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Anand Gopal: The Combined and Uneven Development of Afghan Nationalism

The Combined and Uneven Development of

Afghan Nationalism

Anand Gopal*
Columbia University

Abstract
The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has been based, in part, on a pair of contradic-
tory notions: First, that the Taliban are a supra-ethnic, transnational group severed
from the social and cultural heritage of Afghanistan; and second, that the Taliban
represent a form of Pashtun nationalism. This article uses archival data and field
research to show that both views are incorrect. The Taliban are historically rooted
in Pashtun communities and yet are not a force of Pashtun nationalism. Rather,
they comprise a network of exclusion, bound together in rhetoric by a particular
conception of political Islam and Afghan sovereignty. This is an ‘Islamist nation-
alism’ in word, but crucially, not in deed: While the Taliban aspire to act as a
nationalist force representing all Afghans, under conditions of institutional
poverty and the lack of modernization, the Taliban are bound in practice by
networks of trust and personal contact. This is an example of the ‘combined
and uneven development’ of Afghan nationalism.

Introduction
The United States attack on Afghanistan fifteen years ago was based on a pair of
contradictory propositions about one of its principal military targets, the Taliban.
On the one hand, the United States contended that the Taliban was effectively a
supra-ethnic, transnational group; in this view, by abetting al Qaeda the Taliban
more closely adhered to the aims of global jihad and radical Islam than to the
parochial concerns of classic ethnic or nationalist politics. In practice, this view
meant that the United States made no effort to distinguish between the two entities
on the battlefield, which resulted not only in Taliban leadership but rank-and-file
conscripts being sent to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
On the other hand, at times the United States also viewed the Taliban and its
constituency as representative of the ethnic structure of Afghan social and politi-
cal life. In this view, Afghan politics unfolded on an ethnic landscape; following
the brutal mid-1990s civil war, ethnicity was the primary factor dictating political
allegiance. In November 2001, for example, U.S. war planners halted the forward
march of the Northern Alliance, which was dominated by non-Pashtun ethnic

*
Anand Gopal completed his doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 2016.

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groups, at Kabul, for fear that any attempt to take Pashtun territory to the south
would spark fierce resistance (Gordon 2001). When the exiled opposition chose
an Uzbek as interim president, the U.S. manoeuvred to remove him and install a
Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, on the belief that the country must be Pashtun ruled.
This ethnicized discourse matches much scholarship on the Taliban, which
emphasizes the group’s Pashtun base, its tribal makeup (Johnson and Mason
2008; Rashid 2002), and its cultivation of primordial Pashtun symbols and myths
(Kamel 2015). Such scholarship in turn influenced U.S. and NATO military
planners, who incorporated insights from the social sciences into counterinsur-
gency doctrine after 2006 (Fick and Nagl 2009). NATO studies began to appear
on subjects such as pashtunwali, the tribal ‘code’ of Pashtuns, and its relationship
to the insurgency (Strickland 2007).
This article will show that both the ethno-nationalist and the supra-ethnic, trans-
national interpretations of the Taliban are inaccurate. Both are based on models of
nationalism that fail to explain group formation or the politics of state contestation
in Afghanistan. Instead, I take inspiration from modernist theories of nationalism
(Anderson 2006; Gellner 2008) to argue that due to the failure of Afghan state
formation, ethnicity has not become politicized; rather, the Taliban comprises a
network of exclusion bound together in rhetoric by a particular conception of
political Islam and Afghan sovereignty. This is an ‘Islamist nationalism’ in word,
but crucially, not in deed: While the Taliban aspire to act as an anti-imperialist,
nationalist force representing all Afghans, under conditions of institutional pov-
erty and the lack of modernization, the Taliban are bound in practice by networks
of trust and personal contact. I call this the ‘combined and uneven development’
of Taliban nationalism. The phrase originates in Marxist political economy as a
way to describe the combination of underdevelopment with global interconnec-
tedness, in which cultural practices, traditions, and institutions in the developing
world can coexist with institutions copied from the West. In this case, I argue that
the Taliban have copied the rhetoric of state contestation from more developed
countries while lacking the institutional ability to act on this rhetoric.
I support this line of argument with material from a new documentary archive,
the Taliban Sources Project (Strick van Linschoten et al., forthcoming), which
contains a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and memoirs published by the
Taliban movement. The archive consists of near full runs of Shariat, the official
state newspaper of the 1990s Taliban government, and Tolo-ye-Afghan, an impor-
tant Kandahar-based newspaper linked to the regime. It also contains the near full-
run of Al Samoud, the flagship publication of the post-2001 insurgency. I analysed
this material in conjunction with insight drawn from four years’ worth of field
interviews in southern Afghanistan.

The Transnational Taliban?

There are two variants of the hypothesis that the Taliban represent a transnational
force: the group’s alliance with al Qaeda and its origins within the Afghan refugee
population. The first variant is based on the movement’s sheltering of, and subse-
quent refusal to turn over, Osama bin Laden. While it may appear that this refusal

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is linked to an ideological convergence – bin Laden waged ‘jihad’ against interna-

tional targets, and the Taliban invoked the name and imagery of jihad against their
internal enemies – recent research demonstrates the deep ideological divisions
between the groups. Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn (2012a) describe how the
Taliban, in fact, attempted to curb al Qaeda’s activities throughout the 1990s,
although these efforts were counterbalanced by the supreme leader Mullah
Mohammad Omar’s concerns about domestic legitimacy. Similarly, Mohabbat
(Mohabbat and McInnis 2004) describes persistent splits within the Taliban lead-
ership in the late 1990s, in which certain Taliban leaders attempted to engineer an
extradition deal for bin Laden – sometimes without the knowledge of the supreme
leader. In the post-2001 insurgency, Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn (2012a)
demonstrate that the Taliban and al Qaeda operated as a marriage of convenience,
and that the Taliban’s aims were limited to internal Afghan affairs. To date, there
has been no transnational attack conducted by a member of the Afghan Taliban –
or even by an Afghan. There are no Afghans in the leadership of al Qaeda, and no
Arabs in the leadership of the Taliban (Ruttig 2010).
This variant of the transnational hypothesis is most common in counterterror-
ism circles, but the second variant – the Taliban’s refugee origins – is common
in scholarly analysis. According to this view, the Taliban is a phenomenon linked
to the migrant diaspora that came of age during the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan. Thousands of deracinated young boys, based mostly in Pakistani ref-
ugee camps, grew up severed from the social mores of traditional Afghan life;
instead, they were inculcated with radical Salafist interpretations of Islam, which
they carried back with them into Afghanistan in 1994 to cleanse the country of
warlordism. Ahmed Rashid, in his seminal study on the Taliban, is perhaps the
most articulate proponent of this view:
Many of [the Taliban] had been born in Pakistani refugee camps, educated
in Pakistani madrassas and had learnt their fighting skills from Mujaheddin
parties based in Pakistan. As such the younger Taliban barely knew their
own country or history, but from their madrassas they learnt about the ideal
Islamic society created by the Prophet Mohammed 1,400 years ago and this
is what they wanted to emulate. (Rashid 2002:23)
This hypothesis stresses the alien essence of the Taliban, and the ways in which
the group represents a radical rupture from traditional Afghan life. Other accounts
emphasize the Taliban’s transnational nature by highlighting the group’s religious
links to South Asian Deobandi networks, and particular to movements like the
Pakistani religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (Haq 2015; Metcalf 2002).
Recently uncovered data, however, cast doubt on this theory. The Taliban
Sources Project archive contains notices whenever an individual was appointed
to a high-level government position during the 1990s Taliban Emirate. Using this
data and supporting field interviews, I constructed a roster of nearly two-hundred
individuals who held positions in the Taliban political and military leadership
between the years 1996 and 2001, along with key life-history information. The
roster was limited to those who held senior-most or deputy-level positions, and
it included individuals considered the key ideological and political influencers

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within the movement. Table 1 shows the pre-1991 educational background for this
group: Nearly 60% of Taliban were educated inside Afghanistan. Hujras refer to
informal guest rooms, usually adjacent to the village mosque, where young
students are taught an eclectic mix of basic literacy, Islam, and folklore (Gopal
and Strick van Linschoten, forthcoming). In southern Afghanistan, this education
is heavily influenced by a locally-flavoured mix of Sufism and Deobandism,
which places heavy emphasis on ritual (as opposed to a focus on ijtihad, indepen-
dent reasoning, that features prominently in modernist Islamism; c.f. March 2015;
Metcalf 2002). Maktab refers to nominally secular state-run schools.1 While the
percentage educated outside Afghanistan is undoubtedly larger for the rank and
file, it was the leadership who set the ideological and strategic direction of the
movement.
Recent work (Gopal and Strick van Linschoten, forthcoming) demonstrates that
the 1990s Taliban were primarily concerned with enforcing the strictures of
Afghan village life – particularly as experienced in the southern Pashtun village.
Yet at the same time, the exigencies of state building (and subsequently, of resis-
tance to a foreign occupation) forced the movement to contend with the realities of
Afghanistan as nation-state. The result was that even the group’s iconic actions
were in fact appeals to local and national history, not appeals to a transnational
umma. In 1996, when Mullah Mohammed Omar raised the cloak of the prophet
to a crowd in Kandahar City, he was invoking a local Sufi symbol and a national
memory of religious unity in a time of strife – the last Afghan ruler to hold aloft
the cloak was King Amanullah, in 1929, during an uprising against his rule
(Foschini and Dam 2014). When Omar was declared Amir ul-Mumineen, ‘com-
mander of the faithful’, it replicated a similar announcement, under similar condi-
tions, by Afghan ruler Dost Mohammed in 1836 (Noelle 2012). Moreover, his
spokesman admitted that this did not apply to all Muslims, only those in
Afghanistan (Al-Majallah 1996). Even the command to grow a fist-length beard,
the supreme leader clarified in a 2000 decree, applied only to Afghans, not to
visiting Muslims (Gopal and Strick van Linschoten, forthcoming). The Taliban’s
notorious enforced seclusion of women, and the prohibition against female

Table 1.

Taliban Leadership Education

Afghanistan – hujra 48.97%
Afghanistan – madrassa 7.59%
Afghanistan – maktab 2.07%
Pakistan – refugee camp 5.52%
Pakistan – madrassa 24.14%
Pakistan – secular 0.69%
India 1.38%
Saudi Arabia 0.69%
None 2.07%
Unknown 6.90%

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participation in public life, were not radical Salafist imports, but rather were ex-
pressions of prevailing patriarchal norms in rural southern Afghanistan (Pont
2001).

The Ethno-nationalist Taliban?

One possible conclusion from these observations is that the Taliban are a force of
ethnic nationalism, and this is precisely the approach taken by a line of scholar-
ship and commentary (Kamel 2015; Totten 2009). In particular, proponents of this
view argue that the Taliban represent a form of Pashtun nationalism, and draw at-
tention to three observations: 1) the movement is comprised mostly of Pashtuns
(which also applies across the border in Pakistan, where the so-called Pakistani
Taliban are almost entirely Pashtuns from the tribal areas); 2) the Taliban aspire
for a Pashtun-dominated state; and 3) the Taliban incorporate Pashtun myths
and historical memories as a means of mobilizing Pashtuns.
While it is true that the Taliban are predominately Pashtun (although see
Giustozzi 2010, which describes the movement’s inroads into non-Pashtun com-
munities), in rhetoric the Taliban have assiduously sought to portray themselves
in solely Islamic and Afghan nationalist terms. They avoid mentioning ethnicity
altogether, except in so far as to defend against the charge of ethno-nationalism.
The following, for example, comes from an online question-and-answer forum
run by the Taliban (Rahimi 2012):

Q: Sir, peace be upon you! Dear respected Sir Mujahed, it is clear to the
whole world that Pashtuns are still devoted to the cause of jihad. They have
always been the first victims. Why there is no fighting in Hazara and Uzbek
populated areas? Please answer my question. Since long I have been waiting
to find an answer. Regards, Wahid.

A: Brother, we should try to make a unity among all sections of our nations
for the sake of an Islamic system and our national interest. Like in the past,
today also every ethnic group participates in the ongoing jihad. We are
witness to the mujahedeen [Taliban] attacks which take place in the east,
west, north and south of the country. All ethnic groups of the nation partic-
ipate in these operations. In Sar-e-Pul, Jowzjan, Samangan and Faryab
despite all problems and difficulties, our Uzbek and Turkmen brothers
shoulder to should with their Pashtun brothers take part in Jihad. They have
offered a lot of sacrifices. Time and again they participate in suicidal
attacks. In Badakhshan, Takhar, Kunduz and Baghlan our Tajik brothers
together with their Pashtun brothers participate in the process of Jihad.
Despite all their local problems and difficulties they offer so many sacri-
fices. Our Hazara brothers too, in accordance to their capacity, despite all
local problems, participate in jihad in the provinces of Bamiyan and Herat
and other areas. I don’t think that jihad is waged only by one particular
ethnic group, though most of most of the operations take place in Pashtun
populated areas, because of the presence of better circumstances for jihad

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in these areas. Hopefully the whole nation will participate in our jihad. All
the people will come forward to support their brother in the fight against the
common enemy. This year, the mujahedeen have prepared comprehensive
plans for the whole country. If Allah wills it, you will witness the results.

Poetry and ballads are a central part of Taliban propaganda, and they often take
the form of popular Pashtun verse (Semple 2011).2 But their content tends to
focus on Afghan national themes (Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn 2012b):
Turn all our girls into Malalai and all our boys into Ghaznawi!
Make every stone marble and make every flower pink! For those Afghan
brothers who left because they were poor,
Bring them back to the homeland and end their emigration.
Whether they are in the east or in the west, they are all afghans;
Oh God! Unite them and bring brotherhood amongst them.
Whether Pashtun, Uzbek, Hazara or Tajik, they are all one afghan nation;
May you end their enmity. This is the cry of Majbur’s heart; hear it! And to
those who want bad things for Afghans, may they go
mad!

Majbur means ‘forced’ in Pashto, and refers to the widespread sense among the
Taliban that they were forced to pick up arms in defence against a cruel and
oppressive invader.
Elsewhere, an interview with a commander from Badakhshan province con-
ducted for al Samoud, the Taliban insurgency’s flagship publication, contains
the following (Al-Samoud 2013):

Another reason behind the enemy’s attempt to vilify jihad and the mujahedeen
is that jihad in Badakhshan has thwarted all the misleading efforts and rumors
targeting the Islamic Emirate [the Taliban]. For example, the enemy claimed
that resistance against the crusaders and their agents was an ethnic resistance
limited to the Pashtun areas, not a doctrinal one. However, the strong emer-
gence of jihad in Badakhshan, which does not host any Pashtuns, confirmed
that this jihad is not ethnic, rather an Islamic Jihad against the infidels and
aggressors, to ensure the establishment of an Islamic regime with the participa-
tion of all the Afghan people, based on belief in Islam.

Al Samoud contains dozens of such interviews with Taliban figures, and it is

instructive to analyse their ethnic distribution. Analysing ethnicity is not straight-
forward because the Taliban usually avoid all mention of ethnic and tribal affilia-
tion; instead, we must infer ethnicity from the village and district of origin of the
interviewee. As Table 2 shows, in most cases this is possible (in the remaining,
unknown cases, the individuals hail from mixed areas). At least a quarter of inter-
viewees are non-Pashtuns. Moreover, analysis of the geographic distribution of
interviewees shows that despite the insurgency’s concentration in the south and
east, the generally non-Pashtun northern and western areas are well represented.

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Table 2.

Al-Samoud Interviews
Pashtun 60.0%
Non-Pashtun 24.3%
Unknown 15.7%
South 27.1%
Southeast 14.3%
Northeast 11.4%
North 21.4%
West 10.0%
Leadership 15.7%

Note: Data through April 2013

Whether these trends reflect the reality of Taliban membership is beside the
point; what is relevant is that the Taliban strive to portray their movement as
representing all ethnicities and regions in the country. This stands in contrast with
the classic model of ethno-nationalism, which is the conscious and deliberate
invocation of a group’s language, mores, and history. It is borne from a sense of
ethnic oppression, and it produces either secessionism or an attempt to remake
the state to rectify the ethnic imbalance. The Taliban, however, do neither with
respect to Pashtun ethnicity. Their critique of the post-2001 government is based
not on ethnicity, but rather on the grounds of national (Afghan) sovereignty and
religion.
The third argument for a Pashtun nationalist understanding of the Taliban
relates to the Taliban’s ability to mobilize Pashtuns, which scholars who empha-
size the emotive and psychological aspects of identity attribute to the group’s
use of Pashtun myths, symbols, and collective memories that resonate with the
population. For example, Scott Atran (2010, loc. 3742) writes:
A key factor helping the Taliban is the moral outrage of Pashtun tribes
against those who deny their autonomy, including the right to bear arms
to defend their tribal code, known as Pashtunwali. Its sacred tenets include
protecting women’s purity (namus), the right to personal revenge (badal),
the sanctity of the guest (malmastia) and sanctuary (nanawateh).

Kamel (2015:69) gives an ethnosymbolist interpretation for the rise of the

Taliban, writing that ‘light from Afghanistan as a “territorial referent” has passed
through the Taliban’s “Pashtun nationalist” and “Islamist” ideological lenses to
focus on certain symbolic resources in order to distil a positive national image
among their respective audiences’.
This thesis, however, suffers from two significant weaknesses. First, during their
reign and subsequent insurgency, the Taliban have frequently acted in opposition to
Pashtunwali, the tribal ‘code’ of Pashtuns. They outlawed baad, a key element of

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Pashtun tribal dispute resolution in which an offending group presents a girl or

woman to the victim’s family to settle a blood feud. They banned levirate mar-
riages because it violated a woman’s right to choose her marriage partner (Cole
2003). They de-legitimized the tribal jirga, a key institution for dispute resolution
and local rule, in favour of clerical-run religious shura. Even infamous decisions,
like the group’s refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden – which outside observers
often interpreted as a manifestation of the Pashtun virtue of hospitality – was
almost always explained by Mullah Omar as a religious duty towards a fellow
Muslim, not a Pashtun duty. The decision to ban music went contrary to the
long-standing role that music played in the conception of Pashtun virtue (Rzehak
2011). Finally, those symbols and motifs that the Taliban did incorporate were cast
in national, Afghan terms. The group frequently invokes past heroes and heroines
of resistance like Malalai, the Joan-of-Arc–like figure who took part in the Battle of
Maiwand in 1842, but she is considered a national figure as much as a Pashtun one.
The second weakness of this line of argument is that it unwittingly mimics the
portrayal of Pashtunness put forward by Pashtun nationalists themselves, and by
doing so, essentializes Pashtun experience. As a normative framework,
Pashtunwali varies widely across Pashtun lands, from mountain areas and remote
regions where tribal structures are relatively intact to settled regions like southern
Afghanistan that have experienced centuries of state integration. Whereas the
tribal jirga adjudicates disputes in areas like Loya Paktia (along the mountainous
eastern frontier with Pakistan), in Kandahar local elites (khans) often play the pre-
ponderant role of adjudication. As Lutz Rzehak (2011) points out, the term
Pashtunwali itself is usually only found in Loya Paktia and tribal Pakistan. In fact,
while Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan talk about settling disputes in the
‘Pashtun way’ (i.e. ‘doing Pashto’), they are typically referring to a manner of
informal adjudication that bears little resemblance to the Pashtunwali of Loya
Paktia. And within a given community, tribal normative systems function along-
side a distinct normative system based on sharia, most notably in the form of
sharia courts for dispute resolution. The Taliban’s origins lie not in Pashtunwali
but in this sharia-based framework. Although the Taliban’s banning of music,
for example, is contrary to certain Pashtun conceptions of the virtues of music,
it is concordant with long-standing religious traditions in the Afghan village that
see music as sinful (Baily 1989). There is no uniform set of symbols and myths
that speak to Pashtuns across this diverse tableau or act as boundary mechanisms
that differentiate Pashtuns from non-Pashtuns. On the other hand, there are many
traditions and norms that are authentic to Pashtun village experience – such as a
version of sharia – that are not, in the mind of its proponents, linked to a specific
ethnie.
The core problem with ethnic theories of the Taliban is that there is no consis-
tent ethnic boundary separating insurgent-supporting and government-supporting
communities, which means that ethnic symbols and myths are insufficient for
mobilizing people. The following example will make this clear. In the
ethnically-mixed northern province of Kunduz, the principal fault line is ethnic;
in the first few years after 2002, Pashtuns were disproportionately targeted by
Tajik and Uzbek strongmen (Human Rights Watch 2002). This helped produce a

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sense of Pashtun alienation, leading to Taliban mobilization in those communities.

Today, the Taliban in Kunduz tend to have greater support in Pashtun communities
than in non-Pashtun communities.
The cleavage in Kunduz is profoundly local in nature: Local non-Pashtun com-
manders abused local Pashtun villagers. What does this mean for areas where
there are only Pashtuns? In Kandahar province, which is almost entirely Pashtun,
one of the principal fault lines is tribal. (The Pashtun ethnic group consists of hun-
dreds of tribes, each of which are further divided into clans. Pashtun tribes share
language and customs, although there are slight regional variations between east-
ern and southern tribes.) In Kandahar’s Spin Boldak district, members of the
Achekzai tribe were able to outmanoeuvre those from the Noorzai tribe in secur-
ing government posts, foreign patronage, and control of the lucrative cross-border
trade (Aikins 2009). As a consequence, the Taliban drew disproportionately from
the Noorzai tribe (Gopal 2012). In other words, one Pashtun tribe predominately
allied with the government, and another with the Taliban. But what about areas
where there is only a single tribe? In Uruzgan province’s Khas Uruzgan district,
the majority of the Pashtun population belongs to the Achekzai tribe – but the
same pattern of patronage and exclusion means that one section of the tribe (the
Matakzai) was able to outmanoeuvre a different section (the Alizai) for state
and foreign resources. As a result, the Taliban more successfully recruited from
the losing community, the Alizai. Finally, patterns of exclusion are specific
to the local context: While the Noorzai in Spin Boldak are closer to the Taliban than
the government, Noozais in Uruzgan province’s Deh Rawud district are closer to
the government than the Taliban (Gopal, forthcoming; The Liaison Office 2012).
This fractal-like pattern illustrates that the boundary of exclusion shifts depend-
ing on the area and the actors involved. While there are important ethnic and cul-
tural differences between communities on various sides of the conflict in Kunduz,
there are no such differences in the intra-ethnic and intra-tribal divides of southern
Afghanistan. Alizai and Matakzai in Khas Uruzgan are both Pashtun-speaking
communities that share symbols, myths, and histories. At the same time, among
the various Taliban-supporting communities countrywide there is no shared set
of ethnic symbols, no transcendental mythomateur that constitutes them as a
collectivity. Because tribal and ethnic identities are simultaneously linked with
the government and the Taliban, tribal and ethnic motifs are poor choices for
anti-state mobilization. The most appropriate choice, as the Taliban and many
other movements in the Middle East and South Asia have discovered, is religious
and national sovereignty.

Combined and Uneven Development

The Taliban perceive injustices stemming from foreign occupation as the reason
for the system of winners and losers at the local level: Some individuals benefited
from the foreign presence, while others lost out (Gopal 2014). This, together with
the fractal nature of exclusion described above, led them to articulate their vision
simultaneously in terms of Afghan sovereignty and Islam. This ‘Islamist national-
ism’ has variants elsewhere, such as Hamas in Palestine and Ahrar al-Sham in

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Syria. However, it is important to note that the Taliban have been unable to actu-
alize their nationalist vision in practice: The Taliban is not a ‘Pashtun movement’,
yet it is a movement comprised predominately of Pashtuns. How to reconcile this
contradiction? Why have the Taliban been unable to broaden from their Pashtun
base to match the nationalistic vision described in their statements?
I argue that the answer is due to the under-formalization and under-
rationalization of Afghan social life. The initial 1994 mobilization of the Taliban
took place among small groups of talibs, or religious students, from the Pashtun
provinces of Kandahar and Uruzgan. The individuals knew each other from their
time in taliban fronts, small semi-autonomous mujahedeen bands that fought
against the Soviets in the 1980s (Agha 2014; Zaeef 2011). As individuals joined
the burgeoning movement to rid the country of warlordism, they recruited friends,
relatives, and fellow former mujaheds they knew from the frontlines – in other
words, they recruited along lines of personal contact and trust. Nearly the entire
Taliban leadership was linked through qawm (networks of solidarity; see Roy
1994) and andiwaal ties (friendships from the war; see Ruttig 2009; Zaeef
2011).3 The growth of the Taliban, like all other Afghan movements at the time,
was based on personal ties, and the resulting organization was patrimonial in
nature. Trust and personal contact was the ‘event horizon’ of the Talib’s world –
and because contact was mediated along intimate, pre-existing lines of kinship
and propinquity, the ability of the movement to recruit individuals from diverse
backgrounds decreased as a function of social distance. Thus recruitment, in order
of difficulty, followed a classic segmentary pattern, from historically marginalized
Kandahari and Uruzgani communities (the easiest) to those in southern
Afghanistan to Pashtun Afghanistan to non-Pashtun areas (the most difficult).4
In this way, the Taliban were predominately Pashtun without aspiring to be so.
After 2001, this link between the Taliban and Pashtuns led the U.S. and Afghan
government to target predominately in Pashtun areas, producing a re-mobilization
of the Taliban that was largely confined to those areas. Once again, the Taliban
grew along homophilous networks (McPherson et al. 2001) but now as an insur-
gency the role of trust and prior contacts was greater than ever.
While trust and homophily are factors in all social networks, and therefore in all
forms of recruitment, what distinguishes this process in Afghanistan from Western
models is the near complete absence of any formal component – thereby produc-
ing organizational structures that are almost purely personal and patrimonial. Put
differently, scholars of militarization describe a distinction between ‘civil’ and
‘military’ societies; in a modern state army, various forms of socialization occur
to increase within-unit solidarity and cleave social ties between the military unit
and civil society (Bearman 1991; Heckathorn 1990). This can be done, for exam-
ple, by mixing individuals from different geographic backgrounds to create the
unit. In civil wars, on the other hand, social solidarity is often achieved by cou-
pling civil and military societies: All members of a given unit typically hail from
the same area, and are commanded by a local elite from that area. In this form of
military organization, in other words, many of the individuals will have known
each other before joining. In Afghanistan, the central role of trust and personal
relationships makes it difficult for groups to develop a non-local character.

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Ethnicity functions on a far more general scale than kinship, propinquity, and
andiwaal identities; where different ethnicities fall along a structural fault line
(like in Kunduz) it can became a meaningful form of association, but in all other
contexts ethnic ties are simply too impersonal to generate group structure. A
group’s ethnic character instead emerges from personal interactions that are not
directly related to ethnicity at all.
This patrimonial process is not unique to the Taliban. Rather, it is the case
across the Afghan political spectrum, a fact explained by the weakness of the
Afghan state, the legacy of indirect rule, the failure of formal organizations to
shape Afghan social and political life, and the general institutional and economic
underdevelopment of the country. This recalls the modernist theories of national-
ism of Gellner (1994), Wimmer (2002), and others, and it suggests two insights
into the phenomenon. First, it helps explain the lack of ethnic nationalisms in
Afghanistan. Barfield (2010) and other scholars have noted the lack of ethnic
secessionist movements in Afghanistan, which they take to indicate a strong
Afghan national identity; instead, my argument suggests that this fact shows the
prevalence of strong sub-ethnic identities, of ever-shifting networks of solidarity
defining hyper-local collectivities. This is why, as described above, no segmentary
grouping is able to transcend local conditions; the Taliban recruit disproportion-
ately from the Noorzai tribe in Spin Boldak and Maiwand districts of Kandahar,
but in Deh Rawud district of neighbouring Uruzgan province, the Noorzais are
closer to the government. In Char Chino, which borders Deh Rawud to the north,
the Noorzai tribe is split into pro- and anti-government tendencies (Dawudzais
and Durzais, respectively). Table 3 summarizes these relationships across southern
Afghanistan for the Achekzai and Noorzai tribes. All significant Afghan political
groups remain tied to particular regions and andiwaal networks that are not
reducible to ethnicity. In this sense, the lack of ethnic secession movements is
not an indicator of a strong national sentiment, but rather a reflection of the
country’s severe underdevelopment.
Second, this argument predicts where nationalisms should arise: in circum-
stances where localism is most easily overcome by alternate forms of social soli-
darity. This would include institutions with a formal character, which draw
individuals from diverse geographic backgrounds who therefore do not have prior
contact – such as universities and other urban institutions. Nationalisms should be
strongest, then, among segments of the urban elite in places like Kabul – and this
is precisely where ethnic nationalism prevails in Afghanistan. Pashtun nationalist
groups such as Wekh Zalmyan (Awakened Youth; see Misdaq 2006) and Afghan
Mellat (Afghan Nation; see Dorronsoro 2013) were or are based primarily in cities
like Kabul and Peshawar and have influence on university campuses. Sections of
Afghan Mellat call for, among other things, the dismemberment of Pakistan and
the adjoining of the tribal areas to Afghanistan to create ‘Pashtunistan’. These
groups, which are typically secular, are opposed to the Taliban.
As a rural, patrimonial movement, the Taliban do not meet the above criteria but
nonetheless espouse an Afghan nationalist vision. They do so by mimicking the
rhetoric of insurgencies elsewhere, particularly Iraq’s. But crucially, it is only
the rhetoric they mimic – in practice, the Taliban are no more able to overcome

488
 Table 3.

Spin Boldak Maiwand Deh Rawud Char Chino Chora Khas Uruzgan
Achekzai Pro-government N/A N/A N/A Pro-Taliban Split

489
Noorzai Pro-Taliban Pro-Taliban Pro-Government Split N/A N/A

Note: Allegiance of Achekzai and Noorzai Pashtun tribes in five districts of Kandahar and Uruzgan provinces. Data from Aikins (2009),
Gopal (forthcoming), The Liaison Office (2012), and interviews in Uruzgan and Kandahar, 2013–14.
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 16, No. 3, 2016
Anand Gopal: The Combined and Uneven Development of Afghan Nationalism

localism than any other Afghan faction. This is the ‘combined and uneven devel-
opment’ of the Taliban’s nationalism. This phrase was first applied by Trotsky and
other Marxists to describe inequalities in global economic development (Löwy
2010; but see, for a usage – slightly different from mine – in the field of national-
ism studies, Nairn 1975). In this case, it refers to the Taliban’s copying of certain
rhetorical forms of state contestation from more developed countries while lack-
ing the institutional ability to actualize this rhetoric in practice; it is the combina-
tion of Western-style nationalist phrasings with the structure of Afghan
patrimonial relations – a combination that occurs because of uneven development
globally.
When the United States attacked fifteen years ago, its misunderstandings of
Afghanistan were legion, but chief among them was the basic failure to grasp
the profoundly different institutional and organizational reality in the country. It
is perhaps ironic that as the United States grafted concepts like nationalism onto
the Afghan landscape, the Taliban attempted to do the same. Both, in their own
ways, have failed.

Notes
1
After 1991, 6.2% of this leadership roster moved to Pakistan for study, but they had all
returned by 1995. This roster over-represents formal leadership, but one check of key infor-
mal leadership – the office of supreme leader Mullah Omar – suggests that those in formal
positions were in fact more likely to have been educated abroad than those in informal roles
(perhaps owing to the greater bureaucratic-rational competency required for the former).
2
Some authors point to the Taliban’s invocation of nang, honour, as an attempt to cultivate
a quintessentially Pashtun virtue; however, honour as a motif is common in all military
organizations (Moskos 1976).
3
‘Qawm’ is a subtle concept, with different interpretations. In some contexts, it can denote
ethnicity. For a discussion of the concept, see Coburn (2011).
4
Cultural differences were also important – the Taliban’s defence of the ‘traditional way of
life’ meant the traditional way oof life as they knew it – in the southern Pashtun village. For
more on the cultural role, see Gopal and Strick van Linschoten (forthcoming).

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