Rock and Hard Places (6 page)

When Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the jig was up in 1988, Red Army casualties stood at 50,000. The road between Kabul and the Pakistani border is still littered with rusting remains of dead Soviet tanks. The tribesmen of Afghanistan, the dashing horse-mounted mujahedin who had opposed the initial Soviet invasion with rusty cutlasses and flintlock rifles, were by this stage bringing down MIG fighter planes with Stinger surface-to-air missiles. They hadn’t found these lying around—America, reasoning that the enemy of its enemy was its friend, spent $3 billion equipping and training the mujahedin. In creating this army of Islamic holy warriors to fight the godless communists, decadent Christian America forged the heavily armed and anarchic environment in which the Taliban would flourish. Funny old world.

The common enemy defeated, the mujahedin took their shiny new American weapons, and their captured old Russian ones, and fought amongst themselves. Throughout the early 90s, former mujahedin chiefs and sundry warlords—notably Ahmed Shah Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Rashid Dostum—fell in and out with each other at such a rate that the favoured black humour fashion item among foreign aid workers at the time bore the legend “My party raided Kabul and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

Enter, in late 1994, the Taliban. The Taliban—the term is a plural of Talib, or religious student—formed in the madrasas (Islamic schools) of the southern city of Kandahar. They had Allah on their side like everyone else, only more so. They had weapons supplied by local merchants tired of the beatings, robberies and rapes perpetrated by the bandits who preyed on the roads around Kandahar (Noel Spencer had told me that, pre-Taliban, he’d been hijacked several times along the Kabul-Jalalabad road). The Taliban were tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime. They rounded up 50 local highwaymen and hung them off the barrels of tanks.

To a population as harassed as it was uneducated (53 percent of Afghan men and 85 percent of women are illiterate), this robust approach to enforcing civic order had a definite appeal. Over the next two years, the Taliban annexed swathes of Afghanistan, recruiting as they went from Afghanistan’s uncountable gangs of freelance brigands, who knew a winning side when they saw one. In September 1996, the Taliban hoisted their flag over Kabul, a city which the mostly southern, rural talibs had always regarded with the same pious repugnance that Utah Mormons harbour for Las Vegas. The Taliban’s all-white—or rather, given Afghanistan’s chronic filth, all-grey—banner was alleged to be a symbol of peace. The Taliban removed Soviet-era President Muhammad Najibullah and his brother from their sanctuary in Kabul’s UN compound, and hung them off a traffic observation kiosk.

Casual brutality and an enthusiasm for Islam were hardly innovations in Afghan politics, but the Taliban really weren’t messing about. They introduced a blizzard of laws. Some were biblically severe (public amputation of hands for theft, public execution for murder, often by relatives of the victim). Some were faintly hilarious (the criminalisation of kite-flying, the compulsory flowing beards for males). Except that
even these really weren’t funny. According to a report in Peshawar’s
Frontier Post
, 500 Kabuli men were lashed the week before I arrived for having trimmed their beards. Akbar solemnly tells me that he has been warned about his fringe.

One afternoon, when Akbar is taking me shopping for a rug on Chicken Street, a young, correctly hirsute Afghan approaches me and asks if he can practice his English. Over tea in a nearby cafe, he and Akbar ask me about Australia. I tell them about the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, which I’d been to a few months previously. Their minds boggle almost audibly.

“What were the police doing while this was going on?” demands Akbar.

They marched in the parade.

“You have sodomites in your police?”

Akbar clearly thinks I’m winding him up.

“I was in Herat in March,” says our new friend, blandly. “The Taliban caught two sodomites there. They pushed a wall over on them with a tank.”

The department that enforces these laws is the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The name, like many aspects of Taliban rule, manages to evoke both George Orwell’s satire and Monty Python’s comedy (the Spanish Inquisition sketch comes to mind more than once, especially one morning at the Intercontinental when eight turbaned Talibs appear behind the waiter to hear me order breakfast—Rice Krispies, I decide, to general muttered approval). This Ministry’s operatives are the public presence of Taliban justice, scowling beneath black turbans and behind blacker Ray-Bans as they sip Pepsi and patrol Kabul in Toyota pick-ups with tinted windows.

Akbar and I go to the offices of Vice & Virtue, which are situated just opposite the roundabout where Najibullah and his brother were killed. I ask to see Alhaj Mawlawi Qalamuddin, the Deputy Minister. I am treated with customary Islamic courtesy, provided with tea and biscuits and kept waiting for ages before being told that Qalamuddin is away at the front line (fighting continues 20 kilometres north of Kabul, against forces loyal to Massoud). This happens every morning for a week, which suggests that one reason nobody can figure the Taliban out is that the Taliban themselves aren’t too clear on what they’re
doing. The chap who runs the shop, a one-eyed thirty-something called Mullah Mohammad Omar, stays down in Kandahar and doesn’t do much press. There are, in theory, Ministers, but none of the ministries I visit know where the bloke in charge is—“Away at the front line” is, I suspect, a convenient shorthand for “Shagged if I know, and what’s it to you, anyway?”

“There’s no power structure, no accountability,” one aid worker tells me, back at the UN club. “They’re just young guys with guns who think they know everything.”

 

ON SATURDAY MORNING, outside the offices of the Taliban’s intelligence service, the Estekhbarat, I wait to see some young guys with guns who think they know everything. While Akbar is inside making representations on my behalf, I sit at the gate with the guard. Like a depressing proportion of young Afghans, he has the soaring cheekbones and blazing eyes of a 50s matinee idol—if the women are as pretty as the men are handsome, the burqa is as great an affront to aesthetics as it is to human rights. The guard is keen to test an English vocabulary apparently acquired from satellite transmissions of
Play School
.

“My nose,” he says, pointing at his mountainous Afghan beak.

“My eyes,” he continues, gesturing at two iridescent irises of a limpid aquamarine that suggests someone in his gene pool didn’t object too strongly to either the British or the Russians.

“My ears,” he announces, resting his rifle on his lap so he can hold them out for emphasis.

“And,” he says, “my . . . bread?”

He has his fingers in the thatch trailing off his chin.

It’s your beard, mate. Beard.

“Beard,” he confirms. “Very good. Thank you.”

Inside the Estekhbarat building, I am ushered into an office that smells of feet and resembles a student bedsit, except that the groovy oriental rugs on the walls were made locally. Inside, cross-legged on two camp beds, are two terse young Talibs in white robes and white turbans. One gives his name as Abdul Haque Waseeque, and claims to be Acting Director of Intelligence. The other declines to give a name or a title, but mentions that he’s just been away at the front. Ah, so it does exist.

As the inevitable tea and biscuits arrive, I start with the easy stuff. Like most Talibs, they’re of Pakhtun descent, and from outside Kabul—they both grew up in Ghazni, to the south, and were raised to regard Kabul as a sink of depravity. They’re in their mid-twenties, and won’t go into detail about their work, but say they’re the Afghan version of the CIA.

“Laws made by humans have flaws,” begins Abdul. “The rule of Allah has none.”

The tone is set for the next couple of hours: God said it, they believe it, and that settles it. But why does divine rule have to be this . . . miserable?

“For the time being,” says Abdul, “it is delicate. How can cinema be right in war conditions? The Taliban pledged Islamic law and peace, and we have created that.”

Granted, Kabul is no longer at war, though the airport was rocketed by Massoud just before I arrived (I’d originally hoped to fly to Kabul on the the Red Cross shuttle from Peshawar, but flights were suspended when Massoud started acting the goat). There are fewer guns visible in Kabul than on the streets of Belfast or Beirut. Crime, which was rampant, is now so rare that for the last few weeks there haven’t been any amputations or executions before the Friday football match at Kabul Stadium. Akbar and I had gone to the game the day before, a dismal 0-0 draw between two teams wearing shorts like you’ve only seen in footage of 1920s Cup Finals (the Taliban decided that football was un-Islamic for a while, but changed their minds). A few thousand people turned up, and mostly talked amongst themselves, though the wild, two-footed tackles that punctuated the match were greeted with appreciative laughter. Akbar, who I increasingly suspect of being a closet liberal, glumly admitted that on afternoons when someone’s due to get something lopped off, the place fills to its 30,000 capacity.

But I still don’t understand how security is abetted by forcing women to drift silently about looking like pantomime ghosts.

“The burqa is the rule of Islam,” says Abdul. “The rule of Mohammad, Jesus and all the messengers is that women should be covered.”

I take the sort of deep breath you take before arguing with armed fanatics on their own terms. According to my Penguin translation, the Koran says that “the wives of true believers should draw their veils
close round them.” It doesn’t say that they have to cover themselves totally. It certainly doesn’t rule them out of work, education and life the way the Taliban have.

“The burqa is the rule of Islam,” repeats Abdul, though the news that I’ve read the Koran cheers him up a bit. “I must ask if you are concerned about the years you have wasted in preparing for the next world.”

I change the subject. When the Taliban took power, they made extravagant fulminations against the drug trade: evil, corrupting, the ruination of us all, etcetera and amen. In 1997, according to the UN Drug Control Programme, 200,000 Afghan farmers grew 58,000 tonnes of opium, mostly on Taliban-controlled land. The British government estimates that 95% of the heroin in Britain is grown in Afghanistan’s poppy fields. Afghanistan is also the world’s biggest exporter of hashish—those who consider their narcotic recreation a victimless crime may care to contemplate whose wages they’re paying.

Now, the Koran doesn’t explicitly forbid making a fortune shipping smack to the infidel, but . . .

“The purpose of Islamic law,” intones Abdul’s friend, “is to protect life, property, religion and the brain. Heroin is forbidden.”

So why not forbid it?

“We cannot stop the poppy from growing.”

Yes, you can. Get some flamethrowers in amongst all those poppy fields I saw alongside the Jalalabad-Kabul road. It’d be a start.

“It is not our people who consume it. It is yours. In the West, society is riven by drugs and prostitution. In the Islamic environment, young people have more love for Islam.”

It’s odd, then, that they find it necessary to beat people for failing to attend prayers.

“If a person does everything in accordance with Allah, then everything will be good. If not, we must implement the will of Allah by any means.”

Eyes beginning to glaze, desperate to hear an answer that doesn’t invoke Allah, Mohammed or the Koran, I ask Akbar to ask them who they fancy for the World Cup.

Abdul doesn’t blink.

“In accordance with the teachings of the Holy Koran, no human being knows the future, only Allah almighty.”

Oh, come on. Brazil? France? Argentina?

“Only Allah . . .”

Okay, okay. What do you do for fun?

“To relax, we recite from the Koran.”

The depressing thing is that I believe him. If I thought there was the slightest chance that, as soon as I’d gone, Abdul was going to turn to his mate and go, “There’s another dopey gringo sold on the gimlet-eyed holy warrior tip, you go and round up some birds and I’ll get some cans in for the match,” I’d be a lot less worried about Abdul and his mate and the country they’re running.

When I get up to leave, two strange things happen. The first is that Abdul stands as well, clasps my hands in his and asks Akbar to ask me to stay in Afghanistan, become their brother and join their jihad. The second is that while I’m trying to think of a polite way to decline this kind offer, the room starts shaking. At first, I think it’s just me—nobody else notices, or if they do, they don’t care. After a few seconds, with the shaking growing more violent, and things starting to come off shelves, I ask Akbar what’s happening.

“Abdul wants you to join the Taliban,” he says, wobbling.

This isn’t what I’m worried about; I’m thinking that maybe Massoud’s rocket batteries have lost interest in the airport and are trying out a new target. Or that Abdul really does have friends in high places.

“Oh,” says Akbar. “I think it’s an earthquake.”

I will later learn that a few hundred kilometres north, 5000 people have just been buried alive. Funny, in a country so forsaken by God—scenery aside—that people should be so keen on Him.

 

WONDERING IF AN older head might prove more reasonable, I drop in on the mayor. Mullah Abdul Majid, even by Afghan standards, is an imposing figure. He has one severely mangled hand and one missing leg, legacies of his time as a Mujahedin commander—a common CV among senior Taliban figures. He begins by welcoming me to his city “in the name of Allah, the compassionate and merciful,” and pours me the first decent coffee I’ve had in two weeks. An elderly secretary beside him writes down every detail of our conversation, so that it may be broadcast to an enthralled nation on Radio Shariat (I listen to the
daily English-language bulletin that night, hoping to hear that “His Excellency the Mayor today briefly tolerated some scruffy hack from
The Face
,” but I can’t make out a word through the static).