The Taliban PR Push

Allauddin Khan / AP Photo Three weeks before the Afghan elections, Taliban commander Mullah Omar is offering a manifesto to unite his fractious fighters and cement his power. Reza Aslan on why his effort will fail.

Just as the presidential campaign in Afghanistan has begun to heat up, with the various candidates publishing individual manifestos that lay out their plans and promises for the country, the notorious Taliban commander Mullah Muhammad Omar, Osama bin Laden’s cohort and cave-companion, has issued a manifesto of his own.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Rules for Mujahideen,” published in Pakistan but clearly meant for an Afghan audience, is intended to be a kind of Taliban code of conduct—to which every fighter in Afghanistan who wants to call himself Taliban must adhere.

The new rules also encourage suicide bombers to “do their best to avoid civilian deaths and injuries and damage to civilian property.”

This is not the first time the Taliban has issued rules for conduct, but it is obvious that the manifesto’s publication was timed to coincide with the presidential elections in Afghanistan. The government of Hamid Karzai, and indeed all of the major contenders for his office, are united in the goal of initiating dialogue with those among the Taliban who may be willing to lay down their weapons in exchange for a few bucks and the promise of semi-autonomy. The new code of conduct may be Mullah Omar’s way of preempting such dialogue by making himself the only legitimate leader of the Taliban—that is, the only person in a position to negotiate anything with the government.

Some half-dozen unaffiliated groups and military organizations in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan operate under the umbrella of the Taliban. (Experts caution that the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban must be considered two separate branches of the larger Taliban movement, with little in common beside tactics.) What we call “Taliban” is a fractious and deeply divided movement made up of different ethnicities and tribes, some of which loathe each other as much as, if not more than, they loathe the “infidel West.”

According to David Kilcullen, one of the chief advisers to Centcom Commander General David Petraeus, about 1 percent of those who call themselves Taliban—including Mullah Omar and his followers—have joined al Qaeda and given up their nationalist ambitions in favor of bin Laden’s global jihad. However, the rest of the Taliban fall into a bunch of other categories.

Some are precisely what the name Taliban suggests: “students.” These are ultra-conservative Muslims—followers of the Deobandi School of Islam—who nevertheless remain totally uninterested in politics or statecraft. Mostly, they just want to be left alone.

A good portion of the Taliban are little more than petty thieves who have grown long beards and who dress in Taliban clothes in order to break into people’s homes and steal their electronic equipment—TVs, stereos, home computers—all of which the Taliban forbid. They then make a hefty profit selling the stolen contraband on the open market.

Beyond these two groups are those Taliban militants who seek to overturn the Afghan government and replace it with a draconian Islamic state. The majority of these Taliban act independently of each other. The fighters associated with these Islamist groups follow the leadership of their individual commanders, most of whom enjoy a sense of autonomy, choosing for themselves whom to attack, how, and when.

But experts see Mullah Omar’s new Taliban manifesto as a deliberate attempt to bring this fractious group under his centralized control, thus weeding out what he calls the “criminal elements” operating under the Taliban name. So, for example, the new rules state that all decisions about what to do with captured prisoners can only be made by Mullah Omar himself. “If a military infidel is captured, any decision to kill, conditionally release, or exchange such a prisoner can only be made by the imam [Mullah Omar] or his deputy,” the manifesto declares.