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The dramatic collapse of the Taliban has exploded many myths that had been perpetuated by a melange of self-proclaimed Afghan experts. For one, the Taliban proved no great fighters, no descendants of Saladin. They were, at best, a ragtag brigade of guerrillas that disintegrated once their medieval defence was pounded by the latest in weapons technology.

A WOUNDED CIVILISATION: An Alliance soldier walks over dead Taliban fighter

For another, the Taliban may have been successful in traumatising the Afghan people, but its rabid antics had won them little popular support. Images of Afghans making a

beeline for a newly opened cinema hall and women discarding their burqas will remain an abiding testimony for an age-old adage: conquerors may be able to destroy the will of a people through violence and force, but they can rarely win their hearts or change the way they think. In other words, the Taliban, despite its Afghan roots, was little more than an occupation army, with a culture and an ideology that had little to do with Afghanistan.

AFGHANISTAN AND THE TALIBAN Ed by William Maley Penguin Price: Rs 295 Pages: 253

In contrast to the pop wisdom about Afghanistan that is being currently doled out in the media, William Maley's ably edited collection of essays, Afghanistan and the Taliban: The Rebirth of Fundamentalism?, is a serious work of scholarship. The book, originally published in 1998 and now reissued with a new preface, has chapters by leading Afghan experts from the world over, including Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistan-based correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Amin Saikal from the Australian National University, Bernt Glatzer from the Zentrum Morderner Orient in Berlin and the redoubtable Olivier Roy from the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifque in Paris. This book is a must read for those interested in the rise of the Taliban, its relations with the main actors of the region and beyond, and the contradictions within that have resulted in its doom.

Olivier Roy's masterly essay is easily the pick of the volume. Roy, who visited India recently to deliver a lecture, destroyed the belief that the Taliban comprised great scholars of Islam. Not only were they a product of an "instant" Islam learnt in months rather than years, as was the case with traditional scholars, but they consciously and rather self-depreciatingly called themselves only as Talibs (students), never as Aalims or the learned ones. Will Talibanism then survive as an ideology and will the Taliban live on as a band of guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan? Unlikely. The defeat will have crushed the average talib's fanatical belief in the omnipotence of his supreme leader, the Amir al-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful), Mullah Omar. Neither the Cloak of Prophet Mohammad, which apparently gave Omar his legitimacy, nor any other deus ex machina was able to save the Taliban from the helicopter gunships that crushed it into oblivion. And without faith, the Taliban can hardly continue to exist.