1997
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INTERNATIONAL REPORTING |
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Index | 2/5 | 2/14 | 10/1 | 10/7 | 10/14 | 10/15 | 10/27 | 11/3 | 11/30 | 12/31
How Afghan's Stern Rulers Took Hold
Two teen-age girls from the mullah's village of Singesar had
been abducted by one of the gangs of mujahedeen, or "holy
warriors," who controlled much of the Afghan countryside.
The girls' heads had been shaved, they had been taken to a
checkpoint outside the village and they had been repeatedly
raped. At the time, Omar was an obscure figure, a former guerrilla
commander against occupying Soviet forces who had returned
home in disgust at the terror mujahedeen groups were inflicting
on Afghanistan. He was living as a student, or talib, in a mud-walled religious
school that centered on rote learning of the Koran. But the girls' plight moved him to act. Gathering 30 former
guerrilla fighters, who mustered between them 16 Kalashnikov
rifles, he led an attack on the checkpoint, freed the girls and
tied the checkpoint commander by a noose to the barrel of an
old Soviet tank. As those around him shouted "God is Great!"
Omar ordered the tank barrel raised and left the dead man
hanging as a grisly warning. The Singesar episode is now part of Afghan folklore. Barely
30 months after taking up his rifle, Omar is the supreme ruler
of most of Afghanistan. The mullah, a heavyset 38-year old
who lost his right eye in the war against the Russians, is
known to his followers as Prince of All Believers. He leads an
Islamic religious movement, the Taliban, that has conquered 20
of Afghanistan's 32 provinces. Omar's call to arms in Singesar is only part of the story of the
rise of the Taliban that emerged from weeks of traveling across
Afghanistan and from scores of interviews with Afghans,
diplomats and others who followed the movement from its
earliest days in 1994. It is a story that is still unfolding, with the Taliban struggling to
consolidate their hold on Kabul, the capital. The city fell three
months ago to a Taliban force of a few thousand fighters who
entered the city with barely a shot fired. But the Taliban, despite their protestations of independence,
did not score their successes alone. Pakistani leaders saw
domestic political gains in supporting the movement, which
draws most of its support from the ethnic Pashtun who
predominate along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Perhaps more important, Pakistan's leaders, in funneling
supplies of ammunition, fuel and food to the Taliban, hoped to
advance an old Pakistani dream of linking their country,
through Afghanistan, to an economic and political alliance with
the Muslim states of Central Asia. At crucial moments during the two years of the Taliban's rise
to power, the United States stood aside. It did little to
discourage support for the Afghan mullahs both from Pakistan
and from another American ally, Saudi Arabia, which found its
own reasons for supporting the Taliban in their conservative
brand of Islam. American officials emphatically deny the assertion, widely
believed among the Taliban's opponents in Afghanistan, that
the United States offered the movement covert support.
American diplomats' frequent visits to Kandahar, headquarters
of the Taliban's governing body, the officials insist, were
mainly exploratory. In fact, American policy on the Taliban has seesawed back and
forth. The Taliban have found favor with some American
officials, who see in their implacable hostility toward Iran an
important counterweight in the region. But other officials remain uncomfortable about the Taliban's
policies on women, which they say have created the most
backward-looking and intolerant society anywhere in Islam.
And they say that the Taliban, despite promises to the contrary,
have done nothing to root out the narcotics traffickers and
terrorists who have found a haven in Afghanistan under the
mujahedeen. In its most recent policy statement on Afghanistan, the State
Department called on other nations to "engage" with the
Taliban in hopes of moderating their policies. But the statement came as the Taliban were tightening still
further their Islamic social code, particularly the taboos that
have banned women from working, closed girls' schools, and
required all women beyond puberty to cloak themselves
head-to-toe in garments called burqas that are the traditional
garb of Afghan village women. The result, so far, is that not a single one of the member
countries of the United Nations has recognized the Taliban
government and none have come forward with offers of the
reconstruction aid the Taliban say will be needed to rebuild this
shattered country. In the words of Mullah Mohammed Hassan,
one of Omar's partners in the Taliban's ruling council, "We are
the pariahs of the world." How the Taliban succeeded in pacifying much of a country that
had spent years spiraling into chaos is not, as their progress
from Singesar to Kabul attests, primarily a question of military
prowess. Much more, it was a matter of a group of Islamic nationalists
catching a high tide of discontent that built up when the
mujahedeen turned from fighting Russians to plundering, and
just as often killing, their own people. By 1994, after five
years of mujahedeen terror, the Taliban was a movement
whose time had come.
One man who has seen more of the Taliban than any other
outsider, Rahimullah Yusufzai, a reporter for The News in
Pakistan, put it simply: "The story of the Taliban is not one of
outsiders imposing a solution, but of the Aghans themselves
seeking deliverance from mujahedeen groups that had become
cruel and inhuman. The Afghan people had been waiting a long
time for relief from their miseries, and they would have
accepted anybody who would have freed them from the
tyranny." In any case, Omar contends that the decision to act at Singesar
was not, at the time, envisaged as a step toward power. Although he is universally known in Afghanistan as mullah, or
giver of knowledge, he is a shy man who still calls himself a
talib, or seeker after knowledge. He has met only once with a
foreign reporter, Yusufzai. Omar said at their meeting in
Kandahar that the men at Singesar intended originally only to
help local villagers. "We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong," he
said. "How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes
being committed against women, and the poor?" But appeals were soon coming in from villages all around
Kandahar. At about the time the two girls were being abducted
in Singesar, which is in the Maiwand district 35 miles to the
west, two other mujahedeen commanders had confronted each
other with tanks in a bazaar in Kandahar, arguing over
possession of a young boy both men wanted as a homosexual
partner. In the ensuing battle, dozens of civilians shopping and trading
in the bazaar were killed. After the Taliban took control of
Kandahar, those commanders, too, ended up hanging from
Taliban nooses. With each new action against the mujahedeen, the Taliban's
manpower, and arsenal, grew. Mujahedeen fighters, and
sometimes whole units, switched sides, so that the Taliban
quickly came to resemble a coalition of many of the country's
fighting groups. The new recruits included many men who had
served in crucial military positions as pilots, tank commanders
and front-line infantry officers in the Afghan Communist
forces that fought under Soviet control in the 1980's. After a skirmish in September 1994, at Spin Boldak on the
border with Pakistan, netted the new movement 800 truckloads
of arms and ammunition that had been stored in caves since the
Soviet occupation, there was no force to match the Taliban.
Moving rapidly east and west of Kandahar in the winter of
1994 and the spring of 1995, they rolled up territory.
Sometimes, using money said to have come from Saudi
Arabia, Taliban commanders paid mujahedeen commanders to
give up. But mostly, it was enough for Taliban units to appear on the
horizon with the fluttering white flags symbolizing their
Islamic puritanism. "In most places, the people welcomed the
Taliban as a deliverance, so there was no need to fight,"
recalled Yusufzai, the Pakistani reporter. Another event in Sept. 1994 gave the Taliban their most
important external backer. Naseerullah Babar, Pakistan's interior minister, had a vision
for extricating his wedge-shaped country from the precarious
position in which it was placed when it was created in 1947 by
the partition of India from territories running along British
India's frontiers with Afghanistan. Babar saw a Pakistan linked to the newly independent Muslim
republics of what had been Soviet Central Asia, along roads
and railways running across Afghanistan. He believed that
stability in Afghanistan would mean a potential economic
bonanza for Pakistan and a strategic breakthrough for the
West. "It was in the West's overall interest," he said in an interview
in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. "Unless the Central Asian
states have an opening to the sea, they will never be free from
Russia." With the rise of Taliban power around Kandahar, Babar spied
a chance to prove the vision's practicability. Using Pakistani
government funds, he arranged a "peace convoy" of heavily
loaded trucks to run rice, clothing and other gifts north from
Quetta in Pakistan, through Kandahar, and onward to
Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan. But outside the American-built airport at Kandahar, a
mujahedeen commander guarding one of the thousands of
checkpoints that had made an obstacle course of any Afghan
journey seized the convoy, demanding ransom. Once again,
the Taliban intervened, freeing the convoy and hanging, again
from a tank barrel, the commander who hijacked it. Babar's subsequent enthusiasm for the Taliban gave rise to a
widespread belief among the the group's opponents that it was
a Pakistani creation, or at least that its growing military power
was sustained by large transfers of cash, arms and ammunition
from Pakistan. Because of Pakistan's close ties with the United
States, it was a short step for these Taliban opponents to
conclude that Washington was also backing the Taliban. After Kabul fell in September, Americans venturing into
non-Taliban areas north of Kabul faced a common taunt from
soldiers of the ousted government of President Burhanuddin
Rabbani. "The Taliban are American puppets!" they said. But while this was not accurate, there were ties between
American officials and the growing movement that were
considerably broader than those to any other Western country. From early on, American diplomats in Islamabad had made
regular visits to Kandahar to see Taliban leaders. In briefings
for reporters, these diplomats cited what they saw as positive
aspects of the Taliban, which they listed as the movement's
capacity to end the war in Afghanistan and its promises to put
an end to the use of Afghanistan as a base for
narcotics-trafficking and international terrorism. Unmentioned, but probably most important to Washington,
was that the Taliban, who are Sunni Muslims, have a deep
hostility for Iran, America's nemesis, where the ruling majority
belong to the rival Shiite sect of Islam. Along the way, Washington developed yet another interest in
the Taliban as potential backers for a 1,200-mile gas pipeline
that an American energy company, Union Oil of California,
has proposed building from Quetta, in Pakistan, to
Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic that sits atop some of
the world's largest gas reserves, but has limited means to
export them. The project, which Unocal executives have estimated could
cost $5 billion, would be built in conjunction with Delta Oil
Co., a Saudi Arabian concern that also has close links to the
Taliban. Among the advisers Unocal has employed to deal with
the Taliban is Robert Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to
Pakistan. American officials, however, denied providing any direct
assistance, covert or otherwise, to the Taliban. Similar assurances were given to Russia and India, as well as
indirectly to Iran, countries that were involved in heavy arms
shipments of their own to the Taliban's main opponents, the
armies of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and Rabbani that control
the 12 northern provinces that continue to resist the Taliban. "We do not have any relationship with the Taliban, and we
never have had," David Cohen, the CIA official who directs
the agency's clandestine operations, told Indian officials in
New Delhi in November. Babar offered similar denials, asserting that "there has been no
financial or material aid to the Taliban from Pakistan." But
Western intelligence officials in Pakistan said this was a
smokescreen for a policy of covert support that Babar, a retired
Pakistani general, had extended to the Taliban after the convoy
episode at Kandahar airport. These supplies, the intelligence officials said, apart from
ammunition and fuel, included the deployment at crucial
junctures of Pakistani military advisers. The advisers were
easy to hide, since they were almost all ethnic Pashtuns, from
the same tribe that make up the overwhelming majority of the
Taliban. American officials like Robin Raphel, the top State Department
official dealing directly with matters involving Afghanistan,
have placed heavy emphasis on the hope that contacts with the
new rulers in Kabul will encourage them to soften their
policies, especially toward women. They also say that the United States sees the Taliban, with its
Islamic conservatism, as the best, and perhaps the only, chance
that Afghanistan will halt the poppy growing and opium
production that have made Afghanistan, with an estimated
2,500 tons of raw opium a year, the world's biggest
single-country source of the narcotic. A similar argument is
made on the issue of the network of international terrorists,
many of them Arabs, who have set up bases inside
Afghanistan. But as the Taliban consolidate their power in Kabul, the signs
of cooperation are not strong. In the week before Christmas, as
bitterly cold winds from the 20,000-foot Hindu Kush
mountains swept down on Kabul, senior Taliban officials
seemed to be in a more pugnacious mood than in October,
when a counteroffensive by the Rabbani and Dostum forces
came within 10 miles of Kabul. The attacking forces have since been driven back beyond
artillery range, allowing the Taliban to concentrate on
tightening their grip on Kabul's restive population of
1.5-million. The sense that these Taliban leaders now give is that they see
little reason to accommodate the West. Reports from U.N.
officials monitoring drug flows suggest the Taliban have done
nothing to impede the trafficking, and that in the key provinces
of Helmand and Nangahar -- accounting for more than 90
percent of the opium production -- they are in league with the
drug producers, taxing them, and storing some of the opium in
Taliban-guarded warehouses. Confronted with these reports, Taliban leaders have a stock
response. "We intend to stop the drug trafficking, because it is
against Islamic laws," they have said. "But until we can rebuild
our economy, there are no other jobs, so now is not the time." The Taliban position on those who support international
terrorists is still more elusive. According to Western
intelligence estimates, as many as 400 trained terrorists are
living in areas under Taliban control, some of them with links
to the groups that mounted the bombing of the World Trade
Center in February 1993 as well as other major attacks. One of the most-wanted terrorists of all, Osama Bin Laden, a
Saudi Arabian businessman who praised the bombing last
December that killed 19 American servicemen at an air force
barracks in the Saudi Arabian city of Dahran, has been spotted
within the past month at a heavily-guarded home in the Afghan
city of Jalalabad, held by the Taliban since early September. But it is on their treatment of women that Western
governments' attitudes seem most likely to hinge, and on this,
the Taliban show no sign of relenting. After a Taliban radio
bulletin earlier this month celebrated the fact that 250 Kabul
women had been beaten by Taliban forces in a single day for
not observing the dress code, Ross Everson, an Australian
working as a coordinator for private Western aid agencies in
Kabul, visited one of the city's top Taliban officials, Mullah
Mohammed Mutaqi, to appeal for a turn toward what Everson
called "the doctrine of moderation that the Islamic faith is
famous for." Mutaqi stood up and waved his fist in Everson's face. "You
are insulting us!," he said. Then, snuggling back into the
blanket that Taliban officials wear around their shoulders for
warmth in the unheated offices of Kabul, he made his clinching
argument. "I must ask you, are you the Muslim here, or am I?," he said.
"If you westerners want to help us, you are welcome.
Otherwise you are free to leave Afghanistan. You may think
we cannot survive without you, but I can tell you, God will
provide the Taliban with everything we need." |
