Afghanistan: A Dialogue
M. Majid Khan
Linell Davis
Learning in Post-conflict Situations
May 2001
The Universal and the Particular
Majid: I enrolled in this course because of my interest in that region, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That whole region is really suffering because of constant war. We may not see an end to this conflict in the near future. Whether it is post-conflict or real conflict remains to be seen. The second thing is I think we should work on a project to improve the basic educational infrastructure in a way that is in line with local needs. It should help them to understand why we want them to get education.
Linell: It is my idea that in the class discussions and readings we get universal principles such as gender issues, the needs and resilience of children, and the need for healing. But you have to apply these universal principles in a particular situation. You, Majid, are the one who has more knowledge of the particular situation since you come from that part of the world. You have personal knowledge of those particulars. You and I by working together have the opportunity to apply the universal to the particular.
Majid: Yes, that is very much needed. It is the only way to get to a solution.
When we started out we thought we would design a project, and this goal shows up in our dialogue. We did not do that. What we did was have a conversation and then search for resources to increase our understanding of both universal principles and the realities of the local situation in Afghanistan. We were the learners in this project. We present our findings in the form of an annotated bibliography organized according to the topics that we discussed in our dialogue. We leave it this way so that it can be a resource to others who want to explore issues of post-conflict learning in this particular setting.
In our dialogue we first discuss some of the characteristics of Afghan society and culture and then we discuss the conflict. To conclude we explore possibilities for post-conflict learning in relation to three themes from the course: healing, gender issues, and social capital.
Related Sources
Dirlik, Arif. Our Ways of Knowing: Globalization . . . The End of Universalism? Keynote address for the conference "New Directions in Area Studies." University of Massachusetts/Amherst. April 26, 2001.
Professor Dirlik spoke about the apparent paradox of fragmentation in an era of globalization. He points out that Western ways of knowing, Western epistemologies, are under attack both in the Euro-American centers of the globalized economy and in many other places around the world. He cautions against falling into either economic or cultural reductionism. We should not think that Western or non-Western traditions are monolithic, that there is one set of Confucian values, Western values or Islamic values. The author sees it as a mistake to identify whole peoples with certain symbols despite differences among them. When processes and practices that we identify as modern are adopted in non-western countries, they are adapted to the local culture or cultures.
Eisenstadt, S. N. 2000. Multiple Modernities. Daedalus, Winter 2000 129
The author argues that Western patterns of modernity are not the only "authentic" modernities. Today we are seeing an ideological conflict between universal and pluralistic visions of modernity. The particularistic view accepts the existence of different values, different rationalities, different ways of knowing while the universalistic vision conflates different values and especially notions of rational thought in a totalistic way. The tension between the universal and the particular is evident in much that is written about Afghanistan today. In Afghanistan fundamentalism is aligned against western modernism. It is necessary to find alternatives to these polarities, modernism with local characteristics.
Linell: I agree but the situation is very much in conflict now. We should discuss the conflict in terms of the local situation. You know much more about that than I do. What are the things we should keep in mind as we plan a project?
The religious context
Majid: The first thing is that we should look at who is now in power and who is now the ruling elite. We know that the Taliban are supreme and they control 90% of the country. If we enter Afghanistan we have to be acceptable to them. They belong to a certain school of thought called the Deobandi. It is orthodox and very fundamentalist. This group goes back to the 1860s to Deoband, which is in India. In 1860 they established a religious school there. Now we have come to the point where the students of those religious schools are ruling Afghanistan.
Linell: What is unique about the teachings or approach of the Deobandi school of Islam?
Majid: The special thing is that they are very orthodox. They emphasize Islamic teachings, which are very fundamentalist. They think that women should not be allowed to work or educate themselves, that women have no rights. They think that the solution to conflict is jihad. They want to fight. They believe that dialogue is not the best solution. They are extremists. The prophet Mohammed said that to seek knowledge is the right of every man and woman. At the time, he said that you have to seek knowledge, you should go to China. In those times China was very far from the Middle East.
Linell: So he was saying, do whatever you have to do, go as far as you have to go, to get that knowledge.
Majid: Yes. He said that it is the duty of each man and woman to seek knowledge. But the Taliban is taking different things from Islamic teachings.
Linell: I understand that because it also happens in Christianity. There are different groups who interpret the teachings of the religion in different ways. One of things we want to keep in mind as we plan a project is that this is an Islamic country. As you were saying, the teachings of Islam put gaining knowledge and education in a very high place.
Majid: Education has a very high place. The Prophet Mohammed, though he was himself illiterate, he rated knowledge very high. He used to sit with people to educate them. That was his way to create awareness He was himself an orphan. He stood against the social evils of his time. I think that was how he got his support. In those times in Arab society people would kill their daughters as soon as they were born. He stood against those social evils.
Linell: He was a progressive. He was trying to improve social conditions.
Related Sources
Shorish-Shamley, Zieba. 1985. Women's position, role, and rights in Islam. Unpublished Dissertation, University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign 1985: 48-50
Passages from the Qur'an and the Hadiths (tradition) show that Islam supports education, property rights, employment, and human rights for women. It is not necessary to define the situation in terms of a conflict between Islam and the secular state. There is sufficient basis for gender justice in the teachings of Islam. Learning initiatives should take advantage of this cultural resource.
Butt, J. 1997. The Taliban Phenomenon. In Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan. Media Action International. Available at:
The author describes the background and development of the Taliban movement. The Taliban was born in the refugee camps of Pakistan after the Soviet invasion. Many are Afghan orphans who were sheltered, fed and instructed in religious schools with the specific purpose of training fighters for war in Afghanistan. Until the rise of the Taliban, Islam in Afghanistan was not fundamentalist. The article has much useful information, including the fact that the Taliban make a distinction between an action being permissible (ruskhah) and honorable (azeemah). It is permissible to take a life for a life, but the honorable thing to do is to forgive. We can see that even in the philosophy of the fundamentalist Taliban it is possible to find resources for healing.
The ethnic context
Linell: In connection with the issue of the Taliban, I understand that there are different ethnic groups in Afghanistan. It is not just a religious struggle between a conservative and a more progressive form of Islam.
Majid: According to what I know all these areas that are now part of Afghanistan were brought together in the 1730s when Ahmed Shah Abdali took over and made it one country. From that period until now Afghanistan has been made up of different ethnic groups, Tajik, Uzbek, Pushtuns and Hazara, they are Shiia Muslims. There are few ethnic groups. We heard that the Tajiks, like Ahmed Shah Masoud
Linell: Yes, he is the leader of the National Alliance that is fighting the Taliban in the north.
Majid: These Tajiks were always among the ruling elite. They are taken as intellectuals, literary people, more enlightened and more accepting of changes.
Linell: Maybe we could say that the Tajiks had a more secular orientation.
Majid: Exactly and they were always in the ruling elite but after the 1979 Soviet invasion all these groups came together and fought against the Soviets. In the early 1990s things went in their favor, although initially Rabbani was made president. He was a Tajik and Masoud was the defense minister. He was a Tajik. Then maybe they were not accepting direction from Islamabad. Pakistan had always played a major role in Afghanistan since 1979, so they wanted to have a government of their own choice. The Pakistan government and the Pakistan military wanted to have a government of their own choice. But when Rabbani and Masoud came to power they started to have an independent stance. Those policies were not acceptable to Pakistani rulers, maybe to Pakistani friends. They started on a new program. At that time there were many hundreds of schools in NWFP (Northwest frontier province of Pakistan) run by Deobandi ulemas, Deobandi religious scholars. At that time the majority of students in those schools were Afghans. We know at that time there were more than 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan
Linell: As a result of the war with the Soviet Union?
Majid: Exactly. The children of Afghan refugees were getting a religious education from the Deobandi religious schools. The Pakistan government or religious parties in Pakistan started funding the Afghan Taliban. Taliban is from an Arabic word that means student. Taliban means students. They got outside funding and they learned how to use weapons. In 1993-4, Pakistan was not satisfied with Rabbani and Massoud, so they started funding the Taliban. The Taliban made inroads in Afghanistan and within a year they controlled almost 70% of Afghanistan. They had enough funds, which they used to buy the local commanders. These are the old values of the Afghan people. They always obey their commanders, the leader of a clan.
Linell: You are talking about a tribal social system. There is a leader and people are loyal to that leader.
Majid: Exactly. The Taliban started buying those leaders. Eventually they became the supreme rulers of Afghanistan. Now we have to take into consideration that the Taliban were brought up and they were taught in just one school of thought. They do not have much awareness of Islam and they don't have much knowledge about the rest of the world. A person who is getting education at a religious school, and those schools are focused on one theme, they became the rulers of the country.
Linell: We should also keep in mind that the educated elite of the country left. During the Soviet conflict and this later conflict with the Masoud government, the more western style educated elite left the country. The people remaining are the working class.
Majid: Lower middle class. When Rabbani and Masoud came to power they accepted those Soviet officials that were working in Kabul and they asked them to work with them. The people who had left earlier came back to Afghanistan to work because Rabbani and Massoud were more accommodating.
Linell: More modernist.
Majid: They had that personal charisma to attract people, but when the Taliban came to power, you are right, all the enlightened intellectual and liberal people left Afghanistan.
Linell: I read recently that a high percentage of the population is no longer living in the country. Some are in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran and others have gone to other countries. The people who remain have not had much education. And the Taliban come from that group. Perhaps they are from village families.
Majid: Many of them are orphans from the Soviet war. They had no one to support them and through the religious schools they got education plus food. It was free there.
Linell: What is the relationship between the Taliban and these ethnic groups?
Majid: Talibans are basically Pashtuns. They are the majority population of Afghanistan. They were part of the previous ruling elite but the Pashtuns who were liberal, enlightened and intellectual were always in Kabul, the capital. When the Taliban took over they gathered support from the Pashtun clans, Pashtun tribes, and now the Taliban government, I am sure, is more than 90% Pashtun. After that they conquered the Tajik and Uzbek dominated areas like Mazar Sharif and northern Afghanistan. They subdued the local Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks and they have made them part of their government structure, but in many instances we have seen that the other ethnic groups do not accept the Taliban. The Taliban are more inclined to favor the Pashtu speaking group.
Linell: This is not an uncommon situation, but we should remember that this has not been an ethnic conflict up to now. If the conflict continues even longer it could become that. People are loyal to their own group whether it is religious, regional, linguistic or tribal. When I was in Tajikistan the conflict there had to do with regions. They have the same ethnic groups there as in Afghanistan, but the conflict was not between ethnic groups but between regions. Now people from the southern region of Tajikistan hold the presidency and people complain that all the good jobs are going to people from that region. I think that loyalty to one's own group is the way things are in that region. We don't have to accept it in the sense of endorsing it as the way things should be, but we do need to recognize it as a fact.
Majid: It was always there and it is still there.
Related sources
Magnus, R.H.& E. Naby. 1995. Afghanistan and Central Asia: mirrors and models. Asian Survey, July 1995 35:7 605-621.
This is an excellent article about the historic relationships between the peoples of the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan. There has always been a mix of ethnic groups in Afghanistan that lived and worked together. The conflict has given rise to tensions among ethnic groups but divisions are not primarily along ethnic lines.
International context
Linell: I understand that Russia, China and the United States are all opposed to the Taliban government.
Majid: And its immediate neighbor Iran is also opposed to that ruling regime. They are interested in a broad-based government for Afghanistan. Massoud has been to Europe recently and he got widespread support from the European parliament. He has always been a strong French ally. He gets a lot of positive reporting by the French media. Things might change in the future. And now Dostam who was the governor of Mazar-I- Sharif when the Taliban took over, is a staunch socialist supporter when the Soviets took over, and then he left Afghanistan and went to Turkey, which also has a strong interest in that region. Turkey also is in support of a broad-based government. Turkey and Iran are two friends of Pakistan. They, and even China, are asking Pakistan again and again to stop support for the Taliban. They are asking Pakistan to sit down with opposition groups to go for a broad-based government there. Pakistan is even interested in becoming a part of the Shanghai Five, but this was opposed by the Central Asian states because of Pakistan's support of Afghanistan.
Linell: China supported Pakistan's membership in the Shanghai Five. The former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan and Khirgizstan opposed Pakistan's participation.
Majid: Pakistan is facing huge international pressure to accept the realities and stop support to Afghanistan. It might happen in the future.
Linell: There seems to be a growing international consensus around this issue.
Majid: Yes. Pakistan is facing severe economic problems. In order to receive aid and loans from international agencies it has to accept international demands.
Linell: Even though the situation is terrible now, it could be moving toward a settlement. It is a good time for us to be thinking about the possible post-conflict situation.
Majid: In the near future, I can see that, maybe within three, four or five years. There will be loans and aid to Afghanistan to build up its educational infrastructure, because everything has been ruined. There is nothing left.