Samuel McIlhagga
There’s a theory that people overlay on top of these political phenomena and have been for a while now. The idea was found in [the fourteenth-century Arab philosopher] Ibn Khaldun and his Muqaddimah of peripheral nomads or warlords taking advantage of a reverse pendulum of historical forces, where the central state becomes “decadent and weak,” whether that be through capitalism or older ideas of corruption.
People got keen on this theory with the fall of the Afghanistan Republic, looking at the Taliban. No matter what you think about their politics, or how reactionary they are, they were these competent state-builders, in microcosm, through militias between the early 2000s and the 2020s. In addition, the state-building that was pursued by the US was achieved, partly, through proxies: NGOs, think tanks, BlackRock, and private mercenaries like Blackwater.
In Afghanistan, under US hegemony, there was no centralized vision of what the state should be, only competing outsourced forces. In contrast, the Taliban were consummate at the basics of state-building: learning on the sidelines.
I wonder if that will apply to HTS. We’ve had all this rhetoric about Julani reading Why Nations Fail. Is that just a meme? How much does it feed into reality? This is a long way of asking: Do you see HTS as an organization restricted to warlord and/or microstate status as they were around Idlib? Are they going to be able to successfully manage the diversity of Syria in terms of ethnicity, religion, political, and economic interests? Are they going to be able to build on momentum successfully?
Auteur: Helen Thompson
