Who Are the Taliban? A Brief History

In his new book (to be published tomorrow), The Forever War, Dexter Filkins, who's covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times, describes the time the Taliban invited him to take a sideline seat in Kabul's stadium to witness a little justice. "Come sit with us, they’d said; you are our honored guest."

The fist Toyota pick-up truck brought in a man the loudspeakers blared was a pickpocket. Within moments, a little Taliban mob huddled around the man, some cutting was performed, and a man held up, by the middle finger, one of the pick-pocket's hands, displaying it to a roarless crowd before throwing it on the ground like the wrapping of a ballpark frank. The second pick-up brought in a more hooded man, or rather an 18-year-old boy, said to have murdered another man in a dispute. The boy's family, as well as the victim's, sat side by side behind Filkins, the way family members sit in the same box at Wimbledon. The father of the alleged murderer pleaded uselessly with the father of the victim to spare his son. Then the brother of the victim was handed an AK-47. He crouched, pointed, and shot. Several times, until he was sure the other man was dead. And that was it.

“The Koran says the killer must be killed in order to create peace in society,” the loudspeaker said, echoing inside the stadium. “If punishment is not meted out, such crimes will become common. Anarchy and chaos will return.”

Filkins asks someone in the crowd for a reaction. “In America, you have television and movies — the cinema,” he was told. “Here, there is only this.”

That was before the Taliban lost Kabul and the power it had held in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. But the Taliban has been literally inching its way back since, not just in Afghanistan. It controls the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. And it's provoked the Bush administration finally to commit more troops to Afghanistan, albeit by withdrawing them from Iraq.

For all that, my guess is that most people here don't know who the Taliban are, where they came from, what their aim is, besides chopping people's hands off and reverting Afghanistan to a form of Islam that never, in fact, existed except in the Taliban's perverse imagination. We fail to know as much as we can about the Taliban at our own risk. It's not a spent force. It's the deciding factor between a continuously anarchic and destabilized Central Asia and somewhat more stable region.

Here's a brief history of the Taliban.