and Sunni groups in Syria and Iraq, Karagiannis demonstrates that Islamists have embraced ideas and practices from the global marketplace and have attempted to implement them locally. He looks closely at the ways in which Islamist activists, politicians, and militants have utilized the language of human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and popular support and to contend for power.

 

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wright, “The Terror Years”

9780804170031Last month, Penguin Random House released the paperback edition of The Terror Years: From Al Qaeda to the Islamic State, by journalist Lawrence Wright. Wright’s 2007 work about 9/11, The Looming Tower, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize, and this book, which picks up from where the earlier book left off, looks very worthwhile. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

These powerful investigative pieces, which take us from the religious police of Saudi Arabia to the rise of the Islamic State, comprise an essential primer on jihadist movements in the Middle East—and the attempts of the West to contain them. In these pages, Lawrence Wright examines al-Qaeda as it experiences a rebellion from within and spins off a growing web of worldwide terror. He shows us the Syrian film industry before the civil war—compliant at the edges but already exuding a barely masked fury. He gives us the heart-wrenching story of American children kidnapped by ISIS—and Atlantic publisher David Bradley’s efforts to secure their release. And he details the roles of key FBI figures John O’Neill and his talented protégé Ali Soufan in fighting terrorism. In a moving epilogue, Wright shares his predictions for the future. Rigorous, clear-eyed, and compassionate, The Terror Years illuminates the complex human players on all sides of a devastating conflict.

Posted on by Liam Ray

Idrissa, “The Politics of Islam in the Sahel”

In June, Routledge will release The Politics of Islam in the Sahel: Between Persuasion and Violence by Rahmane Idrissa (University of the Witwatersrand). The publisher’s description follows:

routledge-logo‘Ideologies need enemies to thrive, religion does not’. Using the Sahel as a source of five comparative case studies, this volume aims to engage in the painstaking task of disentangling Islam from the political ideologies that have issued from its theologies to fight for governmental power and the transformation of society. While these ideologies tap into sources of religious legitimacy, the author shows that they are fundamentally secular or temporal enterprises, defined by confrontation with other political ideologies–both progressive and liberal–within the arena of nation states. Their objectives are the same as these other ideologies, i.e., to harness political power for changing national societies, and they resort to various methods of persuasion, until they break down into violence.

The two driving questions of the book are, whence come these ideologies, and why do they–sometimes–result in violence? Ideologies of Salafi radicalism are at work in the five countries of the Sahel region, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, (Northern) Nigeria and Senegal, but violence has broken out only in Mali and Northern Nigeria. Using a theoretical framework of ideological development and methods of historical analysis, Idrissa traces the emergence of Salafi radicalism in each of these countries as a spark ignited by the shock between concurrent processes of Islamization and colonization in the 1940s. However, while the spark eventually ignited a blaze in Mali and Nigeria, it has only led to milder political heat in Niger and Senegal and has had no burning effect at all in Burkina Faso. By meticulously examining the development of Salafi radicalism ideologies over time in connection with developments in national politics in each of the countries, Idrissa arrives at compelling conclusions about these divergent outcomes. Given the many similarities between the countries studied, these divergences show, in particular, that history, the behaviour of state leaders and national sociologies matter–against assumptions of ‘natural’ contradictions between religion (Islam) and secularism or democracy.

This volume offers a new perspective in discussions on ideology, which remains–as is shown here–the independent variable of many key contemporary political processes, either hidden in plain sight or disguised in a religious garb.

Posted on by Liam Ray

Ahrari, “The Islamic Challenge and the United States”

In February, McGill-Queen’s University Press will release The Islamic Challenge and the United States: Global Security in an Age of Uncertainty by Ehsan M. Ahrari (Strategic Studies Institute). The publisher’s description follows:

islamic-challengeOn September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden declared “global jihad” on the West. In response to the day’s attacks, the United States has waged its own global war on terrorism, which the Pentagon has described as a generational conflict similar to the Cold War.

In The Islamic Challenge and the United States, Ehsan Ahrari takes a close look at this ideological conflict, focusing on the Middle East, Africa, and South and Central Asia. Arguing that the war on terrorism is founded on secular fundamentalism (an ideology that envisions Islam as dangerous and volatile because it mixes religion and politics) and the Enlightenment narrative, Ahrari suggests that the United States sees global jihadists as absolutist, irrational, obscurantist, and anti-modern. While violence on behalf of the Muslim community – ummah – is thus framed as reprehensible, violence on behalf of the Western nation-state is seen as sometimes necessary and often praiseworthy. Unsettlingly, this framework does not encourage careful scrutiny of America’s historical dealings with the Muslim world. The belief that religion causes violence, Ahrari argues, may blind the West to its own forms of fanaticism.

A timely analysis of one of the most contested issues of our times, The Islamic Challenge and the United States is a must-read for global security practitioners, policymakers, and general readers.