I may be wrong, but I don’t think McCallister is trying to say that the Taliban is traditional in the way that Marton apparently thinks he is. Marton seems to imply this when he objects to McCallister by saying that the Taliban is “radically removed from the ‘older concepts of community and traditional codes of behavior.’”

Hmmm. Well, the Taliban is ‘radically removed’ from its own traditional concepts and context in the same way that our own western postmodern humanism is ‘radically removed’ from the Judeo-Christian traditions and context from which it sprang … which is to say that the ‘removal,’ while definitely there, may not be as ‘radical’ as one might think. One is the convoluted product of the other.

McCallister is right, IMHO, to say that “effects resulting from all individual and group interactions are ‘determined not simply by preceding causes but are part of a continuous process of evolution.’” He is trying to recognize patterns, not predict future actions, after all. Those patterns have come out of (to a large extent) the traditional codes of conduct that have been tweaked, altered and even undermined to suit the Taliban’s own purposes.

The Taliban — as thoroughly contemporary (dare I say postmodern?) as it is — must necessarily trace some of its underpinnings to the traditions and “intrinsic codes of behavior” latent in the culture of its birth. (The same can be said of contemporary culture in the West, as McCallister points out in this example: “Our present-day western concept of tolerance, in my opinion, is the result of cultural evolution, lots of trial and error and associated bloodshed,” not just some sudden apparition or the result of a sudden awakening to “reason.”)

The Taliban may be aberrant, but it is aberrant in a way that is particular to its context. It can’t escape its context. It’s not some freakishly new thing that came out of nowhere and can’t be classified as a part of its own cultural context.

Of course, the Taliban (as the rest of the contemporary Islamist movement) is absolutely NOT feudal or recidivist. On that we can all agree — even McCallister (if I’m reading him correctly). But I think McCallister is right when he contends that the traditional social code is still a major underpinning of behavior in Taliban-dominated areas in Afhanistan and Pakistan. And this social code, as he says in his paper, “is the basis for negotiating the social contract and hence “legitimacy” upon which the existing political formula is based.”

So we cannot look at the Taliban as either “traditional” or radically new. It’s much more complicated than that, which is why, I think, McCallister rightly says: “Military operations along the North-West Frontier are far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.”