Taliban (8 page)

This is not to say that they weren’t sometimes guilty of terrible intolerance. In 1997 the leadership was still at the bottom of a steep learning curve, and by their own later admission they made many mistakes. The sum total of their ambition when they started out in 1994 had been to save two small provincial districts from bandits. Now they found themselves in charge of an entire country, almost, and they were frankly struggling to cope. Like the Americans in Iraq in 2003, the Taliban sought regime change. Also like the Americans, their preparations for running the country once they had taken the capital were almost non-existent. In fact, forming a government themselves had never been a part of their agenda. The idea rather was to install one that would govern according to Sharia law, and then to go home. But ‘mission creep’ within the movement, combined with the pressures of civil war and the influence of their Pakistani and Saudi sponsors, drove them much further than they first intended. In that sense, the Taliban were the victims of their own success.

Before 1997, most of the leadership had never even been to Kabul, a city whose customs and mores were very different from those of conservative Kandahar. It was the most outward-looking city in the country, a seething, multi-ethnic conurbation of perhaps
a million and a half people in 1997, about half of whom were ethnic Tajiks and only a quarter were Pashtun. It wasn’t just television that kept its citizens entertained. Kabul in the past had been a city of music and flowers, of cinemas and nightclubs. The children flew kites, the men gambled on partridge fights. In the 1960s, female students at the university had worn trousers, even mini-skirts. In the 1970s, the city had been a popular staging post on the hippy trail from Europe to India.

Kabulis had also flirted with Western modernity earlier, in the 1920s, under the modernizing Shah Amanullah, who had been the city’s Governor before he ascended the throne. He kept a fleet of Rolls-Royces, introduced co-education in schools, and promoted a constitution based on equal rights for women. He campaigned against the burqa and even decreed that Afghan men in the capital had to wear Western clothes, complete with a European hat. For all these reasons, Omar both distrusted and disliked Kabul. He might have been expected to take up residence in the Arg, Kabul’s presidential palace, but instead he appointed his close colleague Mullah Mohammad Rabbani to head the six-man ‘advisory council’ while he remained in splendid isolation in Kandahar. In the seven years he controlled the country, he visited the capital just twice.

This aloof style created a problem for the administration in Kabul before it had even begun to govern. No country is easily ruled from two capitals at once. As the Amir ul-Mu’mineen, Omar considered it his primary role to set the spiritual tone of his revolution; the business of actual government was generally left to others. ‘Everything that happens depends on God,’ he said when he had accepted the leadership in 1994 – and it turned out that he really meant it. Mullah Rabbani was the de facto Prime Minister responsible for the day-to-day running of the government. Since Omar
chose not to show himself, Rabbani also became the domestic and international public face of the Taliban. At the same time, Omar had no intention of loosening his grip on the revolution he had created. All key government officials had either to be nominated or approved by him. Rabbani’s job ultimately was to interpret and implement the orders that now began to stream northwards from Kandahar, where all the important decisions were taken. It was a highly inefficient command and control system that caused tension from the start.

Schooled at a madrasah in the Kandahari village of Pashmol, Rabbani was a former mujahid who had fought the Soviets alongside Omar. He had taken part in the destiny-laden attack on Spin Boldak, and was reputedly an excellent tactician and field officer who still commanded the loyalty of thousands of fighters. Even so, he was no firebrand but a ‘soft, gentle, humble man – the kind who always makes himself “small” in a meeting,’ a contact who knew him told me. He was naturally revered by his mullah peers.

When the Taliban first took Kabul, Rabbani had favoured negotiating a peace with the Northern Alliance government under the auspices of the United Nations. He agreed to a ceasefire, and proposed calling a
jirga
of
ulema
– an assembly of religious scholars – who would thrash out a constitution agreeable to both sides and that would incorporate the Sharia law the Taliban craved. As a sign of good faith he even withdrew the heavy weaponry surrounding Kabul, and might have seen a peace deal through were it not for Omar, who flatly rejected any such proposal. It was almost certainly a Taliban rocket that broke the ceasefire: ‘The moment they turned from liberators into a warring faction just like any of the others that preceded them,’ according to Peter Jouvenal. Whether the rocket was fired on orders from Kandahar is still disputed.
Many Afghans insist the ISI had a hand in it, for by this stage of the campaign there were many reports – never verified – of Pakistani military ‘advisers’ among the Taliban ranks. Nevertheless, it was clear enough that the Amir ul-Mu’mineen had no interest in compromising with the warlords of the north.

For Mullah Rabbani, loyalty to the Amir had to come first. He was forced to go back on his word to the United Nations and to the ulema, and to declare that the Taliban would be taking power alone and without consultation. With this move, a rare chance to put an early end to years of internecine strife was lost – or at least that chance was never put to the test. Rabbani died of liver cancer in April 2001.

Mullah Rabbani’s greatest fear was that he might lose control of Kabul, a development that would spell disaster for the Taliban project. Showing any weakness could encourage fresh insurrection from the non-Pashtun community, who were still far from defeated in the north and east of the country. The strength of the Taliban at its inception was that everyone knew each other – a small band of brothers held together by mutual trust and a common goal. Yet by the end of 1996, so many people had joined the cause that its leaders were no longer sure who was actually in their ranks.
¹
The certainties of the early days were gone. Factions had grown up, even within Omar’s inner circle. Mutual trust was replaced by a climate of suspicion.

Some Taliban officials – though not all – reacted by clamping down on Kabulis and their immoral, big-city ways with unprecedented harshness. One of the worst was Rafiullah Muazzin, the head of the Amr Bil Marof Wa Nai An Munkir, the infamous Office for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Some of the edicts he issued in Omar’s name were so bizarre that
they have passed into international folklore. As well as television, Rafiullah outlawed ‘the British and American hairstyle’, music and dancing at wedding parties, and the playing of the drum. Chess, cards and partridge-fighting, a national pastime, were early casualties because they encouraged gambling and distracted people from the mosque. Not content with banning women from the workplace and hiding them under burqas in public, the windows of private homes were now ordered to be white-washed to prevent anyone from accidentally peeking in. Tailors were forbidden from taking female body measurements. Women were also stopped from playing sports, from washing clothes in the streams that run through the city, from wearing nail varnish, even from wearing ‘squeaky shoes’. This insistence on sexual propriety seemed deranged to most Kabulis. In Britain, we joke that Victorians covered the legs of pianos to prevent inappropriate stirrings. In Afghanistan, there were reports from the countryside that stallions had been forced into trousers.

Rafiullah’s edicts were publicized on Radio Sharia, the Taliban’s new music-free radio station. They were then enforced by his deputy, the terrifying Maulawi Inayatullah Baligh, whose 100-strong squad of religious inspectors carried out their duties with the zealousness and, apparently, the impunity of Hitler’s Brown Shirts in the 1930s. Despite his title – a
maulawi
is a kind of senior mullah – Baligh was really a career bureaucrat who had served in the deposed previous government: a little man with an unhealthy liking for the big stick. ‘Whenever we catch them doing immoral things, we can do anything we want,’ he told one foreign journalist. ‘We can execute them, we can kill them.’
²
His squads would set up spot-checks in the city centre to measure the length of beards. Beard hair, they decided, had to be long enough to poke through
the gaps of a clenched fist. They also inspected the more private parts of the human body, for cleanliness is next to godliness in Islam, and the Prophet advised that all pubic hair should be shaved. The damage done to the Taliban’s image by all this was incalculable. Internationally, the floodgates of opprobrium were now opened.

One of the most celebrated confrontations on the issue of women’s rights came when Emma Bonino, the Italian European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, visited the Indira Gandhi mother and child clinic in Kabul. When some journalists accompanying her began filming the proceedings, the Taliban ordered the whole party arrested.

‘It is the policy of the Taliban that no unrelated man may take pictures of women,’ said Hajji Habibullah, a security official.

Bonino was incandescent, even after the Taliban’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sher Abbas Stanakzai, had apologized.

‘He said that these questions [of women’s rights] would be decided when they had brought peace and security to the country,’ she said. ‘I said that if they did not take care of women’s health now, what are you going to provide peace and security for – dead bodies?’
³

The Taliban’s testy relationship with the international aid agencies reached a new low in July 1997 when these were ordered to close their offices, which were scattered around the capital, and relocate en masse to a complex of abandoned student dormitories on the bombed-out university campus. The move was ordered ‘for the foreigners’ own protection’, although it looked like blatant provocation to the aid agencies. Some feared that, far from improving their security, a concentration of foreigners in one place would actually make them more vulnerable to attacks and kidnappings.
They also complained that they could not afford to renovate the dormitories, which had been uninhabited since 1992.

Many aid organizations were already struggling to staff their operations thanks to the Taliban’s ban on local women working, which had itself caused much heart-searching in Western capitals. To go on operating under such a ban was to collude with a grave affront to civil rights, but if they quit the capital and its 750,000 inhabitants out of principle, what would become of the estimated 200,000 of them who were dependent on subsidized food, medicine and clothes? The foreigners bore the main responsibility for much other essential work besides. But the relocation order proved the final straw. When the EU Commission in Brussels urged the many aid organizations associated with it to leave Kabul, a mass exodus got under way.

Human rights organizations, meanwhile, were in full cry over the judicial killings taking place at the Ghazi football stadium – a venue that particularly outraged the West because it had been paid for with aid money from the European Union. Smuggled video footage of these executions found its way into the mainstream Western media, confirming the Taliban’s new status as international pariahs. The stadium was always packed with spectators at these grisly events, which made it look as though the authorities were using executions as a form of public entertainment. The battle-lines were drawn. From 1997 on, the Taliban were almost universally portrayed in the West as a regime beyond comprehension or redemption.

‘We are dealing here with a failed state which looks like an infected wound,’ the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi remarked in 1998. ‘You don’t even know where to start cleaning it.’
⁴

But there was another view of the Taliban regime, which was
that it was not, actually, failing in 1998. Nor, necessarily, was it in need of the cleaning services of the UN. The Taliban used the same metaphor when they described their mission to ‘cleanse’ the country of evil and corruption, and in some respects they were doing a pretty good job.

‘No one really
liked
the Taliban,’ said William Reeve, a BBC correspondent who reported from Kabul for much of the 1990s; he was famously in the middle of a live TV interview during the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 when he was blown off his seat by a 2,000lb American smart bomb that landed on the other side of the street. ‘They were never the answer to Afghan government. But they were very clever at carrying out Omar’s promises – unlike, these days, us Westerners, who make lots of promises we don’t or can’t keep. The Taliban did and still do carry out their promises. They very nearly
did
get rid of the warlords and the corruption they brought. They even got rid of the poppies in the areas they controlled. And Kabul and other areas were disarmed. A lot of Westerners got very cross about women’s rights in the 1990s, but the Taliban’s strictures were nothing compared to the rape and slaughter that were going on before. I think it is important to see the Taliban at that time in this context. That is how almost all ordinary Afghans remember them.’

Reeve knew more than he perhaps cared to about life in pre-Taliban Kabul.

‘January 1994 was the worst, when Dostum [the Uzbek leader] changed sides . . . the slaughter of innocents caught up in the fighting was appalling, ghastly. Hundreds upon hundreds were killed and badly injured, week by week. A million people fled Kabul, mostly on foot, carrying what they could. The city’s hospitals were full to bursting. I didn’t see a single Afghan smiling for months.’

One of the West’s central misunderstandings about the Taliban was a failure to see that their conservatism differed from the rest of the country not in kind, but in degree. Women had always been abused by Afghan men – and not just by Pashtun men, either, but in the villages of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras too. The main difference was that the Taliban were more systematic than the mujahideen ever were in the way they exerted their power; and when their religious police beat a woman with their switches for showing her ankles, they did so openly, in public. It certainly didn’t look good. But the maltreatment of the capital’s long-suffering women came as less of a shock to most of them than the horrified West ever properly grasped. Beatings, however cruel and outrageous, were also infinitely preferable to murder and rape: common crimes in the years preceding the Taliban, but which virtually disappeared once they were in charge.