Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Fresh misery for Afghanistan The Taliban return

by Liam Mac Uaid  |  Socialist Resistance no8  |  page 16

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Trigon of a beekend be series raditional Afghani Islam was the

agrarian society, it was structured on tribal lines valuing symbolic religious sites and tribal hierarchies

This society was destroyed by the war against the Soviet army which made refugees of three million Afghans. The majority of these went to refugee camps in Pakistan where the old tribal loyalties no longer had the same value.

Displaced by war, finding their old tribal attachments of lesser importance, but defining themselves by their religion, the refugee camp children were taken into religious schools (madrassas) in Pakistan. Here they were introduced to a more "cosmopolitan" and assertive version of the most reactionary version of Islam. Its hallmarks, apart from its worse than medieval view of the world, were a training in the spirit of jihad and No one, including probably the Taliban themselves, can know how many adherents they lost in the American war against their former proThere has been constant anti-govemis held accountable. There have been attacks on German, against the Soviet army, and it is continuing it with its campaign of low intensity war against its former allies. We can predict with confidence that the Taliban will continue to grow in strength as it rallies sections of Afghan society against the imperialist occupation and killing. It is also clear that the future for Afghan society over the next five years is a relentless murder spree. It is for that reason we demand that the imperialists leave.