Center for Strategic Communication

Kandahar & London
An Appeal for Funding

(This is a joint post by Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn and Anand Gopal)

I wouldn’t normally put something like this up on the blog, but after over a year or so of asking around (without success) we’re trying all options.

For several years now, Felix, Anand and I have been collecting old (and new) Taliban documents. Felix and I made a point of finding things that covered pre-2001, and Anand found things post-2001. Some of the research you may have read about on this blog or in books came from this material. For example, the poems written by Talibs in Poetry of the Taliban (published later this year) were all gathered together in this way.

Our collection is pretty wide and comprehensive. I won’t say too much about the kinds of sources we have, but suffice it to say that we have complete collections of most publications and books that the Taliban were associated with (and various other documents/videos/audiotapes). These sources date from the 1980s until the present day.

We are looking — we have been looking — for funds to translate these sources into English and place them (and scans of the originals) online so that researchers and anyone else can access them. Almost none of this material is used (or has been used) in the study of the Taliban (particularly pre-2001) and this project would allow a far deeper understanding.

If you are a donor and are interested in funding this project, please get in touch with me, Felix or Anand at the contact page.