EuropaWorld 23/11/2001 The Taliban

According to the Taliban, their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was praying one day when a woman entered the mosque and began to tell how she and her daughters had been raped by Northern mujahedin. Mullah Omar was incensed by the story and urged the congregation to take up arms to avenge this most un-Islamic act. Around this nucleus Mullah Omar succeeded in attracting other clerics and mujahedin seeking a purer, more fundamental version of the Muslim faith which they were willing to fight - and die - for. Thus the Taliban - the name means religious students - were born.

Pakistan recognised the movement in its early stages, giving it funds to defend trade convoys crossing Afghanistan on their way to the republics of central Asia. Such convoys had long been easy plunder for the roaming, lawless gangs of local fighters that had blossomed since the end of the Soviet occupation, and which had reduced Afghanistan to a state of crippling anarchy.

At least the Taliban had a vision of a pure and unified Islamic state taking its orders from a college of clerics who would base every decision on their interpretation of the Holy Koran. Armed with such a vision, and loyalty to their mullahs, the Taliban soldiers fought off the local mujahedin. The convoys went on their way unmolested.

This success led them to a bolder step. Growing all the time in numbers and recruiting the floating allegiance of local warlords, the Taliban moved on to take the Southern city of Kandahar. Thus began a remarkable advance which led to their capture of the capital, Kabul, in September 1996.

The Taliban movement had been created in the south of the country. Its leaders and its core fighters were all ethnic Pashtuns, a tribal group that accounts for some 40 per cent of the Afghan population and which also has a significant presence in Pakistan. While their support was always firmly rooted in the south of the country where the Pashtun tribes were most heavily represented, the movement quickly became popular all over Afghanistan.

The Taliban's early popularity with many Afghans initially surprised the country's warring mujahedin factions. But these, especially in the north, had become disillusioned with feuding ethnic Tajik and Uzbek warlords. Ordinary Afghans, weary of the prevailing lawlessness in many parts of the country, were often delighted by Taliban successes in stamping out corruption, restoring peace and allowing commerce to flourish again. Their refusal to deal with the existing warlords whose rivalries had caused so much killing and destruction also earned them respect.

The Taliban said their aim was to set up the world's purest Islamic state. In pursuit of this they banned what they saw as frivolities like television, music and cinema. Their attempts to eradicate crime were reinforced by the introduction of strict Sharia law whose practice includes public execution and amputation.

But it was the flurry of regulations forbidding girls from going to school and women from working that soon earned them the detestation of the international community. This went against the overwhelming view of Islam then prevailing, which guaranteed rights and equality for women.

The impracticality of running a state on the sole and unhelpful basis of a religious doctrine laid down more than a thousand years previously soon became apparent. The Afghan economy, such even as it was, collapsed, trade faltered, investment dried up. And as if in some celestial vengeance, a drought began to afflict the country that endures to the present. The Taliban's response was not to loosen their grip but to tighten it, as if to drive the country still further back into medieval times.

Their soldiers, whose numbers were now swollen by fundamentalist recruits from Pakistan, Arabia and other Muslim countries, increasingly behaved with less and less respect for human rights. Massacres of those civilians that resisted their advances continued on a scale that could not be hidden. And all the while the evidence of their mismanaged affairs was all around. Millions of Afghans fled the country, others starved and died.

The end could not have been far off even without the intervention of the American led coalition.