BOOK REVIEW:Humanising the monster-by Dr Mohammad Taqi
BOOK REVIEW: Humanising the monster —by Dr Mohammad Taqi
Courtesy to "Daily Times"
Translated from Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
Hurst/Columbia University Press; Pp 331
In
his foreword to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s book, Professor Barnett
Rubin of New York University sets the stage for the launch, ostensibly,
of a refreshingly authentic work of this inaccurate and revisionist
take on contemporary Afghan history.
My Life with the Taliban,
written by the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, has been praised
across the board by the media ‘Afghanologists’ such as Ahmed Rashid and
Peter Bergen to academics like Antonio Giustozzi of the London School
of Economics, without any critical evaluation. Some, like Christina
Lamb, have gone as far as calling it a must read.
To those of us
who grew up in the NWFP or Afghanistan at the height of
US-Saudi-Pakistani anti-Soviet war, the crude lies presented in the
account are all too apparent from the get-go, as is the
translators-cum-editors’ shallow understanding of the local languages
and culture.
From the outset, the village prayer leader (imam)
is presented as a religious scholar and mosque madrassa as almost the
counterpart of Notre Dame University. The basic Arabic text booklet —
Quaida Baghdadi — which all Muslim children from Kabul to Kolkata read
as an Arabic primer, is mentioned as “Al-Quaida”, only to be
differentiated from the terrorist group in a tedious footnote — of
which there is no dearth in the book. Frivolous and superfluous
information is dignified by stuffing such footnotes with it, as is the
glossary and an initial biography section. A flurry of names and events
— as insignificant as a pinprick on the skin of Afghan history — have
been deployed to bloat the work to roughly 300 pages.
Zaeef has
taken serious liberties with the truth, which, to their discredit, the
reviewers and endorsers have failed to point out. He confabulates that
the Taliban were a distinct group during the anti-Soviet mujahideen
wars and operated as such under their own identity and leadership.
While
there is no doubt that the sundry madrassa students, i.e. Talib-e-ilm
(plural: Taliban), were part of the Peshawar-based mujahideen groups
and were also included in the fold of the field commanders like Abdul
Haq and Jalaluddin Haqqani, there is no evidence that the Taliban
operated then as a distinct entity.
The mujahideen, People’s
Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Pakistani or international
media and literature — including Ahmed Rashid and Peter Bergen’s books
— have made no mention whatsoever of any anti-Soviet group fighting as
the ‘Taliban’ until their first appearance on the scene in the second
half of 1994.
In doing so, Zaeef — though making periodic
anti-Pakistan whimpers throughout the book — glosses over and indeed
suppresses the role of the Pakistani security agencies in conceiving,
creating, training, arming, financing and letting loose the Taliban
monster on Afghanistan.
Among the key historical developments in
Afghanistan during the Taliban era, Zaeef makes no mention of the major
international crimes committed on their watch. He does not mention,
even in passing, the killing of the former president Dr Najibullah, who
was murdered by the Taliban and their handlers in utter disregard for
any human, Pashtun or international conventions. That is how the
Taliban rule was ushered in, in Kabul in 1996.
Similarly, he
skips over the genocide of the Shiite Hazaras and the ethnic cleansing
of the Tajiks in Mazar-i-Sharif while remembering this much that the
former Pakistani interior minister Moinuddin Haider was supposedly a
Shia.
According to Amnesty International, in 1998 the Taliban
slaughtered more than 4,000 people in Mazar-i-Sharif alone. Amazing
that a book that drops names like the My Lai massacre in its opening
pages would not mention war crimes of this magnitude.
Zaeef and
his editors make it a point to criticise and condemn the PDPA for its
land reform policy and allege that the party systematically eliminated
the traditional power brokers like the tribal chieftains, landlords and
indeed the petty mullahs.
In his selective amnesia, Zaeef makes
no mention of a much more vicious version of the same strategy deployed
by his regime, through which wholesale killing of teachers, middle
class employees, politicians and tribal elders took place on both sides
of the Durand Line. In fact, the Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani
counterparts commissioned and conducted the bombings of whole jirgas
(assembly of tribal elders), creating a power vacuum that the militants
themselves would subsequently fill.
There is complete silence in
the book about the finances of the Taliban regime. It does mention its
diplomatic recognition by three Muslim states including the Saudis, but
does not touch upon their massive financing of the Taliban regime. It
completely ignores the military and technical expertise, oil and gas
supplies, food items and human cannon fodder that the Taliban received
from its three patrons.
The book’s author and his editors have
taken pains to construct a positive image of the simple and pristine
Afghan village life in building a narrative of Kandahar and Zaeef’s
childhood spent therein. This quasi-romantic interplay of village life,
characters like the author’s widower father — a spartan prayer leader,
mention of music and Pashtun dance atan, is a blatant attempt to put a
humane face on members of a fascist regime, which inarguably remains
the most brutal phenomenon of the late 20th century.
That Mullah
Zaeef, his editors and academics like Professor Rubin have attempted to
humanise a monster is clear. But the question is why?
Zaeef in
this book emphatically criticises and condemns the notion of hard vs
soft Taliban. However, ever since his image holding an iPhone appeared
in the US a couple of years ago, he has been a focus of attention of
the regional and world players involved in Afghanistan. Faced with an
economic crunch and running against an election clock, the US is
clutching at straws to bolster its flawed plan for the endgame in
Afghanistan.
While Obama had his Gorbachev moment on December 1,
2009, the nuts and bolts of the withdrawal were not clear. In their
quest to turn failure into at least a perceived success, the US
policy-makers are now scrambling to resuscitate, retrofit and
rehabilitate such dubious characters as Abdul Salam Zaeef.
My
life with the Taliban is a poor narrative by a tainted and poor
historian (raavi-e-zaeef). The glorification of the book by authors of
repute, impugns their credibility too.
Dr Mohammad Taqi
teaches and practices medicine at the University of Florida and
contributes to the think-tanks www.politact.com and Aryana Institute.
He can be contacted at mazdaki@me.com
In : Abdul Salam Zaeef
Notes