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Taliban.
Everyone’s heard it, like
insurgent, Sunni, ayatollah,
or
Taiwan.
But what does Taliban really stand for? I’ve suffered with them, what you might describe as
close encounters of the most god-awful type. And I’ve done a lot of reading. The facts fit the
reality. Those guys are evil, murderous religious fanatics, each one of them with an AK-47 and a
bloodlust. You can trust me on that one.
The Taliban have been in prominence since 1994. Their original leader was a village
clergyman named Mullah Mohammad Omar, a tough guy who lost his right eye fighting the
occupying forces of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. By the mid-’90s, the Taliban’s prime targets
in Afghanistan — before I showed up — were the feuding warlords who (a) formed the
mujahideen and (b) threw the Soviets out of the country.
The Taliban made two major promises which they would carry out once in power: to
restore peace and security, and to enforce sharia, or Islamic law. Afghans, weary of the
mujahideens’ excesses and infighting, welcomed the Taliban, which enjoyed much early success,
stamping out corruption, curbing lawlessness, and making the roads safe for commerce to
flourish. This applied to all areas that came under their control.
They began their operation in the southwestern city of Kandahar and moved quickly into
other parts of the country. They captured the province of Herat, which borders Iran, in September
1995. And one year later, their armies took the Afghan capital of Kabul, overthrowing the regime
of President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his defense minister, Ahmed Shah Massoud. By 1998,
they were in control of almost 90 percent of the country.
Once in power, however, the Taliban showed their true colors. They set up one of the
most authoritarian administrations on earth, one that tolerated no opposition to their hard-line
policies. Ancient Islamic punishments, like public executions for convicted murderers and
amputations at the wrist for those charged with theft, were immediately introduced. I cannot even
think about the penalty a rapist or an adulterer might anticipate.
Television, music, sports, and cinema were banned, judged by the Taliban leaders to be
frivolities. Girls age ten and above were forbidden to go to school; working women were ordered
to stay at home. Men were required to grow beards, women had to wear the burka. These
religious policies earned universal notoriety as the Taliban strived to restore the Middle Ages in
a nation longing to join the twenty-first century. Their policies concerning human rights were
outrageous and brought them into direct conflict with the international community.
But there was another issue, which would bring about their destruction. And that was
their role in playing host to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda movement. In August 1998
Islamic fanatics bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 225
people. Washington immediately presented the Taliban leaders with a difficult choice — either
expel bin Laden, who was held responsible for the bombings by the U.S. government, or face the
consequences.
The Taliban flatly refused to hand over their Saudi-born guest, who was providing them
with heavy funding. President Bill Clinton ordered a missile attack on the main bin Laden
training camp in southern Afghanistan, which failed to kill its leader. Then in 1999 the United
States persuaded the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Two years later, even harsher sanctions were put in place in another attempt to force the Taliban
to hand over bin Laden.
Nothing worked. Not sanctions nor the denial of Afghanistan’s U.N. seat. The Taliban
were still in power, and they were still hiding Osama bin Laden, but their isolation, political and
diplomatic, was becoming total.
But the Taliban would not budge. They took their isolation as a badge of honor and
decided to go whole hog with an even more fundamentalist regime. The poor Afghan people
realized too late what they had done: handed over the entire country to a group of bearded
lunatics who were trying to inflict upon them nothing but stark human misery and who
controlled every move they made under their brutal, repressive, draconian rule. The Taliban were
so busy trying to enslave the citizens, they forgot about the necessity for food, and there was
mass starvation. One million Afghans fled the country as refugees.
All of this was understood by the West. Almost. But it took horrific shock, delivered in
March 2001, to cause genuine inter-national outrage. That was when the Taliban blasted sky-
high the two monumental sixth-century statues of the Bamiyan Buddhas, one of them 180 feet
high, the other 120 feet, carved out of a mountain in central Afghanistan, 143 miles northwest of
Kabul. This was tantamount to blowing up the Pyramids of Giza.
The statues were hewn directly from sandstone cliffs right in Bamiyan, which is situated
on the ancient Silk Road, the caravan route which linked the markets of China and central Asia
with those of Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia. It was also one of the revered Buddhist
religious sites, dating back to the second century and once home to hundreds of monks and many
monasteries. The two statues were the largest standing Buddha carvings on earth.
And their summary destruction by the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan caused museum
directors and curators all over the world to have about four hemorrhages apiece. The Taliban
effectively told the whole lot of them to shove it. Whose statues were they, anyway? Besides,
they were planning to destroy all the statues in Afghanistan, on the grounds they were un-
Islamic.
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