Christian Science Monitor reports:

In several provinces close to Kabul, the [Afghan national] government’s presence is vanishing or already nonexistent, residents say. In its place, a more effective – and brutal – Taliban shadow government is spreading and winning local support.
“The police are just for show,” one local says. “The Taliban are the real power here.”
Widespread disillusionment with rampant crime, corrupt government, and lack of jobs has fueled the Taliban’s rise to de facto power…
…Independent political analyst Waheed Muzhda says the Taliban’s advance from the south toward Kabul resembles their progression when they first took power 12 years ago. In both cases, he says, they won support by bringing law and order.

Governments exist largely because people feel they provide necessary things. Generally, a sense of security is at the core of services. One strategy of revolutionaries must be to displace the government by providing services better than it can. In libertarian left land, that would certainly include mutual aid to replace government controlled welfare and a host of private firms and entrepreneurs providing everything a counter-establishment economy would demand. Not least among these services are private security organizations, whether they be professional firms or guilds, or community militias.

The counter-economy operates on free market principles and not fundamentalist commands, so it can avoid failures like the following:

[L]ocals say that the number of schools in Taliban-controlled territory is dwindling fast. Of the 1,100 schools operating three years ago in Ghazni, only 100 are left, according to the Ministry of Education. Almost no girls’ schools remain, except nearly a dozen in the government-controlled provincial center.
The group also brings its austere interpretation of Islam to the areas they control, banning nonreligious music and flashy wedding parties. In Logar, guards at Taliban checkpoints regularly stop vehicles and beat drivers playing music.

A libertarian revolution will encourage people to decide for themselves what kind of services they would like, and encourage participation in them. Revolutionary libertarian defense, arbitration, and enforcement organizations would not allow such gross initiations of force as beating music listeners or shutting down schools. They would try to remove as many barriers to learning and expression as possible while upholding legitimate property claims.

When desired goods and services are provided in a revolutionary context, the consumers then join entrepreneurs in building revolution. A revolution based on libertarian principles ought to build liberty outside of the system. It is not enough simply to tell people that the free market can do things better. They must be shown that we will make it do things better. Agorism and other left libertarian philosophies provide ideas for such action.

(Article via RRND)

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