Free Afghanistan by David Isby

it. When the situation starts deteriorating in Afghanistan, it can do so with great speed and suddenness and with few stopping points before arriving at the bottom.
    Similarly, the US and coalition partners often find it hard to recognize how difficult it is for them to legitimate their presence and interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan in humanitarian and security terms. In Afghanistan, it is hard to accept that a great power can be motivated to act except to further its own immediate advantage; second-order benefits such as preventing the destabilization likely to flow from renewedcivil war are not recognized. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is common knowledge—among government officials and illiterate farmers alike—that the US presence reflects a covert and subtle strategy rather than a desire to help the Afghans rebuild their country and lives. The US failure to capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar is seen as evidence that they have no desire to do so, but rather are looking for a justification to prolong their presence. The bribes paid to the Taliban in Pakistan to protect the coalition’s resupply trucks driving from Karachi to Kabul represent further proof. There is no agreement as to the strategy these policies are serving. Many believe that it is intended to be part of an unending war against Islam or to disarm and dismember Pakistan. Others point to US and western airbases in Afghanistan and central Asia and identify countering influence from Iran, Russia, or China as the real reason for the conflict.
    Legitimacy in both Afghan and Islamic terms requires a degree of social justice. The Soviet-backed 1978–92 Afghan regimes were unable to provide it except in a few areas—including much of Kabul—where local alliances, subsidized bread, and make-work jobs could buy stability. That the mujahideen that took Kabul in 1992 failed to bring about the social justice that many of their constituents had actually been fighting for and dissolved in factional fighting enabled the rise of the Taliban.
    For many Afghans, social justice is doing the right thing, following the tenets of Afghaniyat or Pushtowali. In the face of the culture of corruption that has become widespread in 2008–10, there has been widespread nostalgia among Pushtuns for the perceived Islamic rectitude of the pre-2001 Taliban. Mullah Omar’s simple lifestyle is often recalled fondly while the more complex reality, such as how the Taliban encouraged opium cultivation and then tried to manipulate the market to maximize its return on this crop of dubious Islamic legitimacy, tends to be forgotten.
    An alternative view, also widespread, social justice is seen as equivalent to Sharia law and its administration through a juridical system. This is something the Taliban regime offered when they first came to power and one where its predecessors and successors have often been lacking. A strength of the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan is its identification with Sharia while both Afghanistan and Pakistan had state justice systems that proved incapable of meeting the needs of the population.
    On both sides of the Durand Line—in southern Afghanistan in 1994–96 and in Pakistan post-2001—the rise of the Taliban was enabled because Pushtun secular elites—especially former mujahideen in Afghanistan and maliks in Pakistan—were not seen as delivering social justice. The perception was that many of the leadership figures were self-enriching, extractive, or were on someone’s payroll and were, in effect, representing them rather than their fellow tribesmen. Prior to 2001, many of the Taliban leadership and their Arab allies were seen as carrying out similar behavior, and despite their links to religious authority this did not prevent their legitimacy from eroding. In Pakistan, the secular Pushtun tribal leaders were seen as increasingly either self-interested or tools of a distant government (especially the malik system) at the same time as the