The term, clerical fascist, is a literal translation of an Italian term, clerico fascisti, coined to refer to those Catholic clergy who believed they could successfully fuse their Catholic conservatism with Mussolini's fascist rule in 1922
It is significant that both Mussolini and then Hitler, once in power, made their peace with the Church, while the clergy, like so many others socially, politically and economically enfranchised in those societies, thought they could influence and direct the fascists and nazis for their own ends. And the Church in Rome further sullied itself by thinking of an abomination like the Croatian Ustasha state as a positive force against the atheist Bolsheviks.
I'm willing to concede that today's Islamic fundamentalism has some of its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1930s, which supported the Axis, and that there are parallels worth pointing out.
However, I think the term 'clerical fascist' is a needlessly orientalizing one that obscures far more than it enlightens in this discussion.
Moreover, my understanding of the Taliban, despite the media and now US government distortions, does not lead me to conclude that they are uniquely awful as far as fundamentalist Islamic movements go--especially ones in countries with civil wars. Nor were they the first to impose Islamic law on Afghanistan.
No, that does not make me a supporter of or apologist for either the Kandahar Taliban under the Mullah Omar or OBL and al Qaeda, which was and still is a terror network, not a church.
However, I can not say anything supportive of the US's war on Afghanistan for all the reasons that at least a handful have given on this list. The US's already limited democracy decays during war; the defense sector gets even more money to waste; and thousands upon thousands of Pilger's 'unpeople' will die unnecessarily.
One somewhat unrelated footnote concerns the surprise some people have expressed about the sudden collapse of the Taliban and the defection of so many of their leaders. The very means of achieving this is how the Taliban themselves came to power so suddenly, too. Leaders and groups were paid to go to the other side. Money appeals to many far more than anti-western, religious or nationalist fervour. Selling ones' loyalty seems to be a major way of surviving there.
Charles Jannuzi