The Taliban truck escort origin
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Asked in August 2021 about the origins of the Taliban, John Kiriakou offered a chain of events he considers underappreciated, beginning not with ideology but with cargo theft.

Refugees, madrasas and trucks

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he said, it caused a refugee crisis, and many Afghan families crossed the border into Pakistan, where they raised children and had children, many of whom were educated in madrasas, religious schools.  Meanwhile the Pakistani government had a problem: mujahideen were essentially pirating Pakistani trucks as they crossed Afghanistan on their way to sell goods in Iran. 

Benazir Bhutto was prime minister at the time, and she, or, as Kiriakou puts it, her people, came up with the idea of taking students out of the madrasas and having them ride along with the truck drivers to protect them. A talib with an AK-47 riding shotgun, one per truck, across Afghanistan to Iran.  Talib is the singular; taliban the plural. 

From escorts to a government

It worked. Then somebody observed that the programme might be more effective, and even more cost-effective, if instead of riding in the trucks the students were placed in villages along the highway. So they did that, and now, Kiriakou says, they were on the ground, armed, and enjoying popular support, because they were all about law and order. The next thing you know they began to take over villages, then territories, then regions; and by the late 1990s they took the whole of Afghanistan. That, he says, was the origin of the Taliban.  

What he says Americans miss

Kiriakou makes two further points about the group's standing. The first is that it had genuine popular support, and that in a post-Soviet, war-torn country awash with armed militias, a movement offering order may have answered a real need.  The second is that the Taliban are not foreign interlopers, not occupiers, not an invasion force, they are Afghans. So many Americans ask why Afghans did not take up arms against the Taliban; the answer, he says, is that they are also Afghans, and villages struggling with crime and piracy welcomed the law and order they brought.  

He pairs this with a criticism of American policy after the Soviet withdrawal: a big mistake was made in Washington in deciding that once the Soviets were pushed out the work was done, and going home rather than financing schools, sewage processing, electrical grids or anything else. In fact, he says, that was not the end of it. 

On what the movement had become by 2021, Kiriakou was cautious rather than reassuring: this is a Taliban that has been meeting with the United States for several years and that ought to have learned its lessons, and he could not help thinking it was not the Taliban that would rush to execute women in soccer stadiums or stone people for listening to music. It may come to that again someday, he said, but he thought they had learned some lessons over twenty years, and that the right course was to wait and see.  

The road, and the takeover

A 2019 telling names Benazir Bhutto as the author of the original idea and gives the route precisely. The problem was that Pakistani trucks were being hijacked as they crossed Afghanistan on their way to Iran to deliver goods; the answer was to take students from the madrasas in Pakistan and have them ride in the trucks with the drivers. It worked, and the attacks stopped.

The second step was presented as efficiency: rather than leaving the men in the trucks all the time, station them in the villages lining the road that connects Pakistan to Iran across Kandahar and Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan.

Kiriakou is precise about how they then took power, and about how little procedure was involved. Rather than standing for the village council or running for mayor, they simply announced what they were: these students who had just arrived were the Taliban, and the villages were theirs now. He notes that they were ethnic Pashtuns and so were the villagers, and adds the concession that explains why it held, "law and order can be a good thing when there's a lack of law and order."

From there, in his description, they became more and more fundamentalist, more and more radicalised, and very well armed: a creation of Pakistani intelligence that "got out of hand and just spun out of control."

See also

- Benazir Bhutto
- ISI
- Afghan National Police Poisoning
- Renting Afghan warlords
- Taliban embassy raid
- Afghan heroin policy
- Hazara Judo Belts
