The Taliban: a Reassessment
20 Jan 2004
[709w]
A version of this piece first appeared in
The Times 20 Jan 2004.
............
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Perhaps because their evils were so newsworthy this goes double for the Taliban, who governed Afghanistan from the mid-90s until the year before last. But Professor Graham Farrell, a Loughborough university criminologist, has dug up a little something on the credit side. His study on worldwide drug control regimes confirms the Taliban really did stop opium-growing in Afghanistan during the first two years of the decade. The world supply of heroin better than halved.
No-one who knew Afghanistan under the Taliban will be surprised. I remember eating venison with the Wakils of a hill town in eastern Afghanistan: the deer had been killed with a shotgun and my hosts stressed the point, as illustrating the excellence of their stalking. But they didn't hunt this way out of choice. They were retired Mujahideen to whom a Kalashnikov on the shoulder was as natural as car keys in the pocket to Mondeo Man. They used a shotgun because the Taliban had impounded their rifles. Afghanistan has been a land in arms since the first Afridi raiding party met its first East India Company sepoys, yet the Taliban disarmed the country. Shutting down the poppy farms was just an encore.
Of course, as we know, the Taliban did many wicked things. The condition of women in Afghanistan was indeed comparable with that of African-Americans in 1950s Mississippi. On the other hand, before the Taliban, Afghanistan was so lawless that women were frequently raped and robbed. Years of total war had obliterated civil society. All that remained was half a dozen militias, each out for what it could get. The Taliban adhered to a pretty wretched set of ideas, but at least they weren't just after power for its own sake. Their programme was not a flag of convenience for kleptocracy. Nobody ever suggested they had Swiss bank accounts. The mid-ranking Talibs I dealt with seemed to live frugal lives, henna for the beard their most promiscuous indulgence.
The Taliban system was oppressive and cracked, but it was a system. One of my Afghan colleagues was pulled over and beaten for trimming his beard. Next day he was punished again by the same checkpoint. Afterwards in the kebab shop, a senior Talib at the next table overheard him grousing about it to a pal. "What? They beat you twice? No, they should beat you once, then you must have time for your beard to grow", and he wrote Nadir a chit getting him out of beard checkpoints for a month. There was method in their madness: and after years of no rules at all, almost any kind of regularity in public life was an improvement. The educated liberal Afghans I worked with hated the theocratic narrowness to which life was reduced, "but", they often said, "at least now we have peace". The Taliban were like chemotherapy for Afghanistan: nasty, but better than the alternative.
Moreover the one thing they weren't was international terrorists. The Taliban weren't international anything. Osama was very welcome when he showed up to help fight Russia, and by the end of the last century he was looked on as a guest, in a country where hospitality is sacred. If Osama wanted to give infidels grief that was the least of their worries. But the Taliban didn't give two hoots if we wanted to eat pork pies in cinemas. More room in paradise for them - or maybe we have our own pork pie heaven. In a land whose culture and faith are so entwined it was easy to mistake the Taliban for a religious movement. But they were a cultural movement. They wanted to impose their own narrow idea of Afghan culture and make it stick. And they did make it stick.
It certainly stuck a lot firmer than the current government, which governs very little beyond the Kabul city limits. Any reasonable person must hope Hamid Karzai comes out on top. But he leads a country that has been at death's door since it broke itself winning the Cold War for us. Don't be shocked in a year or two if Afghanistan reaches for the strong medicine again.
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