Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Second Edition

by Ahmed Rashid

  After 1996, power was entirely concentrated in the hands of Mullah Omar while the Kandahar Shura was consulted less and less. Mullah Omar's confidant Wakil made this apparent. ‘Decisions are based on the advice of the Amirul Momineen. For us consultation is not necessary. We believe that this is in line with the Sharia. We abide by the Amir's view even if he alone takes this view. There will not be a head of state. Instead there will be an Amirul Momineen. Mullah Omar will be the highest authority and the government will not be able to implement any decision to which he does not agree. General elections are incompatible with Sharia and therefore we reject them.’5

  To implement his decisions Mullah Omar relied less on the Kabul government and increasingly upon the Kandahari ulema and the religious police in Kabul. Maulvi Said Mohammed Pasanai, the Chief Justice of Kandahar's Islamic Supreme Court, who had taught Omar the basics of Sharia law during the jihad, became a key adviser to Omar. He claimed responsibility for ending lawlessness in the country through Islamic punishments. ‘We have judges presiding over 13 High Courts in 13 provinces and everywhere there is peace and security for the people,’ he told me in 1997.6 Pasanai, who is in his 80s, said that he had handed out Islamic punishments for nearly half a century in local villages and guided the Mujaheddin in applying Sharia during the jihad.

  The Kandahar Islamic Supreme Court became the most important court in the country because of its proximity to Omar. The Court appointed Islamic judges, Qazis, and Assistant Qazis in the provinces and once or twice a year assembled them all in Kandahar to discuss cases and the application of Sharia law. A parallel system exists in Kabul where the Justice Ministry and the Supreme Court of Afghanistan are based. The Kabul Supreme Court handles about 40 cases a week and comprises eight departments which deal with laws related to commerce, business, criminal and public law, but it clearly does not have the same powers as the Kandahar Supreme Court. According to Attorney General Maulvi Jalilullah Maulvizada, ‘All the laws are being Islamicized. Those laws repugnant to Islam are being removed. It will take several years for us to go through all the old laws and change or remove them.’

  The worsening economic situation and political alienation in Taliban-controlled areas along with the massive military losses they suffered, led to increasing internal divisions. In January 1997, the Taliban faced a revolt from within the Kandahar heartland over forced conscription. At least four Taliban recruiters were killed by villagers who refused to join the army. The Taliban were driven out from several villages around Kandahar after gunfights in which there were casualties on both sides.7 Village elders said that their young men faced death if they joined the army. ‘The Taliban had promised peace, instead they have given us nothing but war,’ said one village elder.8 In June, the Taliban executed 18 army deserters in Kandahar jail.9 There were similar movements against conscription in Wardak and Paktia provinces. Forced conscription has increased the Taliban's unpopularity and forced them to draw more upon recruits from Pakistani madrassas and Afghan refugees settled there.

  Meanwhile the simmering differences between the Shuras in Kandahar and Kabul escalated dramatically in April 1998 after the visit of the US envoy Bill Richardson to Kabul. Mullah Rabbani, the head of the Kabul Shura, agreed to implement Richardson's point agenda, but the next day the agreement was rejected by Mullah Omar from Kandahar. Rabbani went off on one of his periodic long leaves and there were rumours he was under arrest. In October 1998, the Taliban arrested over 60 people in Jalalabad, the largest city in eastern Afghanistan, claiming there was a coup attempt by ex-military officers loyal to General Shahnawaz Tanai, the Pashtun general who in 1990 had deserted Najibullah's army and joined the Mujaheddin. His Pashtun officers had supported the Taliban since 1994 and many served in the Taliban army.10 In December the Taliban shot a student dead and wounded several others during a disturbance at the medical faculty of Nangarhar University in Jalalabad. Strikes and anti-Taliban protests took place in the city.

  The growing discontent in Jalalabad appeared to be instigated by supporters of the more moderate Mullah Rabbani, who had built a political base in the city. Jalalabad's powerful traders who ran the smuggling trade from Pakistan also wanted a more liberal attitude from the Taliban. After the Jalalabad incidents Mullah Rabbani was once again recalled from Kabul to Kandahar and disappeared from view for several months. By 1998, the Kabul Shura was keen to moderate Taliban policies so that UN agencies could return to Afghanistan and greater international aid flow to the cities. Taliban leaders in the Kabul and Jalalabad Shuras were feeling the growing public discontent at rising prices, lack of food and the cut-back in humanitarian aid. However, Mullah Omar and the Kandahar leadership refused to allow an expansion of UN aid activities and eventually forced the UN to quit.

  In the winter of 1998-99 there were several acts of looting and robbery by Taliban soldiers, reflecting the growing indiscipline caused by economic hardship. In the worst such incident in Kabul in January 1999, six Taliban soldiers had their right arms and left feet amputated for looting. The authorities then hung the amputated limbs from trees in the city centre where they could be seen by the public until they rotted. Although internal differences increased speculation about serious weakness within the Taliban, which could lead to an intra-Taliban civil war, Mullah Omar's exalted position and increased powers allowed him to keep total control of the movement.

  Thus the Taliban, like the Mujaheddin before them, had resorted to one-man rule with no organizational mechanism to accommodate other ethnic groups or points of view. The struggle between moderate and hardline Taliban went underground with no Taliban leader willing to contradict Omar or oppose him. Such a situation is more than likely to lead to an eventual explosion within the Taliban – an intra-Taliban civil war, which can only once again divide the Pashtuns and bring more suffering to the common people.

  ∼ 8 ∼

  A VANISHED GENDER:

  WOMEN, CHILDREN AND

  TALIBAN CULTURE

  Nobody ever wants to see the inside of Maulvi Qalamuddin's sparse office in the centre of Kabul. Half the population never will anyway, because the Maulvi does not allow women to even enter the building. A huge Pashtun tribesman with enormous feet and hands, a long thick nose, black eyes and a bushy black beard that touches his desk while he talks, Qalamuddin's physique and name generate fear across the city. As head of the Taliban's religious police, the stream of regulations he issues from this office has dramatically changed the lifestyle of Kabul's once easy-going population and forced Afghan women to disappear entirely from public view.

  Maulvi Qalamuddin runs the Amar Bil Maroof Wa Nahi An al-Munkar, or the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. He himself prefers the translation as Department of Religious Observances. In the streets, people just call the department's thousands of young zealots, who walk around with whips, long sticks and kalashnikovs, the religious police and even more derogatory names. The day I visited him for a rare interview in the summer of 1997, he had just issued new regulations which banned women from wearing high heels, making a noise with their shoes while they walked or wearing make-up. ‘Stylish dress and decoration of women in hospitals is forbidden. Women are duty-bound to behave with dignity, to walk calmly and refrain from hitting their shoes on the ground, which makes noises,’ the edict read. How the zealots could even see women's make-up or their shoes, considering that all women were now garbed in the head to toe burkha was mystifying (see Appendix 1).

  The new edict formalized previous restrictions on disallowing women from working, but it now also banned them from working for Western humanitarian aid agencies, except in the medical sector. ‘Women are not allowed to work in any field except the medical sector. Women working in the medical sector should not sit in the seat next to the driver. No Afghan woman has the right to be transported in the same car as foreigners,’ the edict continued. Education for boys is also at a standstill in Kabul because most of the teachers are women, who now cannot work. An entire generatio
n of Afghan children are growing up without any education. Thousands of educated families have fled Kabul for Pakistan simply beause their children can no longer receive an education.

  I nervously asked Qalamuddin what justified the Taliban's ban on women from working and going to school. ‘We will be blamed by our people if we don't educate women and we will provide education for them eventually, but for now we have serious problems,’ he replied. Like so many mullahs and despite his size, he is surprisingly soft-spoken and I strained to catch his words. ‘There are security problems. There are no provisions for separate transport, separate school buildings and facilities to educate women for the moment. Women must be completely segregated from men. And within us we have those men who cannot behave properly with women. We lost two million people in the war against the Soviets because we had no Sharia law. We fought for Sharia and now this is the organization that will implement it. I will implement it come what may,’ Qalamuddin said emphatically.

  When the Taliban first entered Kabul, the religious police beat men and women in public for not having long enough beards or not wearing the burkha properly. ‘We advise our staff not to beat people on the streets. We only advise people how to behave according to the Sharia. For example, if a person is about to reverse his car into another car, then we just warn you not to reverse now,’ Qalamuddin said with a broad grin on his face, obviously pleased with his modern metaphor.

  The Department is modelled on a similar government organisation in Saudi Arabia and it has recruited thousands of young men, many of them with only a minimum madrassa education from Pakistan. The department is also the Taliban's most effective intelligence agency – a bizarre throwback to KHAD, the enormous intelligence agency run by the communist regime in the 1980s. KHAD, which later changed its name to WAD, employed 15,000 to 30,000 professional spies as well having 100,000 paid informers.1 Qalamuddin admitted that he has thousands of informers in the army, government ministries, hospitals and Western aid agencies. ‘Our staff all have experience in religious issues. And we are an independent organization and we don't take advice from the Justice Ministry or the Supreme Court as to what we should implement. We obey the orders of the Amir Mullah Mohammed Omar.’

  Qalamuddin's edicts are broadcast regularly on Radio Shariat (formerly Radio Kabul) and cover every aspect of social behaviour for the population (see Appendix 1). One addresses public attendance at sports events, which the Taliban had initially banned. ‘All onlookers, while encouraging the sportsmen, are asked to chant Allah-o-Akbar [God is Great] and refrain from clapping. In case the game coincides with prayer time, the game should be interrupted. Both the players and spectators should offer prayers in congregation,’ said the edict. Kite-flying, once a favourite pastime in the spring for Kabulis, is still banned as are all sports for women.

  For the Taliban anyone questioning these edicts, which have no validity in the Koran, is tantamount to questioning Islam itself, even though the Prophet Mohammed's first task was to emancipate women. ‘The supreme, unmistakable test of Islam was the emancipation of women, first beginning to be proclaimed, then – more slowly – on the way to be achieved,’ said Ferdinand Braudel.2 But the Taliban did not allow even Muslim reporters to question these edicts or to discuss interpretations of the Koran. To foreign aid-workers they simply said, ‘You are not Muslim so you have no right to discuss Islam.’ The Taliban were right, their interpretation of Islam was right and everything else was wrong and an expression of human weakness and a lack of piety. ‘The Constitution is the Sharia so we don't need a constitution. People love Islam and that is why they all support the Taliban and appreciate what we are doing,’ said Attorney General Maulvi Jalilullah Maulvizada.3

  However the plight of Afghan women and Afghan society as a whole began well before the Taliban arrived. Twenty years of continuous warfare has destroyed Afghan civil society, the clan community and family structure which provided an important cushion of relief in an otherwise harsh economic landscape. Afghanistan has one of the lowest rated indices for the human condition in the world. The infant mortality rate is 163 deaths per 1,000 births (18 per cent) the highest in the world which compares to an average of 70/1000 in other developing countries. A quarter of all children die before they reach their fifth birthday, compared to one tenth that number in developing countries.

  A staggering 1,700 mothers out of 100,000 die giving birth. Life expectancy for men and women is just 43–44 years old, compared to 61 years for people in other developing countries. Only 29 per cent of the population has access to health and 12 per cent has access to safe water, compared to 80 per cent and 70 per cent respectively in developing states. Children die of simple, preventable diseases like measles and diarrhoea because there are no health facilities and no clean water.4

  Illiteracy was a major problem before the Taliban appeared, affecting 90 per cent of girls and 60 per cent of boys. There were huge swathes of rural Afghanistan where schools had been destroyed in the war and not a single one remained. Thus the Taliban's gender policies only worsened an ongoing crisis. Within three months of the capture of Kabul, the Taliban closed 63 schools in the city affecting 103,000 girls, 148,000 boys and 11,200 teachers, of whom 7,800 were women.5 They shut down Kabul University sending home some 10,000 students of which 4,000 were women. By December 1998, UNICEF reported that the country's educational system was in a state of total collapse with nine in ten girls and two in three boys not enrolled in school.6

  The Afghan people's desperate plight was largely ignored by the outside world. Whereas in the 1980s the war in Afghanistan attracted attention and aid, the moment the Soviets withdrew their troops in 1989, Afghanistan dropped off the radar screen of world attention. The ever dwindling aid from wealthy donor countries, which did not even meet the minimum budgetary requirements of the humanitarian aid effort, became a scandal.

  In 1996 the UN had requested US$124 million for its annual humanitarian aid programme to Afghanistan, but by the end of the year, it had only received US$65 million. In 1997 it asked for US$133 million and received only US$56 million or 42 per cent and the following year it asked for US$157 million but received only US$53 million or 34 per cent. By 1999 the UN had drastically scaled down its request to just US$113 million. In the words of scholar Barnett Rubin: ‘If the situation in Afghanistan is ugly today, it is not because the people of Afghanistan are ugly. Afghanistan is not only the mirror of the Afghans: it is the mirror of the world. “If you do not like the image in the mirror do not break the mirror, break your face,” says an old Persian proverb.’7

  When Kabul's women looked at themselves in the mirror, even before the Taliban captured the city, they saw only despair. In 1996 I met Bibi Zohra in a tiny bakery in Kabul. She was a widow who led a group of young women who prepared nan, the unleavened baked bread every Afghan eats, for widows, orphans and disabled people. Some 400,000 people in Kabul depended on these bakeries funded by the WFP, which included 25,000 familes headed by war widows and 7,000 families headed by disabled men. Zohra's mud shack was pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet holes. It had first been destroyed by rockets fired by Gulbuddin Hikmetyar's forces in 1993, then shelled by the Taliban in 1995.

  With six children and her parents to support she had donated part of the tiny plot of land where her house once stood to WFP for a bakery. ‘Look at my face, don't you see the tragedy of our lives and our country marked all over it?’ she said. ‘Day by day the situation is worsening. We have become beggars dependent on the UN to survive. It is not the Afghan way. Women are exhausted, depressed and devastated. We are just waiting for peace, praying for peace every minute of the day.’

  The plight of Bibi Zohra's children and other kids was even worse. At a playground set up by Save the Children in the battered, half-destroyed Microyan housing complex, rake-thin Afghan children played grimly on the newly installed swings. It was a playground littered with reminders of the war – discarded artillery shell cases, a destroyed tank with a gaping hole where the tu
rret once was and trees lopped down by rocket fire. ‘Women and children face the brunt of the conflict,’ Save the Children's Director Sofie Elieussen told me. ‘Women have to cope with no food and malnutrition for their children. Women suffer from hysteria, trauma and depression because they don't know when the next rocket attack will come. How can children relate to a mother's discipline or affection when they have seen adults killing each other and mothers are unable to provide for their basic needs? There is so much stress that the children don't even trust each other and parents have stopped communicating with their kids or even trying to explain what is going on,’ said Elieussen.

  A UNICEF survey of Kabul's children conducted by Dr Leila Gupta found that most children had witnessed extreme violence and did not expect to survive. Two-thirds of the children interviewed had seen somebody killed by a rocket and scattered corpses or body parts. More than 70 per cent had lost a family member and no longer trusted adults. ‘They all suffer from flashbacks, nightmares and loneliness. Many said they felt their life was not worth living anymore,’ said Dr Gupta. Every norm of family life had been destroyed in the war. When children cease to trust their parents or parents cannot provide security, children have no anchor in the real world.

  Children were caught up in the war on a greater scale than in any other civil conflict in the world. All the warlords had used boy soldiers, some as young as 12 years old, and many were orphans with no hope of having a family, an education or a job except soldiering. The Taliban with their linkages to the Pakistani madrassas encouraged thousands of children to enlist and fight. Entire units were made up of kids as loaders for artillery batteries, ammunition carriers, guarding installations and as fighters. Significantly a major international effort in 1998 to limit the age of soldiers to 18, rather than the current minimum age of 15 met with resistance by the US, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. A 1999 Amnesty International report said there were over 300,000 children under 18 enlisted as soldiers worldwide.8 The plight of women and children would get much worse after the Taliban capture of Kabul.