Why a researcher needs to eat mango with the Pakistani Taliban

The Pakistani Taliban emerged in 2007 and have since then been related to terrorist plots in the West as well as in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Yet, there has not been any comprehensive accounts of the movement. In her newly released book "Guardians of God - Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban", DIIS Senior Researcher Mona Kanwal Sheikh fills out this gap by providing a first-hand account of the Pakistani Taliban.

The book is based on interviews with Taliban leaders and sympathizers conducted by the author herself. Sheikh seeks to display the way religious and secular rationales play together in the grivances of the Taliban and their justifications of violence.

- The fight against the Pakistani Taliban has not yet been successful. On the contrary, we have seen the rise of a growing number of Taliban-affiliated groups. My book is based on the argument that understanding their grievances is the only way to develop better policy tools for dealing with the challenges of violence committed by Taliban-affiliated groups, says Mona Kanwal Sheikh.

Sheikh has had hours of conversations with Taliban militants and their supporters, eaten mangos with them, joined them in prayers, looked at pictures of their martyrs and listened to emotional anthems about the necessity to join the ranks of militant jihad.

- It seems politically convenient to paint a one-sided picture of the Pakistani Taliban as secretive and unapproachable terrorists with a narrow interest to wage war against the West and the Pakistan army. My interviews with adherents and sympathizers reveal a much more complex mindset. The Taliban view themselves as guardians of God, but paradoxically, their violent defence of the sacred encompasses worldly concerns such as social justice, peace and political order, Sheikh explains.

The new generation of Taliban-affiliated groups in Pakistan arose in response to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and united in 2007 to form the Taliban Movement of Pakistan. Before the invasion, the Pakistani Taliban did not exist as a noteworthy phenomenon – as a threat to local and international stability as it has grown to become.

- Many of the Taliban adherents I interviewed frame their fight as defensive, as a response to the Western aggression and to the US abusing its status as world power. In their view, they are defending both their territory and religion, Sheikh says.