Before Taliban

Introduction / 21
Qazi Amin, the events were driven by the incompatibility between the radical
Islamic vision of his group and the views of the other party leaders,
which eventually opened the way for an alternative, and far more conservative,
Islamic movement to come into being (discussed in Chapter Eight).
This movement culminated in the transformation of the Taliban student
militia, which took control of most of Afghanistan, including the capital of
Kabul, in 1996, into the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Retrospectively, it is evident that ruptures in the resistance (between
tribes and parties and among the parties) that developed in the immediate
aftermath of the Marxist revolution and Soviet invasion created the conditions
for the later triumph of the Taliban. These ruptures are the focus of
this book and of the lives that are documented here. In many ways, the cruelest
irony of the conflict is that the struggles of the early years should have
resulted in the ascendance of the conservative Taliban government, for the
three men whose lives I examine in this book were all committed in different
ways to the ideal of progress—the opposite of what the Taliban have
come to represent. All three were products of the Afghan educational system
and were offended by what they saw as the backwardness of traditional
society and committed to the ideal of bringing economic and social justice to
the people of Afghanistan. At the same time, however, these men were cut
off from those they sought to lead and had a limited or distorted conception
of what the people wanted and how best to enlist their support.
This was especially true of two of these men—Taraki and Qazi Amin—
who were leaders of political organizations that insisted that people’s first
loyalties should be to the party itself, which held the authentic hope for the
future. Acquiring power for the party became for both sides more important
than the ideals the parties stood for, and this focus, over time, became an
obsession that ultimately cost them the trust of the people. This sadly has
been the legacy of social reform in Afghanistan—a legacy that began with
the social experiments of Amanullah in the 1920s and that finally resulted
seventy years later in the advent of the Taliban regime, whose overriding
ambition is to return the country to an imagined state of original grace
before the coming of secular education and other imported evils from
beyond Islam’s borders.