Taliban (9 page)

Even the apparently barbaric judicial killings at the football stadium were not quite as they appeared. The Taliban were anxious that Sharia justice was not just done, but seen to be done. The people who filled the stadium were not there for their entertainment, but at the insistence of the authorities. The first ever execution in Kabul, interestingly, was not of some apostate but of a young member of the Taliban who had tried to disarm a citizen and ended up shooting him. This was perhaps a deliberate show of impartiality, the Taliban’s way of demonstrating that everyone was equal under Sharia law. The accused – whom neighbours from his area suggested was a teenager with learning difficulties – was despatched by a single shot to the head in accordance with
qisas
, the Sharia equivalent of the Old Testament principle of an eye for an eye. The audience – and the young Talib – were submitted to a lecture on the virtues of Sharia justice for two whole hours before the fatal shot was fired.

The executions were grisly, but there weren’t actually that many of them: dozens, rather than hundreds, were carried out in the years of Taliban rule. ‘The West made a great fuss about it but we don’t seem to object much when the same thing happens in Saudi Arabia,’ commented one observer. ‘And it was pure hypocrisy, coming from America! There have probably been more judicial executions in the state of Texas than there ever were under the Taliban.’
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The regime was accused of brutality, but it was not they who had invented the penalties of Sharia law. In the execution cases, furthermore, it was not they but almost always a bereaved relative who carried them out. This, too, was in accordance with the retaliatory principle of qisas. In fact, the system prefers forgiveness to retaliation; the death sentence is supposed to be applied only as a last resort. At the second public execution in Kabul, the Taliban repeatedly asked a man whose son had been killed in a knife fight if he would not pardon the two accused, who had been brought on to the pitch in chains in the back of a Hi-Lux truck. The man glanced across at them and insisted that he would not, before marching over and swiftly sawing off their heads with a butcher’s knife. When a convicted thief had his hand chopped off it was done surgically by a doctor in a balaclava. The thief would then be rushed off to hospital in the back of a pick-up truck to have the stump treated and sewn up. The real point, perhaps, was that these punishments were effective. The dismembered hands were sometimes hung up in the town as a warning to others. Crime very soon tailed off. One foreigner living in Kabul remembered that it wasn’t
long before you really could leave your keys in the ignition of your car and know that no one was going to steal it.

Most Westerners only saw what they wanted to see, and read the Taliban wrong from the start. An edict preventing kite-fighting, for example, seemed typical of the Taliban’s joylessness, and became famous in the West following the publication in 2003 of
The Kite Runner
, the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini that was later turned into a film. But the Taliban had no interest in persecuting children. The reason was that kite-flyers tended to stand on the roofs of buildings, which often afforded a view into the enclosed compound home of the next-door neighbour – and potentially therefore of unveiled women. Children flying kites at street level were rarely molested by the religious police.

The Taliban did not wish to antagonize the West. On the contrary, the regime always craved international recognition from the United Nations, and was often sensitive enough to respond to legitimate criticism. In October 1998, for instance, it banned the use of landmines. The move was partly self-serving. As a movement that had always been on the offensive they naturally had a healthy fear of anti-personnel mines, vast numbers of which continued to be sown by the Northern Alliance. But genuine humanitarianism played its part in the decision too, according to Guy Willoughby, the Director of the Halo Trust demining agency.

‘We had a perfectly sensible working relationship with them. We liaised over which village areas they wanted us to work in and they were always pretty straight to deal with.’

The mullahs had not intended to provoke an exodus of foreign aid agencies when they ordered the relocation of their Kabul offices, and certainly never ordered them to leave the country. The United Nations agencies themselves, together with the
International Committee for the Red Cross, were in any case exempt from the relocation order, while the Halo Trust simply weathered the storm, judging its mission to be too important to abandon over a point of principle. Between 1996 and 2001, Willoughby’s 1,400 staff were able to remove over 40,000 mines in areas away from the front lines in a demining programme that actually accelerated slightly over the Taliban period.

‘They were no problem to work with if you didn’t wind them up. We didn’t put in female managers for the hell of it . . . Actually, we didn’t have any female managers. Our deminers had to grow longer beards, and our programme managers had to hide their music cassettes under their car seats at checkpoints, but so what? It was no big deal.’

He was highly critical of Emma Bonino and her famous visit to the mother and child clinic in 1997, which he said had hardened European attitudes to the Taliban and led to the withdrawal of EU funding for Halo.

‘She infuriated the Taliban and that was completely unnecessary. They were tough, unpleasant people, but it is a question of context. You can’t compare them with what went before. Halo operated in Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996 when West Kabul was being destroyed. That was a truly dreadful period: a fact that is still being airbrushed out of history.’

There was evidence that the leadership were genuinely baffled at the West’s outrage over their treatment of women. In Pashtun culture, women had never had the same rights as men. Restricting them to their homes, the Taliban argued with complete sincerity, was as ever necessary ‘for their own protection’ – by which of course they meant for namus, the protection of the honour of women. Kabul had been very over-filmed and the West had
assumed that what was going on there was replicated across the country, although this was never the case. In safe rural areas, for instance, women were permitted and able to go out unaccompanied by a relative, just as they had always done.

The Taliban leadership did not see themselves as oppressors of women but as their defenders. Before 1996 it was not uncommon for Pashtun tribal feuds to be resolved through a trade-off of women – a tradition known as
swara
, which often ended in a forced marriage. This was only one of the instruments of badal, or obligation to seek revenge, available under Pashtunwali. In some instances, women were simply executed in settlement of the bloodprice. It is often forgotten that Mullah Omar issued an edict putting an end to both practices.

At the same time, he seemed strangely reluctant to actively promote women’s rights in Kabul, or even to rein in the religious police’s worst excesses. The main reason for that was the war. Taliban leaders repeatedly told the writer Ahmed Rashid 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.’
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And yet many girls did go to school under the Taliban. Indeed, several Western NGO workers thought it probable that more Kabuli girls were educated under the Taliban than in the preceding era, if only because school education of any kind was impossible during the violence of the early 1990s. Private tuition also carried on in people’s homes. The leadership had no ideological objection to girls’ education in itself; what they most minded about was the
corrupting influence of co-education. Girls, and indeed female teachers, were forbidden from attending mixed schools, and the education of many undoubtedly suffered as a result. Of course this was discriminatory, for it was never the boys who were told to stay away from their formerly co-educational establishments. Yet the Taliban always said they intended to build new, single-sex schools for girls. The fact that they never did was due to the lack of money rather than ideology. The regime was always cash-strapped, and simply could not afford such projects while they were busy with the war.

Omar appreciated that at least some types of female education were essential. For instance, he was happy to sanction the setting up of a training programme in rooms at the central hospital in Kabul, where female medical students could study to become doctors; some 1,200 of them graduated. Meanwhile Qari Barakatullah Salim, a well-known public figure famed for his sung recitations of the Koran, was permitted to run a large girls-only school in the centre of the capital throughout the Taliban period. He employed twenty-six teachers who taught over seven hundred girls aged seven and above. This was no madrasah but a regular secondary school, with a curriculum that included maths, English, even biology.

‘The Taliban were always suspicious of foreign influence in education, and their suspicion grew worse as the foreigners’ demonization of them deepened,’ Salim told me. ‘But they had no problem with girls’ schools so long as they had no association with foreign NGOs or access to their funding. Islam says that girls should be educated. The Prophet himself was married to an educated businesswoman, Khadijah. The Taliban leadership understands that no nation can survive without education; it is essential to humanity. We are as beasts without it.’

His main difficulty in those days, he remembered, was ‘an extreme lack of money. We were privately funded with small donations from the parents. We had just enough to pay the teachers’ small salaries . . . There was nothing at all for books and pens and other essential teaching materials.’

However reminiscent of Nazis the roaming squads of religious police might have been – and the comparison was made, even by the United Nations, after an edict was issued ordering that Kabul’s tiny Hindu community should mark themselves out by wearing a piece of yellow cloth on their shirt pockets – the repression of the people was never comparable to Germany’s treatment of Jews. A Taliban spokesman, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, retorted that the yellow markers were ‘for the Hindus’ own protection so that they can be recognized and not be bothered about the length of their beards, or not heeding the call to prayer’. He even claimed that the edict had not been a Taliban idea, but had been requested by the Hindus themselves.

Even at the height of their zeal, the religious police were not allowed to forget that their mission was to protect the public. On 30 July 1998, for example, an AFP reporter watched them hurl dozens of televisions and video players out on to the street as they mounted yet another raid on the city’s electronics shops. As they worked their way down the street they were followed by their commander in a pick-up truck, a Maulawi Qalamuddin, who yelled at them over a loudspeaker mounted on the cab: ‘Try not to hurt the people!’

Mullah Omar remained majestically indifferent to foreign criticism of his regime. Even so, in December 1996 when Radio Sharia announced that 225 Kabuli women had been beaten in a single day for violating the new dress codes, he was persuaded that things had gone too far. In some cases, people had been beaten with electric
cables. A letter of ‘advice’ was circulated around the capital’s police stations reminding the lawmen that they should not be ‘cruel’. ‘Such kinds of punishment and beating,’ went the text of Omar’s letter, ‘need the permission of the Imam and Emir, otherwise the doer of such actions will be punished under qisas.’ Radio Sharia promptly stopped publicizing the punishments.
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The following year, Omar found it necessary to reiterate an order that the Taliban were on no account to ‘harm civilians’ – an indication that some people were in fact being unnecessarily harmed. The leadership, it seemed, were not always in control of the foot soldiers who underpinned their movement, as the girls’ school headmaster Qari Barakatullah Salim confirmed.

‘The Taliban authorities were very nice but some of the lower ranks gave me problems. At one time they “requisitioned” my car – for governmental use, they said. But I got it back immediately when I complained to their superiors.’

The truth was that the rank and file often acted independently of their leaders. Some of them were little more than a revolutionary rabble, with an understanding of the new ideology that was often no more than skin-deep. Even the mullahs in charge held a variety of views. Mullah Yar Mohammed in Herat, for instance, was regarded by that city’s inhabitants as a relative moderate. When he heard how the religious police had broken up a women’s demonstration using hoses from the Fire Department, he was out-raged and made a point of denouncing the practice at a public meeting. In Kabul, too, the repression of the people was often far more haphazard than it was usually portrayed abroad – and that cut both ways. The rules could be bent, and frequently were. It was also possible to hoodwink the authorities, for the Taliban were often unworldly people. According to Peter Jouvenal, even a Kabul
brandy distillery managed to remain open by arguing that its product was essential for medicinal purposes.

The experience of a Kabuli fortune-teller, Mohammed Jakub Siddiqim, was equally suggestive. Fortune-telling is a wellestablished tradition in Afghanistan, where superstition and Sufi mysticism have thrived for centuries. The ancient fire-worshipping religion of Zoroastrianism was founded here in the fifth century BC; and the legacy of that and other ancient beliefs was never entirely rooted out by the arrival of Islam. This did not stop the Taliban leadership from trying again now.

Siddiqim, who came from a family of Arabs who emigrated to Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, operated from a small scruffy office lined with posters of tropical islands, one of dozens of such fortune-telling shops scattered across the city. His main skill, palm-reading, was advertised by an enormous yellow hand painted on the window. He had wisely closed up his business the moment the Taliban captured Kabul – unlike several other fortune-tellers, who paid a high price for their lack of clairvoyance.