Editor,
I read Maceo Carillo Martinet's Dec. 4 column, and it grabbed my attention when he referred to the Afghan mujaheddin anti-Soviet militias as the precursor of the Taliban.
As a student who studied Afghanistan and Central Asia last semester, I'd like to point out that the rise of the Taliban is not as cut and dry as Mr. Martinet insinuates. Prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, tensions were running deep between conservative Afghans and the government of the Popular Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which had been a nominally pro-Soviet regime.
The conservative Afghans had already begun organizing into anti-communist militias, when the Soviets, fearing a collapse of a friendly state on their frontier, intervened. The mujaheddin was organized along ethnic/tribal lines, based on the groups that reside in the country - Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns and others.
Many field troops for the anti-Soviet armies also came from Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Algeria. The Taliban arose from a cadre of Islamic students who grew up as war orphans during the 1979-89 Afghan-Soviet war. They grew up in Pakistan, learning a strain of Islam referred to as fundamentalist or "pure."
Their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was one soldier in the mujaheddin, from the southern, Pashtun-dominated region. Other factions of the mujaheddin later became the Northern Alliance, commanded until late this year, by the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, the lion of Panjshir Valley, who led the northern mujaheddin front made mainly of Tajiks and Uzbeks.
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The mujihiddin were not one monolithic group. While each militia had the common goal of expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan, they were not one and the same after the war. It's easy to make the assumption that U.S. support for the mujaheddin gave rise to the Taliban.
However, when one reads the recent history of the country, one will see it is not that simple.
Brandon D. Curtis
UNM political science student
