Taliban

The world's attention had wandered since 1989, and the renewed carnage was barely noticed abroad. The Cold War was yesterday's story, and the hottest proxy battlefield of the 1980s seemed an irrelevant backwater. There was in any case much else to preoccupy the West in 1994. Even as President Bill Clinton pulled US troops out of Somalia, he found himself drawn into an intensifying civil war in Bosnia. Boris Yeltsin invaded Chechnya, while Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors and sent troops to the Kuwaiti border once again. In Rwanda, 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death by rival Hutus, a massacre that the international community seemed powerless to prevent. The suffering in Kabul was small fry compared to that. For whatever reason, between 1990 and 1996 the UN Security Council did not hold a single debate on Afghanistan.¹

With the collapse of central government, much of the countryside had fallen under the control of rapacious bandits. Life had become particularly difficult for the rural poor – and nowhere more so than in the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan. Rival gangs of armed men had slung chains across every road around Kandahar city, stopping the traffic to demand a 'toll' before it could proceed. It was becoming uneconomical as well as dangerous for farmers even to try to take their crops to market.

Many of these bandits were minor ex-mujahideen commanders whose salaries had dried up with the ending of the war and who were unwilling, or unable, to disband their hungry followers. Others were merely criminals with an eye to the main chance. By the spring of 1994 it wasn't just farmers but the international trucking business that was suffering. The bandits laid siege with their chains to the A1 national ring road that intersected the southern provinces, a road that connected Afghanistan's main trading partners, Iran to the west and Pakistan to the east. There were fifty chains just on the 65-mile drive between Kandahar and the Pakistani border.² Truckers were paying more in bribes than the value of the goods they were trying to transport. The A1 was a vital artery in the national economy, and now it was all but choked off.

Some highwaymen, such as Shah Baran, a former officer in the Soviet-backed National Army, were often so stoned on chars, the powerful local cannabis, that they were barely able to function. One traveller recalled his dread as his car approached the chain that designated a Shah Baran checkpoint. The gang of grubby armed men huddled in blankets at the kerbside didn't move, however. They were too busy puffing from a large chilam. The traveller was too scared to attract their attention. More than fifteen minutes passed before Shah Baran looked up and even noticed the car.³

Men like these soon graduated from demanding tolls to random acts of murder, or worse. A notorious villain called Saleh, who at times commanded hundreds of men, had taken to stopping inter-city bus traffic and abducting any woman he fancied. Two young girls travelling from Herat to Kandahar were later found to have been gang-raped and beaten to death, their naked bodies thrown in a pit behind Saleh's checkpoint.

Things were no better in Kandahar city. A bloody turf war had erupted between the main local commanders, Ustad Abdul Haleem, Hajji Ahmad and Mullah Naqib. One battle lasted for six days, turning buildings into rubble and streets into impassable mazes of trenches. Bodies lay scattered everywhere. The air was filled with thick smoke from houses burning out of control, and hundreds of shops were looted. On the sixth day, a Friday, thousands of townspeople gathered after prayers to demonstrate against the violence, but at Kabul Darwaza Square their march through the city came to an abrupt halt when they were confronted by Baru, a former mujahideen commander who had taken up position with a tank.

Baru was an odious man, corrupt and without conscience. He was notorious for marrying some girl, demanding a large dowry, then divorcing her a month later without returning the family's money. Nor was his sexual appetite confined to women. Like many mujahideen commanders, Baru kept a teenage catamite, a practice unequivocally forbidden in Islam but which is nevertheless widespread among Afghanistan's huge fighting community: a status symbol as well as a source of sexual release. The difference in Baru's case was that the catamite himself was a bandit, effetely waving a Makarov pistol at passing travellers and able to get away with anything, including murder, thanks to his feared patron. A man such as Baru thrived in Kandahar's present climate. Now, without warning, he fired a shell into the demonstrators, massacring dozens. The Kandaharis had suffered greatly during the Soviet occupation, but this was worse. The period is still remembered as topakiyaan: the time of the men with guns.

Not all former mujahideen had gone to the bad. Among them was the veteran fighter Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who took up arms against the Russians in 1983 at the age of fifteen. He was ambushed nine times and injured twice in that war; in an attack on Kandahar airport in 1988, he lost fifty of the fifty-eight men under his command. Zaeef was no war-monger by nature but a religious scholar who greatly preferred the Koran to the Kalashnikov. But because a jihad had been formally declared against the Russians in 1979, it became his duty as a Muslim to take up arms against them. He was grateful, indeed overjoyed, to hang up his guns when the invaders were finally ejected.

The war had slowed rather than interrupted his studies. Now, back at home, he was able to concentrate on them properly again. In 1990 he became a father for the first time. He was forced to take a job digging roads when money became tight, but by 1993 he had found a position as the imam of a tiny village mosque. This quiet life was not to last. The rumble of artillery could often be heard from Kandahar city, thirty miles to the east. Passing travellers or visiting friends brought news of fresh chaos and atrocities there almost every day. A moment came when one of his parishioners, a young man called Abdul Mohammad who was just back from a trip to the city, told him how he had almost been killed by two armed muggers on a motorbike, one of whom he had managed to wrestle to the ground. The attack, shockingly, had happened not in Kandahar but in broad daylight on the road right next to Zaeef's mosque. Abdul Mohammad was still white and shaking from the experience.

Zaeef was a peace-loving man whose patience had been tried too much. This was the land of his childhood: he had been born in the village of Zangiabad, barely 20 miles away, and had spent most of his adult life in desperate combat with foreigners bent on subjugating his country and suppressing his religion. A million of his countrymen had died in the national cause, and for what? The Islamic society he had fought so long and hard for was disintegrating before his eyes. Some ex-mujahideen friends of his, Abdul Qudus and Neda Mohammad, were in favour of ambushing and killing the villainous Saleh, but Zaeef advised caution. He knew there were other retired mujahideen commanders who thought and felt as he did: local men alongside whom he had fought for years. Saleh and his kind were powerful; banding together again seemed the best means of standing up to them.

The networks from the war were still strong among the ex-mujahideen. The anti-Soviet resistance had coalesced around a number of politico-military organizations, or tanzeems, which represented every possible shade of political opinion in Afghanistan's fragmented society, from the deep religious conservatism of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami to the federalism espoused by Abdul Ali Mazari's Hazara Shi'ite organization, Hizb-i-Wahdat.

Like many Pashtuns from the conservative south, Zaeef initially fought for a unit loyal to Hizb-i-Islami. But as a man with a religious calling, he also belonged to a separate but overlapping network that, although drawn from a far wider area than the typical tanzeem, was no less tightly knit. Their bond was their faith and, very often, a childhood upbringing in a madrasah: an Islamic seminary, a training school for mullahs. Such men formed the grass roots of the movement that became known as the Taliban.

Contrary to common perception in the West, the movement did not emerge out of nowhere in the 1990s. 'Taliban' was no more than the plural, in Pashto, of talib, the Arabic word for an Islamic student: literally, 'one who seeks knowledge'. They had been a presence in Afghan village society for as long as there had been madrasahs – which is to say, since the earliest days of Islam. There had once been so many Islamic students at large, indeed, that they had created something of a social problem. A British intelligence report written in 1901 described the 'talib-ul-ilm' as 'men, chiefly young men, who contemplate following the religious profession. They flock to the shrines of the country and attach themselves to some religious leader, ostensibly for religious education. Their number far exceeds those required to fill up vacancies in village mullahships and other ecclesiastic appointments, and they are reduced to seek other means of livelihood. They are at the bottom of all the mischief in the country, the instigators and often the perpetrators of the bulk of the crime. They use their religious status to live free on the people, who are too superstitious to turn them out, even when they destroy the peace of the family circle.'⁴

In the 1980s, most madrasah students who fought against the Soviets were assimilated into units controlled by the established tanzeems, although some banded together to form their own platoon-sized fighting groups who were described, by both themselves and others, as 'taliban' even then. They were easily distinguished by their turbans that were either jet black or snow white, in emulation of the headgear worn by descending angels who, according to the Koran, came to the Prophet's rescue during one of his battles with the infidel hordes between Mecca and Medina in the founding days of Islam. They were Muslim brothers-in-arms, and their faith made them tough guerrillas who were highly valued by their regular mujahideen colleagues, both for their fighting prowess and for the galvanizing effect that their religious conviction could have on their troops' morale. At their best, taliban fighters embodied the mujahideen ideal. One mullah specialized in ambushing armoured vehicles by hiding under water in a ditch by the road, breathing from the inner tube of a bicycle tyre. They could and frequently did survive on a handful of dates when supplies ran low, and they faced Afghanistan's extremes of heat and cold in the same old sandals and shalwar qamiz each day.

Among the people Zaeef went to consult in 1994 about standing up to Saleh and his like was one Mullah Mohammad Omar, a former fighter born in the neighbouring province of Uruzgan to the north, but who was now living at Sangisar, a village community 25 miles west of Kandahar. In the 1980s Sangisar was home to an important mujahideen base, and both Omar and Zaeef had taken part in a desperate battle with the Soviets in the district in 1988, the type of close combat where they had picked up live grenades and tossed them back at their assailants. Zaeef was 20 metres from Omar when their position was attacked by MiG fighter jets. Omar, looking around the corner of a wall, was struck by shrapnel from a bomb – a wound that would later prove terminal to his sight in one eye.

That same night, even as Omar was bandaging himself up, Zaeef recalled how the defenders celebrated the success of their resistance with an attan, a physically intense Pashtun war-dance performed to the beat of a double-headed drum called a dhol. The men gathered in a large circle, leaping and spinning faster and faster and firing their guns in the air. It was, according to Zaeef, 'a marvellous party . . . May God be praised! What a brotherhood we had among the mujahideen! We weren't concerned with the world or with our lives; our intentions were pure and every one of us was ready to die as a martyr. When I look back on the love and respect that we had for each other, it sometimes seems like a dream.'

Omar had returned to the Sangisar base after the war, and converted it into a madrasah where he now preached and taught. He was a pious, conservative man with a reputation as a courageous but taciturn military commander. He was something of a southern Pashtun archetype in this respect. He kept himself to himself and avoided the petty politics and self-advancing turf wars that preoccupied some of his peers. As a consequence he had never been a very prominent figure in the Jihad, but he was also a clean slate, a man who had no enemies because he had crossed no one in the past, and no scores to settle on his own behalf. In the view of Zaeef and others, this was precisely the kind of man that the reconstituted band of veterans now needed as a leader. Memories are long everywhere in Afghanistan, but nowhere more so than among the Pashtuns, who traditionally put great emphasis on badal, the obligation to seek revenge.^a

Omar's wife had just given birth to a son when Zaeef went to see his old comrade. His friends and the local imams had all gathered there for the traditional celebration ceremony – lengthy recitations from the Koran – and Zaeef and two other mullahs who had accompanied him joined in. After supper, they took Omar to a separate room to talk business. The plan they proposed to him was beguilingly simple: the disarmament of the people in two provincial districts west of Kandahar – Maiwand and Panjwayi – and the establishment there of Sharia law, as articulated by the Prophet Mohammed in the early seventh century.

'We told him that he had been proposed as a leader who could implement our plan,' Zaeef recalled in his autobiography. 'He took a few moments to think after we had spoken, and then said nothing for some time. This was one of Mullah Omar's common habits, and he never changed this . . . Finally he said that he agreed with our plan and that something needed to be done. "But, I cannot accept the leadership position," he said . . . "Why did you not accept it yourself?" '

Zaeef understood Omar's misgivings, for the job would certainly be a dangerous one.

'He asked us what guarantees he could have that everyone wouldn't just abandon him if things became tough. We assured him that all those involved were true taliban and mujahideen.'

He was persuaded eventually. Others had come to see him, asking for the same thing.

'In the end everything that happens depends on God,' he said.

Within six weeks of the first discussion about killing Saleh, some forty or fifty people gathered in Sangisar at a small, crumbling mud-brick building known as the White Mosque to discuss the foundation of what became known as 'the Taliban'. Omar agreed to be their commander and took a solemn oath of allegiance, a beyat, from all those present. No mission statement was drawn up, no articles of association written down. There didn't seem any need. No name for the movement was ever discussed, either: taliban was simply what Omar and his followers were. The term in its present sense, with a definite article and a capital T, was probably coined by the BBC Pashto service, which aired a report about the Sangisar meeting twenty-four hours after it happened. It was never clear how the BBC learned about the meeting, since no press release was ever issued, nor any interview given. No one, least of all Omar, ever suspected that 'the Taliban' would one day become a kind of global brand name.