Late on 21 June, the night before Afghanistan's traditional Friday weekend, a group of armed men stormed the Spozhmai ('Moon') Hotel on Qargha Lake, a recreational spot only a short drive from Kabul's northwestern limits. They killed a still unknown number of people, taking others hostage and continuing the slaughter until they were all themselves killed many hours later by ISAF commandos.
At Qargha, Ikea furbished wooden chalets have been built on the lakeside by a mujahideen commander turned businessman who controls the property that is notionally owned by the government. They were constructed during the political honeymoon that followed the overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001, in the hope of welcoming more well-off customers from the nearby capital. While Qargha has been off-limits to most foreigners for quite a while now for security reasons, Afghans of all walks of life used to gather there to enjoy the ice-cream parlours, french fries stalls and pedaloes, particularly on weekends. This idyll has ended in a blood spill.
Then, in early-July, a video turned up in some media showing a scene that looked like pre-intervention Afghanistan: a group of bearded men jeered when a young woman, later identified as Najiba, was shot dead after a roving Taliban court had condemned her to death for 'infidelity'. After an unhappy marriage she had escaped to the house of a Taliban commander who, after a conflict, was not able to protect her any longer. So she ended up with her relatives who reported her to the self-proclaimed guardians of public morals in another local Taliban faction.
That the Taliban tried to justify their Qargha attack by claiming that it was a venue of 'anti-Islamic' behaviour – the attackers asked personnel 'where the prostitutes' were – shows that the old puritanical tendency in their movement is far from being dead, despite attempts from the Taliban leadership to correct their international image. To the Taliban puritans, any kind of temporal amusement is anathema, especially if men and women are attending without being strictly separated. During their Emirate (1996-2001), for the so-called 'religious police' (the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) the length of beards (for men) and the completeness of veil (for women) were more important than feeding the population. It caused their regime's international isolation, very much to the consternation of those Taliban who were more pragmatic, understood how the outside world (and other Afghans, for that matter) would react to it and who also wanted to see their daughters educated.