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COVER STORY: AFGHANISTAN
Logic Has No Place Here
In
the recent past, the Taliban have gained notoriety for issuing a string
of retrogade fatwas, banning music, television and other kinds of entertainment.
Women have been ordered not to go out and work, girls' schools have been
closed and men have been asked to compulsorily grow beards. Last July,
members of a visiting Pakistani soccer team were arrested in Kandahar
for appearing on the field in shorts-a violation of the Taliban's new
code. When Pakistani diplomats intervened, the players were released,
but not before the heads of five of them were tonsured. Public execution
and lashings form a weekly feature and Kalashnikov-toting personnel of
the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice comb the streets
to round up violators and bring them to brutal justice. Behindsuch religious
zealotry is the Taliban's mission to fashion a purist Islamic revolution
that pushes religious extremism to its limits.
If
the Taliban continues to control most of the country despite such Islamic
fanaticism, it is because Afghanistan was on the verge of destruction
before the group emerged as a potent force in 1994. During the Cold War,
the country was a helpless pawn in the rivalry between the US and the
erstwhile Soviet Union. The landlocked country, at the crossroads of Asia
and the gateway to the Silk Route, is a centre of the new Great Game to
control central Asia's gas resources. Apart from being a major corridor
for oil pipelines to transport energy to Europe and Asia, Afghanistan
also has untapped petroleum resources. The Soviet invasion in 1979 saw
the US and its allies fund one of the largest-ever resistance movements.
It saw Pakistan emerge as a major conduit for arms and funds for the Afghan
rebels.
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Under the Guns: Life in Kabul
is dominated by the fatwa and its minders |
After
the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a debilitating civil war broke out among
the various Afghan mujahideen groups for supremacy. Desperately looking
for an alternative, Pakistan began backing the Taliban-plural for talib
which means a student of Islam. They comprised a small group of mullahs
and others whose main objective was to "cleanse" Afghanistan
of corruption, rather than grab power. It caught the people's fancy and
its cadre exploded in size as it captured the crucial provinces of Kandahar,
then Herat and finally Kabul-all in two years.
The
rank and file was filled with youth in the age group of 14-24, schooled
mainly in the mushrooming madarsas in Pakistan where they had studied
the Koran. They were never taught history. And not having lived long enough
in Afghanistan, they had neither seen nor heard of its glorious past.
Omar himself is said to have never seen the Bamiyan Buddhas that he wanted
destroyed.
The US lost interest in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the Soviet
Union in 1989 and its disintegration. It was forced to take note, however,
when production and smuggling of narcotic drugs, especially opium, soon
became rampant in Afghanistan. Initially, poppy cultivation was actively
supported by the Taliban and by 2000, Afghanistan had produced 3,200 tonnes
of opium annually or three quarters of the world's opium.
This apart, Afghanistan also began to export its brand of Islamic extremism
to the rest of the world. The 1998 bombing of US embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania created a wave of terror and the world reacted in horror. The
mastermind behind the attacks was Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden who
was in Afghanistan. The US demanded that the Taliban surrender him to
the Government or send him out of the country. When the Taliban refused,
the US got the UN to impose two rounds of sanctions
that
cut off all aid, except for humanitarian purposes.
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