What will a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan look like in the 2020s? Some analysts claim the group will govern in a brutal and dogmatic way, similar to when the Taliban ran large parts of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Others argue that the Taliban has changed and has become pragmatic, with promises of an “inclusive government.”
After two decades fighting the Afghan army and Western troops, the Taliban now faces the transition from battlefield mode to actual governance. But the Taliban isn’t the only militant group to run an Islamist proto-state — where armed leaders espousing a militant interpretation of political Islam transition to a governance role with the aim of implementing their strict interpretation of Islamic law, at gunpoint if necessary.
These three takeaways on Islamist governance help explain the challenges ahead for a new Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Expect to see initial successes
Contrary to what we might expect, when Islamist groups like the Taliban seize power, they tend to achieve some popular support at first. This isn’t because of their radical Islamist ideology, which few locals share, but because they bring short-term stability to an otherwise conflict-prone area. Even powerful local warlords or mafia groups are unlikely to take on an organized and battle-hardened armed group that’s in power.
During the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s, Sunni and Shiite militant Islamists took over the cities of Tripoli and Baalbek, where they got rid of local gangs and predatory rebel groups. Somalia witnessed similar dynamics unfold in 2006, when the Islamic Courts Union was able to restore security to Mogadishu after years of lawlessness and crime in the capital.
More recently, militants have also succeeded in another area where previous governments had failed: the provision of basic services. After the Islamic State took control of the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, for example, one of its first moves was to organize the collection of garbage. And when al-Qaeda seized Yemen’s port of Mukalla in 2015, the group repaired sewer lines and expanded the electricity grid.
But people inevitably push back
The history of Islamist proto-states also tells us that such successes do not last long. Sooner or later, militants face protests, clandestine resistance or rebellion. This tends to happen more when they pursue a maximalist strategy aimed at strict implementation of a radical vision of Islam and Islamic law right away than when they take a more gradual, long-term route.
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In 2006, al-Qaeda in Iraq took the maximalist approach after proclaiming an Islamist state over parts of the province of Anbar. Al-Qaeda leaders immediately imposed a ban on cigarettes and a strict dress code for women, and attacked tribal and religious figures. But this soon antagonized local communities. Within a year — and with U.S. logistical support — the population ejected the group from its stronghold. By contrast, al-Qaeda in Yemen governed Mukalla in a more gradualist manner, for instance refraining from banning musical parties or preventing people from watching soccer games. The group faced sporadic protests but not violent rebellion.
My research explains how Islamist militants try to root themselves within local communities by taking steps to bolster their legitimacy. They engage in patronage with tribes, promising rewards to those who join or tacitly back the new regime. When this does not work, they use force to quell potential dissent — but this move tends to create instability. In Yemen, for instance, the Houthi efforts to crush tribal rebellions have made their governance chaotic.
Islamist leaders also saw increased infighting
Beyond initial successes followed by popular pushback, a third trend has characterized these Islamist proto-states: a propensity for violent infighting. The defeat or retreat of a national army provides such groups with a territory to govern, but the victory then deprives their leaders of the external enemy and a mission that helped close up the ranks of the group’s often-fractious base.
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These groups are not monolithic, made up only of Islamist zealots. They also include predatory factions bent on leveraging control of territory to generate profits, which may trigger group infighting. One example is how the takeover of the Lebanese port of Tripoli by militant Islamists in the 1980s brought the group massive resources but also set up violent divisions that ultimately led to the group’s demise. Struggles over the control of checkpoints and border crossings have also been a source of internal tension for Syria’s Islamist rebels since 2012.
Another classic source of division is whether militants in power can afford to stick to their ideology. After it gained control of northwest Syria, the Nusra Front rebranded itself and cut off its ties to al-Qaeda, then promoted a civilian technocratic administration and also engineered a rapprochement with Turkey. These moves led radical members of the group to split off and turn against it. Struggles over how ideologically pure and uncompromising Islamist groups should be have long been a source of infighting among Islamist insurgents, and these tensions often ramp up when these groups begin governing.
Islamist militants have governed territories before, and the combination of external and internal challenges — at times exacerbated by foreign powers — has made these regimes largely unviable. Current optics in Afghanistan may suggest a stronger-than-ever Taliban, but the hard part has yet to come.
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Raphaël Lefèvre is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and a research associate at Aarhus University’s The Other Islamists program. He is the author of the new book “Jihad in the City: Militant Islam and Contentious Politics in Tripoli” (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
