>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> But the Taliban - many of whom were not Afghans, and of those who
>> were, were from an ethnic group representing well under half the
>> population - forced women to wear the damn things. It's not like they
>> were spontaneous expressions of home-grown patriarchy. So who the
>> colonizers are, under those circs, gets very murky.
>
>This is an argument my hero Christopher Caldwell has made - that the
>Taliban are the real foreign occupiers. I don't buy it. True, a lot of
>foreigners joined their cause. And the foreigners were indeed seen as
>unwelcome interlopers. But the Taliban movement itself was based around
>fundamentalist Pashtun refugees and religious students - which is about as
>representative of Afghans as you could get in 1994. Pashtuns, refugees,
>fundmantalist religious students - that's three big segments of Afghan
>society.
They were advised and subsidized by Pakistani intelligence, and their hard core grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan - a kind of foreignness in itself, even if they were ethnically Pashtun. And they grew up with almost no contact with women, which is another kind of foreignness. Besides, Pasthtuns are only what, like 40% of the Afghan population? And they forced women into burkas at gunpoint. So there's not much that organic about them that I can see.
Doug