Tuesday, November 19, 1996
TALIBAN:
West ignores fighters’ role in bringing peace to war-torn
nationBy Manija Said
Recent media coverage has portrayed the Afghan Taliban as
draconian savages. Considering the events that have taken place in
Afghanistan over the years, it becomes evident that the most savage
acts have been committed by the forces against whom the Taliban are
reacting.
To explain the rise of the Taliban, it is necessary to have an
understanding of what life was like during the years of
foreign-backed factional fighting after the Soviet withdrawal. The
Soviets left Afghanistan in February 1989 after killing
approximately 2 million civilians. This caused Afghanistan to
become the world’s largest source of refugees, and left millions of
land mines and "armies of amputees, widows and orphans" (U. N.
Special Report on Afghanistan, 1994). There was no war crimes
tribunal established, nor were there any indemnities paid for the
destruction of villages and atrocities committed against the mostly
rural poor, who had risen in resistance.
The defeat of the Soviet Union also caused the United States to
abandon Afghanistan. Despite prior U.S. promises to help develop
Afghanistan after the war, no effort was made to reconstruct the
country. The Afghans were left with a devastated infrastructure and
inadequate humanitarian assistance to cope with the demands of
recovery.
Along with fostering global apathy, the Russian withdrawal also
created a political vacuum in Afghanistan. As a result, some of
those same Mujahadeen factions who had delivered the humiliating
defeat to the Soviet Union and, in the process, had garnered $3
billion worth of arms from the CIA, began to fight amongst
themselves for control of the country. They had a seemingly endless
supply of arms that had been sent to Afghanistan from governments
around the world during the years after the Soviet invasion.
These governments, according to Amnesty International, continued
to use Afghanistan as a "testing ground" for their weapons. The
Soviet Union tested 30 mm automatic grenade launchers, cluster
warheads and plastic land mines in the shape of childrens’ toys.
CIA funds provided the Mujahadeen with mortars, anti-aircraft guns,
sub-machine guns, M-16 and Uzi carbines, as well as Stinger
missiles. Blowpipe surface-to-surface missiles were provided by the
United Kingdom.
Time magazine (March 1996) adds that regional powers such as
Iran, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia and Russia continued to give
military, financial and diplomatic support to the differing warring
factions in order to further their own geopolitical interests.
This foreign involvement in Afghanistan has taken a tremendous
toll on its civilian population. For years, Afghanistan has had the
world’s highest infant-mortality and lowest life-expectancy rates,
surpassing those of the poorest sub-Saharan African nations. There
has also been widespread hunger and malnutrition. Civilian
casualties of war continue to die due to lack of medical attention.
With the proliferation of land mines, maimed children with
amputated limbs are a common sight. According to the Vietnam
Veterans of America, Afghanistan is the world’s most land-mined
country followed by Cambodia and Angola. The prevalence of
unclaimed corpses laying in the streets is further evidence that
the people in Afghanistan have lived a surreal, horrific existence
during the past few years of foreign-sponsored factional
fighting.
An atmosphere of anarchy has reigned in Afghanistan, where
killings, beatings, torture and the looting of homes have been
carried out by the different factions. The raping of women has been
rampant. As Amnesty International attests, "rape has been condoned
by faction leaders as a means of terrorizing conquered populations
and rewarding soldiers." It reports the cast of a young widow in
Kabul, who in early 1994 left her three small children at home to
search for food outside. Two soldiers abducted her from the street
and took her to their base where she was raped by 22 men for three
days. When she was released, she returned home to find that her
three children had died of hypothermia.
Since the war had shattered the country’s infrastructure, people
had no means to earn a livelihood during this period of inflation.
Young men and boys were forced to become mercenaries for the
warring factions in order to feed their families. As the 1994 UN.
Special Report on Afghanistan explains,"in order to make a living,
people have to kill."
Iran and India have also provided support to the Rabanni
government. The Los Angeles Times has reported that on several
occasions Iran has supplied aid to the beleaguered Rabanni
government by air. India began to supply military aid to Rabanni in
December 1993. Indian technicians are said to have been sent to
Kabul to repair Soviet-made MiG-21s, gunship helicopters, tanks and
artillery guns. Aryana Airlines, the official airline of
Afghanistan, has been frequently used to deliver arms and munitions
from New Delhi to Kabul, according to the Pakistan’s Frontier
Post.
Pakistan, for its part, had been aiding the rival faction of
Gulbudin Hekmatyar. Although many factions took part in the
scramble for power, the bulk of the fighting between 1992 and 1996
took place between the factions of Rabanni and Hekmatyar.
Between them, the two factions reduced most of Kabul to rubble,
caused more than a million refugees to flee the city, and killed an
estimated 40,000 civilians. These people died needlessly for, in
June 1996, the two factions decided to reconcile and form a
coalition government against the Taliban. By this time, the
Taliban, an Islamic movement which sought to disarm all of the
factions that had participated in the killing since 1992, had
gained control of two-thirds of Afghanistan.
The Taliban initially arose out of Afghan refugee camps in
Pakistan. Most of them are young men in their late teens to early
twenties, children of Afghan refugees who have continued to flee
Afghanistan since 1979. They are a generation that has grown up
knowing nothing but war. They are composed of Afghanistan’s rural
poor, who have historically been excluded from political
participation. This socioeconomic group was deprived of education
and opportunity under the monarchy and persecuted under the
subsequent Soviet-installed regimes.
In the refugee camps, the Taliban were indoctrinated by clerics
into a puritanical form of Islam which sought to use its
interpretation of Sharia, or Quranic Law, to disarm the factions
and establish a single, Islamic state. Many of their military
commanders come from Mujahadeen groups who did not take part in the
factional fighting. The movement received financial support from
expatriate Afghan traders who saw the Taliban as a way of pacifying
Afghanistan and opening the roads for commerce. They also received
support from local people. When the city of Kandahar seemed in
danger of falling to one of the factions, poor people lined up to
make donations of whatever they could offer to the Taliban. The
group swept through Afghanistan, disarming the warring factions and
receiving assistance from a Pakistan eager for access to
resource-rich Central Asia ("Afghanistan blocks Pakistan from
overland trade with Central Asia," Los Angeles Times, Aug. 7,
1996).
Apart from disarming the warring factions, the group has ended
raping, looting, extortion, and murder in areas where it has
established control. It has done this through the imposition of
Sharia law (New York Times). The Taliban have also enacted price
controls over basic foodstuffs so that people are no longer going
hungry (The (London) Times). Above all, it has brought about
something that Afghanistan has not had for 17 years  peace.
This is something that neither the United States, Europe nor the
United Nations has managed to accomplish.
All of this seems to have been ignored by most of the mass
media, which concentrates on the extremist aspects of the "Islamic
fundamentalist" movement. The Taliban has taken the brunt of
criticism for forcing women to stay indoors, despite the fact that
the Rabanni government had issued similar ordinances when it first
took control of Kabul. Of late, however, there seems to be an
abundance of Afghan women’s advocates, from CNN’s Christian
Amanpour to ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who have never set foot in
Afghanistan during its 17 years of war. On "20/20," Diane Sawyer
wore a veil, the chadari or burqa, which has holes that women can
barely see through. She neglected to mention that women in Kabul
have been wearing it for centuries (see National Geographic,
September 1968). It is not a garment devised by the Taliban.
If these powers had truly cared for women’s rights, they would
not have fought their proxy wars in Afghanistan. In doing so, they
are just as responsible as the warring factions they backed for the
creation of tens of thousands of widows and orphans.
The Manchester Guardian quotes Charles McFadden, director of 74
relief agencies in Kabul, as stating, "We work on the basis that
the Taliban will need time to reassess" (Oct. 7, 1996). It appears
that the Taliban have done just that. On Nov. 1, the Taliban
announced that it will allow girls to attend school and may allow
women back to work once their safety can be guaranteed (The
Associated Press, Nov. 1, 1996).
However, constructive pressure needs to be maintained on the
group to ensure that equal rights are indeed realized. These rights
need to be secured not only for the educated women of Kabul but
also for women in rural Afghanistan and Afghan women refugees in
Pakistan, who live under horrendous, if less-restrictive, living
conditions.
It is also important to be aware that there are forces who
manipulate the issue of women’s rights to further their political
objectives and mask their own roles in the perpetuation of war and
poverty in Afghanistan.