Read the Foreword from “Looking for the Enemy” by Bette Dam

For twenty years, the Taliban was the number one enemy of Western forces in Afghanistan. But it was an enemy that they knew little about, and about whose founder and leader, Mullah Omar, they knew even less. Armed with only a fuzzy black-and-white photo of the man, investigative journalist Bette Dam decided to track down the reclusive Taliban chief a decade back.

The outcome of a five-year-long pursuit, Looking for the Enemy is a woman journalist’s epic story that takes the reader deep into the dangerous mountains and war-ravaged valleys of Afghanistan as it throws up several unknowns about an organization that is now once again at the helm in one of the world’s most fragile states. Read Martine van Bijlert’s succinct foreword for the book.

When this book first came out in Dutch in February 2019, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, with President Ashraf Ghani at the helm, was still in place. The U.S., keen to extricate itself from the Afghan war, had started formal negotiations with the Taliban’s political office in Doha. A year later, in February 2020, the two parties signed an agreement which allowed the U.S. to withdraw its troops by 2021 and which was meant to kick-start an intra-Afghan peace process.

It went differently. The peace process never took off and, throughout the summer of 2021, while U.S. presence dwindled, Afghan military forces gradually ceded the whole country to the Taliban, district by district and province by province – sometimes after fierce battles but mostly through deals and surrenders. The government in Kabul, in the meantime, continued to behave as if this were only a temporary setback. Then on August 15, 2021, while the U.S. troops had not yet finalized their withdrawal, the Taliban entered Kabul and took over the government after the sudden departure of President Ghani.

The speed of the collapse of the Republic took everyone, including the Taliban, by surprise and they are now scrambling to transform their military movement into something resembling a government. It is unclear how this will go. In contrast to their previous reign, the Taliban currently have no clear center of gravity. Although they nominally have a leader – Sheikh al-Hadith Hebatullah Akhundzadah, Mullah Omar’s latest successor – the man has not been seen in public for years and is probably either sidelined or dead, as Mullah Omar had been before him.

With the Taliban back in power, the world is scrambling to figure out what their reign might look like. There have been striking parallels with how the movement tried to consolidate its previous regime in the 1990s – most prominently the lack of clarity on issues like girls’ education and women’s employment, the threat of violent reprisals, and a tendency towards harsh punishments. There are also clear divergences – for instance, the heavy use of social media, videos and photography, and the push towards establishing uniformed security forces. But, although journalists and analysts have had all these years of international involvement to acquaint themselves more deeply and meaningfully with Afghanistan and its politics, much of the current reporting seems stuck in the 1990s – as if we have collectively learned nothing.

This book is fuelled by a thinly veiled exasperation. Over how much the military, the policy establishment and the media have missed during the last twenty years. How the different frames – the War on Terror, the state-building project, the counterinsurgency – meant that what happened in Afghanistan was often only viewed and interpreted in relation to the international presence and, because of that, often misunderstood.

This book is also fuelled by curiosity. It tries to do something different: to understand Mullah Omar and his movement on their own terms and within their own context. And, in doing so, it tells a very Afghan story, from a vantage point that is rarely seen in the West.

Bette and I were regularly in touch during her years-long research, particularly towards the end when she was in Afghanistan pursuing a new lead, only weeks before the original Dutch edition of this book was scheduled to come out. New and promising contacts sounded like they could shed light on where and how Mullah Omar had spent the last years of his life. We discussed the details as a fascinating story emerged. We weighed the sources, going back and forth to see whether they were solid enough. When the book came out, this was the part that attracted most attention and pushback, as it ran counter to the main narrative and the related worldview and self-image that had been put forward by the Afghan government, the U.S. military and most of the Western media.

This book, though deeply researched, obviously does not claim to be the final word on what happened in Afghanistan, the Taliban as a movement, or even the life Mullah Omar. But it is one of the very few books on Afghanistan in which the author has taken the time to listen deeply and follow a thread until clarity emerged beyond what seemed known already. With the Taliban now embarking on a new era, this is an invaluable resource on their roots, their past dealings with the rest of the world, and how the people in their orbit view the events of the last few decades.

Martine van Bijlert

Co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network,

Former political adviser to the EU Special Representative for Afghanistan

October 2021