Taliban (10 page)

‘I know a couple of them who were beaten by the Vice and Virtue people,’ Siddiqim said. ‘Hoo-hoo! They were so sore, their wives had to massage them with hot bricks for a week!’

The religious police made inquiries, however, and soon tracked Siddiqim down to his home, where he was arrested and bundled into a truck.

‘Those people were the worst. They were taking me to the police station to beat me. But I had prepared for this moment by memorizing some “special verses” from the Koran, which I recited to them.’

The Talibs were so impressed that they turned the truck around and took him home again, apologizing and kissing his hand; they
even told Siddiqim’s father to look after him because his son had a ‘special gift’. Even the Vice and Virtue police, it seemed, had a respect for the old traditions.

‘They told me that fortune-telling was against Islam,’ said Siddiqim, ‘but I told them that I wasn’t fortune-telling: I was only reading what was there.’

The following morning the squad leader came back to see Siddiqim for a private consultation – and the morning after, and the morning after that.

‘After two weeks I had to ask him to stop coming, because the neighbours were starting to suspect that I was working for them!’

5
The state of Texas has put 447 people to death since 1982, according to the Texas Execution Information Centre.

The Taliban were often depicted as amateurs – a collection of incompetent country mullahs who were almost wholly unsuited to the task of running a country. Very few in the movement, it was true, had any previous experience of government, but the charge that they were all incompetent was inaccurate. The capital’s infrastructure was in ruins when they arrived. Many government offices had been looted, departmental budgets were often non-existent, and most of the civil service had fled. From this unpromising start the Taliban were able to establish an administration that, for all its faults, functioned as an internationally recognizable government for over five years. Not even the imposition of United Nations sanctions in 1999 could destroy it.

At least some of the Taliban’s ministers proved capable of learning on the job – and as they did so, the tension between Kandahar and Kabul became more acute. Mullah Omar’s decrees were fine in theory, but it wasn’t him who had to put the re-creation of a seventh-century
Sharia state into practice. A class of ‘career Taliban’ grew up in the capital that was far divorced from the lofty idealism of Kandahar. In time, Mullah Omar’s edicts began to be taken as standards to aspire to rather than laws actually to be applied – in the same way, perhaps, that some southern European countries treated directives from the EU Commission in Brussels in the 1980s and ’90s.

Mullah Zaeef was a competent Taliban administrator who was uncomfortably caught between the worlds of Kabul and Kandahar. The former village imam ran a banking system, three government ministries and the transport sector before becoming the ambassador to Pakistan in 2000: an entire political career shoe-horned into the space of six dizzying years. It began in the western city of Herat, which the Taliban finally conquered in September 1995 after a six-month campaign. Zaeef, still nursing a leg wound received during the fighting around the city, was put in charge of its banks by Mullah Omar. This was an important job because Herat was the gateway to Iran, and its mujahideen overlord, the socalled ‘Prince of the West’ Ismail Khan, had enriched the city through the taxation of cross-border trade.

Zaeef was a reluctant banking official, though, and missed the quiet life in his mosque. One day in August 1997 he simply quit, and drove home to his wife and family in Kandahar in a borrowed government car. But he was too useful to the regime simply to be allowed to retire. People of his quality were thin on the ground, and the Taliban were now in charge of Kabul. A month after his return he was again summoned to see Mullah Omar.

‘Mullah Saheb Amir ul-Mu’mineen wanted me to become the administrative director of the Ministry of Defence,’ Zaeef recalled in his autobiography. ‘He wrote a letter of official appointment for me, and even though I no longer wanted to work for the
government, I could not turn him down. I had taken an oath in Sangisar to follow and stand by him, so if he needed me in Kabul then I would go.’

Like many Taliban mullahs he had never been to the capital before, and when he got there he found his new ministry in chaos. There was no budget and most of the offices were empty. In fact there were so few staff that he was rapidly promoted to Deputy Defence Minister and put in charge of all financial and logistical affairs. Many of the new Taliban ministers were former military commanders, and thus liable to be pulled from behind their desks at short notice and sent into the front line against the Northern Alliance, for the war effort was always Kandahar’s first priority. When Zaeef’s boss, Mullah Obaidullah, was wounded in a battle north of Kabul, Zaeef found himself in charge of the entire ministry for a stretch of nine months. Using the banking skills learned in Herat, Zaeef designed two budgets, the second of which was used to fund the requirements of the troops on the front lines. This was submitted mostly in cash from Kandahar, and amounted to about
300,000 a week.

Compared to the billions swallowed by the American warmachine today, this was an extraordinarily small sum of money. The Taliban’s greatest problem throughout their time in power was that they were broke – and it was this more than anything that prevented the Kabul government from ever becoming a truly effective civil administration. According to Zaeef, the Taliban’s annual budget for the entire country never exceeded
80 million, the lion’s share of which naturally went on the war. The money left over for civilian expenditure, he said, was ‘like a drop of water that falls on a hot stone, evaporating without leaving any trace’.

Considering this dire lack of resources, the Kabul government’s
achievements were actually remarkable. The absence of official corruption meant that a little money went far. They were often ingenious in the way they spent it, and they were highly motivated. They did more than restore the electricity grid and the main roads in the capital. Zaeef progressed from the Ministry of Defence to that of Mines and Industries, where he oversaw the building of new industrial parks in five cities. The production of fertilizer, cement, coal, salt and marble all increased significantly. The natural gas and oil industries in the north of the country, where productivity in some cases was down by 80 per cent after years of neglect by the mujahideen, were overhauled and even began to attract foreign investment.

Then there was the matter of opium production. There has been much debate about the Taliban’s true attitude to poppies. They have long been accused of hypocritically denouncing the trade in public while privately exploiting it to fund themselves and their war. At certain times and in certain places, it is true that poppy production went on as usual. During their years in power, gaining military control of the country was their first priority. Then as now, poppy-farming was the economic mainstay of hundreds of thou-sands of farmers, as well as an important source of income for many warlords and tribal leaders whom the Taliban could not afford to alienate: precisely the dilemma faced by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in their counter-insurgency bid to win hearts and minds a decade later on.

The leadership always said they intended to eradicate poppy-farming when the civil war was won. They made their position on the drugs trade clear on 10 September 1997, when the Foreign Ministry issued a statement reminding ‘all compatriots’ that ‘the use of heroin and hashish is not permitted in Islam. They are
reminded once again that they should strictly refrain from growing, using and trading in hashish and heroin. Anyone who violates this order shall be meted out a punishment in line with the lofty Mohammed and Sharia law.’
¹
Ten days later, a clarification was issued banning the cultivation and trafficking of opium as well.

The ban was not very effective: opium production rose slightly over the next two years. In July 2000, however, Omar himself decreed a total ban on poppy cultivation. The following year, just 8,000 hectares of poppy were planted: the lowest on record, and less than a tenth of the area under poppy the year before. Bernard Frahi of the United Nations Office of Drug Control called it ‘one of the most remarkable successes ever’ in the fight against narcotics. Critics pointed out that the ban was not quite all it seemed. Gretchen Peters, the author of a study of the Afghan poppy trade, described it as ‘the ultimate insider trading con’. The price of opium on Afghanistan’s borders rose almost overnight from
28 to as much as
400 a kilo. And the Taliban, who continued to collect customs revenue, apparently made no attempt to destroy existing stocks.

Did Omar cynically exploit his position as Leader of All the Faithful to increase his regime’s revenue from drugs? Guy Willoughby, the Director of the Halo Trust, thought that it was the West, not the Taliban, who were ‘cynical and unhelpful’ in their response to Omar’s anti-poppy edict. Today’s Taliban, meanwhile, naturally argue that they were just getting on top of the issue when their government was ousted.

‘We are the only ones who managed to reduce the harvest,’ the Taliban’s Mullah Abdul-Basit told me in 2007. ‘Mullah Omar issued a fatwa against it. We were succeeding in abolishing it. We couldn’t stop it all at once – the process is slow, like weaning a
child off breast-feeding – but we were getting there when the Americans came.’

Since ousting the Taliban, the West has spent billions on various schemes to control the growing of poppy, with very limited success. It is an awkward fact that production in each of the last seven years has been higher than in any of the seven years of Taliban rule. Over 90 per cent of the world’s heroin continues to originate in Afghanistan, and two-thirds of that originates in Helmand, now the main focus of Nato’s counter-insurgency. As Gretchen Peters observes, if Helmand were a separate country it would still be the world’s leading opium producer, with the rest of Afghanistan in second place.