Everyone knows the Taliban run a brutal and oppressive legal system. But there are different ways a legal system can be bad and understanding how the Taliban's is bad, and how it isn't, is crucial for understanding their enduring appeal.
The Taliban's version of sharia law is misogynistic, placing extreme restrictions on women's lives, & imposes brutal criminal punishments. This obviously very bad. People often call it a strict interpretation, but this is misleading. If you strictly applied sharia you wouldn't be stoning people to death etc (will explain later). It's a radical interpretation of sharia law
As the scenes in Kabul show, a lot of Afghans are justifiably terrified of this. But many Afghans support the Taliban, hence their success. So do they want to lock women in their homes and stone people? Some do, but many others don't, and tacitly support, or decline to oppose, the Taliban anyway. Why?
(NB: this is not an argument about morality. Obviously you can say that such people are still culpable, but it doesn't help us understand the situation).
Apart from whether its rules are just, the other measure of a legal system is whether it's "just" on its own terms. Are rules applied consistently? Can people enforce what limited rights they have? Do judges rule for the party with the strongest claim, or the biggest bribe?
On this measure, the Taliban's legal system scores well, at least in comparison with the other legal regimes on offer in Afghanistan. The Taliban's central pitch to the population has always been a legal system that's harsh but fair. In the 90s, when the country was ruled by competing warlords, after a decade of mass displacement and a complete collapse of the state, you can see why this would appeal. Small farmers had their land appropriated by the warlords' goons. Merchants couldn't get their invoices paid. There was looting and kidnap rackets.
In the context, many found the Taliban better than the status quo. A functioning legal system, even one as oppressive as the Taliban's, allows people (or at least men) to function economically better than no legal system, or a hopelessly corrupt one.
Why is this important? First, it's crucial to developing a strategy that could defeat the Taliban. I don't know what such a strategy would be, but building a kleptocratic colonial regime in league with drug cartels was probably the worst option. Second, it helps us avoid exoticizing the Taliban. Building an alternative legal system and demonstrating its superiority to the official one is a classic insurgent strategy. The IRA did it in Ireland in the 1910s/20s. It takes form of sharia in Afghanistan because that's the available cultural script.
But we won't understand it if we treat it simply as a product of an alien culture
This analysis of the Taliban has been common for years. US understood & tried to build a justice system but failed as the political system they created was too corrupt.
The second half of the book provides a critique of the ‘rule of law’ model of nation-building that the US and its allies have pursued in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion. Ledwidge begins this section by discussing how older empires attempted to stabilise remote and volatile regions, exploring the strategies pursued by the Ottoman and British empires in Albania, Yemen, India’s North West Frontier Province and southern Sudan in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ledwidge claims that both Ottoman and British imperial elites recognised that engagement with local institutions and practices was crucial to success. He believes that US and British forces today have forgotten this lesson, insisting instead on the centralised state as the solution in unstable countries, even though such states often have little legitimacy and few ways to build it.
...
Ledwidge readily concedes that the alternatives to state-centric solutions – engaging with local and traditional practices of justice – also raise problems, in particular the lack of respect for gender equality and human rights norms among many local figures of authority. He doesn’t offer a solution to this dilemma. In places, he seems to be leading towards the suggestion that concerns about gender and human rights must be jettisoned if such projects are to succeed; but he backs away from this stark conclusion, citing an example when the mission successfully secured the installation of women members on a local judicial council. His ultimate conclusion is more modest: that just as development officials should be candid about the human rights failings of traditional practices, so they should be honest about the Afghan state’s lack of capacity and legitimacy.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofb...rank-ledwidge/
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
