Rating: 
Summary: How to understand a new enemy....
Review: Taliban I have to say is one of the most interesting books I have read in a long time. Ahmed tells us the history of Afghanistan and how the Taliban came into power through bloody war. Also he tells us how the Taliban came together through the war with the Soviet's, and how they think. The Taliban ran Afghanistan until the U.S. led invasion threw them out of power in that country and established a provisional government ran by President Harmid Karzi. Of course this book came out in 2000 before they were thrown out of power, but the Taliban leaders banned sports, kite-flying, music, they destroyed women's rights forcing them to wear the buqura and not allowing them to attend school, to work, and they put some harsh rules which they go by the Shaiah rule. They wanted to bring back the time where the Prophet Muhammed was still alive; meaning that they wanted to bring Afghanistan back to the 7th century. Now when we look at the Taliban through this book, we wonder 'why would these men do something like this to women and be so damn strict?'. During the time of Muhammed, things were different in the 7th century, but things have changed and they didnt like what they saw in the world with women going to school, working, and being in society.
Women during the time of the Taliban were forced to stay inside the house and could not go out unless they were with a man of blood or their husband. It's sad that these men were so extreme, but under Islam, this is not the way that the prophet Muhammed wanted; he wanted peace and unity with the world, it was the Taliban who wanted to bring back the world to the 7th century, and am I glad we got rid of the Taliban? Yes, but still in Afghanistan; beyond Kabul, women are still treated like crap because of warlords that have rules like the Taliban. Is this book worth reading? Of course, but try to read it with a open mind and understand how these men think.
Rating: 
Summary: A Different World that we must Understand
Review: The Taliban did not appear in Afghanistan by magic. With guile and ruthlessness, the Taliban leadership took advantage of poverty, despair and social breakdown to establish their position. Ahmed Rashid provides striking detail of Afghanistan's history relevant to the Taliban's rise to power. Afghans have long been tormented by the lack of an industrial base and by a byzantine reliance on a system of warlords for protection and commerce. The Taliban benefitted from our own country's short-sighted policy of arming them to fight the Soviets, while ignoring the religious fundamentalism and propensity for violence which the Taliban have always held. The book details the Taliban's obsessive, punitive, overnight dismantling of a culture which was diverse and vibrant despite perpetual poverty and feudal-like quasi-governance. The book benefits from having been written by a non-westerner and before the September 11 attack. There is no preaching or editorializing. Rashid simply provides well-annotated history and allows the reader to draw their conclusion from the facts presented (with the exception of the Conclusion, written in 2000, in which Rashid warned that continued chaos in Afghanistan would contribute to Islamic fundamentalism and regional instability with severe consequences worldwide). I would have rated the book 5 stars, but for the writing, which is dense - workmanlike rather than dynamic or particularly engaging. Nevertheless, for a view to a part of the world that now has relevance to our national security rather than merely to National Geographic specials, Mr. Rashid's book seems hard to beat.
Rating:
Summary: Essential Background
Review: This book provides excellent background material for understanding the rise, rule, and fall of the Taliban. Though written in 2000 when the Taliban were at the height of their power, and before the September 11th attacks, the book is far from outdated. The narrative begins in 1994 in Kandahar, with the rise of Mohammad Omar. Rashid then takes us on a blow-by-blow account of the battles that took the Taliban to Kabul. The second part of the book discusses various topics relating to Taliban rule, including Islamic Fundamentalism, the Taliban's political and military organization, the banning of women from public life, the basing of the economy on drugs and transshipment (smuggling), "Arab Afghans", and Osama Bin Laden. The book closes with a section that analyzes Taliban-run Afghanistan in a regional and global context. This section takes up the mutual influences and enmities between the Taliban, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the US. End material includes a sampling of Taliban decrees, a listing of Taliban leaders and the positions they held, a chronology of the Taliban from 1992 to September 2000, a chronology of the struggle to develop oil and gas resources and a pipeline through Afghanistan, a glossary of Afghan terms, a bibliography, endnotes citing sources for all factual material in the text, and an index.
Rashid was very well qualified to write such a book. As a Pakistani journalist, he had covered politics and wars in Afghanistan from the 1978 Soviet invasion. One striking observation that he makes about the difference between the Mujaheddin and the Taliban fighters early on was the cultural ignorance of the Taliban. When Rashid met and talked with Mujaheddin fighters during the 1980s while they were on maneuvers, they spoke to him as tribal members. Many did not have formal schooling, but they all knew their ancestry back many generations, and they had a trade or could make a living from the soil. Many Taliban fighters, on the other hand, had been raised in refugee camps in Pakistan, often as orphans. They were ignorant of their ancestry and tribal customs. Though they had attended "school", it had been at madrassahs, were they got rudimentary training in the religious ideas of mullahs, many of whom were unqualified as Islamic scholars. As refugees, they knew no trades, and had no connection to the land. Many had grown up outside of family structures and had no memories of interactions with women, not even with close female relatives. Thus it wasn't surprising that they had no skills at running a government or even interest in such activities once they came to power, or that they seemed to want women to just disappear.
The chapter on the Arab-Afghans is especially interesting. In it, Rashid documents the early influences the Saudi government and the CIA had (under the leadership of William Casey) in laying the groundwork for the Taliban. As far back as 1982, Pakistan had been allowing Islamic radicals free passage so they could fight Communism with the Mujaheddin. In 1986 and 1987, Casey got the CIA to support the Pakistani ISI in recruiting Islamic terrorists worldwide to fight with the Mujaheddin. The Saudis joined in, eager to both push Wahabbism in the region, as well as to provide a worthwhile cause for their own radical malcontents like Osama Bin Laden. Rashid describes how these radicals established terrorist training camps both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the relations between the Taliban and these foreign thugs.
Another point that Rashid raises in several places is the idea that is apparently common throughout the Islamic world that the fall of the Soviet Union was due primarily or solely to the Muslim Mujaheddin. In the West, we assume that the Mujaheddin played a small role in the drama, and that what really happened was an economic collapse, both because the Soviet system was rotten to the core, and because the Arms Race forced the Soviets to spend their last kopeck. This difference in opinion about the demise of the Soviet Union provides some insight into how disparate the worldview may be between the West and Islamic countries.
Any reader of this book when it first came out in 2000 could see that Afghanistan was a disaster waiting to happen. Rashid warns us that this is not only a powder keg waiting to blow, but that the fuse has already been lit. He stresses the dangers of ignoring the crisis, and continuing to make due with the status quo. But not even he could guess at the magnitude of the explosion when it finally came. With this in mind, one particularly ominous observation from Rashid is the following "The radical Islamicist discourse suffered from the same weaknesses and limitations as the Afghan Marxists did: as an all-inclusive ideology, they rejected rather than integrated the vastly different social, religious and ethnic identities that constitute Afghan society. Both the Afghan communists and Islamicists wanted to impose radical change on a traditional social structure by a revolution from the top. They wished to do away with tribalism and ethnicity by fiat, an impossible task, and were unwilling to accept the complex realities on the ground." Let's see-when the Coalition Forces threw out the Taliban and the UN stepped in to establish a new government, did they try to impose a democratic revolution from the top? Are they doing enough to understand how this complex traditional society works? Are they taking care of the needs of the all the disparate ethnic and tribal groups without showing undue favoritism? Could this be a factor why peace has yet to be established in Afghanistan?
Rating:
Summary: Useful background for understanding current events
Review: This is a fine introduction to the recent history of Afghanistan written by a Pakistani journalist who has extensively covered the country. The writing is fairly dry, but a great deal of useful information is included. The book begins with a very brief summary of Afghan history and then goes on to describe the civil war that has followed the Soviet withdrawal and the Taliban's consolidation of power over most of the country. The myriad atrocities committed by all sides are covered, as is the impact the war has had on neighboring countries and on the cultural diversity that thrived inside Afghanistan itself. Cities such as Herat have had a centuries-long tradition of a vibrant and relatively open culture that was not understood by the poorly-educated Taliban, who came from one of the most covservative areas of the country. The oppression of women, the lack of any sort of economic plan for the country from the Taliban, and the importance of the international heroin trade for the government are all covered. A chapter is also devoted to discussing the extremely negative impact that its support for the Taliban has had and will continue to have on Pakistan.Rashid dedicated a particularly interesting section of the book to what he has dubbed the 'new Great Game', the pursuit of oil and natural gas pipeline rights-of-way to bring the potentially huge reserves in the Caspian Sea region to end users in other countries and sea ports. This has brought huge US oil companies, smaller Argentinean concerns, the US government, the Russians, and other players all to the area, each anxious to further its own interests, even at the expense of paying homage to the repressive Taliban in some cases. This is a story that is far from over, and one that I can only hope will be interesting to follow for years to come. There is also a fascinating and disturbing sampling of Taliban decrees about the status and behavior of women and cultural issues in an appendix as well as a detailed timeline of the Taliban's rise to power. This book provides a good background and context for understanding the current situation in Afghanistan, and one that comes from a perspective different from that found in most American news sources. The only major complaints I had with it is that the maps could have been a bit more detailed and that the text was very poorly edited for spelling, grammar, word-choice, and sentence structure. One unfortunate (or perhaps prescient?) sentence was, "American citizens only woke up to the consequences when Afghanistan-trained Islamic militants blew up the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, killing six people and injuring 1,000" (p. 130).
Rating: 
Summary: A sleeping pill
Review: This is a great book for anyone hoping to learn about Afghanistan or the Taliban. Starting with a thorough summary of Afghanistan's history and the people who inhabit it, he goes all the way up to the current day and age and gives the reader a very good idea of the main players in the Taliban, where they came from, and what they want.
Ahmed Rashid knows his stuff, he has personal experience with the nation and with many of the people he writes about. I doubt you'll find anyone else with his perspective writing books.
It's a very well written and engaging book. From a purely entertainment standpoint the book also does well, you'll enjoy it.
A lot of misinformation can be found about Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the role of other nations, mainly the US, in their creation, reading this will give you a much better and much more accurate picture.
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