Afghanistan - The Taliban

The black-turbaned Taliban are a PR agent's worst nightmare. A visual mix of Darth Vader gansta rappers and rejects from a Bible play, they come to press conferences with Noriega-style Ray Bans, scruffy beards, long black robes, armed bodyguards and an attitude that makes Louis Farrakhan seem like Mr. Rogers. The Taliban are not bad guys, they're just a little rough around the edges and they don't get out much. Maybe a guest shot on Oprah with a sensitivity coach would help them "address their issues." Their leaders are primarily 40-something muj selected from the Durrani tribes from the backwater southern provinces of Helmand and Uruzgan. They are a simple, pure people led by very religious but culturally isolated mullahs who want outsiders out of Afghanistan and to establish a pure Islamic state. They are simply mad as hell at foreign intervention and ain't gonna take it any more. The funny thing is their northern enemy says they are just the latest Pakistani-backed stooges in this too-long-running war movie/soap opera.

Why are they mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? Well, when they started their leader was one-eyed, 35-year-old ex muj commander Mullah Muhammad Omar. Trucks driving towards Kabul from southern Pakistan were forced to pay a toll of 2 million afghanis (about US$250D300) to cross the checkpoint. Charging tolls is generally accepted in Afghanistan, but other, more repulsive things happen that could not be ignored. The gunmen would force young boys who have the misfortune to pass through the checkpoints to undergo a mock public marriage and then sodomize them repeatedly. A sort of Deliverance meets Rambo, Part 2.

Outraged by the treatment the warlord dealt to his own people, the local Taliban or students of the madrassah, took action. They strung up the miscreants from the barrels of their tanks. These atrocities had not only angered the common people but they cut into the business of influential traders based in Quetta, Pakistan, and in Kandahar. These traders with links to the Pakistani government financed the initial campaigns of the Taliban to clear Kandahar of the warlords. Thus began the direct involvement of Pakistan, which saw that tight business, religious and ethnicity connections could force out or marginalize Tajik, Hazari and Uzbek elements in Afghanistan. That's the story of the Talibs as told to DP by the Talibs. Other sources say that the Talib, led by Mullah Omar and 11 students from Kandahar, got rid of some thieves in the town of Sing Hissar and then overthrew the governor for not doing his job. There is also the one about the dream and yadda yadda. Either way, don't wait for the movie version.

The Talibs also drew support from the madrassahs in the refugee camps of Baluchistan and Peshawar, where thousands of young Afghan refugees were studying. The Pakistani madrassahs in the south were supported by businessmen and religious leaders who had connections with the Pakistani religious party Jamiat-i-Ulema Islami, led by a member of Bhutto's government, Fazlur Rahman. The Talib's brand of Islam is the strict, old-fashioned Sunni Deoband schoolÑso strict that the leaders forbade their pictures from being taken. It has been traditional that Afghans be encouraged to seek out knowledge; Talib means "seeker" in Arabic. The madrassahs started operating in the northwest frontier regions of British India around the early part of the 20th century. Up until 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, Afghan religious students dreamed of learning in the Islamic centers in Deoband and Delhi. When it became difficult to travel from Afghanistan through Pakistan to India some scholars of the Deobandi school opened madrassahs in Lahore, Karachi and Akora Khattak in NWFP. With the establishment of these madrassahs, there was a steady flow of Afghans studying in Pakistan.

There is also a current movement to restore the ancient learning centers of Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan. But this religious goal has been overshadowed by the Taliban's new military and political image.

The transition of the term Taliban from that of students to military was when the Taliban captured the AfghanDPakistani border town of Spin Boldak in October 1994. It didn't take long, about two to three hours. In two days the entire city of Kandahar fell to the Taliban after weak resistance. In November and December, the provinces of Uruzgan to the north and Zabol were taken by troops riding in the back of pickup trucks waving the Koran. The Talibs had revolutionized warfare by using pickup trucks bought by Osama bin Laden. They formed a Rat Patrol strategy, loading men, ammunition and supplies on the Toyota Hiluxes. Within hours they could surround towns or military positions, or change their own positions, a radical departure from the sandals and RPG war fought against the Russians in the mountains.

In January, the Taliban took over Afghanistan's major poppy growing center, Helmand, without a single shot fired. In late January and February, Ghazni and Maidanshahr came under Taliban control, erasing Hekmatyar's supply line to his position at his base of Charasyab south of Kabul and in Logar province. On February 14, Hekmatyar fled Charasyab. All this was accomplished with an army of less than 3,000 ill-equipped, ill-trained but eager Talibs.

Estimates put the Taliban army at 20,000D30,000 men (about half volunteers and half conscripts) and their holdings at about 80D90 percent of the countryÑthe largest unified area since the Soviets occupied Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance is evenly matched with 40,000 men and less heavy weapons. Oddly, the north will tell you that Pakistan is behind the Talibs, and the Talibs will tell you that Pakistan is behind the destruction of Afghanistan. Go figure. The Talibs will tell you that Massoud is a Russian, Iranian and Indian stooge, and Massoud will tell you that the Talibs are American, Pakistani and Saudi stooges. Go figure. Neither of them have a pot to piss in.

The first setback for the Taliban came in May of '97 when Dostum assassinated Abdur Rehman Haqqani, a close ally of his number two, General Malik Pahlawan, because he wanted to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban. Malik turned on Dostum and formed an alliance with the Taliban allowing them into Mazar-i-Sharif. When the Taliban began to disarm the Shiites in their most holiest of cities (the prophet Ali is buried in Mazar-i-Sharif and the Taliban are Sunnis who view the Shiites as a cult), a battle ensued forcing the Taliban to retreat and creating the first major setback in their 18-month history.

In 1998 and 1999 the Talibs pushed northward across the Shomali plains into the very headquarters of Massoud's Northern Alliance. It seemed all over until under DP's buddy Commander Daoud they pushed the Talibs all the way back into Kabul. The people were initially terrified of these black-turbaned Ybermensch but once they got a taste of the Taliban they rose up and defeated them soundly. The Talibs have changed their holier-than-thou agenda, and now it is not uncommon to see them laying land mines, pressganging women to be married off and plain old looting and stealing. Although the Talib high command says they will discipline anyone caught doing these things, it's starting to sound like a press release.

The overall structure of the Talibs is under scrutiny as well. The Talibs are traditionalists, or orthodox, who want to return to the purity of the teachings of the Koran and the SunnahÑthe practice of the Prophet. This sense of purity rejects non-Muslim interference and traditional political structures. The Talibs are also confused with Islamic fundamentalists (like the Wahabi) and more moderate Islamists (like Rabbani and Massoud) who follow the teachings of the iqwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, at the Al-Azhar University in Egypt. The strength and the weakness of the Taliban is its foundation along regional affiliations rather than pure political parties. This ensures that unless the Taliban changes they cannot conquer or hold anyone past their own ethnic, regional and religious support base.

Many attribute the Taliban's success to Pakistani military management and control. Although DP met with captured fighters from Yemen and Pakistan, we didn't see any Pakistani officers as the north promised us. There is an undeniable influence of Pakistan with the Talibs. The highest decision-making body in the Taliban is the Shura, which reportedly numbers 30 but has grown to include leaders from areas that have come under the Taliban's influence. The problem is that Omar is not a emir (someone who has undergone supervised religious studies for eight to nine years) and not even a mullah (about four to five years of religious study) and therefore technically not able to issue fatwahs. He has a reputation similar to that of a TV evangelist (although Omar has only apparently been interviewed only once TV, by DP of course) who talks the talk but can't quite get his followers to walk the walk.

Many of his decrees and rules are quite baffling to the world Muslim community who view his religious credentials as about as credible as Tammy Faye Baker's. Still, those who have met him have all agreed on his strong charisma and vision for Afghanistan. The inner core of the Shura is limited to eight members, of which a group of four leaders, all from Kandahar, one-eyed Maulvis Umar, Muhammad Rabbani, Muhammad Abbas and Borjan, are considered the brains behind the Taliban. Osama bin Laden is more involved in the decisions of the Taliban than most western intelligence services want to admit.

http://www.taleban.com

The Taliban Can and Can't List

Confused by dress codes? Baffled by protocol? Now the Taliban have made it easy for social klutzes to follow the rules.

No music

Say good-by to old favorites like

"I Left My Hand in West Kabul"

No theater

"Achmed, Get Your RPG" closed after ten years

No TV

No 24-hour All Mullah, All the Time, Talibvision

No movies

Debbie can't do Kandahar

No book reading

Can't read DP to find out what you can't do

No soccer

Watch the Jihad All-stars play buzkashi

No drinking

No Colt 45 unless it really is a Colt 45

No paper bags

No sneaking Colt 45s in a bag

No flying kites

No Afghan space program

No photography

Rides on Xerox machines are definitely out

No videos

Debbie can't do Herat either

No foreigners with Afghan women

No paper bag jokes

No recycling the Koran

See paper bags

No white socks for females

No coed cheerleading, either

No schooling for females

Tiny Talibettes have to figure things out themselves

Men must grow beards

at least four fingers long

Bic is out of business

Source: Radio Shariat, Kabul, DP

In Taliban areas, soccer, volleyball and even chess have been banned because they cause youths to miss some of their five daily prayers. Women must wear the burqa, a kind of shmoo-sack slash veil that covers the entire body, and men must have long beards, something that shocks naive journos but is quite normal outside of Kabul. Western pleasures like trashy novels, MTV, movies, beer and Nintendo are all forbidden. The idea is to not divert people's minds from God and family. Come to think of it, these guys might be on to something. To contact the Taliban stateside get ahold of:

Mulawi Abdul Hakeem Mujahid or Noorullah Zadran

55/16 Main Street

Flushing, NY

Tel.: (718) 359-0457

News Hotline: (718) 762-8095

Fax: (718) 661-2721

Web site: www.taleban.com

E-mail: AMujahid@aol.com

Nonofficial site:

http://www.ummah.net/Taliban/