Taliban (6 page)

The Pashtuns were the undisputed overlords, and their legendary past continues to play to their strong sense that Afghanistan is their land by right. Between the seventh and nineteenth centuries, after all, the term ‘Afghan’ – a Persian corruption of the Sanskritic ‘Ashvaka’, the name of a tribe who lived in the Hindu Kush during
the Iron Age – was used interchangeably with the word ‘Pashtun’. ‘Afghanistan’ in its modern sense only came into use in 1919; before then, the country was known by the British as the specifically Pashtun ‘Kingdom of Kabul’.

Today there are some 42 million Pashtuns, 25 million of whom live in north-west Pakistan, making up around 15 per cent of that country’s population. The remaining 17 million live mainly in the south and east of Afghanistan, accounting for perhaps 42 per cent of the total there
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– the largest single ethnic group, and well ahead of the next most numerous people, the Tajiks, who account for 27 per cent.

Unlike the country’s other inhabitants the Pashtuns remain a defiantly tribal society, divided into about sixty major tribes incorporating more than 400 sub-clans. They are proud of their status as the largest tribal society in the world, and this is key to understanding both them and the Taliban movement they spawned. The Pashtuns principally define themselves by the unique Indo-Iranian language they speak – Pashto – and by a strict adherence to their ancient tribal customs, which are collectively known as the
Pashtunwali
, the famous ‘way of the Pashtuns’, an honour-based behavioural code that still regulates all social intercourse. It is by keeping to this code that the Pashtuns have ensured the homogeneity of their society for so long.

‘Customs are subtle chains with which the primitive man tries to keep intact the pattern of his society,’ observed the poet Ghani Khan, one of the twentieth century’s most famous Pashtun poets, in 1947. ‘They are his school and radio, prime minister and preacher . . . [A Pashtun] knows his customs before he knows how to eat. It is bred in him. It is mixed in his bones and works in his liver. He does not have to go to a learned man in a wig to know the law
against which he sinned. He knows it as soon as he does it. He is his own judge and jailer. His ancestors have seen to it that it is so.’

Ghani Khan noted that Pashtuns have thousands of customs – for death, birth, marriage, love, hate and war – all of which are ultimately geared to a common purpose: the protection of the integrity of the tribe. It is every Pashtun’s duty to defend his tribe’s
Zan
,
Zar
,
Zameen
: women, gold and land. Many Taliban beliefs are rooted in this tribal imperative. For example, the strict sexual propriety of women that they insist upon is a modern interpretation of the ancient custom that prescribed death for elopement or adultery – part of what Ghani Khan called ‘a subtle system of selective breeding’.

‘[The Pashtun] must breed well if he is to breed fighters,’ he wrote. ‘The potential mother of the man of tomorrow is the greatest treasure of the tribe and is guarded jealously. He does his duty by his people. He will play true to his blood even if he breaks his heart and his neck in the bargain. He will walk to the gallows with proud steps with his hands covered with the blood of his wife or sister. And the admiring eyes of his people will follow him, as they always do those who pay with their life for a principle.’

Treating extramarital relations with such extreme intolerance not only kept the tribal gene pool pure but also preserved sexual health: an important consideration in an era when there was no cure for syphilis. The system, Ghani Khan acknowledged, was ‘hard and brutal, but it works . . . Death to him who dares to risk the health of his tribe. It is treachery and sabotage which you also punish with death.’

The teachings of Islam often overlapped with such traditional Pashtun thinking, and the Taliban had clearly assimilated elements of both in the formulation of their ideology. Working out which
was which was evidently going to be of critical importance to those foreign aid workers who hoped to go on working in Afghanistan; for on 11 September 1996, the Taliban captured the eastern stronghold city of Jalalabad – the gateway to Kabul.

Reinforcements for the defence of the city had been promised by the Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, but he arrived too late. The opium-dealing governor of Jalalabad, Hajji Abdul Qadir, fled to Pakistan, and the remaining garrison surrendered without a fight just two days later. Massoud hurried to block the pass leading to Kabul, taking up position 30 miles east of the capital in the small market town of Sarobi, whose approaches he heavily mined. The Taliban, led by Mullah Bor Jan, simply drove one vehicle after another at a fixed point in the eastern defences until a path through the minefield had been cleared. And each vehicle, according to the rumours in Peshawar, was manned not just by a single brave driver but by a crowd of up to thirty men, all waving flags and singing to Allah – such was their fervour for martyrdom and a passage to Paradise.

This was something new, even in a country as devoutly Muslim as Afghanistan. The mujahideen had often given their lives for the jihadist cause in the 1980s, but never so wantonly. There was no tradition of martyrdom for its own sake in Afghanistan; when self-destruction was called for in the campaign against the Soviets, it generally had a point. In pure military terms, moreover, the Sarobi assault seemed the craziest waste of manpower.

Two weeks later, on the night of 26 September, Kabul finally fell. The American Bar pundits were wrong: the seasoned fighters of Hizb-i-Islami could not match or cope with this level of religious zeal, and nor could any other mujahideen militia. With the exception of the north, the country now belonged to the Taliban. A new
era had begun. But any quiet optimism that a Taliban government would bring a better Afghan future was quickly qualified, if not quashed. On the 27th, the Taliban breached every diplomatic protocol when they entered the United Nations compound in Kabul, where Mohammed Najibullah, the Soviet-era President, had been sheltering since 1992. In a grisly echo of their earlier tactics in the south, and to widespread international condemnation, Najibullah was tortured, castrated, and hanged from a lamp-post outside with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

It was a terrible moment of truth for the world. The Taliban, a movement founded on a noble pledge to establish peace and justice for Afghanistan, had just demonstrated that it was also capable of the worst kind of savagery.

‘It had to happen,’ said Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, appointed the same day by Omar as the head of a six-man council charged with running the capital. ‘He killed so many Islamic people and was against Islam and his crimes were so obvious. He was a communist.’

The world sucked through its teeth at this paradox. How could anyone behave with such callous disregard for the conventions of the civilized world, for other cultures, for human life itself?

In later years, apologists for the Taliban would argue that Najibullah’s murder had never been a part of their plans for the takeover, and that it was Pakistan who had insisted on his elimination. This was because Najibullah was a close ally of India, where his wife and children had taken up sanctuary in 1992. It is sometimes alleged that Abdul Razaq, the Taliban mullah who led the five-man hit squad into the UN compound, was acting on the direct orders of the ISI. But this still did not explain the Taliban’s extraordinary blindness to the value of human life which,
as their battles for Sarobi and elsewhere showed, included their own.

Their particular interpretation of Islam provided only part of the answer. The Taliban were also the product of their country’s experience of modern industrial warfare, which was surely unique. The human cost of the decade-long Soviet occupation alone was staggering. Out of a population of perhaps 15 million in 1989, over a million were killed, over four million were wounded, and five million were turned into refugees. Because there had been no real peace in Afghanistan since the 1970s, no Afghan under the age of twenty-one in 1996 had any memory of peacetime at all. For this brutalized generation, displacement, poverty and violent, premature death had all become the perverted norm.

Just as significantly, a large number of the Taliban’s foot soldiers were orphans: a class of people with special resonance in Islam, since the Prophet himself had lost both his parents and grandparents by the age of eight; he was raised by an uncle named, appropriately enough, Abu Talib. Millions of Afghan children lost their parents as well as their homes in the 1980s. The ancient ties of family, village and tribe that might have swept these orphans up in the past were in many cases permanently fractured. There are few actual orphanages in this part of the world, either in Afghanistan or in the frontier regions of Pakistan where most refugees ended up. Something had to be done with these children, and a common solution – at least for the boys, since girls were generally excluded from the possibility – was to send them as wards into an Islamic madrasah, which was often the only institution beyond the extended family prepared to take them in.

The madrasah system was the incubator of the Taliban movement. In the majority of the big madrasahs in Pakistan, the
curriculum follows the Deobandi school of thought, which takes its name from a still-flourishing religious college established in the town of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, in 1866. The Deobandis are dedicated to the propagation of Sunni Islam, an expansionist programme founded without apology on the learning of the Koran by rote. At 80,000 words the Koran is about a tenth of the length of the Bible, although memorizing even this much takes years of dedicated work – particularly since the text must be studied in its original language, a poetic and elliptical seventh-century Arabic. (Although the Koran has been translated into almost every language on the planet, convenient local versions are rejected by most Islamic scholars, and certainly by the Deobandis. Muslims believe that the text of the Koran was handed down to Mohammed directly from Allah. It follows that translations must be inferior – perhaps dangerously so – because no human scholar can match the perfection of holy writ.)

The key to memorizing anything substantial is mental discipline, which the Deobandis foster through the iron regulation of all personal behaviour. Some madrasah children are brought up with a strictness that makes the London workhouses described by Dickens look like luxury hotels. Children as young as four are made to study in exchange for their daily bread, and they do not eat if they fail in their task. In some cases they are chained to their lecterns. These Asian Oliver Twists are taught almost no other subject, and they are kept at it for as long as there is daylight to study by, chanting and rocking back and forth on their crossed legs in long serried ranks on the floor. There is no privacy and precious little free time. Every activity is prescribed. Since 1900 the Deobandis have issued nearly a quarter of a million
fatwa
, or edicts, governing the minutiae of daily life: more than any other Islamic
school of thought in the world. Drawn either directly from the Koran or from the
hadith
, the body of interpreted ‘sayings’ of the Prophet, these regulations are themselves considered the will of Allah. Any child breaking the rules can expect to be beaten or, possibly worse, thrown on to the streets to fend for himself.

By the mid-1990s the orphan boys of the decade before had grown into joyless young men of fighting age. They were tough and disciplined and there were many, many of them.
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Despite the decades of war, Afghanistan’s population is growing just as fast as Pakistan’s: 8 million in 1950, 20 million in 2000, close to 30 million today.
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The Koranic knowledge of this lost generation may have been unparalleled, but they were also ignorant and deeply suspicious of everything that lay beyond the madrasah walls – including, and perhaps particularly, women. How could it be otherwise, when they had been segregated according to gender all their lives and taught nothing but Scripture? Raised without the love of parents or family, and cut loose from the traditional tempering influence of their tribal communities, there was nothing and no one to counter-balance the inevitably skewed view of the world engendered by such an education. No wonder they sometimes fought like religious automatons. The Taliban were the world’s first Army of Orphans.

Madrasahs have gained an evil reputation in the West, where they are often derided as insidious ‘mullah factories’ that do nothing but propagate terrorism. Their image was certainly not helped by an incident in 2007, when the pro-Taliban imam of Islamabad’s
Red Mosque called for a suicide-bombing jihad against the government. A lengthy siege of the mosque-and-madrasah complex by the Pakistani Army ended with the deaths of hundreds of students. The link between some religious schools and the Taliban is not contested. The immense Dar-u-Uloom Haqqania madrasah near Peshawar, for instance, is sometimes called ‘the Harvard of the Taliban movement’. In 1998, notoriously, its headmaster Sami ul-Haq shut the college down and sent the entire student body – as many as eight thousand young men – over the border as troop reinforcements for the Taliban.

The size of colleges like Haqqania is not typical. A madrasah is traditionally a small annex to a mosque, a place for the discussion of the Koran’s finer points outside the hours of formal worship. Most madrasahs, and almost all of those in Afghanistan, remain small. But in Pakistan in the last twenty-five years, many madrasahs have become much larger than the mosques they used to service. Religious education, often generously subsidized by Arabian petro-dollars, has become a very big business. The number of madrasahs in Pakistan has outpaced even that country’s exploding population, and continues to soar. In 1947 there were just 137 of them. These days they number in the thousands, a development that the West perhaps understandably views with suspicion and alarm. In 2006 Islamabad alone had 127 madrasahs, with a new one opening every week.
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