The Afghan Taliban Strikes Out

The Conflict

Afghanistan, having been divided and torn apart by two decades of war, was taken over in 1996 by a group of religious students professing to set up a pure Islamic state. The Taliban was harsh and oppressive, but put a stop to the violence and chaos that was rampant in Afghanistan's cities. The Taliban has repeatedly enraged the international community with a variety of offensive acts, openly defying the United Nations and its neighbors as well as the West.

Religious

• The Taliban imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law on Afghanistan in its mission to create a pure Islamic state. To most Westerners and the majority of Muslims its rule has been repressive and has denied basic human rights to a large portion of the population, but there are Muslims around the world who revere the ideals the Taliban appears to stand for.
• Although purporting to create a pure Islamic state, the Taliban has questionable credentials in this regard. Its application of Islamic law, concept of jihad, and brutality conflict sharply with most Muslims' knowledge of the Koran.

Political

• Afghanistan, after being at war for more than 20 years, has a very splintered opposition group made up of ethnic minorities, with a history of corruption, betrayal, and violence. Neighboring countries have added fuel to the fire by siding with ethnic groups and supplying arms and money for war. As the Taliban exits, the danger of resuming the infighting of the civil war looms.

Economic

• Afghanistan has faced the prospect of a widespread famine for several years, with millions of lives threatened by lack of food and water. Humanitarian aid workers have courageously averted total disaster at great risk to their own lives.
• When the United Nations placed sanctions on Afghanistan and isolated it from the world community, the Taliban reacted with defiance. The result has been worse suffering among an already impoverished people.

When the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, took place on September 11, 2001, the Taliban of Afghanistan—the extreme Islamic fundamentalist group that had ruled most of that nation since 1996—found themselves once again under the glare of the public eye. The prime suspects behind the attacks, exiled Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden and his organization, al Qaeda, were based in Afghanistan, and the Taliban refused to turn them over to international authorities.

The Taliban had in fact been incurring the disfavor and often the hostility of the international community for all the years of its rule. For a tiny, impoverished country in central Asia, Afghanistan had drawn more than its share of attention as the Taliban repeatedly defied the United Nations and the Western powers as well as its moderate Muslim neighbors. Sporting its own brand of extreme Islamic rule, the Taliban inspired the devotion of many young Islamic fundamentalists, who hoped that an Islamic state in Afghanistan would pave the way for other Islamic states throughout the world. But to most moderate Muslims, humanitarian agencies, the United Nations, and Western nations, the Taliban represented a brutal and oppressive force that ran counter to the teachings of the Koran and to the interests and well-being of the people of Afghanistan.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush (2001-) delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban to hand bin Laden over or to face possible attack in retaliation for harboring a terrorist. A group of Taliban clerics, called a ulema, debated the issue and then announced they could not give up bin Laden without proof that he was responsible for the bombings. The Taliban leader in Afghanistan, Mullah Mohammed Omar, threatened a holy war, or jihad, against the United States if there was a strike against Afghanistan.

On October 7, 2001, the United States and the United Kingdom began a military strike against the Taliban. With the aid of the air strikes, the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan were able to wrest Afghanistan's centers away from the Taliban within two months. On December 7 Kandahar, the spiritual center of the Taliban, was surrendered. Taliban rule was at an end, but the impact of this tough and defiant breakaway group of extremists upon the people of Afghanistan and the Muslims of the world will be tallied for many years to come. That they were able to take power and hold it against great odds is due to a number of factors, including support from al Qaeda and the government of Pakistan, a strong antipathy in many Muslim countries to the dominance of Western culture, and the deep divisions that had developed among ethnic groups and warlords in Afghanistan prior to their rule. During their reign in Afghanistan the acts of the Taliban deeply disturbed observers all over the world, and, it is becoming increasingly apparent in liberated areas of Afghanistan that their rule was highly traumatic for many Afghan citizens.

Historical Background

The stage was set for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghanistan war (1979-89). In December 1979, after communists had taken over the Afghan government, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghanistan War followed for the next ten years, a vicious fight among anti-communist Afghanistan guerrillas, the communist Afghan government, and Soviet forces. During this war, more than one million Afghans were killed. The Afghan guerrillas, known as the mujahideen (fighters in a holy war against infidels), considered the atheistic communist regime an affront to their religious beliefs and fought fiercely against it.

The mujahideen received help from a variety of places. Muslims came from all over the world when they learned of the Soviet invasion, particularly from Saudi Arabia, but also from Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Tajikistan. According to some estimates there were as many as 35,000 foreign warriors helping the Afghans against the Soviets. Among the earliest of them was Palestinian Sheik Abdallah Azzam, an early mentor to Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was one of the first people from the Middle East to join Azzam, helping to establish the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK, or Services Office), a center used to recruit volunteers and raise money for the Afghan struggle.

The United States secretly supported the mujahideen in their efforts to overthrow the communist government. The United States allowed the MAK to set up recruiting offices in the United States as well as in the Middle East. There are some reports that the United States funded and may well have helped train bin Laden and his colleagues. By the early 1980s the MAK had built a network that brought thousands of Muslims from more than 50 countries to join the mujahideen in their battle against the Soviets, with training bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat in 1989, leaving chaos behind them. The Soviet troops had brutally raped, tortured, maimed, and massacred Afghan peasants in their path, destroying livestock and burning down towns as they passed. During the Soviet occupation one-third of Afghanistan's population fled the country; Pakistan and Iran sheltered a combined peak of more than 6 million refugees. In 1992 there were a remaining 5 million landmines in Afghanistan that the Soviets had scattered about the countryside before leaving. A decade later, in 2001, as many as 300 people are killed every month by those mines.

The president of Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet withdrawal was Muhammad Najibullah. Aligned with the Soviets, Najibullah remained in office until 1992 as the country descended into violent factional fighting. The United States rapidly withdrew its support after the Soviets left. Many Afghans accused the United States of selfishly abandoning them once the Cold War threat was past, although there was still an urgent need for help.

The Factions Collide

Afghanistan's mujahideen fighters entered into an alliance with each other in 1992, installing a coalition government that was to rotate among the leaders of the seven mujahideen groups. But faction leaders quickly came into conflict over which group would govern Afghanistan. The victory over the Soviet empire led to a new kind of civil war based on political and ethnic disparities among the leadership.

Afghanistan's population includes several ethnic groups. The Pashtun are the majority, comprising about 38 percent of the population and living in the southeastern portion of Afghanistan as well as the northern part of Pakistan. The Tajiks make up about 25 percent of the population and live in scattered areas throughout the country. The majority of the world's Tajiks live in Tajikistan. The Hazara make up about 19 percent of the population. The Eastern Hazara are Shi'ite Muslim, a branch of Islam differing from the majority Sunni branch in its belief in the succession of Ali and the Imams with direct descent from Mohammed, as the divinely appointed leaders of Islam. The Hazara are of Mongol descent. There is also a large Hazara population in Iran. Eight percent of Afghans are Uzbeks, living in the northwest part of the country. The majority of the world's Uzbek population lives in Uzbekistan. Other ethnic groups in Afghanistan include the Turkmen, Balochs, and Aimaks.

In 1992 the Tajik forces of Burhanuddin Rabbani and his military commander Ahmad Shah Masud, along with the Uzbek forces of General Rashid Dostum, took the capital city of Kabul. The city had been ruled by the Pashtuns for centuries, and Pashtun forces under General Gulbuddin Hikmetyar immediately began to fight for the city, beginning civil war. By 1994 Rabbani controlled Kabul and an area around it and claimed to be the president of Afghanistan, but he did not have power over most of the country. Anti-Soviet mujahideen Ismail Khan governed the western province of Herat; Pashtuns governed three provinces from the city of Jalalabad; Hikmetyar held a small region near Kabul; and Dostum held six provinces in the north. Much of the south was divided among Pashtun warlords who were at war with each other.

In the civil war the ex-mujahideen fought each other, often betraying one another in short-lived alliances. Half of the capital city of Kabul, which had survived the war with the Soviets, was destroyed. In the cities of Afghanistan violence and crime abounded and no one was safe. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians were killed in the five-year period of factional fighting, and many more were displaced from their homes, raped, robbed, and otherwise traumatized.

The Taliban

In Pakistan and in parts of Afghanistan madrasas, schools for training spiritual leaders, had been educating young men since the twelfth century. During the Soviet-Afghanistan War, however, the number of madrasas in Pakistan went from less than one thousand in the early 1970s to 8,000 registered and 25,000 unregistered madrasas in 1988, according to Ahmed Rashid in his acclaimed book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism (2000). These new schools had no central system to oversee their curricula. Many factions arose among the madrasas, teaching ever-changing interpretations of the Koran. By the 1980s these were the only schools in Pakistan that poor, young men could attend. Often the teachers themselves had little formal education, and many of the students came from rough backgrounds without benefit of structured family life or home.

In the past, the curriculum of a madrasa included the sciences and human values. Anis Ahmad, a religious scholar in Islamabad, Pakistan (quoted in the September 19, 2001 Los Angeles Times), observed that since the 1980s the madrasas "have gotten restricted to a few narrow issues," promoting a very rigid interpretation of Islamic law, or sharia, and particularly advocating a view of Israel and the United States as enemies of Islam.

When civil war among the warlords brought Afghanistan to desperate straits, Afghan students (or "talib," which means "student" or "seeker of truth" in Persian) in the madrasas began to seek answers to their country's woes. One of the mullahs (teachers, or givers of truth) was Mohammed Omar, who had been wounded and lost an eye fighting the Soviets before returning to his home near Kandahar to establish a madrasa. As students met in Omar's madrasa, they decided to take it upon themselves to restore peace in Afghanistan: to disarm the population and set up an Islamic society under Islamic law. They decided to call themselves the "Taliban."

The first battles the Taliban fought were small and local, freeing terrorized civilians from the violence of the military commanders stationed nearby. Then, in November 1994, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto appointed the Taliban to protect a trade caravan that had been captured by the local warlord in Kandahar. According to many, when Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI; the equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA) saw how successful the Taliban was in this endeavor, it began training and funding the group. Pakistan wanted to ensure that a Pashtun government would take power in Afghanistan, and it had been dissatisfied with the Pashtun leaders thus far. The Taliban was made up of Pashtuns.

At the time, the town of Kandahar had fallen into chaos, with crime and violence running out of control in its streets. After safely delivering the trade caravan they had been assigned to protect, the Taliban moved into the city and killed or drove off the criminals. They got rid of all guns in the town and then took control. Announcing that their mission was to set up the world's most pure Islamic state in Afghanistan, they applied their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law to all aspects of life, banning music, photographs, and also education for girls. Women were required to cover their faces in public and could leave their homes only if accompanied by a close male relative. They were not allowed to work. Men were required to grow beards. If they shaved, they were imprisoned until the beard grew back. The right hands of thieves were amputated. Even though many citizens of Kandahar were not happy with the restrictions, there was general relief that the Taliban had stopped the violence and crime.

When news spread of the success of the Taliban, thousands of young Afghan Pashtuns arrived in Kandahar to join. Within three months, the Taliban had gained control of 12 Afghan provinces.

The leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, made his base in Kandahar. Omar remained an enigmatic figure. He was in his thirties and a Pashtun. Because the Taliban prohibit taking photographs of people, few knew what Omar looked like and he tended to remain behind the scenes. Omar's opponents claimed he was ignorant of Islamic law (in fact he had just a few years in a madrasa) and was not really a Mullah or scholar of Islam. He maintained an ignorance of the world, not even traveling about in his own nation, in fact, only visiting Kabul twice during his reign. Many who were able to meet with him found him to be more a simple, uneducated villager than a leader of a nation. But Omar believed that he had been called by God to save Afghanistan and lead an Islamic state, and perhaps to be the political leader of all of Islam. He also believed that the edicts that he issued, which sometimes made little sense to others, were instructions from God, and he would not be dissuaded from them no matter what the consequences. Many of Omar's followers believed he was chosen by God to lead them.

The Taliban's rise to power was surprising and rapid. Its leaders did not at first speak about controlling the country—rather they professed to be setting it on a course in keeping with the Koran. According to Ahmed Rashid, this, their initial mission, appeared to be in keeping with the generally misunderstood Muslim concept of the "jihad:"

Essentially jihad is the inner struggle of a Muslim to become a better human being, improve himself and his community… Islam also sanctions rebellion against an unjust ruler,… and jihad is the mobilizing mechanism to achieve change. Thus the life of the Prophet Mohammed has become the jihadi model of impeccable Muslim behavior and political change as the Prophet himself rebelled… The Taliban were thus acting in the spirit of the Prophet's jihad when they attacked the rapacious warlords around them.

In many cases, the Taliban did not have to fight to occupy a city; the Afghans were so tired of the civil war and of the corruption of the warlords that they welcomed the Taliban as protectors and saviors. With these successes, the Taliban attempted to take Kabul, but there resistance to them was strong.

In March 1996 Mullah Omar summoned a huge council of mullahs from all over Afghanistan to Kandahar to discuss the future of Afghanistan. It was understood that in order for the Taliban to rule Afghanistan they needed to take the city of Kabul. The mullahs from the Kandahar region, to give strength to their leader, nominated Mullah Omar as "Commander of the Faithful," the leader of the jihad and the emir of Afghanistan. On April 4, Omar unsealed a holy shrine in Kandahar containing a cloak that was believed to have once belonged to the Prophet Mohammad. The shrine had not been opened for nearly 60 years. Standing on a rooftop, he placed the prophet's cloak on his own shoulders and declared himself the commander of the faithful and the leader of all Islam. According to Tim Weiner, in an article in the December 7, 2001 New York Times, "No one had claimed that title since the Fourth Caliph, more than 1,000 years ago."

International Involvement in Afghanistan's Divisions

As the Taliban fought to gain control of Kabul and the remaining cities holding out against them, their war with the warlords drew in other nations on both sides. Russia did not wish to see an extremist Islam government so close to its borders, since it had its own struggles with the Muslim state of Chechnya. Iran sympathized with the Shi'ite population of Herat, which had recently been captured by the Taliban, and supported the Hazara people against them. India was at odds with Pakistan, which supported the Taliban, and therefore supported the anti-Taliban forces. These countries sent military supplies and aid to Kabul for resistance. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, supported the Taliban with supplies, arms, fuel, transport, and money. Pakistan in particular was interested in training fighters that could help them in their battles over Kashmir with India, and supported many extreme Islamic groups. Over and over again, when the Taliban needed new recruits in their battles, the madrasas in Pakistan would close down, sending thousands of students off to battle for the Taliban in Afghanistan. With support from many sources, the fighting raged on.

On August 25, 1996, the Taliban took over the city of Jalalabad and then moved on for Kabul. Taking the city by surprise on September 26, 1996, they forced Rabbani and Masud's forces to flee.

Crossing the United Nations

The Taliban's first act in Kabul was to enter the UN compound there and drag out the former communist president Najibullah and his brother. They beat and tortured both men mercilessly before killing them and hanging their battered and mutilated bodies for the public to view. The act disgusted most of the citizens of Kabul as well as the international community. The United Nations issued a statement, quoted by Rashid: "The killing of the former President without any legitimate judicial procedure not only constitutes a grave violation of the immunity UN premises enjoy, but also further jeopardizes all the efforts which are being made to secure a peaceful settlement of the Afghan conflict." Unrelenting, the Taliban went on to impose its harshest laws on the city of Kabul, which it found to be too modern to conform to its rules without strict policing.

Resistance to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban was strongest in the city of Mazar-i Sharif, which repulsed the Taliban three times, killing an estimated 2,000 Taliban soldiers. It is reported that when the Taliban took the city in August 1998, they massacred anywhere from one to five thousand civilians belonging to the ethnic Shi'ite Hazara minority in a two-day rampage. The bloodshed and violence was so great in the city that UN humanitarian workers were forced to withdraw twice.

There were many within the Taliban who wanted to see the UN and all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) out of Afghanistan. There was a severe food shortage in the country, and millions needed the help of foreign humanitarian aid workers for daily survival. But the Taliban distrusted the influence of the foreigners despite the sufferings of the people. In 1997 the Taliban ordered some of the top UN officials to leave the country because they had defended the right of a female UN lawyer to question a leader without a curtain between them. The Taliban later arrested some Afghan UN staffers. There was ever-growing concern at the UN about the treatment of Afghanistan's women. In February 1998 the UN staff in Kandahar was beaten; the UN was forced to withdraw from the city altogether. In June of that year the Taliban ordered all female Muslim UN personnel in Afghanistan to be chaperoned by a male relative, a nearly impossible demand to fulfill. In July the Taliban closed down all NGOs' offices.

The Taliban and Women

Shortly after capturing the capital city of Kabul, the Taliban set up a policing agency called the Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, which enforced the Taliban version of Islamic law. The agency immediately began to impose strict regulations on women. Women were not allowed to work in most occupations and girls could not attend school. Women over the age of fourteen were to wear only traditional garb, including the burqa, an ankle-length veil that fully covered the body, making it very difficult to see and move. The windows on the lower floors of homes were blackened so that no one could look in upon the women inside.

The consequences for violating these bans were severe. Reportedly, women were shot to death for running home schools, or for attempting to leave Afghanistan without a male family member to accompany them. Women were beaten and whipped in public for such offenses as accidentally permitting an ankle to show below a veil. The whippings were extreme: the recovery period could be months, and sometimes the whippings were fatal.

Since women were not allowed to work or to go out without a male relative, widows and orphans in Afghanistan had a very rough time and were often forced to beg or turn to prostitution in order to feed themselves.

Tough on Crime and Other Things

Not only women suffered from the harshness of the Taliban's rule. The punishment for stealing, even if it was a last resort to feed one's family, was the amputation of the right hand. If a person was caught stealing a second time, the left foot might be amputated. Homosexuals in Afghanistan were buried alive. Prostitutes were publicly hanged. Adulterers were stoned.

The Taliban banned television, all music except religious songs, movies, the Internet, card-playing, books and periodicals published outside of Afghanistan, white socks, kites, the game of chess, paper bags, and many other things, particularly things that are Western in origin. The Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice was well known for its brutal beatings and applications of the whip when a rule was violated. Jail terms were doled out in many cases.

Harboring Terrorists

Throughout 1998 and 1999, the United States and the Taliban clashed over Afghanistan's harboring of Osama bin Laden, who was believed by the United States to be responsible for the August 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. From the mid-1980s bin Laden had been establishing training camps in Afghanistan and continued to attract thousands of recruits from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, and Sudan.

Although he worked with Americans during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, bin Laden soon became hostile to them. In Afghanistan he met Ayman al Zawahiri, a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and the two became close friends. The idea of exporting terrorism and establishing Islamic states in other Muslim countries was probably originally Zawahiri's. Using the millions he had inherited, bin Laden formed the terrorist group al Qaeda ("the base") in 1988 with these goals in mind. Al Qaeda is believed to function in as many as twenty countries.

In 1990, the Persian Gulf War brought American soldiers to Saudi Arabia. To bin Laden and his accomplices it was an outrage that Americans had set foot in the birthplace of the prophet Mohammed and the home of the two holiest Muslim shrines. He also blamed the United States for its support of Israel in the conflict with Palestine. In 1998 bin Laden announced the establishment of "The International Islamic Front for Holy War Against Jews and Crusaders." The organization, connecting Islamic extremists worldwide, announced to the world: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies, civilians, and the military, is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate al-Aqsa Mosque and the Holy Mosque from their grip and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated, and unable to threaten any Muslim."

In 1994, bin Laden was back in Saudi Arabia, but was soon expelled for his denouncements of the royal family. He then moved to Sudan, where he developed his business interests. In 1996 the United States convinced Sudan to expel him. He then moved to Afghanistan, where the Taliban were just taking over. By 1997 he had developed a friendship with Omar and moved his entourage to Kandahar.

According to Tim Weiner of the New York Times, bin Laden, looking for a place to permanently base his operations, probably flattered Omar to further his own mission. Weiner quotes a former Pakistani ambassador who had met with Omar frequently: "My very strong hunch is that bin Laden convinced this village man that he had to bring his revolution to the whole world." Rashid, in an article in Foreign Affairs, (November/December 1999) argues that the Taliban would not have come to political power had it not been for the support of foreigners. "Until they captured Kabul in 1996 they expressed no desire to rule the country. But ever since then—abetted by their Pakistani and Saudi backers and inspired by ideological mentors such as bin Laden—the Taliban have committed themselves to conquering the entire country and more."

From the end of the fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan until 1998, bin Laden was suspected of organizing or being in some way linked to many terrorist acts, including an attack on a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people. After the bombings of the U.S. embassies, President Bill Clinton's administration (1993-2001) ordered missile strikes against suspected bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan.

The United Nations also resolved to act against the Taliban. On October 15, 1999, it demanded that the Taliban extradite Osama bin Laden to a country that would bring him to justice. The Taliban refused, saying they had not seen evidence that bin Laden was responsible for the bombings. On November 14, 1999, the United Nations prohibited air transportation to and from Afghanistan and urged all its members to apply sanctions—freezing Taliban assets abroad and barring Afghans from investment.

Recent History and the Future

Despite its control of about 90 percent of Afghanistan, the Taliban was an unrecognized political entity—only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognized the Taliban government before the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. The international isolation and the sanctions deeply hurt the nation economically. Rather than capitulate to pressure, however, the Taliban further isolated itself from Western favor. Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an envoy of the Taliban, commented in a PBS interview on March 29, 2001: "Well, these economic sanctions are meant to pressurize our government and this is so ridiculous for us because to try to change our ideology with economic sanctions will never work, because for us, our ideology is first."For a time it seemed that the Taliban was deliberately pushing international buttons.

In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed a large number of statues, among them two historic treasures: giant stone Buddhas—one 165 and the other 114 feet tall (50 and 35 meters respectively), that had been carved into the sandstone mountains of Afghanistan's Bamiyan province sometime between the second and fifth centuries CE. A general worldwide protest arose when Omar announced that the Buddhas were "false idols" and would be obliterated. Hashimi said that the destruction of the Buddhas was done in anger. With a famine hitting the people of Afghanistan in the midst of worldwide sanctions, religious scholars were indignant when a group of Western historians offered to provide money for the preservation of the statues. "What do you expect from a country when you just ostracize them and isolate them and send in cruise missiles and their children are dying?" Hashimi asked. Some observers, however, noted that a council of clerics had been deliberating on the move to destroy the statues long before the Western historians expressed interest in them.

Within a couple of months of the destruction of the Buddhas, the Taliban was in the news again, this time for its unexpected help in international efforts to eliminate drug trafficking. Afghanistan had been responsible for nearly three-quarters of the poppies used to make the world's heroin. In July 2000, Omar had issued an edict banning the growing of poppies in Afghanistan, calling it a sin against the teachings of Islam. His edict went mostly unnoticed in the West until spring, when the world could clearly see that the once-abundant poppy fields in Afghanistan lay fallow. Although the Taliban said that it banned poppy crops for religious reasons, they had reason to believe that the United States and other Western nations would provide assistance to them for the tremendous loss of income the Afghans experienced. The United States did provide a US$43 million dollar grant for drought relief, but the already impoverished people of Afghanistan were suddenly without one of their major remaining sources of income.

In May 2001 the Taliban were again the focus of international protest when they proposed to force Hindus in Afghanistan to wear identification labels on their clothing. There are at least 5,000 Hindus living in Kabul and thousands elsewhere in the country. The Taliban explained that the tagging was for the Hindus' protection. Since the Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice patrolled Afghanistan's cities, searching out and punishing Muslims who broke the Taliban's rules, they reasoned that by wearing identification labels, the Hindus could be excluded from those punishments. Hindus, however, were not exempt from most rules. Hindu women, for example, were forced to wear the burqa. Hindus interviewed by journalists did not want to wear labels, fearing that it would make them vulnerable to more repression from the Taliban.

In August 2001 the Taliban Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice shut down the offices of a German-based Christian aid organization, Shelter Now, saying that the group was trying to spread Christianity among the people of Kabul. They produced evidence, including a Christian bible translated into a native language. The Taliban arrested eight of the organization's workers, two of whom were American. At the time of the terrorist attacks on the United States, the Christian aid workers were undergoing a trial in Kabul. They later escaped from the Taliban as their captors retreated from enemy forces.

The Aftermath in Afghanistan

Because of a wide gulf in value systems, the Taliban's system of rule was very alienating to most non-fundamentalists. Their interpretations of the Koran were foreign to many Muslims. But there were some merits to their rule, and the Taliban had devotees around the world. For one thing, the Taliban did not appear to use their rule in Afghanistan to enrich themselves. They lived simply and by their own rules, for the most part. More importantly, they were highly successful in imposing order where there had been chaos and crime. A significant segment of Muslims believe in combining religion and state and look to Afghanistan as the supreme example of this. Since the Taliban's professed goal, at least originally, was to create a pure Islamic state, the question arises, was their extreme application of rules in keeping with the Koran? A lot of scholars say no. Ahmed Rashid commented that the Taliban knew little of Islamic and Afghan history, sharia, or the Koran, and thus had little historical perspective or tradition on which to base their actions.

When the Taliban was forced by U.S. air strikes and Afghan resistance to flee the city of Kabul, the change that took place there was profound. Without the dreaded Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, the people in the city once again can enjoy music, film, television; young girls can go to school and women go out in public (although still, for the

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most part, dressed in burqas due to a lingering fear). Antipathy for the Taliban is widespread in Kabul, and people are particularly bitter that its brutal and oppressive regime has been associated with the peaceful Muslim religion.

Celebrations were hesitant, though, as the Taliban fled. There was much to concern the Afghan people, even supposing that the country doesn't lapse into more ethnic division and fighting amongst factions. There will be a huge recovery period after a new government is in place. There is little economic structure left to return to. The Taliban, with no respect for knowledge or professionalism, removed educated people from their posts and so administrative and technical maintenance of the nation's resources was lost. Prolonged war has torn apart energy, irrigation, and communications systems. The poppy crops that had sustained many are not a viable choice for Afghanistan's future. For five years the country has existed in enforced ignorance. For three years food and water shortages have jeopardized the lives of millions.

Afghanistan is beset with problems on all fronts. Its population is once again over-armed; some areas have already resorted to the banditry, kidnapping, and the general lawlessness that existed before Taliban rule. Beyond this, the Taliban, though scattered and no longer in power, continues to fight and mobilize. With support from many sectors within and around Afghanistan, the Taliban and its allies can still do harm to attempts to unify the country. The United States, accused of withdrawing its support from Afghanistan at a crucial time after the Soviets were defeated in 1989, is indicating that it will remain in Afghanistan this time until some stability is achieved. Yet its presence is certain to be a source of friction among the different groups in the country and a threat to some neighboring countries, such as Iran.

Only prolonged peace and stability can lead Afghanistan to recovery from decades of trauma. The new government in Afghanistan will have to ensure that the ethnic groups and religious sects are treated equitably. In the meantime, humanitarian aid agencies are fighting to maintain access to the people who face starvation without their courageous support. With such a difficult road ahead, it is to be hoped that the international community and its funding won't disappear with the Taliban.

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Sonia Benson

Chronology

1978 Afghanistan's communist government, which is closely allied with the Soviet Union, fights a civil war against several groups of guerrillas, or mujahideen.

1979 Soviet troops invade Afghanistan.

1979 Osama bin Laden travels to Afghanistan to fight against the invading Soviets.

1989 The Soviet Union withdraws its troops fromAfghanistan in defeat.

1992 Afghanistan's mujahideen fighters enter into an alliance with each other, installing a coalition government that was to rotate among the leaders of the seven mujahideen groups.

1992 The Tajik forces of Burhanuddin Rabbani and his military commander Ahmad Shah Masud, along with the Uzbek forces of General Rashid Dostum, take the capital city of Kabul. Civil war breaks out among the different factions of mujahideen.

1994-96 The civil war rages on. Rabbani controlsKabul; Ismail Khan governs the western province of Herat; Pashtuns govern three provinces from the city of Jalalabad; Hikmetyar holds a small region near Kabul; Dostum holds six provinces in the north; much of the south is divided among Pashtun warlords.

November 1994 Pakistani Prime Minister BenazirBhutto appoints the Taliban to protect a trade caravan captured by the local warlord in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) begin training and funding the group.

1996 The Taliban captures Kabul, the capital ofAfghanistan.

August 1998 The Taliban takes the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and massacres from one to five thousand civilians belonging to the ethnic Shi'ite Hazara minority in a two-day rampage.

1998 The Taliban declines to turn suspected terroristOsama bin Laden over to the United States.

1999 The Taliban controls more than 90 percent ofAfghanistan, although it still faces considerable opposition. The United Nations imposes sanctions on the country for its refusal to extradite bin Laden.

2000 Mullah Mohammed Omar bans the growing of poppies in Afghanistan, one of the world's largest sources of heroin.

March 2001 The Taliban destroys two ancient statues of Buddha, giant artifacts of Afghanistan's history and culture.

May 2001 The Taliban police arrest eight Christian humanitarian aid workers for proselytizing.

September 11, 2001 Terrorists hijack U.S. passenger airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; another hijacked plane crashes in Pennsylvania. Thousands are killed in the attack. The United States accuses Osama bin Laden and asks the Taliban to give him up or face retribution. The Taliban refuses to give up bin Laden.

September 25, 2001 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan calls on the international community to help the Afghan people, who, because of a dire food shortage, face the "worst humanitarian crisis in the world."

October 7, 2001 The United States and Great Britain start an air strike on targeted sites in Afghanistan.

December 7, 2001 The Taliban cede Kandahar, ending their rule in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden

1957- Osama bin Laden was the seventeenth of 52 children, born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His father was a magnate in construction. His family is known in Muslim countries for financing important building projects and endowing charitable foundations. Bin Laden is said to have inherited about US$300 million.

In 1979 bin Laden traveled to Afghanistan to fight against the invading Soviets. It was there, many believe, that he became radicalized, dedicating his life to a militant Islamic creed. Supplied with American arms and intelligence, he recruited thousands of volunteer fighters, and set up training camps to aid the mujahideen in the war against the Soviet Union. In 1988 bin Laden set up al Qaeda ("the base"), a network of secret terrorist cells that operated in many countries. His goal was to stimulate extreme Islamic religious movements throughout the Muslim world and expel the corrupt Westerners, non-Muslims, and the Muslim leaders who, he believed, had strayed from the true law of Islam.

In 1991 bin Laden was enraged to learn that U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia due to the Persian Gulf War. He denounced Saudi Arabia for allowing them in the country and then announced a jihad or holy war against the Americans who, he felt, had occupied the Muslim Holy Land. That year the Saudis expelled him and revoked his citizenship, and he moved to Sudan, where he set up businesses and terrorist training camps in preparation for a war against the United States. Sudan expelled him in 1996 and he moved to Afghanistan, where he set up state-of-the-art terrorist training camps, according to some of his trainees who are now in custody.

In 1998 two U.S. embassies in Africa were bombed. The United States, convinced that bin Laden was responsible, bombed sites in Afghanistan and in Sudan where his training camps were suspected to be. The United States and then the United Nations demanded that bin Laden be extradited to a country that could try him for his terrorist acts, but the Taliban, then in power in Afghanistan, refused.

Al Qaeda is a highly secret organization. Experts believe that bin Laden and its leaders tell the operatives within the organization only what they need to know to carry out terrorist plans. Few individuals know what the group as a whole is planning. The size of the group probably varies as people are called in. It is estimated that al Qaeda draws from a group of about 50,000 Muslims worldwide, perhaps using several hundred to several thousand of them in projects. Al Qaeda is known to bankroll terrorist projects that others bring to its attention. The network is thought to be responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; the 1995 assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; the 1996 attack on the U.S. military headquarters in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 soldiers; the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 235 and injuring more than 5,000; the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors; and the 2001 hijackings of four U.S. passenger airliners that destroyed the World Trade Center towers and a portion of the Pentagon, killing thousands of people.

Speech by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar

Wednesday, September 19, 2001. Source: Reuters. Cited December 7, 2001. Available online at: http://www.bostonherald.com/attack/world_reaction/ausmul09192001.htm.

The Ulema have always guided the nation.

Our Islamic state is the true Islamic state in the world and for this reason the enemies of our religion and our country look on us as a thorn in their eyes and use different pretexts to try to finish it, including the one about the presence of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

They put the blame for Washington and New York on him. The question is how did Osama tell the pilots? And which airports did they use? And whose planes were those? The answer is that it is America.

In this regard, Afghanistan does not have the resources and neither does Osama have the strength or resources. He is not in contact with anyone and neither have we given permission to anyone to use the Afghan land against anyone.

We have not tried to create friction with America. We have had several talks with the present and past American governments and we are ready for more talks.

We have told America that we have taken all resources from Osama and he cannot contact the outside world. And we have told America that neither the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan or Osama are involved in the American events. But it is sad that America does not listen to our word.

America always repeats threats and makes various accusations and now it is threatening military attack.

This is being done in circumstances in which we have offered alternatives on the Osama issue.

We have said, if you have evidence against Osama, give it to the Afghan Supreme Court or the Ulema [group of mullahs or clerics] of three Islamic countries, or have OIC (Organisation of Islamic Countries) observers keep an eye on Osama.

But America rejected these, one by one. If America had considered these suggestions there would not have been a chance of such a great misunderstanding.

We appeal to the American government to exercise complete patience, and we want America to gather complete information and find the actual culprits.

We assure the whole world that neither Osama nor anyone else can use the Afghan land against anyone else.

And if even after this, America wants to use force and wants to attack Afghanistan and our innocent and oppressed people and wants to destroy the Islamic emirate, we seek your guidance and a fatwa (ruling) on the issue in the light of Islamic Sharia.