Ruling the Unruly

As you enter Afghanistan by road from Pakistan at Torkham, leaving the border checkpost, there is a small hand-painted notice in Pushtoo, nailed to a tree at the side of the road. Translated, it reads, "The Taliban should rule our people by winning over their hearts with their good character." This seemed like an official exhortation to all the Taliban, the "students" who have taken over almost the whole country, rather than to the people. If the onus was on the students to earn the approval of the people as a pre-requisite for their mandate to rule, this seemed encouraging, but would this noble principle manifest itself in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. How do they win over the hearts of all Afghans? After all, the very word Afghanistan means "Country of the Unruly".

It was to try and find an answer to such question that, as someone who has been attracted by Afghanistan since my first visit 30 years ago, I had accepted with enthusiasm an invitation from my friend John in Peshawar to tour the Taliban-held areas. And so 26 March found John, my wife, Ariane, and myself in a pickup truck, headed into Afghanistan.

Bad Press
There has been a lot of bad publicity for the Taliban, but we were keen to see the real situation for ourselves, first hand. There were tales of women being beaten for showing their ankles under the ´beehive´ type cloak with the crenelated visor; lifetime civil servants were being sacked by the score for having no beard, and even for keeping beards that were too short; and now they were checking if people shaved their armpits, as Abraham had done, and as therefore recommended in the Holy Koran. In Laghman, a woman had been stoned to death for attempting to leave the area with "a male non-family member". In Kandahar, a murderer had been executed at a football stadium, shot by the victim´s relatives (under Taliban supervision) in front of a crowd of thousands. And two French workers in Kabul had been charged with "consorting under the same roof" with some "half-naked" women (their faces had been exposed).

Would we be stoned, or just flogged for being infidels as we left the safety of Pakistan, my wife and I wondered. Or were these horror stories just isolated incidents which had been exaggerated in the media, due to ´Islamophobic´ inclinations? The recent shocking report that the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan were to be dynamited as soon as the Taliban could get there, was indeed nothing more than a scare story from an irresponsible journalist who had asked the wrong person the wrong question.

In what proportions were the Taliban ruthless, barbaric, medieval, wily, naive, innocent, enlightened and benevolent, to have taken over and pacified this brutalised, war-torn country, apparently by winning the support of the people? In the face of all the prejudice and negative reporting we had seen against the Taliban in the media, the only way to find out was to go and see for ourselves.

We had climbed the historic defiles of Khyber and passed through Landi Kotal, the wild smugglers´ capital at the head of the pass, before descending to Torkham. This green oasis was thronging with refugees, returnees, redundant Mujahidin, traders, nomads, truckers – and a few intense-looking young Taliban with Kalashnikovs, bushy black beards and sumptuous, colourful, trailing turbans, riding ostentatiously in the most macho-looking four-wheel drive vehicles on the road. The Taliban´s favourite model is the Toyota Hilux pickup [pix], which seats six inside plus any number behind. This happened to be the very vehicle we were using, which gave us an advantage on the road as other drivers mistook us for top-brass Taliban.

After reading the Taliban aspiration to win over people´s hearts by good character, we were soon flying along the old Jalalabad road, a long avenue of huge cedars, between extensive olive groves. Some of these had not been tended for few years, in others we could see people working to re-irrigate, prune and weed. From the uneven, stony plain west of Peshawar, and the rocky mountains of Khyber, we had come out onto a higher plateau, the first step up towards the lofty mountains of central Afghanistan and the steppes of central Asia.

The aspect was much changed; though desolate, the countryside felt somehow free and wild, truly one which invaders had never succeeded in conquering. It was exhilaratingly different. The feeling was reminiscent of the old Central Asia of Gurdjieff and Hopkirk, rather than of the Subcontinent which, up to the border, had borne the British colonial stamp.

On the dry plains of Hisar Shahi we passed extensive camps for refugees displaced from Kabul during the fighting between rival Mujahidin factions, before the Taliban took over. Further on at Samar Khel was another huge camp, empty now, since the Taliban had facilitated the refugees´ return. Our smooth progress to Jalalabad was suddenly halted, but inquiry revealed it was simply time for prayer. A word from John to the Talib in charge, and with a nod and a wink we were allowed to proceed.

Jalalabad´s Explosion
An hour later we were in Jalalabad, which had just been rocked a few days previously by a huge blast. We went to the Governor for permission to visit the explosion site, which had been a munitions dump, and his deputy was delegated to escort us to the scene. Escorted by a pickup with a half a dozen Kalashnikov-toting men, we arrived at a cordoned-off area. Where rows of substantial buildings had been, was a scorched, bare wasteland, around a 30-foot-deep crater; the buildings had been blown to atoms. A ring of shredded trees, all leaning outwards and with most branches simply torn off, stood in a circle three hundred yards or so in diameter. Everything else was gone, leaving only grey earth. Beyond the trees, were rows of twisted military trucks, personnel carriers and tanks in what must have been a military carpark. The earth all around was littered with pieces of guns, mines, mortar and artillery shells and all sorts of unrecognisable shrapnel, mixed up with soil, branches and pulverised masonry.

An Irish UN munitions expert called Paddy who was assisting the clearing-up operation came up and told us his team had collected 5,000 pieces of live ammunition in the area that very morning alone. He pointed to a badly damaged building across the road, saying it was another munitions store with piles of shells and rockets, "plus what literally blew in through the windows when the first one went off". He added, "And that building over there, they won´t even let me near it, so it´s sure to be another dump. They´re all over the place. Another lot can go off at any moment, and more´s the pity." He rolled his eyes eloquently.

No wonder the Taliban had seemed nervous. They had admitted to 60 dead and 150 wounded in the explosion, but Paddy said we could double that to start with and still be conservative. There was a jail in one part of the building, he said, which had been blown to bits with forty prisoners in it.

Later, we interviewed a Talib whose brother had witnessed the explosion and survived to tell the tale. Apparently three Russian incendiary projectiles rockets called "alew-andaz" (´fire-bomb´) were being unloaded when one had ignited and started setting off other munitions in the store.

Tomb of Noah´s Father
Feeling somewhat shell-shocked by the proximity of so many recent horrible deaths, we eventually resumed our journey. Rather than entering the spectacular Silken Gorge which leads up through another great mountain barrier to the higher plateau of Kabul, we turned North into Laghman Province, to visit a ziarat, or pilgrimage shrine, called Mehterlam Baba. We found an expansive, walled garden enclosure laid out with a spacious domed building. Inside was an enormous, 30-foot long tomb, draped with green and red cotton and velvet sheets of cloth, decorated with bunting. We asked the people sitting around on the outside verandah and inside, if we could take photographs. Of course, they said, of course! Ariane got busy with her camera.

A blind Hafiz (one who can recite the whole Koran) told us in Pushtoo that the saint commemorated here was pre-Islamic, and not only that but pre-Flood. In fact, Mehterlam Baba was none other than the father of Noah himself, said the Hafiz, as in the early Old Testament. The light was fading as we sat contemplating the timeless beauty of the place, and the full moon soaring over an ancient watertank nearby.

Suddenly a young Talib came up and saw us sitting there at the holy place, three Westerners including a woman who was not fully covered up. Foreign infidels defiling the shrine! He rudely ordered us away. John tried to argue with him, referring to the edict we had seen at the border.

"Are not the Taliban supposed to rule by virtue of their good character" he asked rhetorically. "How can the way you are treating us be considered as of good character?" The young man replied defensively that this was a religious place and we were infidels. Meanwhile, the old scholar agreed with John and scolded the young Talib for his bad manners.

"The hussy even had a camera," countered the outraged Talib. "Did she dare to take any photographs?"

"No, oh, no!" protested all the people together, "do you think we would let her do that?"

It seemed clear that the people felt the Talib was being over-zealous, and discreetly took our side.

After a very refreshing tea we took our leave of this idyllic place as night fell and drove back South to the Kabul River valley. For several hours we drove through the darkness, across areas which until very recently had been highly dangerous, even for Afghans to travel in during the daytime, until the Taliban took over and cleaned the place up. We eventually found a place to spend the night at a roadside refuge outside Soribi, right on the raging river, trapped between craggy cliffs vaulting skyward on both banks, where the caravanserai, or motel Afghan style, had catered to travellers for centuries or even thousands of years.

We had no Afghan money, but the hotelier accepted Pakistani rupees and gave us eighty thousand Afghanis change, which sounds a lot, but is worth less that three pounds. A pound used to make 200 Afghanis in the old days, but now it´s worth all of 30,000; you could buy a good horse for 7,000 Afs once, but that would hardly pay for our tea now.

Into the Countryside
We studied the map and decided where to head next. Northwards, towards the Panjshir valley seemed a good area to explore. The hotel keeper informed us that in the Kabul river valley where we were, the people were Pushtoons, in Panjshir they were Tadjikhs, and up in the hills were the Kohistanis or ´Kushtianis´.

We crossed the river, skirted the lake and set off into Kapisa, a small province around the valley of the Tagab. After a pleasant but bumpy drive through inhabited and cultivated areas we came to the village of Tagab and its school, part inside and part open-air. Several classes of boys between six and ten were in progress. A mat was brought and John joined our hosts to interview them on the education situation.

There were of course no girls in sight, and we questioned the teachers about girls´ education. It had simply never occurred to them that girls should go to school, and it was an interesting proposal. We suggested they put all available teachers to work educating girls at home, if it was not their custom for girls to attend school. They assured us that this was already being done of course, for girls had always been educated at home by other educated members of the family.

Leaving this friendly and welcoming school and its accompanying bazaar to push on towards Najrab, ever closer to the war front, some people hailed us. As we slowed down, men, women and children swarmed onto the back of our pickup. With about a dozen of them clinging on, we bounced and swayed down the road. Soon we came to the scene of what had been quite a substantial battle, near the Naglu dam, with some dozens of burnt-out military hardware left amongst the trees on the hillside and around the old government buildings in the valley below. The Naglu dam itself had been badly damaged, with its hydel station rendered inoperative.

A little further along the road was an International Red Cross camp which was helping rehabilitate refugees which had fled this area. Why had they fled in the first place? It turned out that this whole valley had been a battleground in a huge fight between Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Masood. Now the Taliban had come and chased both these famous commanders and their armies away to the north, allowing the inhabitants to return, and Hekmatyar and Masood, the deadly enemies, had joined forces against the Taliban in an effort to save themselves from being overrun.

Climbing further up onto the plateau, leaving the river valley and cultivated areas far below and behind, the scenery opened up with flocks and herds spread over a wide area, and the magnificent snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush range standing off to the north, ever nearer.

Mind That Tank!
The next stop was Najrab, pronounced ´Najrao´, where we came to a substantial school building which had been taken over by the Taliban forces as the local HQ for their war operations. This was only twenty miles away from the frontline at the gate of the upper Panjshir Valley. Half a dozen tanks were parked, along with the usual military vehicles. There was a truck-mounted rocket launcher, with 20 or so actual three-metre-long rockets lying haphazardly on the ground nearby like so many scaffolding pipes, with another heap of huge artillery shells lying just nearby for good measure.

As in many such installations, there were a few Taliban sentries with Kalashnikovs lounging on a string bed. Their officers emerged and started talking to John, who asked about road conditions. The leader pointed to the nearest Kuhestani hills to the north, beyond which lay the upper Panjshir Valley, which Engineer Masood had held against the Soviets, and said: "Behind that hill is our enemy. You must take the left road at the fork, and cross over the river towards Bagram. Don´t go any further up the Panjshir Valley, or towards the Salang Pass. The fighting only stopped there yesterday."

"Would you like your photographs taken?" John suggested genially.

"By all means," they grinned back, adjusting their turbans before lining up for a group portrait with the school HQ as a backdrop. Then they saw us off, wishing us a safe journey and reminding us again to take the left fork towards Bagram.

Not far ahead we had problems fording the multi-channelled stream of the Tagab river, whose bridge had been blown up. While we were negotiating the freezing snow-melt, we heard loud engine noises from beyond the bluff on the far bank. Suddenly it came to the brow of the hill: an old Russian T-72 battle tank, with four men sitting on top of it. It revved and roared down the narrow rutted track, spouting clouds of grey smoke. As the tank tipped down towards us, the Taliban riders waved frantically to us to get out of the way. As they went crashing and clanking past, the fighters saw we were Westerners and held up their Kalashnikovs triumphantly and grinned broad grins, aware of the impression they were making.

When the soldiers stopped to ford the river, John called out to greet them and soon struck up an amiable shouted conversation. They had come straight from the fighting, we found out, having helped to push the frontline back a few kilometres in the Panjshir Valley.

"Do you want to take photo-graphs?" they asked at length when the conversation flagged.

Snapping done, after a few more shouted invitations and pleasantries such as "may you never feel tired" and "may you never become poor", their tank lurched off into the river, and we continued on our way north.

The Panjshir Valley
The trail led up out of the Tagab valley, with the Hindu Kush looking ever closer. On a bend in the road we passed a pile of rocks with a white silk flag on a stick, and a star embroidered in the middle of the flag; the grave of another Taliban commander recently killed leading his followers into battle.

Suddenly, we were at the edge of the desolate plateau, and the road plunged down through a gap in the near horizon, revealing a broad, deep swathe of the lower Panjshir Valley far below to the west, floodlit by the sinking sun, the river snaking like a broad silver belt winding through the dark green farmlands and villages. As we proceeded, we took the left fork as advised and crossed the river on the still-standing ´Sayad´ bridge. Another photo-opportunity with the Taliban when we stopped to confirm our route at the intersection was interrupted by the approach of their commander, upon which the other Taliban discreetly advised us to hide our cameras.

Proceeding further, we passed just south of Charikar, "the City of Knives", where all kinds of cutting instruments from small penknives to Pushtoons´ long daggers are forged and sharpened like razors. Trying to figure out on our not very detailed map exactly where we were, we suddenly came upon a very large gateway in a clump of buildings. A little too late, we saw it was a checkpost with a string-bed load of Taliban on duty. We screeched dramatically to a halt as they leapt to their feet, guns at the ready, peering to see who we could be, friend or foe. Then we saw a model jet fighter, 15 feet long and painted silver, on the right side of the gateway.

"Oh god, it must be the military airbase!" someone cried, as the Taliban fanned out around us. We had landed ourselves at the gate of the Bagram airbase, the biggest in the country.

"Cherta zey! (where are you going?)" barked the chief at John, who was driving.

"Kabul ta zu!" he responded. A moment´s perplexity, and then they laughed. We´d taken the wrong road they said, and we should go back and turn left at the first junction. No problem. The airbase probably didn´t have any planes anyway, since General Dostam flew most of them up to Kunduz when the Taliban came along. And the Taliban always travel by road in their cars and jeeps, so it never occurred to them to question these three unescorted foreigners for turning up uninvited there, a few miles behind the front-line. If there was a civil war going on here, this side at least seemed to be extremely confident and relaxed.

Hitch Hikers and Other Children
Outside Kabul, after darkness had already fallen, two small and half-frozen boys dressed in pitiful rags hailed us for a lift. After some hesitation, we allowed them to haul some heavy sacks on to the back. These were full of scrap iron collected from battle sites, to be sold to a metal dealer in Kabul for a tiny amount. In this way the boys were supplementing their family´s income in order to survive. We had heard about this miserable business, and the number of casualties that occurred when small boys handled the live ammunition lying about.

Heading into Shar-e-nau, the more modern quarter of the city where all the tourist hotels used to be, we were besieged by a mob of aggressive beggars, mostly small children. As we handed out some money, they became extremely nasty, clawing at us through the windows, swearing and abusing us, spitting, and kicking the vehicle. These were the street children of Kabul, war orphans, the homeless, the dispossessed, the product of two decades of brutalising war.

Our host in Kabul, a journalist, regaled us with stories of his interviews with Taliban officials. He had asked the Chief of Police whether he was satisfied with the average beard-length in Kabul these days, and was told no, there were far too many beard-trimmers about, and beards were generally far too short and thin, and needed to be much, much bushier. At another interview, with the Minister of Culture, he had asked how the songs brought out by the Taliban was permitted, yet all other music was banned. It was the musical instruments used in other music which was un-Islamic, the minister explained, whereas the Taliban songs were voice-only and therefore pure.

We saw that 60 percent of Kabul was 90 percent destroyed. Whole main streets were lined with the ruins of shattered buildings, none of them habitable, all the roofs and most of the walls collapsed, pockmarked with countless bullet holes, mostly nothing more than piles of rubble. To the east of the city, we patrolled the Dahna Maidan, or ´Mouth of the Plain´, a wide avenue alongside the sports ground where tourists used to hire horses in the old days. Every single building had been destroyed.

In the middle of one terrace, however, we spotted some fresh plaster and saw that someone had found a ground floor which could be restored and was converting it into a tea shop. The owner told us he had the permission of the Shahr Wali, or Municipal Committee, to make good the premises in the skeletal row of ruins and open his business there. The whole street was government-owned, and the committee was meeting few days later to decide on a fair rent for him. The fresh plaster in the row of blackened ruins, and the newly-cut timber of the window frames recalled a phoenix rising from the ashes; the very first sign of recovery from a devastating war. He had been sent to Bulgaria by the Communist Government for three years´ training in Philosophy. We wished him lots of luck with his tea shop.

Work was also starting on the premises next door as well. It seemed like many others would follow his example, and if the Taliban´s rule could be consolidated, the whole city could be rebuilt and working in a comparatively short space of time.

Taliban Make Their Point
Before starting our return journey, we had to obtain exit permits from the Immigration Office. Arriving at the impressive building, we had to push through a thick crowd at the entranceway, and were brought in to the chief officer. He welcomed us with a warm handshake, invited us to remove our shoes and join him sitting on a bare rush mat thrown on the ground outside the building in the sunshine. Tea and sweets were brought while he tore up a sheet of paper into four squares, scrawled on them, and stamped them with an indecipherable rubber stamp. Our exit permits were ready.

Soon we were leaving Kabul, past dozens of blocks of communist-type flats, and more wrecked and shell-pocked administrative buildings, finally onto the flat and empty plain to the east of the city. We followed the Kabul river, which flowed straight into a crevice in the hills, with the road squeezing in alongside. This crevice became a magnificent soaring cleft thousands of feet deep in the naked rock, with the road clinging half-way up, passing through a series of tunnels in the cliff face and s-bends, and the river looking like a tiny stream far below.

As we stopped to stare at the giddying scene, a loud explosion suddenly echoed round the deserted mountain faces. Through a crack between two mighty buttresses, we saw the ruins of a village on the mountain face, with red flags fluttering to indicate demining activity. White flags meant an area had been demined; red meant demining was in progress. We had seen a number of demining parties working in various places on our journey, always with a Red Cross tent nearby in case of accidents.

Emerging from the gorge towards Soribi and the confluence of the Panjshir and Kabul rivers, we came to a military encampment which had been the headquarters of the Mujahid Commandant Zardad, now occupied, of course, by the Taliban. Zardad had been a "loose cannon", an irregular follower of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar´s Hesb-e-Islami party who had controlled the main road to Kabul from this point.

As we approached, three Taliban emerged from a building to welcome us. We salaamed and asked about Commandant Zardad. With a smile they pointed up the Panjshir Valley to the North, and said he had fled to join Dostam when he heard the Taliban were coming from Gandomak, despite all the mines he´d laid in the road to try to hold them back.

The three Taliban holding this camp were glad to find a Western audience in us, so John conducted an interview. The Taliban, they said, had taken over most of the country peacefully, with minimal fighting and destruction, by means of friendly persuasion. They relied on winning the support of the people inside Mujahidin-held areas before negotiating a peaceful hand-over.

Said one, "In this way we have taken over the whole country except the Northern quarter. We have disarmed and dispersed all the Mujahidin, and all the bandits. We have chased away the warlords, closed down the checkposts of the robbers and oppressors of the people, brought law and order back, and we have the support of the vast majority of the people. So why are we not being recognised as a legitimate government by any other country?"

The spokesman continued, "When it was recognised as legitimate, the Rabbani Government controlled only a small part of the country and had the support of a very small minority of the people. So why is the government of the Taliban not being recognised? At no time did Rabbani control the country and impose peace and security, as the Taliban has already done."

The logic of this complaint seemed irrefutable, and it summed up the arguments we had heard all along the way from Afghans from all walks of life who had praised the imposition of this "Pax Talibanica" after all those years of fighting, suffering and strife that had started with the Soviet invasion in 1979. With some justification, as far as their skilful termination of the civil wars was concerned, they claimed success in peaceful conflict resolution which seemed an example to the rest of the world. Even the urban Afghans with Western education we met had expressed their willingness to make whatever personal sacrifice was necessary to accept, in the over-riding public interest of peace and order, what was for them the medieval rule of the Taliban.

Pros and Cons
Despite this general acceptance, however, amongst such Western-educated people there is still resentment against some of the Taliban´s extreme measures, especially the ban on women´s work and education. Often, this has affected families financially, and unless the Taliban are able to deliver economic betterment as a ´peace dividend´ and some improvement in living conditions, the level of support they are currently enjoying might soon begin to erode.

We were assured by one educated Afghan man, whose own wife was also educated outside Afghanistan, that all the womenfolk in his family were more than happy to accede to the Taliban edicts on women´s role in society, for the sake of peace and security, and for the certain knowledge that their own husbands and sons were no longer likely to be slaughtered at any moment. We could not confirm this with his wife directly, however.

Neither were we able to find out anything about all those unfortunate women who had already lost their menfolk in the 20 years of war, and who had become the breadwinners for their children. How did they feel, having now been thrown out of their jobs because of the Taliban edict against women working? We could only imagine their desperation. What is the Taliban´s answer, how are these women, and their children to be provided for?

A little further down the road, back in the roadside hotel outside Soribi, one of the staff, when asked how he felt about the Taliban peace achievement, exclaimed, "So there is peace. So what? What can we do with this peace? We have nothing! What´s the use of peace to us?"

What with the unresolved conflict in the north beyond the Salang Tunnel, it would seem the Taliban are living on borrowed time; they will have to complete the conquest, and take measures which provide for the economic betterment of the people. There is runaway inflation, little or no infrastructure, and widespread destitution. Unless they can do something about these problems, they run the risk of losing the support which they have indubitably won within the country.

To make things worse for the Taliban, UNICEF has been urging the international community "to increase pressure on the Taliban until every woman has her basic human rights restored". These young Islamic peacemakers, subduing the warriors who defeated the Soviets, certainly have a challenge on their hands if they are to get any support, or even recognition, from outside the country.