Ever since 1945, when President Roosevelt conferred with Saudi King Ibn Saud on a warship in the Red Sea to ensure a petroleum supply for the war effort, Saudi Arabia has tried to balance its increasingly global, West-friendly economy (as well as its dependence on American military power) with its more conservative, historical role as the birthplace of Islam. (The prophet Mohammed was born in the Saudi city of Mecca.)
Still, for the last half-century the country, at least through most American eyes, has enjoyed a sort of rarefied existence, most notably in the status it enjoys as a so-called "moderate" state. Yet alcohol is banned in Saudi Arabia, as were valentines and Pokéman cards recently. Women, who are routinely segregated from men, cannot drive automobiles. The country has no written constitution and no elected legislature, and there are no political parties. Instead, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. Its royal family numbers 4,000, but just 60 have a major say in policy decisions. Saudi courts order more than 100 public beheadings each year, and human rights groups claim detainees are routinely tortured.
Radio, television and Internet content is censored by the state. Religious police patrol markets, searching for women not properly covered up or shops remaining open during required daily prayers. Tourist visas do not exist. American reporters can be denied access to the country during times of uncertainty. (Like now.) Official population and unemployment figures are deemed suspect by outsiders. Government spending is not made public. And an extreme, puritanical brand of Islam, Wahhibism, is the official religion of the Saudi monarchy. It's also practiced by Saudi native Osama bin Laden.
Earlier this week Saudi Arabia did give the U.S. coalition a boost by breaking off diplomatic as well as crucial financial ties with the fundamentalist Afghan government.
"Taliban needs Saudi support and needs the prestige within the Islamic world that the Saudi relationship represented," says Voll at Georgetown. Perhaps more importantly, donations that in recent years had flowed from wealthy Saudi businessmen to the Taliban will now likely cease.
But unexamined in the wake of that diplomatic break is why in 1997 Saudi Arabia became one of just three countries in the world to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government. (Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were the other two.)
The answers are numerous, but each illustrates the precarious path the Saudi royal family must travel when navigating the minefield of provincial Islamic politics.
First, in a region ruled by secular regimes, such as in Egypt, Syria and Turkey, it was natural for Saudi Arabia, which sees itself as the promoter and protector of Islam, to reach out to the fervently religious Taliban leadership. "Saudis were also concerned about encouraging Muslims in Central Asia," notes Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Additionally, Cordesman says, Pakistan asked the Saudis to make the diplomatic move.
Then there was the fact that the new Afghan government acknowledged the Saudi monarch's brand of fundamentalist Islam, Wahhibism, making the Taliban "the most visible group in the Muslim world" to do so, says Voll. That was key, because coming from the Taliban, the nod gave the Saudis the appearance of being at the forefront among Islamic revolutionaries. And for a lavishly wealthy royal family which for the last 20 years had often been accused -- most notably by Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- of no longer being properly Islamic, the association with the Taliban helped quell those religious criticisms.
The Saudis, though, quickly found it difficult dealing with the Taliban, and downgraded their diplomatic ties in 1998.
Next page: A monarchy shakeup unnoticed by the Western press