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The Taliban
Surge in Taliban Activity in Southern Afghanistan
- 05/03/06
Analysis: Who are the Taleban?
The world first became aware of the Taleban in 1994 when they were
appointed by Islamabad to protect a convoy trying to open up a trade route
between Pakistan and Central Asia.
The group -
comprised of Afghans trained in religious schools in Pakistan along with
former Islamic fighters or mujahedin - proved effective bodyguards, driving
off other mujahedin groups who attacked and looted the convoy.
They went on to take the nearby city of Kandahar, beginning a remarkable
advance which led to their capture of the capital, Kabul, in September 1996.
Anti-corruption
The Taleban's popularity with many Afghans initially surprised the
country's warring mujahedin factions.
As ethnic
Pashtuns, a large part of their support came from Afghanistan's Pashtun
community, disillusioned with existing ethnic Tajik and Uzbek leaders.
But it was not purely a question of ethnicity. Ordinary Afghans, weary
of the prevailing lawlessness in many parts of the country, were often
delighted by Taleban successes in stamping out corruption, restoring peace and
allowing commerce to flourish again.
Their refusal to deal with the existing warlords whose rivalries had
caused so much killing and destruction also earned them respect.
Islamic state
The Taleban said their aim was to set up the world's most pure Islamic
state, banning frivolities like television, music and cinema.
Their attempts to
eradicate crime have been reinforced by the introduction of Islamic law
including public executions and amputations.
A flurry of regulations forbidding girls from going to school and women
from working quickly brought them into conflict with the international
community.
Such issues, along with restrictions on women's access to health care,
have also caused some resentment among ordinary Afghans.
Extending control
The Taleban now control all but the far north of
the country, which is the last stronghold of the ethnic Tajik commander Ahmed
Shah Masood.
With 90% of the country under their control, the Taleban have continued
to press claims for international recognition.
But the Afghan seat at the United Nations continues to be held by former
President Burhanuddin Rabbani.
The UN sanctions which have now been imposed on the country make it even
less likely that the Taleban will gain that recognition.
The sanctions are intended to force the Taleban to hand over the
Saudi-born militant Osama Bin Laden, who is accused by the United States of
plotting the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed
more than 250 people.
The Taleban say that Osama Bin Laden is a guest in their country, and
they will not take action against him.
Afghanistan has suffered 20 years of war, and this year has brought the
worst drought in decades.
There is little sign that sanctions will change the Taleban's policies,
or weaken their position within the country.
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Michael Griffin The Taleban |
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Seven
years after the Taleban movement was founded, the features of its leader,
Mullah Muhammad Omar, are unknown outside Kandahar, where he lived with his
wife and children until the events of September 11. He has been described as
about 44 years old and “unusually tall” for an Afghan; alternatively
“heavy-set” or “distinguished”. His right eye is stitched shut, the result
of an encounter with Soviet soldiers when he was a Mujahidin commander with
the Harakat-I Inqilab-I-Islami Party. The left eye, his few visitors allow,
has a “hawk-like, unrelenting” gaze.
He assiduously cultivates this air of enigma in a refusal to be
photographed, and by delegating all but the most crucial encounters with
non-Afghans to colleagues or underlings. He has visited Kabul once since the
Taleban captured it five years ago. What scant media access the Mullah
permits tends to reinforce his image as a sphinx-like visitor from another
plane of being.
The atmosphere in his immediate court, by contrast, is relaxed and
informal. Commanders come and go, dipping their fingers into the communal
cooking pot and contributing at liberty to whatever discussion is going on.
The Mullah keeps a strongbox by his side, handing out expenses as and when
required. This is expected under the Pashtun tribal code, known as
pashtunwali, in which relations between men are seldom hierarchical.
Muhammad Omar’s first explanation of the Taleban’s mission was that it
had arisen to restore peace, to provide security to the wayfarer and to
protect the honour of women and the poor. But the rise of the mullah under
the Taleban proved to be less a return to the elusive values cherished in
pre-communist times than the stupefying of a spiritual tradition that once
traced its origins back to the footsteps of the Prophet.
The sayed, the pir and the alim, Afghanistan’s
spiritual aristocracy, comprised a legacy that combined “High Church” trends
in Islamic thought with a popular belief in spirit possession and anchored
them in the everyday life of the village. The Taleban buried them all and
the mullah, a cross between a country parson and a Shakespearean clown,
recited the funeral rights.
The young taleb, or religious students, who rallied to the
cause were the product of the Deoband school of Sunni thought, founded 130
years earlier in Uttar Pradesh, India. The Deobandis represent the extreme
of attempts to regulate the personal behaviour of their pupils, having
issued nearly a quarter of a million fatwa on the minutiae of everyday life
since the beginning of the 20th century.
Boys enter the system as wards, exchanging life in a poor family for
bed, board and an austere catechism that will one day lead to life as a
mullah. It is tempting to identify in this early separation from female
relatives the origins of the extreme misogyny that, even more than the
objective of a pure Islamic state, lent cohesion to the Taleban as they
marched into and subdued non-Pashtun lands.
But Taleban misogyny went so far beyond what is normally intended by
the word that it qualified as a kind of “gynaeophobia” so broad that a
glimpse of stockinged foot or varnished nail was taken as a seductive
invitation to personal damnation.
Women had to be covered, closeted and, where necessary, beaten to
prevent more sin from being spewed into society. Part of this anxiety was
sexual and could be attributed to the highly charged rules of pashtunwali
under which girls embark on the perilous road to puberty at seven when they
are separated from boys and men. From then until marriage, youths have no
permissible contact with the opposite sex beyond the members of their own
family.
In Kandahar, the custom of seclusion had given rise to a rich
tradition of homosexual passion, celebrated in poetry, dance and the
practice of male prostitution. Heterosexual romance, by contrast, was
freighted with the fear of broken honour, the threat of vendetta and,
ultimately, death by stoning. In Pashtun society, man-woman love was the one
that dared not speak its name: boy courtesans conducted their affairs
openly.
The taleb grew to maturity on the gruel of orthodoxy, estranged
from the mitigating influence of women, family and village. This made early
recruits to the movement disciplined and biddable. If their gynaeophobia
appeared the product of a repressed homosexuality on the march, Taleban
cohorts also conjured up echoes of a medieval children’s crusade, with its
associated elements of self-flagellation and an innocent trust in the
immanence of paradise.
The versatility of the Taleban elite, who alternate as military
chiefs, governors and ministers, as well as mullahs, combined with the
ingrained Afghan practice of adopting noms de guerre, argues in
favour of the thesis that the movement merely clothed its membership in
ecclesiastical titles to disguise their origins. This process of
“clericalisation” similarly transformed each enemy defection into a
Damascene conversion, just as the enforcement of Sharia-based edicts in non-Pashtun
regions added a patina of religion to what was essentially the imposition of
martial law.
It also veiled a coat rack of skeletons. “Mullah” Muhammad Hassan, the
Governor of Kandahar, had nothing to do with the religious world before his
emergence as the Taleban’s number three, while “Mullah” Borjan, the
movement’s Rommel until his death in 1996, was a former Afghan army officer
who had served under King Zahir Shah. Other military figures were in the
Afghan Army until 1992, making a mockery of Mullah Muhammad Omar’s claim
that his goal was to rid Afghanistan of “time-serving communists”.
Michael Griffin is the author of Reaping the Whirlwind: The
Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com). |
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Understanding the Taliban Is a
Crucial Task...By Aisha Geissinger
News from Afghanistan in the international media
revolves around reported bans on marbles, kite-flying and toilet paper, and
the forcible imposition of the beard and burqa. It seems that the vocabulary
of the average Talib has shrunk to two words: haram (forbidden) and fardh
(obligatory). Reports of draconian restrictions on women take centre stage,
because of western audiences fascination with what lies behind the veil. Men
responsible for enforcing public decency are said to beat women in the
street who show their faces or ankles. Most women are not allowed to work.
They are forbidden to see male doctors, yet there are few female doctors
available. Most girls schools have been closed, and the only education
available is religious instruction for girls who have not reached puberty.
What are we to make of all this? Some Muslims
agree with these policies and publicly support the Taliban. Others violently
disagree, advocate shaving the beard in order to demonstrate their
disagreement, and are willing to appear on television along with secular
human rights and feminist groups in order to denounce these policies. But
most Muslims maintain an embarrassed silence, taking refuge behind the
excuse that "we dont really know what's going on there." It might be more
honest to say that we don't want to know what is happening, much less deal
with it.
To most Muslims, the Afghans are the heroic
people who defeated the former Soviet Union despite overwhelming odds. The
subsequent civil war in Afghanistan deeply disappointed most people and has
led them to turn their faces from the on-going conflict as much as possible.
The majority of Muslims worldwide cherish visions of a just Islamic state
emerging somewhere, if not in their own country. This hope sustains many
people in the face of what appear to be hopeless odds. To see the dream
become a nightmare, and the phrase "Islamic justice" used as a synonym for
tyranny, is painful.
Finally, criticism of the Taliban, whether it
comes from non-Muslims or Muslims, is often heavily overlaid with prejudices
or political interests. Muslims often show their partisan, class, ethnic and
madhhabi interests in their criticism, deriding the Taliban as "peasants",
"ignorant Pakhtun", or "Wahhabis". Muslim criticisms tell at best a partial
tale: who does the ban on toilet paper primarily affect? Pity thepoor
foreign correspondents who are forced to use a lota (water jug)! Ifany
non-Muslim country banned toilet paper, environmental groups would
beapplauding it for its ecologically progressive decision.
Western complicity in and responsibility for the
Taliban's excesses is usually ignored; if the economy is based on opium,
what can anyone expect after 22 years of war and upheaval, to say nothing of
the recent imposition of economic sanctions? These criticisms of the Taliban
are clearly a way of attacking Islamic movements in general and proving that
any attempt to actualize Islam's socio-political dimensions in this age is
doomed to failurein fact, that nothing could be worse than a societybased on
Islam. Other Afghan factions have been making political mileageout of such
western media attacks, but in the long term all Muslims, in and outside of
Afghanistan, will pay a high price for such coverage inyears to come. It is
being used as a weapon against any Muslimself-assertion anywhere, even of
the most peaceable and innocuous sort.
While the media deride the Taliban as mediaeval,
in fact such groups arethoroughly modern and emerge as a result of the
unsettled conditions ofthe modern world. Similar movements can be found in
other countries andamong many of the worlds religions. American Christians
who bomb abortionclinics, Hindus who demolished the Babri Masjid and have
their eyes on anumber of other masajid throughout India, ultra-orthodox Jews
who throw stones at women who walk through their neighbourhoods wearing
trousers orshort sleeves, all have more in common with the Taliban than they
(or theTaliban) realise. All such movements, despite their outward
differences,are a reaction to the dramatic social, political and economic
changeswhich have taken place in the last hundred and fifty years. The world
isbeing swamped by lahw (vain pursuits), and much of it is beyond thecontrol
of ordinary people. Many Muslims realise that their cultures arein retreat
before the advance of the technologically advanced andaggressive global
secular civilisation.
The modern world focuses primarily on material
things. Development ismeasured by material indicators, not by intangible
things such asGod-consciousness, brotherhood and sisterhood, or
neighbourliness.Taliban-style movements also focus on the material, the
tangible aspectsof faithrules and outward behaviour. Unlike beliefs,
intentions and feelings, these can be controlled and imposed upon people.
Talibanviolence against those who break the rules is an application of
themodern view that state interference in the lives of individuals is
theanswer to most social problems. An over-literal focus on
individualQuranic ayaat and ahadith obscures the larger picture, and makes
laws thecentre of attention while ethical conduct remains at best optional.
This focus on rules also ignores the
prerequisites for establishing anIslamic system in the modern world. Since
the 1975 drafting of CEDAW(Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women), the UNand various NGOs have been trying to discourage
single-sex education andmedical care when possible. Muslims by and large
have ignored this, withsome communities quibbling over whether and to what
degree women shouldbe educated. As a result, there is still a marked
shortage of womendoctors, nurses, other medical personnel, and educators in
most Muslimcommunities, including Afghanistan.
Some women pursue degrees in medicine or
education with the intention ofenhancing their marriageability rather than
practising after graduation.Others prefer (or are compelled by
circumstances) to work in the west.The twisted ideas that a married woman
has no responsibility to the ummahas a whole, and that it is shameful if she
has concerns beyond herimmediate family circle, are also alive and well. In
addition, someMuslim women, even those who observe purdah, prefer to be seen
by maledoctors because they do not have confidence in the competence of
women.This is based partly on cultural beliefs in female inferiority, but
alsoon the sad fact that female doctors are often restricted from receiving
comparable training to men, and are often are not able to
pursuespecialisations outside of obstetrics and gynaecology.
In these circumstances, the separation of
medical and educationalfacilities for women and men becomes blatantly
unjust. It harmsindividual women, infants and children, men, the family and
the ummah asa whole. It is also profoundly destabilising: people who have
the meansto leave such a society will do so in search of medical
treatment,education and opportunity. Those who stay will tend to be
suffocated, andtheir ability to deal with the challenges posed by the modern
world willbe decreased.
The Taliban are having to deal with
international condemnation andfinancial arm-twisting by donor countries. As
a result, they have to gothrough the motions of improving their position on
women. On March 8,they held a celebration of International Womens Day in
Kabul for 700hand-picked women, formerly employed as medical workers. The
Taliban haveforbidden the celebration of Nawruz (the pre-Islamic Persian new
yearsday) as a bidah (innovation), but apparently International Women's Day,
which commemorates a strike by American female garment workers, is
acceptable. This is an indication of their helplessness in the face
ofwestern condemnation because the womens problem wont go away by casting
aveil over it, western solutions are being used as window-dressing.
ThoseAfghans who might have proposed constructive and creative
Islamicsolutions have been killed or driven into exile.
The situation in Afghanistan cannot continue as
it is, and when things fall apart one wonders who will be there to pick up
the pieces. Christian and secular aid organizations are eager to build on
the disillusionment of Afghans with Islam, and missionaries are actively
converting Afghan refugees to Christianity. Twenty years from now, what will
be the result of the Taliban experiment? A generation of embittered,
violently anti-Islamic intellectuals, authors and artists? Will anyone dare
to walk in the streets of Kabul wearing a beard or a burqa?
The Islamic movement needs to look honestly at
the situation in Afghanistan (and places such as northern Iraq and Pakistan,
where Taliban-style ideas have following), consider the origins and
consequences of such groups, and develop responses which will solve the
problems that they create within an Islamic framework. Averting our faces
from painful realities is an option we cannot afford, both because it
betrays the suffering of many in Afghanistan men and women and because of
the long-term consequences for the Ummah as a whole. |
Taliban Movement Gains Strength
in the United States
by Francis King
page two
In Afghanistan, Taliban followers are
convinced that the only solution is to keep all women inside the house, quiet,
and away from any position of responsibility.
Should American women be kept away from roles which require
adult judgement, or are today's American women ready to take responsibility for
their actions? Apparently they are not, according to the National Organization
for Women (NOW). NOW has passed a resolution indicating their opposition to any
penalties for the false reporting of child abuse or spousal abuse. Maybe passing
this resolution makes NOW members feel good, but many will interpret this
position as confirmation of their widely rumored Holy War Against Men.
In NOW's view of things, there is no problem of false
reporting. They would tell us that it is a miscarriage of justice when a man is
let free after an abuse charge is found to be without substance. Perhaps NOW
would feel much better if we just forgot about this substantiation business
altogether. They know that this might result in some women being falsely
accused, but that seems a small price to pay when there is a war on.
NOW seems to have put feeling good
ahead of responsibility, and in doing so has sacrificed a valuable piece of its
integrity. Misandrist, self-indulgent positions such as this one tend to
polarize people's attitudes. Reasonable people can begin to see merit in an
opposing stand that they otherwise would shun as extreme.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban used plain old-fashioned male
dominance to stake an exclusive claim to the moral virtues of self-discipline,
responsibility, and integrity.
In the U.S., our equivalent of the Taliban is the
conservative right. They want to actually do something about what they describe
as the immorality of the liberal, feminist left, and they promise to take
decisive action.
A man chooses his path; a woman follows behind to clean
and complain.
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