Lessons from the Taliban: Ethnicity As An Antidote to Liberalism
When people forget what made them successful, and when they ignore the obvious, when they ignore competent advice, then they make mistakes and bad things happen. Nowhere is this all more evident now than in Afghanistan as the Taliban swiftly reoccupy the territory, cutting off land bridges to its neighbors Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and putting the Afghan security forces to flight. The US military command effectively came to an end on July 12 when the last commanding general, General Austin “Scott” Miller “closed up shop” in Kabul relinquishing command of the US Forces in Afghanistan. Thenceforth, the fighting would be prosecuted via long distance from the US by another four star general who would for the most part do little more other than to authorize air strikes on Taliban positions.[1] As this is being written, the Afghan government announced it was in a defensive posture as it attempted to defend provincial capitals and also Kabul, after the United Nations headquarters in the western part of the country was attacked and car bombings started in the supposedly safe “green zone” of the capital city.[2]
The Americans, along with the United Nations and the West, pursued the implementation of an ideology by political, military and economic means. They ignored the tribal nature of the Taliban and forgot their own history so now the Taliban, an ethnically[3] based movement of the Pashtuns, will most likely be declared the winner of the War in Afghanistan 20 years after the infamous 911 attacks on New York City.
The Plan
Bagram Airbase was a sprawling complex that was the headquarters and hub of US military activity in Afghanistan. It grew over the years to house tens of thousands of US soldiers and friendly forces in the fight to subdue the Taliban and impose Liberalism on the country. Abandoned by the Americans in the middle of the night a few days before General Miller’s resignation, and with the Taliban surging throughout Afghanistan, Bagram is now a symbol of Liberalism’s defeat.
The US Army was headquartered at Bagram and the US forces worked the United Nations which had a mission in Kabul called the United Nations Assistance Mission Afghanistan (UNAMA). UNAMA and the US worked together in implementing complementary mandates for Afghanistan.[4] The UN effort (supported by the US) was officially three pronged: pacification or elimination of any armed resistance, institution of political institutions along the lines of the West, and implementation of an economic infrastructure based on capitalism. The three catchwords that summarized the effort were security, governance, and sustainability.
Necessary to all of this was the proper foundational document, or the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and something called the Afghan National Development Strategy or ANDS. The Constitution made sure to undermine Islam as any sort of unifying system of social organization. ANDS was a continuation of the doctrinal or ideological warfare formally launched by the US Government in the early 1950s as was explained in John Courtney Murray, Time/Life and The American Proposition. Both documents designed a system that was supposed to put real power in private hands while altering society. Liberalism subverts religion whether it be Catholicism or Islam, for an independent strong religion is always a danger to the capitalist spirit as Amintore Fanfani would argue. Liberalism is also supposed to put real power in private hands by weakening the government because a second great enemy of the capitalist spirit is a strong, independent government that has the real power in society. And Liberalism, as a means of social organization, changes traditional societies thereby opening them up to more economic activity or as some might say economic exploitation. All of that proved unacceptable to the Pashtuns (and a few others) in Afghanistan because their ethnic and tribal identities remained too strong. The idea of “civil society” meaning the elevation of the individual to preeminence was viewed as a danger by the Pashtuns
The Afghan Constitution contains a provision seemingly supporting Islam as the state religion but it advances the principles of Liberalism. It is a mechanism by which to secularize the national society in a pluralistic country – a situation the Americans faced more than two hundred years earlier. This will lead to the watering down of Islam, or its control by the powerful private interest whether they be local or global. It is the same situation we face in the US, only it was Christianity that was watered down.
Article One of the Afghan Constitution states that “Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic independent, unitary and indivisible state.” In the very next article, Article Two, it is written that while the “religion of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam,” the “Followers of other religions are free to perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.” The mischief comes in with that term “law” because nowhere in the Constitution, which consists of twelve chapters and 160 articles (at least as of 2008), is there any mention of Shariah, an odd result for a country that formally and fundamentally claims to be Islamic.
One of the basic duties of the Afghan state is set out in Article Five which states, among other things, that in the implementation of “the provisions of this Constitution and other laws” the state under Article Seven is supposed to “abide by….the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” an Enlightenment document written by Jacques Maritain a strong proponent of Liberalism. The Afghan Constitution provides or guarantees “rights” which is the function also of government according to Thomas Paine and other proponents of Liberalism. Article Twenty Two prohibits “any kind of discrimination between and privilege among the citizens of Afghanistan” and the “citizens of Afghanistan have equal rights and duties before the law.” Article Twenty Four states
“Liberty is the natural right of human beings. This right has no limits unless affecting the rights of others or public interests, which are regulated by law. Liberty and dignity of human beings are inviolable. The state has the duty to respect and protect the liberty and dignity of human beings.”
Article Thirty-Four holds that “Freedom of expression is inviolable” and the right to demonstrate is protected in Article Thirty-Six. The same panoply of rights that Americans are allowed are granted to the Afghans in their Constitution. To borrow liberally from a quote by American Justice Felix Frankfurter, people will become imprisoned and isolated in their rights. The values so needed to make capitalism flourish are contained in the Afghan Constitution and its commitment to laws that are to be enforced for the “protection of human dignity, protection of human rights and realization of democracy….” Because the state is “obliged to create a…progressive society” (Article Six), the effectiveness of Islam will be weakened or nullified.
The rule of law is a concept that promotes a progressive society which usually means a society that is bent to the will of the plutocrats who are the most powerful for they have mastered the art and science of creating and accumulating wealth, the ultimate determiner of success in secular societies that reject God[5]. The Afghan Constitution makes that clear in Article Fifty-Six which holds “Observing the provisions of the Constitution, obeying the laws, adhering to public law and order are the duties of all people of Afghanistan. Ignorance of the provisions of law shall not be considered an excuse.”
Article Ten elevates the all-important market as the mechanism that dictates right economic behavior when it declares that “The State encourages and protects private capital investments and enterprises based on the market economy and guarantees their protection in accordance with the provisions of law.” With this provision of the constitution, Afghans are now allowed – by law – to make money any way they can, or want, which is a clear indication of the presence of the capitalist spirit as laid out by Amintore Fanfani in Catholicism Protestantism and Capitalism. The second part of the capitalist spirit is to enjoy wealth in any way one wants, without any restriction other than those put on one by the law. Article Forty protects wealth as it states “Property is immune from invasion. No person shall be forbidden from acquiring and making use of a property except within the limits of law. No person’s property shall be confiscated except win the provisions of law and the order of an authorized court”
Capitalism, which does create wealth, is all but established in Article Six which declares that the “state is obliged to create a prosperous…society” and that the state “shall formulate and implement effective programs for development of industries, growth of production, increase of public living standards….” as more fully set out in Article Thirteen. The ANDS established goals and techniques that Afghanistan, working with the international community, was to pursue and implement in achieving security, self-governance, and a proper level of development. Every effort at transforming the country had to have a connection with the ANDS, which is the blueprint for achieving the transformation. Some of the goals (also referenced as Millennium Development Goals) are to eliminate “extreme poverty and hunger,” “achieve primary education,” “promote gender equality and empower women,” and “develop a global partnership for development.”
The global partnership for development was, and probably still is, very important. It links the efforts of the international community with domestic leaders ostensibly to create the infrastructure necessary for the flow of private capital into the country and to prepare the country for integration into a global economy. Under ANDS, the state is to build things like roads, transport, telecommunications systems, develop energy and water resources and allow for exploitation of the natural resources and mining. All of this is meant to “create an enabling environment for entrepreneurship and private investment in the formal sector.” To “achieve our economic priorities, Government’s investment programs in economic governance and private sector development…will…improve the investment climate…facilitate trade….and strengthen financial services and markets.”[6]
For the West to make sure that future generations of Moslems are inculcated with the values for a civil society, education is key. Article Forty-Three states that “education is the right of all citizens of Afghanistan and shall be provided up to secondary level….” Article Forty-Four calls for the advancement of “gender equality” and the “state shall devise and implement effective programs for balancing and promoting education for women improving education of nomads and eliminating illiteracy in the country.” To implement this, the Ministry of Education, with the help of the West, devised and implemented a program to construct and staff Centers of Education Excellence or Centers of Excellence for the express purpose of conducting education in “Modern Islamic.” That was a way to teach ideas and behaviors to children whose parents and grandparents had different ideas. The number of schools in Afghanistan skyrocketed since the time of the Taliban, and the number of young minds being opened to different ways vastly increased. The number of schools and the number of girls in school is something always of great interest to the West and these numbers were tracked closely especially by UNICEF and various NGOs (non-governmental organizations). By some counts, the number of schools since the 1996 Taliban takeover increased many multiples while the number of girls in school increased just as quickly. It is reported that in 1999 there were only 9,000 girls in primary schools and none in secondary or higher schools, and about fifteen years later there were hundreds of thousands of girls in primary, secondary and higher schools.[7]
Women, and especially young girls, were the key to the success of the Western efforts in Afghanistan. (Indeed, I submit that they will remain a “fifth column” in Afghanistan sympathetic to the West and Liberalism once the country comes under the Taliban again.) Their education was necessary to make the transition to Liberalism, and their education lead to their “liberation”. This meant reordering of societies within Afghanistan, which meant destruction of traditional societies which any business school text book on economics will tell you is a hindrance to economic activity. With “liberation” comes consumerism, gender role confusion and gender ideology, and death of a people, all in the name of civil society. This was the view of the Pashtun leaders, just as it was their view with the Soviet invasion and its materialism in the name of the Communist collective.
The Pashtuns, or people who founded Afghanistan in 1747 (“Afghanistan” is a Pashtun word), knew this when the Western invasion began in 2001, and they know it now. They know Liberalism means the end of their people, and the Taliban are the reaction to this threat. Much like a body has an immune system, so the Taliban operate as the immune system of the Pashtun who are fighting for their life against the great materialist societies of the day. The mountains of Afghanistan, or Pashtunistan as some call it, has been called the freest place on earth as the great powers of the world can never subdue the people, at least not for long. The British failed in 1842 and the Soviets in 1989.
It’s easy for some to say that the Taliban are fighting for freedom, and they are fighting for freedom from foreign or outside domination or control by other ethnic groups in Afghanistan like the Uzbekhs, Tajiks, and Hazzaris. It is summertime, so the 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, comes to mind because the Battle of Thermopylae was fought during the summer nearly 2400 years ago. The Greeks were fighting for their political freedom from the Persians but they were also fighting to preserve their culture and society which was a good. And with the Declaration of Independence in July, 1776, the Americans were fighting for their freedom from a foreign, international elite but they were also fighting to preserve and implement their way of life. The Taliban’s fight was not just about freedom but it was about defending something that at least the Pashtuns considered good. That good was the protection of a people that arose through the operation of the natural law. Certainly defending the natural law and its products from a destructive ideology is good in itself, and there would be no dearth of people who would agree that the wars waged against Nazism and against Soviet Communism were good in that regard. Where some may disagree is when it comes to Liberalism. As an ideology it threatens peoples as I and others have elsewhere argued. Therefore, it threatens a good as these peoples arose from the operation of the natural law. Americans, always pragmatists and always struggling to find virtue, are conflicted on imposing Liberalism on foreign peoples. The Pashtuns were not so conflicted. They fought for their people which they view as a definite good.
Forgotten History and Real Tribes
Early on in the conflict it became apparent that in Afghanistan, the West was up against an ethnic conflict in which a tribal dynamic played a key role. The Pashtuns comprised at least 38 percent of the population of the country (recent estimates put it at 42 % of the population or more than 13 million), a very sizable, and growing, minority in a country founded by the Pashtuns. The growth of the Pashtuns despite years of warfare is a strong testament to their resiliency and prolific nature. The Taliban drew most of its fighters from the Pashtun. It was headquartered in the heavily Pashtun areas of Eastern and Southern Afghanistan. These areas were close to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) or Wazirastan in Pakistan, the other half of Pashtunistan. In other words, the land of the Pashtuns was astride the Afghan-Pakistan border, and Pakistan provided a safe haven for the Pashtuns to carry out their activities in Afghanistan. This reality was always a source of friction between the Americans and the Pakistanis who allowed the borders to remain porous to the Pashtuns. Indeed, the Pakistanis let the Taliban back in the country after they were chased out in late 2001, and they did so under the eye and with the approval of Hamid Karzai, then interim President of the country. The Pakistanis also had a great intelligence network on the Pashtuns which was developed with US aid in the 1980s as the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan was contested, but those lines of communication went silent with the US invasion of the country in 2001.
The Pashtuns are composed of about 60 individual tribes with a number of “subtribes” or “super tribes”.[8] Some tribes are less than 10,000 members with some more than 100,000. The Durrani Confederation and the Ghilzai Confederation[9] are the largest tribes and a major source of support for the Taliban with the fighters come largely from the latter and the leaders from the former.[10] The Government of Afghanistan (also known as the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or GIROA) sought to shift Afghan identity away from the tribal basis to a manufactured basis. Groups or individuals who lost their tribal identity were the ones most likely to support and benefit from GIROA – Tajiks, Uzbekhs, Hazaris, former GIROA President Hamid Karzai and other Westernized leaders. Their presence as equal participants in the Afghan experiment diluted the power and authority of the Pashtuns.
The Pashtuns have their own code of ethics and rules of social organization when it came to running their society, the internal operations of the tribes, and intertribal relations. That unwritten code is the Pushtanwali, and consent within and between the tribes can be obtained by formal processes which involve the use of jirgas or counsels. A knowledgeable former CIA officer said “the Taliban have degenerated from a religious movement into a tribal cabal. `They are tribal chiefs, who give themselves Islamist credentials for foreign consumption, but the real source of their power is their tribe….Their power does not extend beyond the influence of their tribe.’”[11]
The tribes were the key to stabilizing the country. The interests and concerns of the tribes had to be taken into account and accommodated if the US was going to win the war against the Taliban. By assuaging the tribes, or better yet, being able to pit them against each other thereby destroying their unity or cohesion, the Taliban movement would be weakened and destroyed. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus with others understood this and the importance of using the tribes to defeat the Taliban by October, 2008, but they could not implement such a plan.[12]
An insight into the reason for this decision not to utilize the tribes may be found in a paper that was published in August, 2009 by the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point. The authors Mili and Townsend wrote
“As Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s insurgent conflicts drag on, the stress on tribal structures will continue, pressured by jihadists and the international community alike. Both antagonists have a long-term interest in undermining tribalism, but both also have an interest in using tribalism to support immediate military aims.
“For the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan and their international supporters, this implies a difficult trade-off. Immediate military interests in bargaining with tribes require subordination of interests in issues such as human rights and good governance. Notably, as the arbakee tradition illustrates, a resort to tribally-mediated security structures implies a continuing devolution by the central government of its core responsibilities. This may be functional in the short-term, but will likely leave unchanged the uneasy relationship between relatively progressive governments and conservative tribal traditions — an uneasiness that proved fertile ground for jihadism in the first place.” (emphasis supplied; see footnote 10)
The issue was one right out of the business school economics textbooks. The traditional societies were a barrier to economic growth and the capitalist spirit. The progressive governments and the tribal societies could not co-exist. One or the other had to go.
The Americans had a successful history from colonial times of dealing with tribes by dividing and conquering and not insisting on adoption of ideological principles by the Indian tribes. A notable example from history was the Creek Civil War that lasted from 1812 and into 1825 and in which General Andrew Jackson pitted the White Sticks against the Red Sticks. The issues that lead to this divide and conquer strategy were bread and butter issues – land, water, hunting rights. The US was not intent on imposing Liberalism on the Creeks, as the Americans just wanted land and America was still largely what we would call a traditional society though that was beginning to erode. But the situation was different 200 years later because a global plutocracy had arisen and was on the march seeking to extend its power into every corner of the globe, especially one as mineral rich and as strategic for the laying of pipelines as Afghanistan.
The global regime, working through the US Government, NATO and the United Nations, would have nothing to do with this because they were intent on imposing the ideology of Liberalism on the Pashtuns. That ideology, the Pashtun leadership sensed, would put the Pashtuns in service to materialism with the grand puppet masters being the plutocrats, and lead to the destruction of their identity, their tribes, their people. The main sticking points were the liberation of women and the radical individualism that comes with Liberalism. These were the points on which the Pashtuns, lead by brave men who saw the deaths of many of their family and friends at the hands of the Soviets and now of the NATO coalition, would not compromise and would rally under the Taliban to successfully expel the West.
In Islam, women are treated as women and their roles are as women. There is no such thing as gender ideology nor are there manly women. Women are expected to be women – bear children, as many as they can, and be their mother while cooking, cleaning and pleasing their husband. The men rule the household and they do not share power with their wives. The Taliban required women to wear Hijabs because that covers the feminine form especially their eyes, for the Taliban know that a woman can be a cause of lust in a man if she is immodest. Acting out that lust causes division and strife in the community and threatens solidarity of the tribe or of the community. This is not an alien concept nor is it an unusual one. Indeed, in Catholicism there is a similar idea that is found in Section 1869 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) which states that sin is social and leads others to sin.[13]
As the Taliban grew in strength earlier this year, the Western media reported instances of women being beaten for being out of their house without their husband or for speaking to a man or for having their face uncovered.[14] The State Department of the USA called it all part of the “Taliban war on women” and of greatest concern was that women would not be educated and in not being educated thereby cease to be radiators of Western ideology that leads to the destruction of the family through confused gender roles, increased individualism, and reduction of children.
The Pashtuns, their men in particular, love their children, they love their people. So they will not compromise with Liberalism. They will defeat it. And Liberalism through its chief agents will then use religious radicalism disassociated from any ethnicity, such as ISIL or ISIS[15], to attack the Taliban and the Pashtuns. Liberalism’s agents repeatedly sift target populations and the Pashtuns will be no different – if the individualism of Liberalism doesn’t work, then radical Islam will be tried.
A Lesson, Again
There are military factors that made possible the pending Taliban victory. One is low intensity warfare waged with patience. Another is a very difficult terrain best known to the Taliban, or “home team” as one may say in popular parlance. Another is a very extreme or great distance from the homeland of the foreign power making logistics difficult. Yet another is a population that is sympathetic to the Taliban in the theater of operations. The Taliban could also rely on tribal allies in Wazirastan or the FATA and often used that area as a safe haven according to some reports while playing the Pakistanis off against the NATO alliance. Many of these factors have existed elsewhere — Vietnam and America during our Revolutionary War — and contributed mightily to the success of the ethnic group. But the ethnic group, the national identity, is a powerful moral force in war and the Taliban, the Vietnamese, and the Americans all had that at the right time for the right period of time.
The Vietnam War lasted from 1964 to 1973 and by 1975 the North Vietnamese overran Saigon thereby unifying the land. Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., a decorated Army infantry officer who served in Vietnam, explained in his famous work, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist hero who served to unite the Vietnamese against the Americans. The Vietnamese comprised over 80% of the population of the country, and Ho Chi Minh was of that ethnicity. He therefore had legitimacy in the eyes of the people who endured horrific bombings by the US to the tune of between 500,000 to almost 2 million deaths. A dedication to one’s people could cause one to endure such suffering and privation. The hard headedness also came in with the realization that the enemy was from far away and serving a global plutocracy or elite.
It was the same dynamic in 1776-1783 when the American people, separate and distinct from the British, rose up against that imperial and international elite that was slowly crushing the Americans. We are losing that sense of a people and it is harmful. We are seeing a national, and a global plutocracy, waging war on the American people with things like Big Tech censorship, vaccine tyranny, massive printing of fiat currency that inflates asset prices, huge government bailouts to financial capital firms, and a culture that perennially denigrates the family and a positive social structure all for the latest whim.
Ethnicity matters and a love of one’s own people matters. That love of one’s own people is in keeping with the natural law as St Thomas Aquinas noted in his Summa Theologica and as has been characterized all through history. Catholicism recognizes that ethnicity matters and that DNA matters as a component of nationhood and as part of God’s plan.[16] A proper organization of the family goes hand in hand with ethnicity or tribal solidarity and survival. Men have to be men, women have to be women, and men have to be in charge. There are religious grounds for this but there are also practical reasons and historical precedent. Proper gender roles are imperative for peace, survival and order. So we can learn from the Taliban as our societies deteriorate to the point of targeting White people for being White people. The right ordered family is important and that begins with establishing the right relationship between men and women. An important first step is to tell a prospective wife that she is to serve the man, her prospective husband, and give his mission top priority. The husband is in charge. The wife obeys. She is to be feminine and take care of herself. She is to cook, clean, bear children, and serve as a gracious hostess while advancing her husband at every opportunity. For as he goes, so goes she and the children. This is an important power dynamic and organizational dynamic that must be decided early in the lives of men and women. Anyone who has ever been in the Army knows that there has to be a leader of every unit. Military units are not democracies, though soldiers’ observations are important and requested.
Another important step is to imagine a system of social organization in which this idea of family is defended and protected. The higher society always shapes the lower society. The higher society must mirror the lower society and the lower must mirror the higher. Both must have elements of authoritarianism. While the Pashtun have many tribes and strive for consensus, they also respect authority and see a hierarchy in their social organization. Merit is rewarded but that merit is determined by service to the tribe and the Pashtun people as a whole. Tribes may accumulate wealth but they share it with other tribes. Again, Pashtunwali governs this complex series of relationships and it serves to keep the tribes united for the greater good. In many ways, the Pashtuns have the ideal system – at least according to Rousseau or Locke, but that is a discussion left to further in depth study at a later time.
Both the family and the ethnic group, or tribe, properly ordered and protected, are necessary for humans. The Pashtuns, by way of the Taliban, have re-taught this lesson to the West.
Error, and disorder, is often a matter of improper emphasis: Communism emphasizes the group without ethnic identity over the ethnic group and the individual; Liberalism emphasizes the individual above all else. A Nigerian Catholic Monsignor told me the following nearly 20 years ago when I asked him about the proper relation of the individual to the ethnic group: “I am because we are, and we are because I am.” The individual needs the ethnic group, and the ethnic group needs the person. Both are to support and protect each other, and in the Catholic view of things, both are needed to help the person to achieve their vocation which is salvation.
Ethnic nationalism can defeat Liberalism, at least on some battlefields as the Taliban are again showing these days. Ethnic nationalism is ironically liberation from “freedom” as the secular West defines the term. Just ask the Taliban and the Pashtuns in about a month or so, and they will probably tell you that they inhabit the freest place on earth.
References Are Available Upon Request
[1] “The Last US Commander in Afghanistan Has Relinquished His Post,” July 12, 2021 as accessed from https://www.npr.org/2021/07/12/1015237287/top-u-s-commander-in-afghanistan-relinquished-post-scott-miller.
[2] “Car bomb hits near Kabul `green zone’,” August 4, 2021, Reuters; Tameem Akhgar, “Afghan President seeks defense of cities as Taliban advance,” August 2, 2021, Associated Press.
[3] Anthropologists define ethnic groups as “categories of people who view themselves as sharing an ethnic identity that differentiates them from other groups…” and ethnicity refers to “culture, religion, language, national origin.” Serena Nanda, Richard L. Warms, Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012), 221.
[4] All information herein is from “open source” and the analysis and conclusions are solely my own as of the writing of the article.
[5] Remember Pope Pius IX in Quanta Cura (1864): “4…..But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?”
[6] ANDS Executive Summary, 10-11; The Afghanistan Compact.
[7] See “I won’t be a doctor and someday you’ll be sick,” by Human Rights Watch, October 17, 2017 at https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/10/17/i-wont-be-doctor-and-one-day-youll-be-sick/girls-access-education-afghanistan accessed August 6, 2021; UNICEF at https://www.unicef.org/afghanistan/education accessed August 6, 2021; ATEFA ALIZADA AND AMIE FERRIS-ROTMAN “The US is leaving Afghanistan, the Taliban is growing in power, and education for girls and women is already at risk,” July 7, 2021, Time; “Women and Girls Take the Lead in Afghanistan,” https://www.educationcannotwait.org/girls-day-afghanistan/ accessed August 6, 2021.
[8] “Pashtuns,” June 29, 2021, Encyclopedia Britannica.
[9] “The Ethnic Groups of Afghanistan,” World Atlas, https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/ethnic-groups-of-afghanistan.html.
[10] Hayder Mili, Jacob Townsend, “Tribal Dynamics of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Insurgencies,” CTC Sentinel August, 2009 as found at https://ctc.usma.edu/tribal-dynamics-of-the-afghanistan-and-pakistan-insurgencies/
[11] Scott Baldauf, “Key to governing Afghans: the clans,” June 24, 2004, Christian Science Monitor.
[12] “A Tribal Strategy for Afghanistan,” November 5, 2008, Council on Foreign Relations.
[13] “Thus, sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them. Sins give rise to social situations and institutions that are contrary to the divine goodness. `Structures of sin’ are the expression and effect of personal sins. They lead their victims to do evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a `social sin.’”
[14] Alijhani Ershad, “Taliban tribunal gives woman 40 lashes for talking to man on phone,” April 22, 2021, The Guardian; Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Fatima Faizi and Najim Rahim “Afghan Women Fear for the Worst,” April 18, 2021, The New York Times.
[15] There is some evidence that ISIS or ISIL was organized by the Americans who are no strangers to inciting religious heresies and animosities as I demonstrated in my book. The now dead leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, had ties to the intelligence community and also sported a Western watch in photographs, for starters. See, “Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Made and Killed by the CIA,” ParsToday, October 30, 2019 at https://parstoday.com/en/radio/world-i111940-abu_bakr_al_baghdadi_made_and_killed_by_the_cia
[16] See, CCC 1935-1937; John J. Wright, National Patriotism in Papal Teaching (1942).