....This report tries to lay out how the Taliban are structured and organized, with an eye to assessing the impact of their organization and modus operandi on their willingness to negotiate and to reach a political settlement. There is considerable controversy over the way the Taliban function, which is inevitable given the limited information available. The different points of view can be summarized (with some simplification) as follows:
• the Taliban operate as a “franchiser” business, allowing disparate groups of insurgents to display the Taliban brand while retaining complete autonomy on the ground;
• the Taliban are not organized to the same extent as the Marxist movements
that had been the main worry of Western counterinsurgents until the end of the cold war, but nonetheless have a discernible organizational structure (decentralized).
As the reader will realize while going through the paper, this author tends to follow the second line of thinking. One reason for the failure to understand the modus operandi of the Taliban is the lack of in-depth studies of the 1980s jihad in Afghanistan; if such studies had been carried out, understanding the Taliban would be much easier now....
Bookmarks