The Taliban at War, 2001–2018 by Antonio Giustozzi (review)

Understanding how the Taliban, despite being outmanned and outgunned, have managed since 2002 to hold their own and even expand remains a daunting puzzle for observers of the group. Antonio Giustozzi’s book goes a long way toward shedding valuable light on this question. His focus is on Taliban military organization and its evolution. Rejecting portrayals of the movement that emphasize a rigid ideological cohesiveness or a centralized and hierarchical power structure, Giustozzi maintains that the single most important feature of this insurgent movement is its “polycentric” and “horizontal” organization. In his usage “polycentrism” connotes “multiple chains of command,” and not “fragmentation,” which he associates with “competing chains of command” (p. 7).

Giustozzi presents a portrait of an extraordinarily complex and adaptive movement, with multiple geographic centers, whose relative influence has ebbed and flowed with the tide of the insurgency against the Kabul government and its international backers. He maps power struggles between — and within — autonomous “command and control” structures (shuras) based mainly in Pakistan (i.e., in Quetta, Peshawar, and Miran Shah) and in Mash-had, Iran. The Haqqani family network forms a key piece of this “polycentric” organization, which expanded further in late 2017, when, he argues, the Haqqanis formed an alliance of sorts with the so-called Khorasan Province affiliate of the Islamic State organization. To add to this complicated picture, Giustozzi tracks extensive debates within the leadership of the movement. He points to competing factions calling for “reform” and “counterreform” and discerns the presence of political versus military wings. Shifting to the level of foot soldiers, who, he argues, have become an increasingly professionalized group, the author also identifies a variety of views and highlights frequent criticism of Taliban elites by members of the rank and file doing the fighting in Afghanistan.

Though focused on the adaptive leadership structures of the movement, The Taliban at War offers intriguing insights into an array of crucial logistical matters that account for the group’s survival. One of the most striking claims of the book is that, particularly from 2008, the Taliban have depended heavily on foreign financial support. In 2014, the financial organs of the Quetta, Peshawar and Miran Shah shuras managed to collect nearly $900 million — with some 80 percent coming from abroad, he estimates, and the rest generated by drug profits, local taxation, and donations from Afghan businessmen. Money has flowed to the movement from Pakistan and the Gulf as well as from official and private Saudi channels. Giustozzi notes that their financial sponsors even include al-Qa‘ida and the Russian government — and that, from the second half of 2016, Iran may have superseded Pakistan as the movement’s top funding source. Much of this financial and other detail is summarized in a series of annexes to the book, including more than two dozen graphs, charts, diagrams, and maps that present striking data representing, for example, Taliban insider claims about money that the Miran Shah shura received from al-Qa‘ida, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia (distinguishing between state and private sources) between 2008 and 2011 (p. 260).

Although this ready access to financial support allowed the leaders of the various shuras to pay salaries and mount dramatic and complex incursions into Afghan cities, Giustozzi points out that being awash with foreign money presented its own problems. The Taliban found themselves caught between rival donors, especially in 2014, when the deepening antagonism between Iran and the Gulf monarchies spilled over from Yemen, Iraq, and Syria into Afghanistan. Worse still, he argues, “the abundance of funding destroyed the original romantic ethos of the Taliban and turned them into simply a colossal fighting machine, unsure of its overall aims” (p. 245).

Beyond financial support, Giustozzi traces additional forms of foreign assistance that point to a vast web of heterogeneous actors upon whom the Taliban have come to depend. Consider the case of the Mashhad office that the Taliban opened in 2012 at a ceremony attended by both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard...