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Posted on 11/03/2001 8:00:48 AM PST by Pokey78

There are no "moderates" in the Afghan regime

OF ALL THE PUZZLING THINGS that have been said since the United States started bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age -- or, as pedants would have it, up to the Bronze Age -- none outranks the idea offered during the October 16 press conference with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and Secretary of State Colin Powell that there are  "moderate Taliban leaders."

It was a distinction that one might think could be drawn only by the president of a militantly Islamic country on the cusp of violent overthrow. But Powell echoed the notion (minus the "leaders"), saying that even with the Taliban vanquished, there would be those who "find the teachings and the beliefs of that movement still very important," who might be included in a new Afghan government. Besides, Powell added, "You can't send them to another country."

But you can send them to their just reward -- which would be a deserving fate for a regime where "moderates" have historically differentiated themselves from hardliners by, say, throwing homosexuals off roofs instead of crushing them under stone walls.

Powell must have thought he was doing the polite thing by agreeing with his host. In the interest of knowing thine enemy, I have spent the last two weeks surveying stacks of human rights reports, first-hand dissident accounts, and books such as Ahmed Rashid's indispensable Taliban, in search of the elusive "moderate Taliban." They don't appear to exist. What you find in these sources, instead, is a nearly inexhaustible accretion of Taliban atrocities and absurdities that end up taking on a black comic hue -- assuming you don't live in Afghanistan.

From the moment, in 1996, when militant madrassa-trained talibs (or religious students) seized power from nihilistic mujahedeen fighters, they immediately gained the world's attention. Their housewarming party in Kabul included kidnapping former President Najibullah from the U.N. compound where he was staying. The Taliban beat him, castrated him, dragged his body behind a jeep, then hung him from a traffic light in front of the presidential palace. But first impressions can be deceiving. Despite the blinding efficiency with which the Taliban terrorized Afghanistan's war-weary population, they proved woefully inept at governing.

The Taliban's first act was to declare Afghanistan a "pure Islamic state." This was bad news for church/state separatists, Hindus (who must wear yellow identification stickers), and Christian Afghans (Christian converts from Islam under the Taliban are executed). But it seemed like good news for the eleven parties that jousted for power at the time of the Taliban's ascendancy, ten of which had the word "Islamic" in their monikers. (The Taliban then broke the bad news to its rivals by banning all political parties -- since Islam "forbids divisions.")

Instead of elected officials or the self-appointed strongmen that usually commandeer third-world countries, Afghanistan was now being run by the village mullah, described by Michael Griffin, author of Reaping the Whirlwind, as a "cross between a country parson and a Shakespearean clown."

What the mullahs lacked in erudition, they made up for with perfect mosque attendance. In Afghanistan, five-times-a-day prayer is enforced religiously. Sports such as soccer are not allowed to be played at prayer times, as clapping might prove a distraction (as an extra caution, the Taliban banned clapping altogether, though sports fans are permitted brief pro-Allah chants when the home team scores).

Men who do not wish to pray in mosques may do so at home -- if they want to be shot, or beaten by a variety of instruments (staves, iron-fortified leather straps, electric cables). Women are expected to pray in the privacy of their burqua, behind the blacked-out windows of their homes, assuming they can afford homes, since one out of every eight women in Kabul is a widow, and they are, for the most part, forbidden to work. Women do have a prayer loophole, however. Since the Taliban do not permit women who have had their periods to pray until they've had a ritual bath, and since many women no longer have running water and the Taliban shut down public bathhouses, many women have not been permitted to pray in roughly four years.

All this compulsory mosquing doesn't leave much time for governance, which may be just as well. Government offices are open only from 8 A.M. to noon each day. Civil servants were laid off in droves, often for the crimes of being female, having too short a beard, or being educated abroad.

What's left, then, is a rogue's gallery of Taliban ministers who are in a perpetual race to see if their cruelty can outpace their stupidity. The minister of higher education has no formal education. The culture minister has overseen the looting of museums and the destruction of priceless ancient artifacts. And the health minister has been spotted cleaving off hands at public amputations. This, in a country where one out of every four babies dies before the age of five, where a child is blown up by a landmine every three hours, and where 268,000 children die every year from easily treatable conditions like diarrhea.

Overseeing all this is the one-eyed commander of the faithful, Mullah Mohammed Omar. Not much is known about the 43-year-old recluse, whose harem reportedly includes Osama bin Laden's daughter. But thanks to the Sunday Telegraph's Christina Lamb, who interviewed one of Omar's doctors, a widely held suspicion has been confirmed: Omar is nuttier than a Stuckey's log. Alternating between childlike behavior and serious depression, Omar likes to sit in the driver's seat of his parked car, turning the wheel while making engine noises. According to his physician, the "visions" Omar claims to have had when locking himself away for days on end are probably seizures caused by the shrapnel that lodged itself in his brain during a 1989 Soviet rocket attack.

THIS MAY EXPLAIN A HOST OF TALIBAN EDICTS, which range from mildly eccentric to criminally sadistic. Bus drivers are not permitted to tell jokes, and must have a boy younger than 15 collect fares from female passengers. If a dog bites someone, the dog's owner must pay the victim 20 million Afghanis and give him "a girl for marriage." According to Taliban law, a woman cannot leave her house without being accompanied by a male relative, which causes considerable problems for the unemployed legions of widows, many of whom have been driven to prostitution. To avoid Taliban beatings, they must lug along their children, who are then present for the act, and who are sometimes forced by violent pederasts to become part of the act themselves.

This is not to say the Taliban fail to provide bread and circuses. Well, actually, not much bread (Afghans have been spotted eating everything from boiled bones to grass). But there are plenty of circuses. For fun, Afghans have been known to get in rock fights, pray for death, or visit the Kabul zoo, where the blighted animals cower from years of getting poked with sticks by Taliban militia seeking entertainment. Then there are the public stonings. On one recent afternoon, an adulterous mother was stoned, while her crying child was forced to periodically check under her burqua to see if she had died. At the soccer stadium, where thieves' limbs are severed, and where enemies of the state are hanged from the goalposts, soccer games do occasionally break out. But often, they have unhappy endings. Last year in Kandahar, when a visiting Pakistani soccer team dared wear shorts, baton-wielding police broke up the game, arrested the team, and took them to prison, where they had their heads shaved.

Then, of course, there are the massacres, which usually involve non-Pashtun minorities like the Hazaras. From Mazar-e-Sharif to Bamiyan, the Taliban have been good for at least one civilian massacre per year, in which people have variously been shot, raped, suffocated in metal transport containers, had their hands broken with stones, their eyes gouged out with bayonets, and the skin peeled off their heads. On occasion, their families have been ordered to leave their loved ones' bodies in the street -- so they can be eaten by dogs.

But despite all this terror, the Taliban haven't been entirely bad for business. Though Afghan currency has been completely devalued, you can pick up prosthetic limbs or children, which many families have been forced to sell since they can no longer support them, for a song ("song," here, is figurative -- actual singing has been banned). Likewise, Afghanistan has become a large exporter of refugees and opium.

The Taliban have no problem with selling drugs but do frown on using them. The head of the Taliban's anti-drug control force told Ahmed Rashid, for instance, that when they catch hashish users, they're entered into the Taliban treatment program: After beating them, he said, "We put them in cold water for many hours, two or three times a day. It's a very good cure."

What Americans should take from this is that even if bin Laden packed up his cave and moved to Buenos Aires tomorrow, rooting out the Taliban with extreme prejudice would still be the humanitarian equivalent of a Superfund cleanup. The only problem with wresting the country away from the bad guys to give it to the good guys is that as of yet, we haven't identified many. The same human rights groups that monitor Taliban atrocities have produced long rap sheets showing many of the venerated Northern Alliance's commanders are also guilty of raping, pillaging, and generally acting like the Mongol hordes from which some are descended.

I asked an old Afghan hand in the intelligence community, how, then, can a postwar Afghanistan achieve some level of civility and stability? He laughed at such a naive notion, saying, "It's way too late for that." But Afghans, among the world's most resilient people, still hold out hope for normalcy -- though after two decades of war, no one can quite remember what normal looks like.

Perhaps someday, when its cities regain certain luxuries -- like electricity -- Afghanistan can open a Ministry of Tourism and crank out zippy little slogans, the Afghan equivalent of "Virginia Is For Lovers." Until then, it is damned by the words of a U.N. mediator, who told Rashid, "We are dealing with a failed state which looks like an infected wound. You don't even know where to start cleaning it."



Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard

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