The Taliban and Afghanistan as a Rogue State
A Country Already at War
By 1996 Afghanistan had been fighting almost without pause for seventeen years. The Soviet invasion of 1979 had been driven back by 1989 with American, Saudi and Pakistani backing for the mujahideen. When the communist president Najibullah finally fell in 1992, the victorious resistance commanders fought each other for Kabul. Whole districts of the capital were flattened. Roughly 50,000 civilians died in this warlord period of 1992–96, and another two million Afghans fled to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. Out of those camps came the men who would call themselves the Taliban.
The Taliban did not emerge from nothing in 1996. They grew out of the chaos of the 1992–96 civil war between mujahideen warlords, in which roughly 50,000 civilians died and millions fled. Afghans desperate for order were prepared to accept harsh rule if it ended the killing.
The Origins of the Taliban
The word Taliban means ‘students’ in Pashto. Most were young Pashtun men who had been raised in the refugee camps of Pakistan and educated in cheap religious schools called madrasas. Their leader was Mullah Mohammed Omar, a one-eyed village cleric who had lost the eye fighting the Soviets. The story Afghans told about him was that in 1994 he hanged a local warlord from the barrel of a tank for kidnapping two girls. That story spread, and recruits flooded in. Backed quietly by Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, the Taliban moved north out of Kandahar, took city after city, and on 27 September 1996 captured Kabul. They executed Najibullah, the former communist president, and hanged his body from a traffic post.
Life Under Taliban Rule
The Taliban imposed their reading of Sharia law through a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Women were banned from working, from attending school after the age of eight, and from leaving home without a male relative. They were required to wear the full burqa. Men had to grow beards of a fixed length. Music, television, kite-flying, photographs of living things, chess and football were forbidden. Public executions and amputations were carried out in Kabul’s former football stadium, often after Friday prayers, with thieves losing a hand and adulterers stoned to death. Religious minorities — Hindus, Sikhs and Shia Muslims — faced harassment and special identification requirements.
Afghanistan’s ethnic groups did not face the regime equally. Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north resisted under the Northern Alliance, but the Hazara of central Afghanistan suffered worst of all. Hazaras are mostly Shia in a country whose Sunni majority the Taliban claimed to represent, and they have East Asian features that singled them out. In August 1998, after capturing the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, Taliban fighters carried out door-to-door killings of Hazara men and boys; Human Rights Watch later estimated that around 2,000 civilians were murdered over several days. Iran came close to invading in response after Iranian diplomats in the city were also killed.
A Sanctuary for al-Qaeda
Among the foreign fighters who had come to Afghanistan in the 1980s was the wealthy Saudi Osama bin Laden. After being expelled from Sudan in 1996 he returned to Afghanistan and was hosted by Mullah Omar under the Pashtun code of Pashtunwali, which obliges a host to protect a guest. From training camps near Khost and Kandahar, al-Qaeda planned the 1998 East African embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which killed 224 people, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. The United States demanded bin Laden’s extradition; the Taliban refused, insisting on proof of his guilt that the regime would never have accepted in any case.
The Bamiyan Buddhas
In March 2001, on Mullah Omar’s orders, Taliban fighters dynamited the two giant Bamiyan Buddhas, sandstone statues carved into a cliff face in the 6th century and standing 38 and 55 metres tall. The Taliban called them idols. The destruction was filmed and broadcast around the world. UNESCO, the Egyptian Grand Mufti, and even the kingdom of Saudi Arabia denounced it. The Bamiyan demolition turned international opinion sharply against the regime in the months immediately before 9/11 and showed that the Taliban had no intention of moderating to win recognition.
Only three states ever recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The United Nations kept Afghanistan’s seat empty rather than seat a Taliban delegate. Most Muslim-majority states, including Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Indonesia, condemned the regime. Western governments imposed sanctions through UN Resolution 1267 (1999) for sheltering bin Laden. Western feminists, including the campaigner Mavis Leno, who chaired the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Afghanistan campaign from 1997, ran public campaigns against the Taliban’s treatment of women. The picture that GCSE candidates sometimes paint — that Western and Muslim opinion stood on opposite sides — is not what the evidence shows. Most of the Muslim world joined most of the West in opposing the regime.
By 2001 the Taliban regime was internationally isolated for four reasons: the systematic exclusion of women, the persecution of Hazaras and other minorities, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the sheltering of bin Laden. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE recognised it.