NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

On a summer evening earlier this year, I sat talking with a Taliban commander in Afghanistan's Bamiyan valley, a region that has become a crucible for the militant group's claim to have moderated its ideology and style of governance. Bamiyan lies in the heart of the central Hazarajat region, considered home to the Hazara, an ethnic group of Turkic-Mongolic origin with a rich cultural history. After the collapse of President Ashraf Ghani's government in 2021, Bamiyan fell under the rule of the reborn "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," as the Taliban refers to the country. The Taliban, most of whom are of Pashtun ethnicity, are now grappling with the monumental task of governing an ethnic group with whom they have deep cultural differences, as well as a history of violence and mistrust. How they handle this challenge may well decide the future of their regime in Afghanistan.

As we sat under the dying evening light, my conversation with the Taliban commander drifted toward the three subjects that have dominated Afghanistan for the last half century: politics, religion and guns. Cradling his Kalashnikov rifle as we spoke, he paused at one point to note the manufacturing date engraved between its trigger and stock. "It was made in 1976," he said. "It is older than me, than you, and almost every one of us here."

The commander was dressed in a shalwar kameez that had seen better days, the cotton thin and frayed to the brink of ruin. His turban was black, his eyes dark, his beard lengthy. Though he held the title of "mawlawi," indicating that he was a religious scholar, his knowledge of Islam seemed rudimentary at best. He was polite and hospitable, as we Afghans usually are. Yet it quickly became clear that he was a village-level mullah who had learned his faith from men of similar schooling. In different circumstances, his ill-informed piety may have been a trivial detail. But the more time I spent with him, the more troubling it became. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan is being run by theocrats who have known little except war. For some, the years of bloodshed have motivated them to reconcile with their enemies and make compromises for the sake of peace. For others, painful memories of their sacrifices during the conflict now fuel a desire to turn their military victory into a full-blown cultural revolution.

The more the mawlawi spoke, the clearer it became which side of the divide he occupied. Once a mid-ranking commander in the Taliban's southern heartlands, he was now an officer in the army of the Islamic Emirate, with responsibility for educating his fellow soldiers about the true nature of their religion. He believed this should have been a straightforward task, and was angry to discover it was not. The more we chatted, the more he revealed his frustration at encountering mundane difficulties he had never imagined during his combat days. In the war against the Americans, he had defined himself against a clear enemy: the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan governments of President Hamid Karzai and his successor Ghani. He hailed from a Pashtun-majority area of Ghazni province and had long been surrounded by insurgents from backgrounds similar to his own.

Now, the mawlawi was stationed in a part of the country dominated by ethnic Hazaras, a minority community with different customs and traditions. Most Hazaras are Shiite, but even the Sunnis among them offend his notion of what it means to be a Muslim, and an Afghan. "Their women, families, and ways of dealing with each other are all opposite to our culture," he told me as he sat on a Persian rug, probably left behind by NATO troops based in Bamiyan before him. "I'm not OK with them -- their thinking has been totally destroyed by the Americans. The culture and freedom they practice is not ours, nor is it practiced in any other part of the country."

Traditionally, the Taliban have drawn their ideological blueprint from an interpretation of Sunni Islam combining classical Hanafi jurisprudence (a school of Islamic law founded by a theologian in 8th-century Iraq named Abu Hanifa, whose family hailed from central Afghanistan) with a 19th-century Hanafi offshoot in the Indian subcontinent known as Deobandism. Their religious practice also incorporates local traditions, which allows them to take a somewhat more pragmatic approach to politics.

Yet the Taliban's pragmatism also lies at the root of some of their most intractable problems. Away from major cities like Kabul and Kandahar, where restrictions on free speech and girls' education have grabbed the attention of the international media, Taliban officials are trying to balance the demands of their most hardline supporters with the complicated reality of ruling over a pluralistic, multiethnic society. This tension is acute in Bamiyan, a province of sandstone cliffs and rolling hills, as well as the site in more recent times of failed uprisings and horrific massacres.

Tweet   @brothersjudd