Academics will write anything, however absurd, to get their name in print.
The coming collapse of the Taliban
Andrew Latham, professor of international relations at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.
..might seem a far-fetched claim. But the history of the movement — and that of the mujahedeen, which defeated the Soviets and their puppet regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s respectively — strongly suggests that this will almost certainly be the case.
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Now, however, one of those unifying factors has evanesced. With the withdrawal of the American “occupier” and the defeat of its Afghan client state, some of the glue holding the Taliban together will soon dissolve.
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...if the experience of the victorious mujahedeen in the early 1990s is any guide, that is not likely to last long. Nor is it likely to prove sufficient to contain the centrifugal tendencies within the Taliban coalition. Perhaps the hierarchical command-and-control structures built up over the past three decades will be sufficient to hold the movement together. But then again, maybe they too will wither now that the war has been won, further accelerating the tendency toward fragmentation.
...civil war...should be remembered that...is precisely what happened in the aftermath of the mujahedeen victory over the USSR three decades ago. In that case, once the common foe was vanquished, the various tribal, communal and linguistic factions turned on each other — and on the Afghan people.
The result...ultimately gave rise first to the Taliban insurrection and then to the first Taliban emirate. Absent the U.S., it is reasonable to assume that the disparate parts of the Taliban coalition — long held together precisely by the American presence — will similarly turn on each other, vying for their share of the spoils of victory even to the point of armed conflict.
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if the Taliban splinters in the post-victory scramble for advantage, it raises the prospect of a single Afghan state being replaced by a patchwork of regional statelets overlaid with pockets of ungoverned or contested spaces.
In such an arrangement, even if there is something approximating a Taliban-dominated national government, its writ is unlikely to run much beyond Kabul. Whatever promises that government might make, it simply won’t be able to keep them.
