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Monday, July 23, 2001
By S. Amjad Hussain, Block News Alliance
KABUL, Afghanistan -- It takes up to eight hours of rough driving over potholes and craters to reach Kabul from Pakistan's fabled Khyber Pass. Along the way lie abandoned villages, defunct irrigation channels and the rusting carcasses of Soviet tanks.
Once this was the approach to the most cosmopolitan city in Central Asia. Now it is a sandy wasteland. And much of Kabul, a fabled stop on the Silk Road, resembles Dresden after the horrific firebombing of World War II.
Twenty years ago, this Texas-sized nation of 25 million people was among the last battlegrounds of the half-century Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Following the Soviet occupation and a long civil war, it fell at last under the harsh and mysterious rule of the Taliban, the world's most repressive theocracy.
Health care in Afghanistan has reached rock bottom
American policy puzzling to Taliban officials
Despite the hardships, Kabul's 2.5 million people function rather well, especially compared with the rest of the ravaged country.
The main bazaars and markets are busy most of the time. There is plenty of wheat flour, cooking oil and grains from Pakistan. Here and there, a few eating places remain; the aroma of roasted meat from sidewalk grills permeates the evening air.
Fresh vegetables and fruit are plentiful, and cheap cloth, shoes, electric bulbs, kerosene lamps and other necessities of everyday life, most imported from Pakistan and China, are easily available to those few who can afford them.
But it is a medieval world -- one that would seem strange even to natives who left a few short decades ago.
For millenia, nomads wandered with the seasons, moving from Pakistan to Afghanistan and back in an age-old rhythm celebrated in James Michener's novel "The Caravan" and the poetry of Rudyard Kipling:
When springtime flushes the desert grass
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
The nomadic life is no more.
U.N. flags dot vast tracts of land off the main roads, warning of deadly land mines. Adulterers are put behind walls and run over by tanks; criminals are executed by firing squad and their corpses hung from cranes for days for all to see.
Kabul is a place of flickering electricity and eerie quiet, broken five times a day by the piercing call to prayer.
An ancient land
Understanding today's Afghanistan would be impossible without knowing some of the forces that have shaped this hard-to-reach land, behind the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
The ancient Greeks and Persians fought over this soil. The nomadic, Buddhist Kushans followed, leaving a deep imprint on the culture.
Islam and a string of Muslim dynasties arrived in the 10th century. Genghis Khan, the Central Asian Turks, the Moguls all held sway for a spell. As the empires retreated, kings from the various Afghan tribes maintained an uneasy hold on the country. The closest thing to normalcy this nation has known began in 1929.
The Afghan tribes jointly chose Nadir Khan king. He was a reformer who sought to bring Afghanistan out of its feudal past -- and paid for it with his life. In the four years of his reign, Nadir Khan opened schools, started a legislature with two houses, and sent young Afghans -- boys and girls -- to study abroad.
Partly because of tribal rivalry and partly because of opposition to his reforms, he was assassinated in 1933. But his death brought his son, Zahir Shah, to power -- and began the longest period of peace modern Afghanistan has experienced.
Zahir Shah continued his father's policy of cautious reforms. Finally, in 1973, he was deposed by his cousin and prime minister, Sardar Daud Khan, and sent to Rome to live out his life in exile.
The coup that deposed King Zahir wasn't bloody -- but virtually everything that followed was.
Within six years, the former Soviet Union engineered three murderous coups and countercoups and set the stage for its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. For Moscow, Afghanistan became a nightmare often compared with the American experience in Vietnam. The Afghans do not take kindly to foreigners ruling their country.
Shortly after the Soviet invasion, a rag-tag army of freedom fighters, the Mujahideen, declared they would wage a jihad, or "holy war, " against the invaders -- and they were as good as their word. Thanks in part to financial and material help from the West, the guerrilla war was bloody and long.
The Soviet Union gave up in February 1989. Nobody knew it then, but that retreat signaled the beginning of the end for European communism. By the end of the year, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and former satellite nations had liberated themselves from the Soviets.
A horrible price
The price for Afghanistan was horrible. Poor to begin with, the nation was devastated. A million Afghans were dead; 6 million were uprooted and forced to live in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. And victory in no way brought peace.
The Mujahideen were united only so long as they faced the common foreign infidel. When the Soviets were gone, they took each other on for control of the country, and Afghanistan sank into anarchy.
Rival warlords controlled the passage of goods and travelers through their scraps of territory. The worst features of civil war and gangster culture prevailed: trade in illicit drugs, kidnapping for ransom, general lawlessness.
Different factions mercilessly rained rockets and bombs on Kabul. Traders had to pay outrageous sums to move goods over short distances, which meant that much trade simply dried up. Warlords sold every piece of public property they could -- including telephone poles and wires.
Life for the common people became an essay in misery. Then, in the spring of 1994, when two girls were kidnapped and raped by a local Mujahid commander in the southern city of Kandahar, a young teacher and his students decided they'd had enough.
The rise of the Taliban
Mullah Omar and 30 students at his religious school somehow scraped together 16 rifles and attacked the stronghold of the evil warlord and freed the girls. They hanged the rapist from the barrel of a tank.
A similar incident followed, and another.
Suddenly, Afghanistan had a Robin Hood. Mullah Omar, then about 35, said all he wanted was a just Islamic order. Gradually, students and teachers from religious schools organized and asserted their authority throughout the Kandahar region, becoming known as the Taliban, a Persian word meaning "students of Islamic knowledge."
Though considered extreme even by fellow Muslims today, at the time they were welcomed as saviors.
The roots of these religious warriors date back to the 19th century, when the Muslims in India started a religious school designed to inculcate religious values in their youth and counter the trend toward Western education. Similar schools were gradually established across India in what is now Pakistan, and they attracted a large number of Afghans as well.
The underlying philosophy was as deeply anti-modern as it was anti-Western. It accepts old religious traditions and opposes any new interpretations. The curriculum gives believers a strong sense of continuity and comfort -- but effectively rules out any accommodation with the modern.
The Taliban has taken even this extreme philosophy to extremes, especially when it comes to their view of women's limited role in society and their fiercely negative attitude toward Shiite Muslims, who they regard as heretics.
Why are they fanatical?
It is important to remember they are mostly young -- and literally, the orphans of the Afghanistan war. Most grew up in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan during the war against the Soviets. They knew their homeland, but only from a distance and only through the prism of Islamic fundamentalism.
The young exiles learned nothing about their own history except for the war of liberation from the Soviets. Their own "jihad" that followed -- against the tyranny of the warlords -- gave their lives meaning.
Could the Taliban possibly be the answer to Afghanistan's seemingly never-ending nightmare? Then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto decided to throw the dice and gamble that they were.
Saudi Arabia followed suit. Soon, the Taliban began to conquer more and more territory, taking aim at the capital, Kabul. But they first needed to decide how they would govern.
Commander of the Faithful
In the spring of 1996, 1,200 mullahs -- religious teachers -- met in Kandahar to tackle these questions. Ethnically, most were Pushtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, though only 38 percent of the population. There was some dissent, but the majority wanted to install as leader Mullah Omar, the young cleric who had started the Taliban movement by rescuing the kidnapped girls in 1994.
But who was he? Legends had started to grow around this shadowy figure. Most accounts say Mohammed Omar was born about 1959. He is said to have fought against the Soviets, at one point losing his right eye.
Admirers say he eats simple food, sleeps on the floor, and never utters a sentence without mentioning Allah's name. He is, by all accounts, shy and reclusive.
It took the Taliban six months to capture Kabul and unify most of the country under their rule. By the time the Taliban laid siege to the capital, the Communist government had been toppled and its leader, Najibullah, imprisoned in the United Nations compound in Kabul.
With the Taliban at the gates of the city, President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a nonfundamentalist guerrilla leader, fled to the north, where his "Northern Alliance " still controls a tiny strip of territory. Najibullah was then summarily executed and his body left strung up in the bazaar for days.
Most people throughout the nation were initially eager to see the Taliban take power, for the same reason they were greeted as heroes in Kandahar. Tired of anarchy and lawlessness, the people welcomed them as holy knights.
They indeed restored law and order. They disarmed the population and insisted on enforcing a strict version of Sharia -- Islamic law. They banned music, closed schools for girls, forbad women to work outside the home, and ordered every male to grow a beard. They instituted public executions for murderers and cut off the hands of thieves.
Afghanistan under the Taliban is not governed like most modern states. It is truly a theocracy.
Orthodoxy is enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtues and Prevention of Vice. The ministry, modeled after a similar one in Saudi Arabia, even has its own religious police.
These police have broad powers, even over minor matters. Those caught with music cassettes get seven days in jail -- and have their heads shaved. A man without a beard is thrown in jail until he grows one.
Two years ago, the religious police arrested an entire Pakistani soccer team and shaved their heads. They had violated the rule against public immodesty by playing in shorts. Afghanistan apologized after the government of Pakistan protested.
The Taliban also frown, as fundamentalist Muslims, against making any kinds of human images or taking photographs. The ministry of foreign affairs requested that I not take pictures of any living being. I was advised to not keep my camera in the open.
Education has suffered enormously. Women are essentially not being educated. But a vast part of an entire generation of boys is growing up uneducated, as well, because female teachers have been forcibly retired and there are not enough male teachers to do the job.
There are voices of dissent, but they are severely muted. People are reluctant to talk openly because of a vast network of informers.
Visiting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I briefly saw a distinguished Afghan with a flowing white beard, a long frock coat, and an astrakhan hat of lambskin. Our eyes met. He whispered how lucky I was not to be living in this hellhole.
Before I could respond, he turned and walked rapidly away.
