Pubdate: Thu, 20 Sep 2001
Source: Christian Science Monitor (US)
Copyright: 2001 The Christian Science Publishing Society
Contact:  http://www.csmonitor.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/83
Author: Scott Baldauf

LIFE UNDER TALIBAN CUTS TWO WAYS

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - Karim has never known anything but a world of war.

At the age of 2, he watched the Soviet Union's occupation force retreat 
from Kabul after a decade-long guerrilla war. When he was 4, his family 
fled their mud-brick house as shelling from two rival Afghan militia, 
fighting for control of the capital, reduced their neighborhood to rubble.

When he was 8, Karim's family breathed a sigh of relief, as religious 
reformers known as the Taliban ("Seekers") toppled the bickering factions 
that had formed an Afghan government and brought peace to a majority of the 
country.

In five years, the Taliban has put Afghanistan on the map of the Muslim 
world as a bold experiment in "pure" fundamentalist rule. It also has 
become an international pariah for its ties to terrorist groups, harsh 
treatment of women, and other policies. But Afghans - like the world at 
large - are still coming to terms with all that this experiment means for 
their lives.

Until last week, Karim's 13-year-old world seemed finally to be getting 
better rather than worse. He had begun taking classes at the training 
center run by Afghan Streetworking Children in New Approach, or ASCHIANA. 
The nonprofit group's acronym means "nest" in Persian.

He receives two meals a day, is learning to read and write, and acquiring 
future job skills as a landscape painter.

But with the United States preparing for possible retaliatory action 
against the accused Saudi-born terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the 
Taliban government that gives him asylum, Karim's life has once again taken 
a turn for the worse.

"Due to 20 years of war, the sources of income for people and the 
socioeconomic fabric of the country have been damaged severely," says 
Muhammad Naizmand, spokesman for Afghan Red Crescent, a branch of the 
International Federation of the Red Cross/Red Crescent in Kabul.

Now, with more than a quarter of Afghanistan's 25 million population 
entirely dependent on aid agencies for food and other assistance, the 
social fabric that holds Karim's world together is close to unraveling. 
Most of the foreign aid agencies and UN relief workers who ran food and 
assistance programs have withdrawn, and the UN's World Food Program 
estimates that there are now only two weeks of food stocks left in the country.

It's a situation that has many Afghans - both inside and outside 
Afghanistan - reassessing the Taliban legacy, and wondering where it will 
lead them.

Peace and law

"The biggest achievement of the Taliban is they have brought sharia 
[Islamic law] to Afghanistan," says Abdul Qudus, an ethnic Afghan and 
religious scholar who runs a madrassah, or religious school, for young 
Afghans in the Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan. "They have 
made a very good peace, they have collected weapons from the people, they 
stopped poppy cultivation [a source of opium], they stopped foreign 
interference - and especially religious conversions of our Muslims - and 
they started electricity in Afghanistan. That is their legacy."

Nasir, a taxi driver in Kabul, takes a much dimmer view, and one shared by 
many of the Persian-speaking citizens of Kabul toward the Pushtu-speaking 
Taliban rulers. (Afghanistan has two official languages, Pushtu and 
Persian, and a variety of ethnic groups. These include majority Pashtuns, 
as well as Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmen.)

"These people don't have any home, any food, any income," Nasir says, 
gesturing at a group of widows and their children begging in a busy Kabul 
market. Like most Afghans interviewed for this story, Nasir asked that his 
name be altered to protect his identity.

"With the Taliban, the first thing they build is a mosque and a madrassah," 
he says. "We need mullahs, but we also need other things too: engineers, 
doctors, teachers."

When Karim saw his first Taliban soldiers, driving in on Toyota pickup 
trucks on Sept. 26, 1996, there was little to indicate that the public mood 
might turn against them. The Taliban, unlike the fractious mujahideen 
rebels who ousted the Soviets, was able to unify a majority of the country 
under one regime and bring a level of peace that hadn't existed here for 
almost two decades.

In Kabul, and the five other Afghan metropolises under Taliban control, 
this newfound peace allowed Karim and his family to rebuild their home. 
Around the country, Afghans returned by the thousands, restoring a 
semblence of the lives they had led in the 1970s, before the troubles 
began. Hundreds of foreign-aid groups began setting up food-for-work 
programs; establishing medical clinics, bakeries, and schools; and 
beginning the long, dangerous task of clearing away millions of landmines 
and tons of unexploded ordnance.

Today, the Taliban claim to control up to 90 percent of Afghanistan, but 
this figure must be tempered somewhat by the fact that Taliban forces still 
face fighting in more than half - 17 out of 32 - Afghan provinces. As 
recently as yesterday, fighters from Afghanistan's Northern Alliance - the 
main Taliban foe - launched a helicopter attack on Kabul itself, destroying 
two civilian airliners and detonating tons of ordnance at an ammunition dump.

Even so, in those areas where the Taliban is firmly in control, Afghans say 
they feel safer than in previous years.

"When the Taliban came in, the fighting stopped," says Ubaidullah, head of 
a food-for-work program that is rebuilding homes in a destroyed section of 
Kabul. "Now, it is OK, there is no fighting, no thieves, no rapists. There 
is also no work and no money, therefore there are a lot of poor people." As 
fellow workers gather, he pauses. "We have a lot of feelings about the 
Taliban that I can't tell you."

A 'pure' Islamic state

But more than anything else, the Taliban aimed at remaking Afghanistan into 
a nation that adhered to its interpretation of the pure Islamic society 
envisioned by the prophet Muhammad. Part of this came from the utter 
disappointment many of these young Taliban felt as they watched the 
mujahideen turn from liberators into bickering warlords, creating an 
anarchic state where robbery, rape, and extortion became the rule rather 
than the exception.

"If you look at the constituency of the Taliban, they are mostly the lower 
rungs of society, those who have little trust in where the world is going," 
says a Western diplomat in New Delhi with extensive experience in Islamic 
societies of the Middle East. "So when the Taliban come in, they say, 'You 
have no food? We'll build a bakery. No mosque? We'll go build one. No 
school? We'll build one, and we'll even give your son free education in the 
Koran."

"When the son comes home, fed and in new clothes, the first thing he tells 
his mother is, 'Mother, I have done bad things to you. I should honor you. 
I wish you to forgive me," the diplomat adds. "What mother is not going to 
be ecstatic about that?"

Even so, the arrival of Islamic law has been greeted with mixed reaction 
among Afghans. Some in rural areas say their daily lives have not changed 
much, since they had followed sharia for decades, even centuries. But in 
urban areas, many Afghans resent the strict rules that govern all aspects 
of their daily lives.

Consider the following list of edicts issued by Taliban religious scholars 
in Kabul in December 1996:

"To prevent music.... In shops, hotels, vehicles, and rickshaws, cassettes 
and music are prohibited."

"To prevent beard shaving and its cutting. After one and a half months, if 
anyone [is] observed who has shaved and or cut his beard, they should be 
arrested and imprisoned until their beard is bushy."

"To prevent kite-flying."

"To prevent idolatry. In vehicles, shops, hotels, rooms, and any other 
place, pictures [and] portraits should be abolished."

"To prevent washing cloth by young ladies along the water streams in the 
city. Violator ladies should be picked up with respectful Islamic manner, 
taken to their houses, and their husbands severely punished."

Though the list was long, the Taliban vigorously enforced these new rules 
through their religious police. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue 
and Prevention of Vice now patrols every major city of Afghanistan, armed 
with whips and automatic rifles. Though Karim says the police largely leave 
him alone, and sometimes even give him alms, other Afghans say the 
religious police perform their tasks with zeal, checking cars for cassette 
tapes, monitoring beard lengths, and maintaining social order in a 
sometimes brutal fashion.

"If you look at the kind of people who are Taliban, they are very poorly 
educated, and they stick to the word of the Koran, with no attempt at 
interpretation," says Frederic Grare, director of the Center for Human 
Sciences in New Delhi. "The rule of the Taliban is ruthless, very 
primitive, and cruel. But nevertheless, there is rule," Dr. Grare adds. 
"When Kabul fell in the hands of [recently assassinated mujahideen 
commander] Ahmad Shah Masood, where was the rule then? Now, you at least 
have some predictability."

Praised on drug control

 From the Western perspective, the Taliban's most impressive accomplishment 
is in the area of drug control. Until last year, Afghanistan accounted for 
nearly three-quarters of the world's supply of opium, with much of the 
addictive drug reaching Europe, America, and beyond. Even though the 
Taliban's interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, specifically bans 
addiction, nearly 500,000 Afghan farmers earned up to $100 million a year 
from the drought-resistant crop. Local Taliban governments took a 10 
percent cut from a zakat, or farm tax.

For years, Taliban officials told Western drug-control officials they 
couldn't stop poppy cultivation because of the hardship it would impose on 
farmers, particularly during a now-three year drought. But this year, 
Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar banned opium outright. To the 
West's surprise, adherence has been total within Taliban-ruled areas - and 
without a penny of foreign aid. The UN Drug Control Program suspended 
assistance two years ago.

"It's really quite remarkable," says Bernard Frahi, director of the UN Drug 
Control Program in Islamabad, speaking last March, when UN teams of 
monitors confirmed that the Taliban poppy ban was total. "If this had 
happened in Colombia, where the US is spending billions of dollars and 
reducing drug cultivation by maybe 5 percent, this would have gotten the 
Nobel Prize. But because it's the Taliban, there's a different reaction."

Diplomatic isolation

Only three nations - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates - 
have granted official recognition to the Taliban government.

Most Western democratic nations object to the Taliban's authoritarian rule, 
and its often brutal suppression of free expression and human rights, 
especially restrictions on women. But Western diplomats say the main 
obstacle for Western recognition is the Taliban's alleged patronage of 
militant groups within its own borders.

"This has become a breeding ground for radical Islam," says the Western 
diplomat.

The US and the West bear some responsibility for creating this breeding 
ground in the 1980s and early '90s, as the US encouraged zealous Muslim 
leaders to recruit Muslims worldwide to come to training camps in Pakistan 
and Afghanistan to overturn the Soviet invasion. Once the Soviets left, 
Western nations lost interest in the region and distanced themselves from 
the mujahideen - Afghans, North Africans, Arabs, and even Southeast Asians 
- - who fought in Afghanistan.

More than a dozen of these training camps are still in operation. Some are 
thought to be funded by Mr. bin Laden. Authorities believe they trained the 
perpetrators of numerous attacks, from from Khobar, Tanzania, and Kenya to 
Yemen, New York, and Washington. A major part of their ideology is the 
overthrow of America, and of less-than-pure Islamic governments in places 
like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

"They're winning the battle of the minds of the people, and we're losing it 
... because we don't speak Arabic and we don't understand Muslim culture," 
adds the diplomat. And with little credibility or leverage in the region, 
there is little the US and its allies can do to influence Afghanistan, 
outside of the use of military force.

Humanitarian aid

Now, more than a week after UN relief officials and foreign aid workers 
have withdrawn from Afghanistan, Afghans like Karim who depend on aid 
programs for food and work are having to rely on other means, primarily 
their families. World Food Program officials estimate there are only two 
weeks of UN food stocks left in Afghanistan. Already, thousands of Afghans 
are reported leaving their homes, both out of fear of US bombing attacks 
and in search of a stable source of food.

Like some 6 million Afghans, Karim and his family spend their daily lives 
fending off starvation. Nearly 1 million urban Afghans and 4 million rural 
Afghans are almost entirely dependent on food relief.

While more than 400,000 Afghan civilians have lost their lives in the 1990s 
alone, the humanitarian crisis has had a particularly hard effect on Afghan 
children, who make up nearly half the nation's population - 10.3 million of 
a total 25 million Afghans here. Nearly a quarter of all infants die by the 
age of 5, mostly from malnutrition. Only 12 out of 20 school-age boys, and 
one out of 20 school-age girls, go to school.

Karim's family is so poor that he and his his four brothers must leave the 
house by 5:30 a.m. and start the day's work: picking through trash and 
roadside filth in search of wood, metal, and bits of paper to sell to scrap 
dealers. His father is unable to work; his mother earns some money washing 
clothes and baking bread for neighbors.

On a good day, Karim earns about 30 cents, enough to buy five pieces of 
bread. His first meal of the day - a glass of milk and a hunk of bread - 
comes at 9:00 a.m. at the training center run by ASCHIANA.

Karim gets two meals a day through ASCHIANA. At noon he rushes out to the 
local bazaar for two hours to scavenge for wood and metal.

"It's dangerous, because there are lots of places in Kabul where there are 
mines," says Karim. "There are some mines beside the rivers and in the 
destroyed areas. We learn what the mines look like, and how to avoid them."

Karim has never been to school, but after a year at ASCHIANA, he can now 
read and write. He has even read the Koran once, and the lessons from that 
holiest of books in Islam give him hope, he says. But his favorite pastime, 
by far, is painting. "I'm learning to be an artist," says Karim, smiling. 
"I have one wish: to be a good teacher, so that I can teach others to be 
good painters."

At the end of the day, Karim walks home with his friends. He's supposed to 
be gathering scrap metal, but on this day he and his classmates stop at the 
playground in Sharinow Park. They take turns pushing a rickety 
merry-go-round, which tips and sways and sends some of the boys flying into 
the dust as it gathers speed.

For 10 minutes, Karim's world is like that of any child in the world, a 
world of play. 
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom