Taliban

The Taliban (Pashto for "religious students") is a radical Islamic group based in Afghanistan. The organization's fundamentalist policies are based on an interpretation of sharia, the legal code of the Qur'an. The group took power in Afghanistan in 1996 and economic and social conditions in the country deteriorated, with frequent human rights abuses by the regime. The dedication to never-ending jihad, or religious struggle, became central to the Taliban's system of beliefs, and it was this dedication that focused the world's attention on Afghanistan in light of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. The Taliban were driven from power by a US-led invasion, but carried on as an insurgent group and gradually rebuilt its strength and influence. Despite various attempts at peace negotiations with both the Afghan and US governments, the Taliban remained a terrorist threat into the 2020s, eventually retaking control of Kabul and toppling the government in August 2021. At that point, the Taliban re-asserted their control over Afghanistan and in subsequent years reintroduced a number of policies they had enacted during their first rule of Afghanistan, such as banning education for girls.

History

The Taliban movement has its roots in the socially conservative traditions of the Pashtun ethnic majority, centered in the southeastern region of Afghanistan. It was founded by Mullah Mohammad Omar, who was born in 1959 in the village of Singesar, near Kandahar. Despite his impoverished upbringing, Omar was renowned for his devotion to Islam and remained the supreme leader of the Taliban until his death in 2013.

Once the last of the occupying Soviet forces left Afghanistan in 1989, political unrest and rivalries among local warlords plunged the country into chaos. During the war, Omar had fought alongside the mujahideen, but he was appalled by their postwar behavior. After witnessing the rape of several women near his village in 1994, Omar and thirty other Pashtun decided to arm themselves and bring the offending mujahideen commanders to justice. Soon, their brand of vigilantism spread beyond Omar's village, and a movement was born.

In 1994, the Taliban helped Pakistan to open up a safe trade route through Afghanistan. In return, the Taliban received financial and military support and was able to recruit Pakistani religious students who were eager to join the jihad. The movement gained more popular support that year when it took control of Kandahar with little resistance or bloodshed. The regime also received significant support from exiled Saudi terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, who provided the Taliban with money and soldiers in exchange for a safe haven in Afghanistan.

By 1996, the Taliban had become more widely accepted among Afghans who were eager for stability after the confusion following the Soviet withdrawal. Omar assumed the Islamic title of Amir ul-Momineen, or "leader of the faithful," a distinction that ranks nearly as high as prophet. Addressing a crowd of thousands of Taliban supporters, Omar wore the Respectable Cloak of the Prophet Mohammad, a sacred relic that had been removed from its shrine only twice in over a thousand years. The appearance was inspiring to the Taliban soldiers, who then left Kandahar to launch an assault against the capital city of Kabul. The city was soon captured, and the Taliban's position was solidified with the execution of President Najibullah.

Among some fundamentalist Muslims, the Taliban were viewed as religious heroes who replaced the postwar chaos of Afghanistan with security and stability. However, most of their extreme policies were not embraced by the majority of Afghanistan's population, and the group ruled through fear and repression.

Life Under Taliban Rule

The aim of the Taliban leaders, once they seized control of Afghanistan, was to create the only "pure" Islamic state in the world. To this end, they promptly banned television, movies, and nonreligious music and established the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice (PVSV) to enforce their extremely conservative laws. Under the PVSV, crimes such as homosexuality, adultery, and murder were punishable by public execution, and those found guilty of stealing could expect to have their limbs amputated. The perpetrators of lesser crimes and religious infractions, including Afghan men who refused to grow beards, were often beaten or flogged by members of the Taliban military.

According to the Taliban's fundamentalist views, women are inferior in every way to men and are therefore denied anything resembling human rights. Under the Taliban, Afghan women were required to wear burqas, long gowns that completely concealed their bodies, with only a small mesh screen allowing them to see and breathe. Women were also forbidden to engage in any work outside the home, their access to health care was restricted, and young girls were not allowed to attend schools.

In July 2000, the Taliban decided that drug production was contrary to the tenets of Islam. Omar issued an order banning Afghan farmers from cultivating poppies, from which opium and ultimately heroin are produced. Before the ban, Afghanistan was the world's largest opium producer, accounting for 75 percent of the global crop in 2000. The poppy, being drought resistant, is an ideal crop for Afghanistan's farmers, who could plant and harvest two crops each year. Rather than phasing out poppy farming over the course of several years, the Taliban demanded that all production cease immediately, plunging an untold number of farmers and field laborers into unemployment and poverty. By May 2001, the US government proclaimed the country's poppy crop had been entirely eradicated, which then opened opportunities for US aid to the country.

Opposition

By 2001, Taliban forces controlled 90 percent of Afghanistan. For years, the only credible threat to their rule was the Northern Military Alliance (NMA), based in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Although the alliance managed to deny the Taliban complete control, its internal structure was fragile and prone to feuding among local militia leaders. This lack of cohesiveness prevented the coalition from making any significant advances against the Taliban. Additionally, the Northern Alliance commander, Ahmed Shah Masoud, was assassinated on September 9, 2001, by three men posing as journalists.

While many of those under Taliban control rejected the group's dogma, few, if any Afghans were allowed to voice their dissent. However, the leadership of the Taliban remained divided between those opposed to any change in the regime's strict edicts, and more moderate elements who felt that a change in policy was necessary in order to ease sanctions against Afghanistan and alleviate the widespread poverty that has crippled the country since the Soviet invasion and occupation.

Leading the Taliban

Because of Omar's edict banning all photography of humans, very few Afghans were able to recognize or describe the appearance of the reclusive Taliban leader. Even after the capture of Kabul in 1996, Omar made no effort to travel to the city to establish a central government. Any official decisions were made in private by Omar and a small group of Taliban elders, and he relied on the PVSV to enforce Taliban law.

In August 1998, Taliban forces captured the strategically important Northern Alliance stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif. After a bomb killed forty people near his home in 1999, Omar moved to a secluded complex in Kandahar, approximately 300 miles south of Kabul. That same year, the Taliban launched a new offensive against the remaining Northern Alliance forces.

With no centralized mechanism for the management of funds, regional Taliban officials were forced to travel to Kandahar for an audience with Omar. It was rumored that the Taliban leader kept a tin box full of US dollars next to his bed, from which he distributed money to his followers. Such inexperience in political and economic affairs, along with its extreme domestic policies, contributed to the Taliban's outcast status on the international stage. Between 1999 and 2001, only three countries—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—gave political recognition to the Taliban government.

Political Outcasts

The repressive policies instituted by the Taliban made the regime an outcast in international politics, and most Muslim scholars agree that the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law falls far outside of any generally accepted reading of the Qur'an.

In October 1999, the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on the Taliban for their failure to turn over Osama bin Laden, who was wanted in connection with several terrorist attacks against the United States. By this time, bin Laden had extended his influence among the Taliban leadership and was allegedly using Afghanistan as a training ground for his al-Qaeda terror organization. As the international backlash against the Taliban continued, the government of Pakistan froze all Taliban assets in that country in December 1999.

The UN imposed further sanctions on the Taliban in January 2001, as the regime continued its refusal to cooperate in efforts to bring bin Laden to justice. The next month, the Taliban leadership attracted worldwide attention and condemnation when it ordered the destruction of all statues in Afghanistan, insisting that statuary was idolatrous and an affront to Islam. The order resulted in the destruction of the 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha at Bamian, treasured internationally as both sacred relics and valuable works of art.

As Taliban discrimination against Hindu Afghans, women, foreign aid workers, and others increased, many minority groups fled the country.

The Regime Falls

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, international attention was once again focused on Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. They immediately denied any involvement in the attacks and maintained that bin Laden lacked the resources to launch a terrorist operation on such a grand scale. Sensing that retaliation for the attacks was forthcoming, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates severed all diplomatic ties with the Taliban.

On October 7, 2001, the United States and Great Britain launched air strikes against suspected Taliban-supported al-Qaeda targets within Afghanistan. Pakistan, the only country to maintain diplomatic relations with the Taliban, supported the US air strikes and urged Omar to surrender bin Laden. He refused, citing the lack of hard evidence of bin Laden's guilt in the attacks on America.

As the US-led military campaign continued, the Taliban gradually weakened. On November 9, the Northern Alliance, supported by US forces, recaptured Mazar-e-Sharif. This gave them a strategic advantage and allowed the Taliban opposition to capture nearby Kabul just days later on November 13. With the Northern Alliance gaining strength, the remaining Taliban forces retreated south to Kandahar, where they made their final stand. Ultimately, the Taliban surrendered to the Northern Alliance on December 7. It is believed that some time before the capture of Kandahar, Omar and bin Laden went into hiding in the network of caves beneath the White Mountains, near the Pakistan border.

By the end of December 2001, a conference of the various anti-Taliban factions within Afghanistan had agreed on an interim government, designed to begin the reconstruction of the country in the wake of the Taliban's defeat. Pashtun tribal leader and prominent Taliban opponent Hamid Karzai assumed control of the new government, which included representatives from all of Afghanistan's minority groups.

Insurgency

After the Taliban's fall from power, surviving Taliban leaders and forces began to engage in insurgency in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. The Taliban insurgents received funding from the opium trade—which they had attempted to ban while in power—as well as from various groups overseas, allegedly including the Pakistani government, though the Pakistani military denied this claim. By 2008 the opium trade had expanded and was a significant contributor to Taliban funding. By 2015, Afghanistan's poppy harvest was worth an estimated $3 billion a year and production was up considerably from the year before.

Attacks on civilians by the Taliban began shortly after the Taliban fell, but began to escalate in 2006, with a series of suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices estimated to have killed over six hundred civilians that year. Taliban attacks continued to increase through 2007 and 2008, and in 2009 the Taliban regained control over rural areas in several provinces. In December of that year, US president Barack Obama announced that he would send thirty thousand additional troops to deal with the Taliban insurgency, but the increase in American forces had little effect.

In 2011, the United Nations estimated that the civilian death toll rose 15 percent, reaching 1,462 deaths. Meanwhile, the US government was reported to be spending $2 billion each week on fighting the Taliban. During this time, the Taliban assassinated several of their major opponents, including former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, police chief Mohammed Daud Daud, and presidential advisor Jan Mohammed Khan. Taliban activity in Pakistan continued as well, with the group controlling parts of the countryside and at times forbidding girls from attending school. In 2012, Pakistani Taliban militants shot Malala Yousafzai, a teenage advocate for girls' and women's education, in the head. Yousafzai survived and went on to become the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history. In both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Taliban targeted officials working to immunize children against polio; polio vaccinations were banned in the Pakistani region of North Waziristan in June 2012, and in December of that year, Taliban assassins killed four UN workers who were attempting to distribute polio vaccines in Pakistan. In March 2013, the Taliban forced the Afghan government to suspend polio vaccinations in the Nuristan province.

In 2014, as US forces began to depart Afghanistan, Taliban violence once more began to rise. The UN reported that year that the Taliban controlled four of the country's 373 districts, but Afghan security forces estimated that 40 percent of these districts had a high level of insurgency. In December 2014, the Taliban assaulted a school for the children of military personnel in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 145 people, most of them children.

Taliban officials reported in July 2015 that approximately two years prior, in April 2013, Mullah Mohammad Omar, who had led the Taliban since 1994, had died in a Karachi hospital of an unspecified illness. The Taliban Leadership Council confirmed that Omar's deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, had been in the leadership position since Omar's death. Despite the internal strife and splintering within the Taliban organization that this announcement produced, the Taliban was gaining strength in the region. They once again held control of the city of Kunduz for the first time since 2001; numerous car bombs had been activated against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Kabul as well as against several US Army bases throughout the region; and a suicide bomb at the Kabul Police Academy killed twenty cadets. Civilian casualties during the first six months of 2015 had reached an all-time high and were up 4 percent from the same time period in 2014. In response to the increase casualties and violence in the area and the belief that the Taliban would take complete control of the country once all foreign troops had withdrawn, the Obama administration announced in October 2015 that the United States was halting all troop reductions from the area, and the current troops deployed to the region would be maintained through 2017.

On May 23, 2016, President Obama announced that Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour had been killed by an American drone air strike just inside the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. Obama explained that repeated attempts had been made to negotiate with Mansour in order engage in peace talks and put an end to the violence throughout the region. The United States believed that the Taliban and Mansour in particular continued to carry out and plan acts of violence against US troops as well and innocent civilian Afghan men, women, and children. This strike was the first drone attack in this southwestern region of Pakistan, which many believe to be the headquarters of the Taliban. Mansour was replaced by Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada after his death.

In 2017, US president Donald Trump reaffirmed Obama’s decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan. By the same year, the Taliban had taken control of more than a third of the country. The Taliban also increased their suicide-bombing attacks on the capital, killing more than 115 people in a series of attacks on Kabul in 2018.

In February 2019, the US entered into peace talks with leaders of the Taliban—with the exclusion of the Afghan government—in an attempt to end the eighteen-year-long conflict. In April 2019, however, the Taliban announced that it was beginning its spring offensive, leading to an increase in fighting across the country. In September 2019 Trump revealed that he had canceled a secret planned peace meeting with Taliban officials after the group claimed responsibility for an attack in Kabul that killed a US soldier and several others. That November, Trump announced peace talks had resumed once again.

A major breakthrough in negotiations came in February 2020, when Taliban and US officials signed an agreement outlining plans for peace. The main terms of the deal were that the United States would withdraw virtually all its troops from Afghanistan by May 2021 while the Taliban would promise to oppose terrorism and not harbor other radical militant groups. The agreement also called for the reopening of peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. However, the following month saw a significant surge in Taliban attacks on Afghan government and civilian targets. A UN report released in June 2020 also suggested that the Taliban retained many ties to al-Qaeda despite its claims of rejecting terrorism. While the Taliban announced a brief ceasefire in its fight against the Afghan military in May 2020, violence resumed the following month, and the US continued to conduct occasional airstrikes in support of the Afghan government.

Return to Power

After US president Joe Biden took office in January 2021, his administration reaffirmed that US participation in the war in Afghanistan could not go on forever. In April 2021 the US committed to a full troop withdrawal with an amended timeline of September of that year. In May, the Taliban launched increasingly large-scale attacks targeting Afghan government forces. By early August the majority of US troops and many NATO troops had left the country, and the Taliban continued to advance even faster than many analysts had expected, quickly capturing several provincial capitals. On August 15, Taliban militants took control of Kabul, effectively toppling the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, thousands of US troops had been redeployed to the country specifically to evacuate American citizens and certain at-risk Afghan civilians. Other coalition nations conducted their own evacuations, and many Afghan people gathered at the airport in a desperate attempt to flee as well. Taliban spokespeople claimed that the transfer of power would be peaceful, but many observers expressed concerns that the organization would conduct retaliatory killings and other crackdowns.

In early September 2021, it was announced that the Taliban had formed an interim government and cabinet under the leadership of Mohammad Hassan Akhund, who had been one of Omar's affiliates. As the new government took shape, many international observers noted signs that it was operating much like the former regime. Watchdog groups raised numerous concerns about potential human rights abuses. For example, the Taliban shuttered the operations of the Ministry of Women's Affairs, ordered some female employees not to go to work, and kept female secondary-school students from attending school.

Throughout the early 2020s the Taliban continued to assert their control over all aspects of life in Afghanistan, instituting new laws and policies based on their fundamentalist beliefs. Much international media coverage continued to focus on increasing repression of women in the country. For example, in December 2022, the Taliban barred women from attending the country's universities, and it soon banned women from working in local and international humanitarian organizations. In response, a number of international aid groups suspended operations in the country. Violence against Afghanistan's ethnic minorities, including the Hazara people, was also reported by human rights advocates. Public executions, including stonings, were reintroduced in the country.

Other Taliban policies were intended to eradicate cultural influences they viewed as contrary to Islam. For instance, in July 2023, the group carried out widespread burnings of instruments and other musical equipment as part of a crackdown on public music performances and dancing. They also shuttered all beauty salons in the country. In August 2024 an extensive list of morality rules was enshrined in law, including formal requirements for women to cover their faces in public and men to grow beards.

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