Ideology, Clericalism, and Socialization: Some Reflections on the Sociology of the Afghan Taliban

Abstract

Before the occupation of Kabul by the Taliban movement in 2021, there had been some hopes that in power, it would behave very differently from how it acted when it earlier occupied Kabul from 1996 to 2001. This proved not to be the case. Always inscrutable, the movement prioritized ideology over interests, embodied a “theocratic-descending” model of authority, and was the product of a pathogenic pattern of socialization. Under such circumstances, the likelihood that it could succeed in securing legitimacy appears very low. A more likely scenario is the use of extreme coercion by the Taliban to crush any resistance.

Keywords:

• Taliban
• socialization
• clericalism
• authority
• ideology
• Afghanistan
• Islam

In 1946, during the famous Nuremberg Trial of Nazi war criminals, Hitler’s former Armaments Minister Albert Speer offered a strikingly-insightful observation about the courtroom clash between the most prominent Nazi defendant, Hermann Goering, and the Chief US Prosecutor, Mr. Justice Jackson: “You know, when Jackson cross-examines Goering, you can see that they just represent two entirely different worlds—they don’t even understand each other” (Taylor 1993, 342). Exactly the same point could reasonably be made about the relationship between the bulk of humanity and the Taliban movement, which seized control of the Afghan capital Kabul in August 2021, and now follows the decrees of a reclusive emir in Kandahar. “Those in Kandahar,” Jackson and Weigand have written, “simply do not care or adequately understand what is at stake, or they believe that the political consequences are a necessary pain to bear in order to achieve a pure Islamic society. This is a ruling system unlike any other in the world, run by a leader who rarely interacts with the population, does not meet with the international community, and sits in isolation from the country’s capital and ostensible organs of government” (Jackson and Weigand 2023, 145).

Before the occupation of Kabul by the Taliban, there had been hope in some circles that the Taliban, in power, would behave very differently from how they acted when they earlier occupied Kabul from 1996 to 2001. These hopes had been carefully nurtured by Taliban propaganda (Haqqani 2020), and induced some observers to support the negotiations that culminated in an exit agreement signed by the United States and the Taliban on February 29, 2020 (Rubin 2020). The results, however, were disastrous (Jamal and Maley 2023, 125–146; Maley and Jamal 2022; Theros 2023). The Taliban, in power, imposed rigorous restrictions on the lives of ordinary people, with Afghan women especially targeted by measures that cut off their access to higher and secondary education, and more broadly thrust them to the fringes of social life (Akbari and True 2022; United Nations 2023). The passage of time only made things worse, prompting one of the most acute observers of Afghan affairs to argue that “the idea of a ‘moderate’ Taliban is a grave misconception” (Sharan 2023b). To those who had promoted the idea of engagement with the Taliban, this posed a notable intellectual challenge, since the idea of a newly-moderated “Taliban 2.0” had clearly fallen flat; and more seriously, the Taliban’s behavior seemed to run counter to their ostensible interests in securing external funding and formal diplomatic recognition, which had been touted as sources of leverage in dealing with them (Maley, Akbari, and Ibrahimi 2023; Rubin 2021).

This article is concerned with drawing out a range of features of the Taliban movement that might aid an understanding of this pattern of behavior. The story is not a simple or straightforward one. To some degree, of course, Western policymakers saw in the Taliban what they wanted to see (Ibrahimi and Farasoo 2022), reflecting wider problems of misperception and cognitive bias that occur all too frequently in international affairs (see Holmes 2018; Jervis 1976, 2017; Johnson 2020; Shore 2014; Wheeler 2018). To the extent that this reflected defects in the analytical and intelligence-gathering capabilities of Western powers, it lies beyond the scope of this article. But that said, the Taliban were a notably opaque and impenetrable movement, and the first section of this article examines this problem in greater detail. Second, the article addresses the distinctive ideology and value system of the Taliban, which was overlooked all too often as Western negotiators sought to identify points of potentially-overlapping interest. Third, the article examines how in the absence of mechanisms of popular legitimation, the Taliban exploited a “theocratic-descending” model of political authority in which a kind of Führerprinzip provided the glue to hold the regime together. As the article notes, religious doctrines of leadership infallibility have existed in other spheres, but in recent times only rarely in conjunction with some degree of control of a territorial state. Fourth, the article canvasses how the pathogenic rather than traditional socialization experiences of the Taliban fostered a clericalism that even many Afghans found jarringly unfamiliar, and that Western observers often found quite perplexing. It is the confluence of these distinctive factors, rather than any single one on its own, that renders the Taliban such a peculiar force. The implications of this, however, are unsettling: that the Taliban are unlikely to change their way of operating, and that coercion will remain their principal mechanism of regime maintenance.

The Inscrutability of the Taliban

The word talib, of which Taliban is the Persianized plural, refers to a religious student, and identifies a figure well-known for more than a century in the region that the British called the Northwest Frontier of India. In 1898, Winston Churchill wrote of “a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, who correspond with the religious students in Turkey [and] live free at the expense of the people” (Churchill 1990, 7). The “Islamic Movement of Taliban” (Da Afghanistano da Talibano Islami Tahrik) that emerged in 1994 in Afghanistan was presented as a coming-together of such students, but there was much more to the story than that. Its foundational mythology presented it as a high-minded force interested only in ridding Afghanistan of corrupt and decadent rulers. This hid the darker reality that the Taliban were above all a military force (Davis 1998), as much a product of the geopolitics of South Asia as of the internal politics of Afghanistan.

The critical factor in the rise of the Taliban movement was its sponsorship by the Interior Minister of Pakistan, retired Major General Naseerullah Babar, who referred to the Taliban as “our boys” (Murshed 2006, 45; see also Khan 2011, 59). During the decade following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 (see Maley 2021a, 29–101), when Pakistan became a “frontline state” supporting elements of the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance (Mujahideen), the critical Pakistani agency involved, namely the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate of the Pakistan Armed Forces (see Coll 2005; Kiessling 2016; Sirrs 2017), had channeled support to a radical Islamist party, the Hezb-e Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which Pakistan saw as less likely to revive an historical border dispute with Pakistan than a more nationalistically-inclined group. The radicalism of the Hezb, however, made it extremely unpopular in Afghanistan, and following the collapse of the Communist regime in April 1992, Hekmatyar’s forces proved notably incapable of seizing and holding territory, although they did engage in destructive “spoiler” activities. It was this that prompted Babar to instrumentalize a new force. But with this came a new problem. The ISI’s blatant support for the Hezb had made Pakistan deeply unpopular within Afghanistan. As a result, it was critically important for both Pakistan and the Taliban to seek to deny the depth of the relationship between the two, and this set the scene for a profound culture of secrecy within the Taliban movement itself. Compounding this was the character of the Taliban as a “network of networks” (Ruttig 2012, 116), which made it difficult to decapitate, but also very difficult to fathom. Mapping networks is an extremely taxing undertaking, because by definition networks are prone to reconfiguration, and, in contrast to formal organizations, may be only loosely institutionalized (Sharan 2023a). This does not mean that organizational structures did not develop within the Taliban (see Sinno 2008, 222–253), but rather that the ability to exercise power involved much more than simply acquiring a particular “office.”

A dramatic illustration of the inscrutability of the Taliban movement came with the death of its founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who had been endowed with the title Amir al-Momineen (“Commander of the Faithful”). Attempts to conceal the death of a political leader are hardly unusual. When the Qajar ruler of Persia, Nasir al-Din Shah, was assassinated in 1896, the premier, Amin al-Sultan, “arranged for the Shah’s body to be spirited away secretly to the royal carriage. Sitting beside the Shah’s seated corpse all the way to the Gulistan Palace, he manipulated his master’s lifeless limbs, his hands and his drooping head, as though he were waving and nodding to the anxious crowd that gathered along the road to the capital” (Amanat 1997, 441). This feat, however, was trivial compared to the success of the Taliban in concealing Omar’s demise. Following his death from natural causes on April 23, 2013, more than two years passed before news of his death became public (Gall 2015); indeed, one of the most respected observers of the Taliban in a December 2014 report had written that “Mullah Omar remains the Taliban supreme leader and the source of all authority in the movement” (Semple 2014, 17). This testified to a remarkable capacity on the part of the Taliban to limit information flows, likely the product of a very high degree of compartmentalization within the movement.

The disclosure of the death of Omar triggered significant tensions within the Taliban, although mapping their dimensions proved difficult (Mashal 2015). The death of Omar’s successor Mullah Akhtar Mansour equally demonstrated how difficult it could be to disentangle truth from fiction when seeking to make sense of the internecine politics of the Taliban. The raw facts of Mansoor’s death were not difficult to establish: he was killed on May 21, 2016 by Hellfire missiles launched from a US General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone when he was returning from Iran along the N-40 National Highway in Pakistan. But the reasons why he was killed remain obscure. Two very experienced observers wrote that:

Mullah Mansour’s outreach to Iran was also aimed at getting the Taliban out from under Pakistan’s thumb, according to his former associate and Afghan officials, so he could maneuver to run the war, but also negotiate peace, on his own terms. That was where his differences with Pakistan had grown sharpest … The trip to and from Iran was one he had taken before. He always travelled on a Pakistani passport, under a fake name, with the full knowledge of Pakistani intelligence. (Gall and Khapalwak 2017; see also Abbas 2023, 31–35)

This interpretation is plausible, but direct evidence is in short supply. As the deaths of Mullah Omar and Mullah Mansour demonstrate, where the internal politics of the Taliban are concerned, even knowing what happened can be tricky: knowing how and why something happened can be more challenging still.

The various networks that made up the Taliban movement were diverse in their composition, and brought together a top leadership council, mullahs and religious students, decentralized patronage networks (Martin 2014, 244), well-equipped fighters trained in Pakistan (Kilcullen 2016, 177), and disoriented and angry youth—once described by the commentator Ahmed Rashid as “Afghanistan’s lumpen proletariat” (Rashid 2000, 32). Some, but perhaps not all that many, joined the Taliban for money (Human Rights Watch 2010) or out of a desire to be on the winning side, but such individuals had little say over the trajectory of the movement. After 2021, the ultraconservative, Kandahar-based leadership, headed from the death of Mullah Mansour by Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, emerged as the dominant element, and this brought new problems of inscrutability, mirroring problems from two decades earlier (see Rubin et al. 2001, 12). The Taliban were anything but a traditional force, and did not reflect the practices of Afghan village life but of an imagined village life that large numbers of madrasa (Islamic training college) students drawn from the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan had never personally experienced (Maley 1998, 2015). Nonetheless, there is one striking parallel between the Taliban’s modus operandi and an historical practice of Afghans in the village, namely the establishment of barriers between the outside world and real decision-makers. This was famously captured in a metaphor coined by the late Louis Dupree:

The village builds a “mud curtain” around itself for protection against the outside world, which has often come to the village in the past … an outsider seldom meets the true power elite of a village unless he remains for an extended period. When outsiders approach, the village leaders disappear behind mud walls, and the first line of defense (second line of power) come forward to greet the strangers with formalized hospitality, which surprisingly enough also serves as a defensive technique. If the central government identifies the village or tribal elite, control becomes easier as the zones of relative inaccessibility evaporate with the creation of an effective infrastructure. (Dupree 1980, 249–250)

The Taliban leaders typically adopted a similar approach to the world, something all too often forgotten by those seeking to engage with them. The danger that can flow from such a situation is that one can overrate the significance of what one is told by one’s interlocutors, or the value of such promises as they may offer. In 2009, a very experienced observer, Sarah Chayes, remarked that, “Promises that the Taliban might make in the process of gaining a deal would not be worth the paper they were written on” (Chayes 2009). This warning went unheeded.

The Ideology of the Taliban

The inscrutability of the Taliban’s internal machinations was undoubtedly a key factor helping to explain how Western policymakers so badly misread the movement before the August 2021 takeover. Another critical failure, however, was to attach too much weight to what were seen as likely Taliban interests, and far too little to Taliban values. This was a disposition of long standing. When the Taliban first seized Kabul in 1996, Zalmay Khalilzad, later to be the architect of the February 2020 agreement, wrote that “once order is established, concerns such as good government, economic reconstruction, and education will rise to the fore” (Khalilzad 1996). He could hardly have been more wrong: the Taliban established a repressive, misogynist pariah regime that the wider world found radioactive. Such a misreading was perhaps understandable at that time, since the Taliban had not thitherto held state power, but it was inexcusable in 2020 and 2021. Impenetrable though the internal politics of the Taliban may have been, there was no shortage of evidence from the Taliban’s own past behavior as to the movement’s key ideological positions.

The Taliban tend to exhibit an unshakeable conviction that they alone understand the “true” nature of Islam, and their doctrinal dogmatism is closer to that of a religious cult than a religious community. In terms of Islamic schools of thought, they derive from the 19^th century Deobandi tradition that took shape in British India (Metcalf 1982), but in a way that 20^th century teachers in Deoband would find hard to recognize (Cooper 1998) and in a form heavily influenced by madrasas in Pakistan, especially the Dar al-Ulum Haqqaniya of Sami ul-Haq, a radical cleric who was assassinated in November 2018 (Khan and Constable 2018; see also Zaman 2018). As is so often the case with militant groups, critical or skeptical thinking with respect to purported religious doctrine did not figure prominently in Taliban discourse, and this meant that suggestions that religious scholars from different parts of the world be invited to attempt to moderate the Taliban’s world view were naïve and, in all probability, futile. The Taliban, as Zaman put it, “never showed much inclination for any religious scholarship or intellectual engagement whatsoever” (Zaman 2002, 140). The Taliban, like other faith communities before them (Zagorin 2003) were also extremely intolerant. Toleration, despite having credible Koranic foundations (Friedmann 2003, 87–120) was never a part of their leitmotiv, which focused on concepts such as jihad and martyrdom (Johnson 2017, 22–27).

One striking feature of Taliban thinking has always been a preoccupation with ideas of moral purity rather than state-building. The welfare of ordinary people is the least of their concerns, something which Western officials often find difficult to understand: as one well-placed observer remarked, “They have an utter contempt for the poor, believing poverty to be retribution for bad behavior” (quoted in Clark 2023). Their obsession with purity was demonstrated in the 1990s by their establishment of a religious police called Amr bil-Maroof wa Nahi An il-Munkir (the Department for the “Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice”), which they re-established, in place of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, in 2021. This was a very clear indicator of their totalitarian propensities: one thing that the Taliban did not do was recognize that there could be spheres of life that lay beyond the right of the state to control. Such a preoccupation with purity can serve an instrumental purpose. In a wide-ranging study, Barrington Moore, Jr. makes the point that, “In a monotheism threatened with splits, the founders’ cruel discipline that created and sustained their religion’s distinctive identity becomes the weapon against the heretics’ challenge to that identity” (Moore 2000, 130). But it can also be a reflection of a deeply-ingrained mindset, amounting virtually to an ideological position.

In Afghanistan, the instrumental and the ideological came together in the Taliban’s treatment of women, which in the 1990s had killed off their prospects of securing significant international recognition (Physicians for Human Rights 1998). Political actors can seek to consolidate their positions by demonstrating a capacity to exercise extreme dominance over some societal group, such as women (see Abou El Fadl 2005, 254). This was—and is—the instrumental dimension of the Taliban’s treatment of women. But beyond this, the Taliban leaders in Kandahar adhere firmly to a range of values with respect to women that position them at odds with modernity. They are grounded in the idea of fitnah, which can be translated as temptation, corruption, or seduction. A saying of the Prophet “to the effect that the greatest fitnah for men is women” (William 2009, 260) underpins much of their approach. In sophisticated Islamic discourse (Abou El Fadl 2001) there is far more insightful discussion of gender issues than one finds in the unhealthily-prurient preoccupation with female sexuality on the part of such ultraconservatives, but it is most unlikely to shift the views of the leaders in Kandahar.

The Taliban have also had a very strong aversion to Shiite Islam, something which works to the disadvantage of the historically-persecuted Shiite Hazara minority within Afghanistan as well as various other groups (see Hakimi 2023). The 1990s in Pakistan, when the Sunni Taliban movement was being instrumentalized for use in Afghanistan, witnessed bitter sectarian conflict between armed Sunni and Shiite groups in the wake of a major expansion in the number of madrasas in the country (Nasr 2000a, 2000b; Zaman 1998). Marginalization of the Hazaras long preceded the emergence of the Taliban movement (Ibrahimi 2017), but the Taliban have never been squeamish about mass attacks on Hazaras; indeed, in Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, they massacred some 2,000 in just three days, in an orgy of killing that the writer Ahmed Rashid described as “genocidal in its ferocity” (Rashid 2000, 73). The depth of this animosity militates against optimistic hopes that the Taliban might morph into a more inclusive regime.

Underpinning the Taliban’s approach to power has always been a deep conviction that the end justifies the means. At one point, the Taliban issued a code of conduct (Layha) for their fighters (Munir 2011; Nagamine 2015), but in practice it made little or no difference to their activities, which were extremely violent. Richards has advanced the view that “terrorism is a method that entails the use of violence or force or the threat of violence or force with the primary purpose of generating a psychological impact beyond the immediate victims or object of attack for a political motive” (Richards 2015, 146). The Taliban frequently engaged in mass-casualty attacks on civilian non-combatants in ways that placed them squarely within the ambit of Richards’ definition (Maley 2021b). They were consistently responsible for the majority of civilian deaths that occurred as a result of armed conflict after 2001 (Jamal and Maley 2023, 92; Maley 2021a, 241, 274). The proposition that the end justifies the means is an extremely dangerous one, since it sets no limits on the harm that can be inflicted to secure a particular end-state.

The Taliban Model of Political Authority

In weakly-institutionalized political systems, the problem of establishing and consolidating political authority can loom large. In some systems, the tool that has been deployed to address this problem has been the synthesizing of charisma through a leadership cult, of a kind seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin, China under Mao, Romania under Ceaușescu, and North Korea under the Kim dynasty (Gill 1984). There was even an attempt to build such a cult around the first communist leader in Afghanistan after the April 1978 coup, Nur Mohammad Taraki (Leake 2022, 50). The successful mounting of such a cult, however, depends upon a relatively-high level of state capacity, which the Taliban regime lacks.

Ever since the earliest days of Islam, the issue of where authority should be located within Muslim communities has figured prominently. Indeed, the schism between Sunnis and Shia that persists to this day arose over just such an issue, with Sunnis endorsing the authority within the faith community (umma) of a khalifa (“Caliph”) chosen through a consensual process (Arnold 1924; Kennedy 2016), while Shia recognized the authority of an imam descended from the Prophet’s household. From this, distinct patterns of authority flowed: “the main point of difference between the khalifa and the Imam is that the khalifa is the socio-political leader of the umma and does not need to have a strong theological standing, while for the Shi‘a, an Imam is not just a prayer leader, but also wields religious and temporal authority that demands possession of unrivalled and esoteric religious knowledge” (Piscatori and Saikal 2019, 54). The Turkish Grand National Assembly finally abolished the Caliphate in March 1924 (Enayat 1982, 52–68), and faced few objections for doing so. It is thus not surprising that the Sunni Taliban opted instead for the looser and less-institutionalized title of Amir al-Momineen to designate their leader.

A problem which flows from this, however, is that since the title of Amir al-Momineen does not derive from a wider constitutional structure, it does not automatically command obedience from a mass population, as opposed to from the coterie that may have granted the title. Even the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings depended upon a broad acceptance of mechanisms by which one monarch succeeded another. There were of course exceptions to such acceptance: as Sir John Harington’s famous epigram put it, “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” There is, however, a radical tension between constitutionalism on the one hand and a “theocratic-descending” model of government on the other. This is well captured in Walter Ullmann’s analysis of medieval political thought:

If the test of any theory on government is whether it is capable of leading to a development which is reflected in a constitution. the theocratic-descending theory of government cannot pass the test. If indeed the ruler, be he pope, king, or emperor, formed an estate of his own, was in every respect sovereign, stood above the law, and if, on the other hand, the members of the community were merely his subjects who had no share in government or the making of the law, but received the law as a “gift of God” through the mouth of the king, it transcends human ingenuity to devise a constitutional scheme by which the subjects could put fetters on the exercise of the monarchic-sovereign will of the Ruler. (Ullmann 1975, 145–146)

Western leaders in the 21^st century, to put it mildly, have had little experience in dealing with this kind of system, but they face it squarely in Afghanistan, where without any kind of underlying social contract or popular authorization, the Taliban nonetheless assert a right to total power on the part of their leader. At the macrocosmic level, they have never agreed to share power with any other political groups; they rule by decree and by force.

That said, the practice of vesting or locating untrammeled authority in a single individual is not without recent precedent, but the most obvious examples are disturbing ones. The most sinister by far was the practice of the Führerprinzip in Nazi Germany, an idea that had been set out explicitly by Adolf Hitler in his tract Mein Kampf. As Archie Brown records,

When in 1930 Otto Strasser, a would-be ideologist of German National Socialism, suggested to Adolf Hitler that “A Leader must serve the Idea”—since the idea was eternal and the leader for obvious biological reasons was not—Hitler told him that this was “outrageous nonsense” and an example of “revolting democracy,” for “the Leader is the Idea, and each party member has to obey only the Leader.” (Brown 2016, 111–112)

Reflecting on how this could apply to the Taliban, one might be tempted to respond with the suggestion that in what are loosely called “fundamentalist” religious groups, loyalty is rather to a canonical or revealed text. A counterclaim, however, is that apparent loyalty to a text is very often in reality loyalty to a leader and of the particular interpretation of the text which that leader offers.

A classic example to which one can point in this respect is the doctrine within the Roman Catholic Church of papal infallibility, dating from the adoption at the First Vatican Council in 1870 of the document Pastor aeturnus (see O’Malley 2018, 251–260). This text provided that when the Pope spoke ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals, he spoke infallibly. The principal force behind this was Pope Pius IX:

Having decided that the battle for the church’s survival depended on the proclamation of papal infallibility, Pius pressed the bishops to support his cause, and those opposed felt his anger. He branded one “evil,” another “a madman,” and a third an “incorrigible schismatic snake.” His campaign came as the culmination of a centuries-long battle aimed at wresting power away from the cardinals and bishops and from the national churches … Europe’s rulers, fearing that the doctrine of papal infallibility might lessen their hold over their Catholic subjects, looked on in horror. (Kertzer 2018, 341–342)

Pastor aeturnus cost Pius the support and protection of Napoleon III, and before the end of the year, Victor Emmanuel II of Italy had seized Rome, and Pius found himself confined to the Vatican City, where successive Popes were to be isolated until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 normalized relations with Italy and granted the Vatican a distinct territorial status. Nonetheless, the doctrine of papal infallibility made the Papacy an even more important prize in the struggle over the direction of the Church, and when Pope Pius X died in 1914, there was an almost-unseemly battle for the Papacy, which saw the so-called zelanti (“intransigents”), led by Cardinal Rafael Merry Del Val, outflanked by the moderates who secured the election of Benedict XV (Kertzer 2014, 4). That said, by the mid-20^th century, the authority of the Pope was essentially spiritual, and grounded in the status of the Pope as Supreme Pontiff and Head of the Holy See rather than as ruler of the Vatican (Bátora and Hynek 2014, 87–111).

Despite the secular character of the Führerprinzip in Germany, it may offer a better window into the operational code of the Taliban than any doctrine of religious infallibility may provide on its own. The combination of an eccentric ideology, a presumed-infallible leader, and some degree of control of a territorial state, makes for a difficult situation to manage. But there is one additional element that also needs to be taken into account, namely the peculiar circumstances in which many figures within the Taliban movement were socialized. These not only augmented the problem of an eccentric ideology, accepted uncritically; they meant that the Taliban movement was one in which challenging the final decisions of the Amir al-Momineen was almost unthinkable. Here again, there are some parallels with other faiths.

Taliban Socialization

The Taliban were the product of a most unusual pattern of socialization in the Afghan context. Historically, the village mullah had not been a figure of especially high social status, and ordinary people were socialized within extended families where conservatism existed alongside pragmatic approaches to social life that resisted the enforcement of norms in ways that could tear communities apart. By contrast, the Taliban were typically socialized in the environment of the madrasa, which militated against the development of relaxed social relationships, and in significant respect left their graduates both developmentally immature, and hostile to social roles of a kind that most Afghans would have considered to be normal. Many seemed devoid of even basic human feelings. In November 2021, the Taliban “Prime Minister,” Mullah Hassan, dismissed the threat of famine, stating that “the Taliban had not promised to provide for the people and that citizens needed to cry out to God to end the famine and drought” (Khalid 2021). And when Paktika was hit by an earthquake on June 23, 2022, a Talib reacted to the resulting misery and distress in chilling terms: “‘This was an act of God and they need to accept it,’ he continued, explaining that people in the villages around him should pray for help. ‘When God is angry with people he sends events like this. It’s a test’” (George 2022).

The content of these statements is perhaps not surprising, and doubtless reflected lines of argument that had been presented to the speakers in the past, as means of explaining “acts of God” that in their devastating impact on ordinary people might suggest that the Deity was neither compassionate nor merciful. What is, however, arresting is what the statements tell us about the dearth of empathy on the part of the speakers at a personal level. It seems unlikely that this would be mere coincidence; rather, it points to the way in which a kind of clericalism can blunt the development of normal human sentiments. This is an aspect of the Taliban that has been seriously under-investigated, but from other faiths, there is some empirical evidence that demonstrates how particular modes of socialization can foster an inculcated clericalism that militates against human empathy if it seems likely to operate to the detriment of the interests or reputation of the faith community as a whole.

It is a commonplace proposition that there is no “clergy” in Islam comparable to those found in Christian churches, although there may be hierarchies of religious figures based on learning and piety, as in Iran and Iraq (Akhavi 1980; Sayej 2018), or loosely-defined religious “establishments,” of a kind that challenged King Amanullah in Afghanistan at the end of the 1920s (see Nawid 1999). There are, however, colleges in which Islamic ideas can be disseminated to potential prayer leaders of the future. Much attention has been paid to the ideas that can emerge from such places. But it is equally important to recognize that venues of this kind are not necessarily healthy microcosms of a wider society, and can shape the personalities of vulnerable or manipulable people in destructive ways. This is not to say that people emerge as zombies from such environments, but rather that their ways of viewing the world and interacting with other people may be distorted or even perverted by the socialization experiences to which they have been exposed.

Where this has most recently been studied in detail is in respect of clericalism and the socialization of priests within the Roman Catholic Church, where scandals relating to child sexual abuse by priests in countries such as the Republic of Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia have come to light, often after years of attempts by the church hierarchy to keep them hidden. The 2017 Report of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recorded one well-placed witness’s definition of clericalism as “a lifestyle, that seeks and expects both power and privilege to be given simply because one is a cleric” (Royal Commission 2017, 615). It noted evidence as to the “identifying features of the culture of clericalism,” several of which echo recorded attributes of the madrasa environment that nurtured many Taliban. These included:

Belief that priests are unique and special because of the supernatural effects of ordination … The public perception of priests as men set apart, as men entitled to deference because of their “calling” and as men who are entitled to respect and credibility because of their priesthood … Life in a homosocial environment … [A]n institutional culture that is monarchical in practice and socially stratified … Priests have a high degree of discretion in their behavior and a very low degree of supervision and actual accountability. (Royal Commission 2017, 615)

At the extreme, these run the risk of creating an environment in which any sense of normal human solidarity is lost, and those who credit themselves with particular insight and status display no concern for those whom they in effect frame as Untermenschen. This is a problem of which insightful observers are all too aware. Pope Francis was quoted in the Report as remarking in 2014 that clericalism was “one of the worst evils” and that “we need to conquer this propensity toward clericalism in houses of formation and seminaries too … Otherwise we are creating little monsters. And then these little monsters mold the people of God” (Royal Commission 2017, 616).

Added to this problem was a theological posture with parallels in the Weltanschauung of the Taliban. As the Royal Commission put it,

In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church began to think of itself as a societas perfecta or “perfect society,” meaning that it saw itself as superior to all other institutions and accountable to no one but God. Societas perfecta theology remained dominant in the Catholic Church up to the mid-20^th century. In relation to the internal structure and governance of the Catholic Church, “perfect society” theology is associated with the view that the Catholic Church is a two-tiered society of the ordained and the non-ordained, where leadership is restricted to the clergy, clergy are only accountable to other more senior clergy, and the pope and the bishops are accountable only to God. (Royal Commission 2017, 621)

Ideas of perfectibility have a long history (Passmore 1970), but when they underpin an imperialistic utopianism (Nozick 1974, 319), they can lead to extremely violent and destructive outcomes, as the Holy Inquisition, designed to root out manifestations of “heresy,” made clear. Religion can be a source of moral inspiration, but it can also take an evil turn. Kimball points to five warning signs: the making of absolute truth claims; blind obedience; a sense that an “ideal time” is looming; a conviction that the end justifies the means; and a commitment to Holy War (Kimball 2002). Arguably, large numbers of Taliban have been socialized to match all these criteria.

Some Conclusions

The attributes of the Taliban discussed in this article are not unique. A range of different political forces have proved to be inscrutable; plenty have manifested ideological rigidity; many have sought to vest authority in a single individual; and quite a number have leaders, cadres, and followers who have found their way to power after disrupted lives in which their socialization experiences have been grossly atypical. What is unusual in the Taliban case, however, is the confluence of these attributes in the one force. In the second half of the 20^th century, arguably only the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (see Becker 1998; Kiernan 2008) manifested these attributes to the same degree as did the Taliban, and it is unsurprising that the wider world found the Khmer Rouge just as difficult to engage (Akbari 2022). From this mélange of Taliban characteristics, two unsettling conclusions flow.

First, the likelihood that the Taliban will succeed in securing generalized normative support or “legitimacy” is very low. The gulf that exists between the Taliban and ordinary Afghans is simply too wide. Fundamentally, the Taliban were able to seize power in 2021 not because they had enjoyed a surge in normative support, but because the United States had abandoned its critical backing for the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (Jamal and Maley 2023, 147–165). A 2019 survey conducted in Afghanistan by The Asia Foundation—a survey accurately described as “the most respected survey of the Afghan people” (Malkasian 2021)—found that 85.1 percent of respondents had “no sympathy at all” for the Taliban (Asia Foundation 2019, 315), and there is no evidence to suggest that this has changed since the Taliban returned to power. Furthermore, while the Taliban have managed to gather funds from customs and other sources to fund their offices and coercive agencies, they lack the larger sums that would be required to underpin an exchange relationship with the wider public in which compliance would be the price that ordinary Afghans would pay for the delivery of goods and services. A more likely scenario, therefore, is the use of extreme coercion by the Taliban to crush all resistance, and to signal to fellow travelers who joined in 2020 and 2021 that it would be dangerous to try to defect.

Second, the implications of all these points for attempts to engage productively with the Taliban are sobering. This has always been a difficult challenge (Maley 2007; 2018, 222–239). In March 1998, the United Nations withdrew its expatriate staff from Kandahar after a staffer was physically assaulted by Mullah Hassan, now the Taliban “Prime Minister.” UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi explained the decision thus: the “international community has a standard and if you want to be a member of the club you have to abide by the rules” (quoted in Maley 2000, 23). The problem is that the Taliban operate according to an entirely different set of rules. As Hassan put it, “we do not care about anybody as long as the religion of Allah is maintained” (United Nations 1997, para. 29). Just as high-level engagement with the Taliban proved deeply destructive in the past, it is likely to prove deeply unrewarding if attempted in the future.

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Notes on contributors

William Maley

William Maley is Emeritus Professor of Diplomacy at The Australian National University. He edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press, 1998), and is co-author (with Niamatullah Ibrahimi) of Afghanistan: Politics and Economics in a Globalising State (New York: Routledge, 2020) and (with Ahmad Shuja Jamal) of The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).