Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban / Al-Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010by Alex Strick van Linschoten (Author)
Work InformationAn Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan by Alex Strick van Linschoten
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  gmicksmith | Apr 30, 2016 |  no reviews | add a review
To this day the belief is widespread that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are in many respects synonymous, that their ideology and objectives are closely intertwined and that they have made common cause against the West for decades. Yet this view have hardly ever been scrutinized or tested empirically. This is all the more surprising given that the West's present entanglement in Afghanistan is commonly predicated on the need to defeat the Taliban in order to forestall further terrorist attacks worldwide. There is thus an urgent need to re-examine the known facts of the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship and to tell the story of the Taliban's encounter with internationalist militant Islamism. In An Enemy We Created, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn focus on the complexity of the relationship between the two groups and the individuals who established them.The book, which has already been cited prominently in The New Yorker, is the first to examine in detail the relationship from the Taliban's perspective based on Arabic, Dari and Pashtu sources, drawing on the authors many years of experience in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban s heartland. They also interviewed Taliban decision-makers, field commanders and ordinary fighters while immersing themselves in Kandahar s society. The story of those individuals who were to become the key decision-makers, and the relationships among all those involved from the mid-1990s onward, reveal how frequently the Taliban and al-Qaeda diverged rather than converged. An Enemy We Created concludes that there is room to engage the Taliban on two fundamental issues: renouncing al-Qaeda and guaranteeing that Afghanistan will not be a sanctuary for international terrorists. Yet the insurgency is changing, and it could soon be too late to find a political solution. The authors contend that certain aspects of the campaign in Afghanistan, especially night raids and attempts to fragment and decapitate the Taliban, are transforming the resistance, creating more opportunities for al-Qaeda and helping it to attain its objectives. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing AuthorAlex Strick van Linschoten is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)958.104History and Geography Asia Central Asia AfghanistanLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4)
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (4)
1
Numerous works were translated in full as documentation for their author's efforts. For the Arab World, the death of Nasser in 1970 signaled a watershed. The 1967 defeat of the Arabs at the hands of Israel resulted in that a alarming number of people, especially youth, returned to their original identity, that of members of an Islamist civilization.
In contrast, the underlying dynamics of politics and power in Afghanistan, particularly in the south and the east of the country, has been characterized by a rural-urban dichotomy. Most education in Afghanistan was directed by Pakistani leaders: Deobandi. In the 1980s jihadist sympathies arrived for these followers as well. There was a generational difference between the older Al Qaeda types and the younger Taliban affiliates.
In the Arab Middle East the Muslim brotherhood set the tone of the jihadists. Takfirism is the process through which a Muslim is essentially excommunicated from the umma or Islamic community and deemed an enemy of the same. For the youth, the first generation to be born in the air of independence came of age and most of the Muslim world. These young people had no firsthand recollection of the anti-colonial tide of liberation that had legitimized the nationalist regimes under which they lived, and thus they were out of step with the elites in government. More troubling, they have been born too late to benefit from the jobs and social advancement created by independence in from the sharing out of property abandoned by the departing settlers and colonists.
In contrast, the educational background of these prominent Afghan Arabs is in numerous secular subjects and they tended to form a new, religiously aware elite committed to jihad in their adopted country.
1979 is a critical year for three events that resonated throughout the Muslim world. The three events are the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, and the siege of mecca. The Iranian revolution did not convince many Sunnis however the attack on Mecca by Sunni fundamentalists who believes that the Mehdi's return was imminent. The attack paved the way for further militancy among the Islamists.