Taliban (7 page)

And yet to criticize the madrasah system as a whole is to strike at one of the foundations of Islam, a faith to which religious education has been crucial for almost 1,200 years. Western policymakers have sometimes struggled to understand that the vast majority of madrasahs are not sinister breeding grounds for terrorists. The oldest madrasah in the world, the Jami’at al-Qarawiyyin
in Fez, Morocco, has been operating benignly – and continuously – since it was established in 859; and even the students at Haqqania are encouraged to play cricket.

In 2002, soon after the Taliban were defeated, the then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embarked on a victory tour of his newly conquered territory. He arrived at the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif in a giant C-17 transport aircraft with an entourage of Secret Service men and, according to a British SAS officer stationed in the city and who witnessed it, ‘a brilliant double dressed in a conspicuous Macintosh’, who emerged and waited at the top of the aircraft steps while the real Rumsfeld was hustled off the aircraft by another exit.

The SAS officer was then detailed to escort the American around the city.

‘He had these dead, cold doll’s eyes, and he kept asking questions about madrasahs,’ he recalled. ‘He wanted to know where the nearest one to our base was. I had to tell him that we didn’t know of a single madrasah in Mazar, which is a liberal, multi-ethnic city, not a Pashtun one . . . I doubt there’s a madrasah within 150 miles of the place.’

Rumsfeld’s armoured motorcade passed the famous Blue Mosque in the city centre: the shrine of the Prophet’s son-in-law Hazrat Ali from which Mazar-i-Sharif, the ‘Tomb of the Exalted’, takes its name. Rumsfeld jabbed a thumb at it and turned to the SAS officer once again.

‘Is
that
a madrasah?’ he wanted to know.

This was not quite the silly question it appeared. The shrine does have a small ‘house of learning’ attached to it. But it is also an integral part of the whole blue-tiled complex, a national monument that appears on the backs of banknotes. To call it a ‘madrasah’ in
the sense that Rumsfeld meant it was a bit like describing the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey as a bomb factory.

‘No, sir,’ replied the exasperated SAS officer drily – perhaps a little too drily. ‘That is the fourth holiest shrine in the whole of Islam.’

‘Young man,’ Rumsfeld snapped, ‘may I remind you that you are a junior officer in the British Army – while I am the United States Secretary of Defense?’

2
Kohl, the Arabic word for stibnite, a naturally occurring sulphide of antimony, has been used throughout the Middle East since ancient Egyptian times at least in order to improve the vision of the wearer. The custom is mentioned by Pliny the Elder as well as in the Old Testament. The Prophet himself advocated smearing each eye with it three times before going to bed every night, according to the
hadith
.

3
To date, more than 3,000 Pakistani soldiers and policemen and some 12,000 militants have been killed, while an estimated 7,000 civilians have died and a further 3.4 million of them have been displaced. (Source: South Asia Intelligence Review.)

4
Afghanistan is an extraordinarily young nation anyway: in 2000 the average age was just sixteen, compared to thirty-eight in Europe. (Source:
The Times
, 3 July 2009, Richard Ehrman, ‘The Forces of Democracy Can’t Beat the Power of Demography’.)

In April 1997 I boarded a small Red Cross cargo plane that flew once a week from Peshawar to Mazar, where it delivered supplies to the handful of aid agency missions based there. It seemed a likely place to find a good news story. With the fall of Kabul, Mazar was now the only town of any size not under Taliban control, and the de facto headquarters of the new Northern Alliance – a shaky coalition of Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara Shi’ite militias who had failed individually to resist the southerners’ advance.

I made my way by bus to the local headquarters of Oxfam, a small compound just west of the city centre that rented a few rooms to itinerant journalists like me. The previous year I had written a commentary piece for the London
Independent
entitled ‘The Peace Brought by the Taliban’. This was largely an exercise in devil’s advocacy, although it had a serious point: it seemed to me that the West’s righteous fist-shaking at the Taliban’s treatment of women was in danger of obscuring the positive side of the new regime,
particularly the benefits of improved security. The article quoted Care International’s Stuart Worsley at some length. Arriving at the Oxfam compound at last, I was amazed to see this very article, pinned up in pride of place next to the reception desk. Worsley was evidently not alone in seeing the Taliban’s plus-side. I was just silently congratulating myself when I heard a man harrumph loudly over my shoulder.

‘I’d like to meet the idiot who wrote that damn piece of crap,’ he boomed, in a heavy Australian accent.

‘Well, um, I think it might have been me, actually.’

We made friends in the end. He was a photographer, recently arrived from Kabul: the gruff epitome of a seasoned war correspondent and, as I later learned, a legend on the Afghan circuit. Two years previously he had been out on the front line near the capital, filming a mortar crew in action against the Taliban forces besieging them. The crew were amateurs who kept thrusting their shells into the launch tube instead of gingerly dropping them in.

‘I knew it was wrong at the time,’ he said. ‘It was an accident waiting to happen.’

He had backed away fast, but too late. One of the shells exploded in the launch tube, obliterating the crew and badly wounding him too. He was evacuated from the country and spent months in rehabilitation: a career-ending moment, his family thought. Yet here he was, back in Afghanistan again, a self-confessed addict to a country famous for its ability to get beneath a Westerner’s skin.

He made me glad I had chosen to try my journalistic luck in Mazar rather than Kabul. The Taliban, he said, had made it so difficult for foreign media to operate there that he had decided to flee for the relative freedom of the north. Every journalist arriving in the capital these days was assigned a local fixer-translator by the
newly established Interior Ministry. These fixers, he explained, were in reality spies for the new regime, who kept a tight grip on where their foreign charges went and whom they spoke to, and even decided what they could and couldn’t film or photograph. This ‘service’ was not optional, and an exorbitant (and nonnegotiable) daily fee was being charged for it. It sounded no place for an impoverished freelancer like me.

The clumsiness with which the Taliban handled the press in the early days was an important factor in the hardening of the West’s attitudes towards them. Restrictions on foreign journalists’ freedom to operate encouraged neither objectivity nor much analysis of what made the Taliban tick. Instead, the Taliban unwittingly handed the foreign media a telegenic scare story about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ that most journalists found impossible to resist: a public relations own-goal that the leadership would later come to regret.

When, for example, an edict was issued banning the watching of television, the Taliban authorities in Kabul decided to reinforce the point by impaling stacks of television sets on poles at the entrances to the city. For good measure these carcasses were sometimes draped with audio and video tape that had been ripped from their housings. The tape was like metal seaweed: long, shiny brown strands that fluttered beautifully when it was windy, their surfaces winking in the sunlight and visible for miles across the moonscape of the capital’s hinterland. The Afghans have always liked a good flagpole. Foreign correspondents such as the BBC’s John Simpson could hardly be blamed for filming them – discreetly, of course, from the back of a car. ‘Welcome to Kabul,’ Simpson gravely intoned, ‘capital of the most fundamentalist government in the world.’ It was great television, a news shot that played directly to the West’s
growing sense that the Taliban really were from another planet.

Yet this kind of reporting does not satisfactorily explain the complex socio-political reasons behind such a Draconian edict. Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ was only a part of it. The Taliban were also driven by a straightforward fear of television and the corrosive effect it could have on society: exactly the same fear that the West experienced throughout the 1960s and ’70s. In Britain this was most famously expressed by the anti-television campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who blamed programmes like
The Benny Hill Show
,
Doctor Who
and even the children’s story-reading slot
Jackanory
for a collapse in the nation’s morals. There was more than a hint of Mary Whitehouse about Omar, an austere mullah from the most conservative part of the country.

It was hardly surprising if he was behind the times. Like everything technological, basic television came very late to Afghanistan, in the 1980s. Afghan society was still coming to grips with the new medium when satellite television arrived in 1991. The civil war that raged in Kabul from 1992 destroyed its electricity supply, but with the arrival of the Taliban in 1996, power was miraculously restored. The capital’s bazaars were suddenly flooded with electronic goods imported from China, cheap and shamelessly cloned. The return of television threw open a window on to an outside world that astounded Afghans, and millions of them were now badly hooked. They watched anything, without discrimination: cheap Italian game shows, soap operas from Brazil, twenty-year-old American crime series like
Kojak
. In the Taliban’s view, the citizens’ time would be much better spent praying in the mosque. The stricter sort of mullah naturally thought the television habit was a direct enticement to apostasy.

Kojak
was one thing, however. The Taliban were far more
troubled by another kind of imported show which was easily the most popular in Afghanistan: the steamy, Hindi-language romances of Bollywood, the Mumbai-based film-making centre that outstrips the world in productivity. Afghans, the inhabitants of a dun-coloured land, were drawn to Bollywood like magpies to tinsel. I saw the power these movies held over the people for myself, once, in a Mazari
chaikana
– a teahouse – where a hundred or so men had crowded around a set suspended from the ceiling, gazing in open-jawed silence as a scantily clad starlet sashayed around a Mumbai car park filled with expensive sports cars.

Bollywood threatened society’s morals far more seriously than comparable material from Europe or America. It made a big difference to the Taliban that this licentiousness was going on not in the other-worldly white West but right here in south Asia, a few hundred miles to the south-east, among men and women of a skin colour worryingly like their own. In Pashtun society, women do not dance semi-naked in car parks, or even go out in public much unless veiled and accompanied by a husband or relative. This challenge to the Pashtun sense of female decorum, furthermore, came not from some random regional neighbour but from Hindu India, the mortal enemy of the Taliban’s brother Muslims in Pakistan. According to
namus
, one of the tenets of Pashtunwali, the honour of women must be defended at all costs: another means, perhaps, of controlling men’s desire for them. The poet Ghani Khan observed that a Pashtun ‘cannot think of love without marriage. If he does, he pays for it with his life – and therefore all his love poetry is about those who dared it. The Pashtun may shoot the lover of his daughter but sing to the glory of love.’ Bollywood’s invasion was cultural rather than military, though not necessarily less dangerous for that in the Taliban’s eyes. It played to the old Pakistani fear of
encirclement by India – as well as to the old Pashtun suspicion of any foreign interference in their country.

In times of external pressure the Pashtuns have historically survived by turning inwards, falling back upon and rigorously upholding the ancient cultural values that had served them so well in the past. Loyalty to the Pashtun nation, or
hewad
, is another important tenet of Pashtunwali, as is the obligation to defend it against any type of foreign incursion. Protecting Pashtun culture, the
dod-pasbani
, from disintegration or dilution by outside influence is also important. For this reason, an ability to speak Pashto is considered not just important but essential. Not speaking it is often taken, quite unfairly, as an inability to comprehend anything to do with Pashtun culture. International television, with its assumption of global values and its tendency to linguistic homogeneity, endangered both the hewad and the dod-pasbani.

The demands of Pashtunwali alone were probably motivation enough for Omar to approve the banning of television, although there was also no shortage of justification to be found in the Koran – at least in the way the Taliban interpreted it. Early Islam forbade the portraiture of all living things on the grounds that it encouraged idolatry, and both Hollywood and Bollywood, with their attendant and highly developed celebrity cultures, undoubtedly smelled of that. The Taliban’s ambition to turn the clock back to the time of the Prophet was often problematic, though. As Mary Whitehouse discovered, controlling television in the modern world is like trying to turn back waves on a beach.

In time, the Taliban learned that it was more useful to exploit the power of Western information technology rather than to try to destroy it. By 2001 even Omar was developing his own website in Kandahar. The Taliban made propaganda films, appointed clever
press spokesmen, courted television channels such as al-Jazeera, and learned to manipulate public opinion in myriad ways that continue to bamboozle the Nato Coalition today. They were capable of adaptation when necessary, in other words. However literally some among them were inclined to interpret the Koran, the rules could still be relaxed. The emotive tag of fundamentalism, with all the crazed inflexibility implied by that word, and which the Western media bandied about so often and easily in the early days, was never quite accurate or fair.