Bollywood songs blare from taxis and street corners. In wedding halls, guests sit glued to the next episode of "Kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi" dubbed into Dari, the main language in Afghanistan. In shops selling pirated CDs and DVDs in Kabul's busy Flower Street, young Afghans walk in to ask for the latest Hollywood action movie, the music of a hot new Tajik singer or the most recent Iranian soap opera. The removal of the Taliban has been celebrated as the end of cultural censorship in Afghanistan, and the easy availability of imported pop culture touted as evidence of new freedoms. But the tragedy of the years of conflict in Afghanistan runs much deeper. What remains after years of violence and fighting, displacement and censorship, is a void. Built over years of absence of art and culture, what echoes today is the lack of an audience where once existed a deep appreciation of arts and music. This is an emptiness – as opposed to a simple tug of war between cultural freedoms and censorship, which could be resolved by lifting the arbitrary restrictions of the Taliban regime. It is also a void that is being filled too quickly and indiscriminately with whatever is at hand.
Contrary to the oft-repeated mantra that equates all censorship with the Taliban, the advent of cultural restrictions in Afghanistan goes back much farther. While the Soviet-sponsored regimes saw a chance for propaganda in art and music, the subsequent mujahideen government had senior leaders whose conservative interpretation of Islam did not encourage music and the arts. What space remained was squeezed in the last years of the Taliban, when its leaders turned more brutal and censorious, systematically destroying the art and culture that they had earlier permitted to exist. The purge culminated in the infamous destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, an act that turned the Taliban into pariahs. But Bamiyan residents still talk of how, in earlier years, the mujahideen soldiers would amuse themselves by taking pot shots at the Buddha statues.
Omara Khan Masoudi is the director of the national museum in Kabul, which he joined 30 years ago. He was forced to leave the country in 2000 because of the growing pressure of the Taliban, but remembers that the destruction of the national treasures did not begin and end with them. Masoudi says most of the losses of the artefacts in the museum took place during the civil war of the mid-1990s, before the Taliban came to power. "When power changed from communist to mujahideen hands [in 1992], there was a security vacuum," he recalls. "The museum was looted." The area where the national museum is situated became a frontline in the civil war, and could not be accessed by the staff. "For two years, this area was cut off and we could not reach the museum," he says. "Rocket attacks set the museum building on fire, destroying a large part of it." Today the museum is undergoing refurbishment, but the Darul Aman Palace, right opposite it, stands shattered and pockmarked with the brunt of many attacks, a mute testimony to what took place in the area.
In the initial years after the Taliban took over power in Kabul, its members actually helped to rebuild the museum and to safeguard the remaining artefacts. Edicts were also issued by Taliban chief Mullah Omar calling for the safeguarding of the Bamiyan Buddhas. However, as the regime came under increasing pressure of al-Qaeda, it took an increasingly stronger stance against 'un-Islamic' activity, eventually desecrating the museum that it had until then worked to preserve. While al-Qaeda's hardline ideology does not tolerate the more liberal arts, political analysts have said that its leadership pushed the Taliban to adopt a more intolerant attitude. The idea, some suggest, was to make the Taliban more isolated from the international community and, hence, more dependent on al-Qaeda.