by Ahmed Rashid
Every Kabuli woman I met during 1995–96 – and reporters could then easily meet and talk to women on the street, in shops and offices – knew their precarious lives would only get worse if the Taliban captured Kabul. One such woman was Nasiba Gul, a striking 27-year-old single woman who aspired to be part of the modern world. A 1990 graduate of Kabul University, she held down a good job with an NGO. Dressed in a long skirt and high heels, she rarely bothered to cover her face, throwing just a small scarf over her head when she travelled across the city. ‘The Taliban just want to trample women into the dust. No woman, not even the poorest or most conservative wants the Taliban to rule Afghanistan,’ said Nasiba. ‘Islam says women are equal to men and respect should be given to women. But the Taliban's actions are turning people against even Islam,’ she added. Nasiba's fears were justified, for when the Taliban captured Kabul, women disappeared from public view. Nasiba was forced to stop working and left for Pakistan.
The Taliban leaders were all from the poorest, most conservative and least literate southern Pashtun provinces of Afghanistan. In Mullah Omar's village women had always gone around fully veiled and no girl had ever gone to school because there were none. Omar and his colleagues transposed their own milieu, their own experience, or lack of it, with women, to the entire country and justified their policies through the Koran. For a time, some aid agencies claimed that this was the Afghan cultural tradition which had to be respected. But in a country so diverse in its ethnicity and levels of development, there was no universal standard of tradition or culture for women's role in society. Nor had any Afghan ruler before the Taliban ever insisted on such dress codes as compulsory beards for men and the burkha.
The rest of Afghanistan was not even remotely like the south. Afghan Pashtuns in the east, heavily influenced by Pakistani Pashtuns, were proud to send their girls to school and many continued to do so under the Taliban, by running village schools or sending their families to Pakistan. Here aid agencies such as the Swedish Committee supported some 600 primary schools with 150,000 students of whom 30,000 were girls. When Pashtun tribal elders demanded education for girls, Taliban governors did not and could not object.9 In Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan tens of thousands of Pashtun girls studied. Outside the Pashtun belt, all other ethnic groups vigorously encouraged female education. Afghanistan's strength was its ethnic diversity and women had as many roles as there were tribes and nationalities.
Afghanistan's cities were even more diverse. Kandahar was always a conservative city but Herat's female elite once spoke French as a second language and copied the fashions of the Shah's court in Tehran. Forty per cent of Kabul's women worked, both under the communist regime and the post-1992 Mujaheddin government. Women with even a smattering of education and a job exchanged their traditional clothes for skirts, high heels and make-up. They went to the movies, played sports and danced and sang at weddings. Common sense alone should have dictated that to win hearts and minds, the Taliban would have to relax their gender policy according to the prevalent realities in the areas they took control of. Instead they viewed Kabul as a den of iniquity, a Sodom and Gomorrah where women had to be beaten into conforming with Taliban standards of behaviour. And they viewed the northerners as impure Muslims who had to be forcibly re-Islamicized.
The Taliban's uncompromising attitude was also shaped by their own internal political dynamic and the nature of their recruiting base. Their recruits – the orphans, the rootless, the lumpen proleteriat from the war and the refugee camps – had been bought up in a totally male society. In the madrassa milieu, control over women and their virtual exclusion was a powerful symbol of manhood and a reaffirmation of the students‘ commitment to jihad. Denying a role for women gave the Taliban a kind of false legitimacy amongst these elements. ‘This conflict against women is rooted in the political beliefs and ideologies, not in Islam or the cultural norms. The Taliban are a new generation of Muslim males who are products of a war culture, who have spent much of their adult lives in complete segregation from their own communities. In Afghan society, women have traditionally been used as instruments to regulate social behaviour, and as such are powerful symbols in Afghan culture,’ said Simi Wali, the head of an Afghan NGO.10
Taliban leaders repeatedly told me that if they gave women greater freedom or a chance to go to school, they would lose the support of their rank and file, who would be disillusioned by a leadership that had compromised principles under pressure. They also claimed their recruits would be weakened and subverted by the possibility of sexual opportunities and thus not fight with the same zeal. So the oppression of women became a benchmark for the Taliban's Islamic radicalism, their aim to ‘cleanse’ society and to keep the morale of their troops high. The gender issue became the main platform of the Taliban's resistance to UN and Western governments’ attempts to make them compromise and moderate their policies. Compromise with the West would signal a defeat that they were wrong all along, defiance would signal victory.
Hardline Taliban turned the argument of the outside world on its head. They insisted that it was up to the West to moderate their position and accommodate the Taliban, rather than that the Taliban recognize universal human rights. ‘Let us state what sort of education the UN wants. This is a big infidel policy which gives such obscene freedom to women which would lead to adultery and herald the destruction of Islam. In any Islamic country where adultery becomes common, that country is destroyed and enters the domination of the infidels because their men become like women and women cannot defend themselves. Anybody who talks to us should do so within Islam's framework. The Holy Koran cannot adjust itelf to other people's requirements, people should adjust themselves to the requirements of the Holy Koran,’ said Attorney General Maulvi Jalilullah Maulvizada.11 The Taliban could not explain how a deeply rooted religion like Islam could be so undermined at the hands of adulterers.
All tribal Pashtuns also followed Pashtunwali, a social code which gave the tribal jirga or council the right to make judgments on cases from a traditional pantheon of laws and punishments, especially when it came to disputes over ownership of land and women and murder. The line between Pashtunwali and Sharia law has always been blurred for the Pashtuns. Taliban punishments were in fact drawn largely from Pashtunwali rather than the Sharia. But Pashtunwali was practised in varying degrees, to a lesser or greater extent across the Pashtun belt and it certainly did not govern the practices of other ethnic groups. The fact that the Taliban were determined to impose Pashtunwali-Sharia law on these ethnic groups by force only deepened the ethnic divide in the country. Non-Pashtuns saw this is an attempt to impose Kandahari Pashtun laws on the entire country.
There were no political conditions in which the Taliban were prepared to compromise. After every military defeat they tightened their gender policies ferociously, under the assumption that harsher measures against women would sustain morale amongst their defeated soldiers. And every victory led to another tightening because the newly conquered populations had to be shown Taliban power. The policy of ‘engagement’ with the Taliban to moderate their policies, advocated by the international community, gave no dividends. And their insistence that they would allow women's education after the war was over became more and more meaningless. The capture of Herat in 1995 was the first indicator to Afghans and the outside world that the Taliban would not compromise on the gender issue. Herat, the heart of medieval Islam in the entire region, was a city of mosques and madrassas, but it had an ancient, liberal, Islamic tradition. It was the home of Islamic arts and crafts, miniature painting, music, dance, carpet-making and numerous stories about its redoubtable and beautiful women.
Heratis still recount the story of Queen Gowhar Shad, the daughter-in-law of the conquerer Taimur who moved the Timurid capital from Samarkand to Herat in 1405 after Taimur's death. One day in the company of 200 ‘ruby-lipped’, beautiful ladies-in-waiting, the Queen inspected a mosque and madrassa complex she was building on the outskirts of Herat. The madrassa st
udents (or taliban) had been asked to vacate the premises while the Queen and her entourage visited, but one student had fallen asleep in his room. He was awoken by an exquisitely attractive lady-in-waiting. When she rejoined the Queen, the lady was panting and dishevelled by the exertions of passionate love-making and thus she was discovered. Instead of punishing her or the student, the Queen ordered all her ladies-in-waiting to marry the students in a mass ceremony so as to bless them and ensure they avoided temptation in the future. She gave each student clothes and a salary and ordered that husband and wife should meet once a week as long as the students studied hard. It was the kind of story that epitomized the liberal, human tradition of Islam and madrassa education in Herat.
The Taliban had no knowledge of Herat's history or traditions. They arrived to drive Herati women indoors. People were barred from visiting the shrines of Sufi saints of which Herat had an abundance. The Taliban cancelled out years of effort by the Mujaheddin commander Ismael Khan to educate the population, by shutting down all girls‘ schools. Most boys’ schools also closed as their teachers were women. They segregated the few functioning hospitals, shut down bathhouses and banned women from the bazaar. As a result Herati women were the first to rebel against Taliban excesses. On 17 October 1996 more than 100 women protested outside the office of the Governor against the closure of the city's bathhouses. The women were beaten and then arrested by the Taliban religious police, who went from house to house warning men to keep their women indoors.
The international media and the UN largely chose to ignore these events in Herat, but several Western NGOs realized the profound implications for their future activities. After a long internal debate and fruitless negotiations with the Taliban in Herat, UNICEF and Save the Children suspended their educational programmes in Herat because girls were excluded from them.12 The suspension of these aid programmes did not deter the Taliban, who quickly realized that other UN agencies were not prepared to take a stand against them on the gender issue. Moreover they had succeeded in dividing the aid-giving community. UN policy was in a shambles because the UN agencies had failed to negotiate from a common platform. As each UN agency tried to cut its own deal with the Taliban, the UN compromised its principles, while Taliban restrictions on women only escalated. ‘The UN is on a slippery slope. The UN thinks by making small compromises it can satisfy the international community and satisfy the Taliban. In fact it is doing neither,’ the head of a European NGO told me.13
The world only woke up to the Taliban's gender policies after they captured Kabul in 1996. The UN could not avoid ignoring the issue after the massive international media coverage of the Taliban's hanging of former President Najibullah and the treatment of Kabul's women. Protest statements from world leaders such as UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the heads of UNICEF, UNESCO, UNHCR and the European Commissioner for Human Rights met with no Taliban response.14Beauty, hair and make-up salons were shut down in Kabul, as were women's bathhouses – the only place where hot water was available. Tailors were ordered not to measure women for clothes, but learned to keep the measurements of their regular customers in their heads. Fashion magazines were destroyed. ‘Paint your nails, take a snapshot of a friend, blow a flute, clap to a beat, invite a foreigner over for tea and you have broken a Taliban edict,’ wrote an American reporter.15
Until Kabul, the UN's disastrous lack of a policy had been ignored but then it became a scandal and the UN came in for scathing criticism from feminist groups. Finally the UN agencies were forced to draw up a common position. A statement spoke of ‘maintaining and promoting the inherent equality and dignity of all people’ and ‘not discriminating between the sexes, races, ethnic groups or religions’.16 But the same UN document also stated that ‘international agencies hold local customs and cultures in high respect’. It was a classic UN compromise, which gave the Taliban the lever to continue stalling, by promising to allow female education after peace came. Nevertheless, by October 1996 the UN was forced to suspend eight income-generating projects for women in Kabul, because women were no longer allowed to work in them.
During the next 18 months, round after round of fruitless negotiations took place between the UN, NGOs, Western governments and the Taliban, by which time it became clear that a hardline lobby of Taliban ulema in Kandahar were determined to get rid of the UN entirely. The Taliban tightened the screws ever further. They closed down home schools for girls which had been allowed to continue and then prevented women from attending general hospitals. In May 1997 the religious police beat up five female staff of the US NGO Care International and then demanded that all aid projects receive clearance from not just the relevant ministry, but also from the Ministeries of Interior, Public Health, Police and the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. This was followed by a demand that all Muslim female humanitarian workers coming to Afghanistan be accompanied by a male relative. Finally in July 1997 the Taliban insisted that all 35 UN and NGO agencies move out of their offices to one pre-selected compound at the destroyed Polytechnic building. As the European Union suspended furthur humanitarian aid, the UN and the NGOs left Kabul.
The plight of Afghanistan's women often hid the fact that urban males did not fare much better under the Taliban, especially non-Pashtuns. All Kabul males were given just six weeks to grow a full beard, even though some of the ethnic groups such as the Hazaras have very limited beard growth. Beards could not be trimmed shorter than a man's fist, leading to jokes that Afghanistan's biggest import-export business was male facial hair and that men did not need visas to travel to Afghanistan, they just needed a beard. The religious police stood at street corners with scissors cutting off long hair and often beating culprits. Men had to wear their shalwars or baggy trousers above the ankle and everyone had to say their prayers five times a day.
The Taliban also clamped down on homosexuality. Kandahar's Pashtuns were notorious for their affairs with young boys and the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key motives for Mullah Omar in mobilizing the Taliban. But homosexuality continued and the punishments were bizarre if not inhuman. Two soldiers caught indulging in homosexuality in Kabul in April 1998 were beaten mercilessly and then tied up and driven around Kabul in the back of a pick-up with their faces blackened by engine oil. Men accused of sodomy faced the previously unheard of ‘Islamic’ punishment of having a wall toppled over them.
In February 1998 three men sentenced to death for sodomy in Kandahar were taken to the base of a huge mud and brick wall, which was then toppled over them by a tank. They remained buried under the rubble for half an hour, but one managed to survive. ‘His eminence the Amirul Momineen [Mullah Omar] attended the function to give Sharia punishment to the three buggerers in Kandahar,’ wrote Anis, the Taliban newspaper.17 In March 1998 two men were killed by the same method in Kabul. ‘Our religious scholars are not agreed on the right kind of punishment for homosexuality,’ said Mullah Mohammed Hassan, epitomizing the kind of debates the Taliban were preoccupied with. ‘Some say we should take these sinners to a high roof and throw them down, while others say we should dig a hole beside a wall, bury them, then push the wall down on top of them.’18
The Taliban also banned every conceivable form of entertainment, which in a poor, deprived country such as Afghanistan was always in short supply anyway. Afghans were ardent movie-goers but movies, TV, videos, music and dancing were all banned. ‘Of course we realize that people need some entertainment but they can go to the parks and see the flowers, and from this they will learn about Islam,’ Mullah Mohammed Hassan told me. According to Education Minister Mullah Abdul Hanifi, the Taliban ‘oppose music because it creates a strain in the mind and hampers study of Islam’.19 Singing and dancing were banned at weddings which for centuries had been major social occasions from which hundreds of musicians and dancers made a living. Most of them fled to Pakistan.
Nobody was allowed to hang paintings, portraits or photographs in their homes. One of Afghanistan's foremo
st artists, Mohammed Mashal, aged 82, who was painting a huge mural showing 500 years of Herat's history was forced to watch as the Taliban whitewashed over it. Simply put, the Taliban did not recognize the very idea of culture. They banned Nawroz, the traditional Afghan New Year's celebrations as anti-Islamic. An ancient spring festival, Nawroz marks the first day of the Persian solar calendar when people visit the graves of their relatives. People were forcibly stopped from doing so. They banned Labour Day on 1 May for being a communist holiday, for a time they also banned Ashura, the Shia Islamic month of mourning and even restricted any show of festivity at Eid, the principle Muslim clelebration of the year.
Most Afghans felt demoralized by the fact that the Islamic world declined to take up the task of condemning the Taliban's extremism. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states have never issued a single statement on the need for women's education or human rights in Afghanistan. Nor did they ever question the Taliban's interpretation of Sharia. Asian Muslim countries were also silent. Surprisingly, Iran issued the toughest defence of women's rights under Islam. ‘Through their fossilized policies the Taliban stop girls from attending school, stop women working out of their homes and all that in the name of Islam. What could be worse than committing violence, narrow-mindedess and limiting women's rights and defaming Islam,’ said Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, as early as 1996.20 Iranian criticism of Taliban policies escalated dramatically after the deaths of their diplomats in Mazar in 1998.