Authors: Jason Burke
The Taliban’s involvement with other countries beyond Pakistan was more straightforward. Regional powers formed three main axes in and around Afghanistan. One could loosely be characterized as Sunni Muslim and relatively hardline in religion. It included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. These three nations recognized the Taliban diplomatically and provided moral, diplomatic and material support. It is a mistake to see state actors as necessarily primary in all these manoeuvres.
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There were also, as during the war against the Soviets, significant flows of funds from devout private donors in the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia prepared to support the Deobandi Taliban to promote their Wahhabi-style Islam and fight against the Shias.
Opposing the Sunni states was a second axis comprising Iran and their Shia proxies among the Hazara factions within Afghanistan. A third axis comprised the Turkic-and Tajik-descended ethnic groups in Afghanistan and their backers, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia and even, on the basis that anything or anyone opposing Pakistan must be good, India. Turkmenistan was largely neutral but tilted towards the Taliban.
Further afield, the attitude of the USA (and to an extent the United Nations) could be characterized as uninterested rather than disinterested. The State Department was distracted by the Gulf War of 1991
and then by crises in east Africa and the Balkans and was simply not that concerned by events in Afghanistan. This abandonment, particularly given the intense involvement during the 1980s, must go down as one of the most ruthless and shortsighted policies of recent times.
The attitude of the British was much the same. Though junior British diplomats had contacts with the Taliban from relatively early on, the High Commission in Islamabad and the Foreign Office in London saw the movement as ‘just another fundamentalism’, little different from Hekmatyar or Sayyaf in views, intent and capability.
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Few in the West had heard of the Taliban before they seized Kabul in late September 1996. It was the measures they took immediately after taking power that brought the movement global attention. Within hours, President Najibullah and his brother had been killed and strung up from a lamppost with cigarettes shoved in their mouths and money pushed into their pockets. Radio Kabul became Radio Shariat, broadcasting Qur’anic readings and music without instrumentation. Women were banned from work, from schools and from the streets unless accompanied by a male relative; the burqa was made compulsory. Kite-flying, pigeon-racing, make-up and photographs were banned. Men’s beards had to be of a specific length. Suits and ties were forbidden in favour of Afghan dress.
These measures were widely reported and provoked international outrage. However, there was little attempt made to comprehend the motivations of the men behind them.
Every time I visited Kabul, I would drive up to the frontlines north of the city to report on the fighting. It was always a good opportunity to talk to the Taliban foot soldiers. In the small village of Guldara, a collection of bullet-pocked and mud-walled homes around a huge mulberry tree under which the Taliban had parked an anti-aircraft gun, I found Nazar Gul, a 30-year-old commander, and his men. They were all from Kandahar, though few had lived in their native city for several years. Nazar Gul told me he had left his medressa near Quetta in 1995, where he had been nearing the end of an eight-year course in Islamic Studies, to join the Taliban. ‘When I heard about them I put down my books,’ he said as we crouched in the basement of a farm-house
during a bout of shelling. ‘These men we are fighting are criminals and thieves. They have corrupted our homeland. We will fight them for as long as it takes.’ He said he had already qualified as a
Qadi
, or Islamic judge, and hoped one day to resume his studies.
For men like Nazar Gul, the source of much of the corruption that needed to be purged from Afghanistan was Kabul. The roots of this view lie in the profound gulf between the rulers and the ruled, the urban and the rural, the cosmopolitan metropolis and the reactionary provinces, that has developed over centuries in Afghanistan and underlies so many of the country’s problems. During the 1970s, Kabul had been a favourite holiday destination in the region, with top jazz singers entertaining drunken partygoers beside the rooftop pool of the recently constructed Intercontinental Hotel.
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The contrast with the conservative, undeveloped provinces could not have been greater. The gulf widened during the war against the Soviets. Then Kabul was seen by those in the rural areas as a city that had collaborated. Soviet subsidies transformed the city, which, unlike the ravaged countryside, did not suffer any physical damage. The Soviets also provided substantial salaries and unprecedented sports and cultural facilities to those among the middle-class urban elite who cooperated with the regime. Local dress in the city was frowned upon and the burqa banished. Though President Najibullah’s Khad secret police killed and tortured tens of thousands in the city, this suffering was forgotten by those from rural areas who had seen their villages destroyed or who had grown up in exile.
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The Taliban saw Kabul as a direct threat. The logic was clear. The transformation to a just and perfect society would be jeopardized by any un-Islamic behaviour by anyone. Afghanistan had to be purged. If the country was to be transformed then the Afghans, or at least those living in their homeland, would have to behave exactly as laid down in the Shariat. Only then would the community of the first generation of Muslims, imagined with a Pashtun rural twist, be re-created and Allah would help His faithful. The name of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue is not, as so many commentators said, Orwellian, but Qur’anic. The first converts to Islam were told: ‘You are the best community raised for the good of
mankind. You promote what is good and forbid what is evil and you believe in Allah.’ Senior Taliban figures always admitted that their rules in Kabul were obeyed through fear. It was unfortunate, they said, but necessary. People were addicted to sin. All threats were to be eradicated. Thus anything smacking of Westernization, such as leather jackets or American or British hairstyles, was forbidden.
This is ‘orthopraxy’ of an extreme nature. It is enforced Salafism on Saudi Arabian Wahhabi lines. The name given by the Taliban for the religious police,
Amr bil-Maroof wa nahi An il-Munkir
, was derived, indirectly, from the excerpt of the Qur’an quoted above, and directly from Riyadh. Yet the local specificity of what was happening should not be forgotten. In justifying the execution of Zarmina that November afternoon, the mullah had referred to the Shariat that he said was compulsory for all Muslims to implement. But he had also been at pains to stress the benefits of observing the word of God. ‘Have we not brought security?’ he had asked.
Kabul, in the Taliban worldview, was Babylon and, like the biblical city, was full of whores. The Taliban attitude to women was, until 1998 and bin Laden’s sudden rise to global prominence, their most controversial quality. Yet it too was rooted in experiences and cultures specific to Afghanistan.
The burqa was not a Taliban invention but had been worn by Afghan women, as a form of portable
purdah
, whenever they moved into an environment where there were substantial numbers of men who were not related to them or were not part of their immediate social grouping, for many years. In the fields or around their villages, rural Afghan women would wear a headscarf, often highly decorated and individual. As mobility increased with modern communications and social relationships, so Afghan women found themselves surrounded more and more often by strange men. As a result, the burqa was increasingly worn. Nor is it just Pashtuns, or even just Afghans, who wear burqas. They are worn by women from non-Afghan ethnic groups in southern Sindh in Pakistan and, in various versions, across India and much of the Middle East. A similar situation prevails with
maharams
, or the male family member who accompanies women, by law in Taliban-run Afghanistan and in current Saudi Arabia, outside their homes.
As William Maley points out, in traditional Afghan society women have always performed strictly circumscribed social roles based on the economy of the household. Within certain bounds, however, Afghan women have historically shown an ability to assert their interests within networks of kinship. But, though Afghan popular tradition has venerated certain women as moral leaders (particularly Mallalai, who challenged the British, and more recently Nihad, a Kabul schoolgirl killed while demonstrating against the Soviet invasion), it was only in the urban areas, and then only recently, that women had much opportunity to move beyond the realm of the household and into the public sphere.
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This has reinforced the gulf between the rural populace and the urban communities who have historically supplied the ruling elite and has focused mutual resentment and misunderstanding of the issue of gender roles and relations. This tension goes back at least to the 1920s. Indeed, the revolts against King Amanullah, and those against the PDPA hardliners 70 years later, were provoked by ill-judged attempts by the centre to impose change in gender relations on the regions by force.
There are echoes of this all over the Islamic world where, throughout the twentieth century, different regimes have battled conservatives over women’s bodies in attempts to prove their modern orientation and identity. Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia all banned or discouraged veiling and encouraged Western dress as a sign of modernity. The abolition of the veil in 1936 by Reza Shah Pahlavi has often been celebrated as a major step towards women’s emancipation. The reform chiefly benefited upper-class elite women, traumatized many less Westernized women and did little to counter the established patriarchal practices throughout the rest of the state.
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Even in 1959, when the Afghan government made the veil voluntary, there was little change outside the capital. Only the western city of Herat developed anything like the substantial body of middle-class, relatively wealthy, educated and politically conscious women that could be found in Kabul. It was these women, who were teachers, lecturers, journalists and doctors under the Communists and the mujahideen, who suffered most under the Taliban. They were also
articulate and sympathetic enough to command substantial representation in Western media reports from the country. Their memories of professional life, well-stocked libraries, mini-dresses and sidewalk cafés in communist Kabul struck a chord with Western journalists (predominantly middle-class graduates themselves).
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For the Taliban, however, these women were the living, talking and walking embodiment of what had ruined their homeland.
Throughout the Islamic world, radical Islamic activists have found that the actual practice of formulating and implementing an Islamic state or a return to the use of Islamic law in politics, business and economics is in fact very difficult and have found it easier to focus on women and the family instead.
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In Iran, members of the Iranian Revolution’s own version of the religious police, the Komiteh, who were recruited largely from the working class, focused their attacks on unveiled, secular, middle-class women. These recruits saw themselves as the guardians of the values of an Islamic republic and thus felt a duty to persecute any remaining members of the middle class who had somehow managed to hang on to their social status and cultural capital.
In Algeria, the victories of the Front Islamique du Salut in local elections resulted in moral prohibitions that ‘pointed a finger’ at the Europeanized secular middle class, whose members were more or less emancipated from traditional taboos. Gilles Kepel sees sexual politics as an important factor:
[This] allowed impoverished young men, humiliated and forced into abstinence or sexual misery by the crowded family conditions in which they lived, to become heroes of chastity who sternly condemned the pleasures of which they had been so wretchedly deprived.
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This has an immediate parallel in the experiences of the vast bulk of largely unmarried Taliban cadres whose experience of sexual relations had been warped by warfare, life in the refugee camps and the strict codes of Pashtunwali.
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The gender issue is another point of significant difference between traditionalists like the Taliban and political Islamists, who on the whole consider women essential to education and society. Islamists are largely opposed to dowries and divorces of convenience and Islamist
organizations often include entire women’s sections like ‘the Muslim Sisterhood’,
al-Akhwat al-Muslimat
, created in Egypt in 1944. Though Islamists often exclude women from posts as judges and heads of state, their obsession is with segregation, not exclusion. In Iran, this involved the invention of a new kind of dress, comprising a scarf, raincoat and gloves that allowed women to achieve two contradictory objectives, to come out of purdah and to maintain modesty. Islamists may still be deeply sexist, convinced of the weakness of women and their ‘overly emotional sensibilities’, but in Iran women vote and drive cars.
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In Saudi Arabia they do not.
But again, though differences from political Islamists must be stressed, this does not mean that the Taliban were part of the militant Islamic movement of bin Laden, the Algerian ‘barbus’ or the foreign militants fighting in Kashmir. The Taliban’s attitude to women was rooted in their own Pashtun culture. It is here that the Islamic tradition of revivalism and Pashtunwali, the cultural code of the Pashtuns, coincide to generate such force. Pashtunwali was born to counter a violent and insecure environment. Women are thus seen as the repository of the honour of a male individual and the family. Any threat of dishonour – the theft of cattle, defeat in battle and the rape of a sister being roughly equivalent – is to be defended against at all costs. Pashtun, and to a great extent Afghan, women are also expected to uphold family honour by conforming to accepted behavioural norms.
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In Pashtun society, there has always been a complex interplay between Pashtunwali, the ‘honour code’, and various understandings of Islam. Both provide useful resources to articulate a range of concerns or grievances. The Taliban were thus genuinely bewildered and aggrieved by the international reaction to their treatment of women. They felt that they were merely fulfilling their duty as Muslims, Pashtuns and men to protect the honour of women and that the best way to do this, in an environment of insecurity, was to get them, by force if necessary, to behave in a particular way. As the self-possessed and confident women of Kabul were unwilling to voluntarily do what they should for their own good, and the good of all Afghans, they would have to be compelled to comply.
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