One of the guys on talk radio a few years ago was explaining how Europe ‘occupied’ territories in the Middle East hundreds of years ago, which is no different than the way we ‘occupied’ Iraq and Afghanistan. They’d basically be clustered together in a dozen forts and would only go outside of these forts for short periods (highly armed), or when traveling between these forts, no different than us in Afghanistan. Compare that to how we occupied Japan and Europe after WW2, and to this day, where our soldiers can safely go anywhere in the those countries when they want.
There was a term for that type of ‘occupation’ in the Middle East, but I don’t remember it.
Actually, the way Islam took over the ME in the first place set the pattern. Mohammed was a tribal warlord from a primitive, migratory tribe who wreaked havoc on the collapsing and weakened cities that had never recovered from the fall of the Roman Empire. Even if they had not been part of it formally, they were within its sphere of influence and benefitted from the stability it brought.
Mohammed’s savage military conquests were one thing, but his true stroke of genius was the invention of Islam, a syncretist “religion” that was part Arab tribal nationalism, part pagan moon-worship, part ritual law based on a sort of parody of Jewish law, and a faux history again based on a distortion of Jewish history, with a few Christian figures thrown in to placate the Christian population of the ME at that time.
When he took over a city, he imposed this bizarre religion on them - by the sword, of course - and the religion of Islam became their new identity. So this imposed unity under a non-tribal identity, even though his tribe actually kept the upper hand. To this day, certain levels of Islamic authority are limited to descendants of Mohammed, who had no sons and thus relied on the family line through his daughter Fatima, and the identification of the descendants is one of the conflicts between Shia and Sunni.
So that’s what the Taliban is doing here in Afghanistan.