Afghan Capital’s Residents Face Fundamental Shock

The white banner, proclaiming that there is no god but Allah, floats now atop the clock tower of this nation’s presidential palace, heralding what is shaping up as one of the poorest and most fundamentalist of the world’s Islamic states.

In recent days, women who have ventured onto Kabul’s dusty streets without cloaking themselves from head to toe in opaque, suffocating gowns have been lashed with whips or fan belts.

A thief was trussed up like a roasting chicken, a weight hung from his lower jaw and currency notes stuffed into his gaping mouth. He was driven around in the back of a pickup truck, witnesses said, as loudspeakers blared the warning that anyone violating Islamic law would be punished.

Employees of government offices have been instructed on the radio by the city’s new rulers to grow beards in keeping with Afghan tradition if they want to keep their jobs.

Women have been told to stay home from work until further notice.

Early Friday, soldiers of the Taliban militia swept into Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital and most important city, after forces loyal to President Burhanuddin Rabbani, his defense chief, Ahmed Shah Masoud, and Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar fled in disarray.

Leaders of the conquering band of Islamic fundamentalists promised the restoration of peace and order in Afghanistan after nearly 17 years of virtually uninterrupted warfare. But many in this war-battered city are consumed by worry and fear that their latest ordeal is beginning. For if the Taliban are to be judged by their deeds so far, their goal is to transform Afghanistan into a state even more fundamentalist and puritanical than neighboring Iran, into a country where women cannot bare even their eyes in the street and where television is outlawed on religious grounds.

The militia, which emerged in late 1994 from students in Koranic schools along the Afghan-Pakistan border, advocates punishments for criminals that include execution for murderers, stoning for adulterers and amputation for thieves.

“We love our country and people, and, in the meantime, we love Islam,” Shirmohammed Stanekzai, the Taliban’s foreign affairs spokesman, told a news conference Tuesday. “In any case, we want to establish an Islamic government in Afghanistan. If somebody is against that in the world, that’s up to them.”

As a result of recent battlefield successes, the Taliban now claim to hold three-quarters of this Texas-sized country. Since their arrival in Kabul, all roads to other parts of Afghanistan have been opened, prices have come down in the bazaars and the airport is back in operation. The bombardments that Kabul residents suffered over the past 4 1/2 years--and which killed tens of thousands of civilians--have ceased.

Still, many in this city are far from overjoyed at the advent of the Taliban. “These people, they are just coming from the mountains, from the forests. They are wild,” shuddered an Afghan employee of a humanitarian relief organization who met with the six-member shura, or council, appointed by the Islamic militia Friday to govern Kabul. “They are just like forest animals.”

Since the capture of Kabul, the Taliban have been pressing their offensive against the fleeing forces of the former government and have captured the cities of Charikar, capital of Parvan province, and Jabal os Saraj, north of the capital. On Tuesday, Masoud’s forces blew up the walls of the gorge leading into the Panjsher valley so they would not be pursued into the sanctuary, which they had defended to great effect when fighting the Soviet army.

As for the other remaining obstacle to the Taliban’s total mastery of the nation, Abdul Rashid Dostum--the northern warlord and a former Communist general--Stanekzai expressed hope for a negotiated settlement so there would be no more fighting.

The Taliban are now busy assembling ministers to form a temporary government, said Stanekzai, who has been given the post of acting deputy foreign minister. When “the situation gets cool and calm,” he said, there will be nationwide consultations to form a permanent regime.

Reassuring Promises

“We want to establish an Islamic government that will not be against or opposed to the modern world,” the Taliban official stressed. Kabul’s new rulers have laid claim to Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations, he said, and promised to adhere to all of the nation’s international obligations.

But for many people in Kabul, the Taliban’s record and events since the takeover of the city have led to deep pessimism. “In Afghanistan, any changes that come are negative and more negative,” said a 43-year-old engineer gloomily. “We only go backward.”

Since the arrival of Taliban fighters--in flowing white and black turbans, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and traveling in Japanese-built four-wheel-drive vehicles--Kabul’s sole television station has been taken off the air. The militia’s mullahs deem TV--which reproduces images of living humans--a violation of Islamic law.

Music is also banned in areas under control of the Koranic students, whose ranks have been swelled by veterans of the Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union and defectors from the forces of the feuding moujahedeen commanders. In Kabul, Talibs have ripped apart audiocassettes they have found in some homes and strung the tape from trees like tinsel.

But it is the city’s women who appear most apprehensive about the future. Kabul radio, now the voice of the Taliban, has begun broadcasting reports on how the militia members have been chastising their wayward “sisters” for immodesty.

In Bibi Mehru, in eastern Kabul, residents watched one morning as five Talibs dismounted from their jeep and used a fan belt to whip half a dozen women who were clad in head scarves instead of burqas, which cover the wearers from head to toe while providing woven screens that allow them to see but conceal their eyes from others.

Corporal Punishment

At Pul-i-Khishti mosque in the city’s center, a teenager wearing a burqa was whipped anyway for not wearing socks and showing a few inches of bare ankle.

“Concerning dress, there are certain rules and regulations in Islam,” Stanekzai explained. But pressed by reporters as to what constituted decent female dress in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, he said an Islamic court must decide.

In provinces under their control, the Taliban have closed schools for girls and barred women from most jobs. For many residents of Kabul, home to more university graduates and a more cosmopolitan population than anywhere else in the country, such an interpretation of Afghanistan’s dominant religion is unthinkable.

“To tell half the population to stay at home, this is not Islam,” objected a 40-year-old field assistant for an international relief group. His 12-year-old daughter cried last week when he told her that she might never again go to school, he said.

Since the Taliban began patrolling the capital, one 25-year-old former Kabul University student in English literature has ventured no farther than her sister’s home across the street. Although her $326-a-month salary as a personnel assistant at a U.N. agency supports her, her parents, four sisters and a brother, she doesn’t dare go to work now.

Never in her life, she said, has she donned a burqa. “For educated people, this is not a thing we can accept,” she said. “We women are helpless. We hope that other countries, friendly countries, can talk to the Talibs and tell them not to bring about such a condition so that women have to stay at home and their rights are taken.”

Stanekzai--a bearded, articulate former commander in the 1979-89 war against the Soviets--noted that Islam gives equal rights for men and women, including education. But he said it will take time to establish “rules and regulations” so standards of Muslim morality can be maintained in the classroom and workplace.

Public schools in Afghanistan, the Taliban official said, were established on the Soviet model, which placed boys and girls in the same classes; they must be modified. Until government offices can be similarly rearranged, he said, women employees will be paid to stay at home and given work to do there.

Many in Kabul said they are dubious that the Taliban’s moral crusade, which owes at least as much to traditional Afghan village customs as to Islamic edicts, will benefit a country reduced to ruins by years of battle. Since 1979, Afghanistan has suffered more than 1 million war dead and as many handicapped; the combat has created one of the largest refugee populations in the world--an estimated 1 million Afghans still live in Iran and more than 1.5 million in Pakistan.

This mountainous, landlocked Asian nation, poor and undeveloped to begin with, has fallen to the bottom or near bottom in almost all demographic indicators measuring the duration and quality of life. The average Afghan now can expect to live for only 44 years. More than two-thirds of the people are illiterate. The average annual income is $150. The infant mortality rate is 36 times that of a typical European country.

In Kabul--which is home to 750,000 to 1 million people, many of them refugees from fighting elsewhere in the country--hundreds of thousands are without jobs and in dire straits. Even government employees may earn just a little more per month than the price of a 15-pound bag of flour. The fierce cold of winter, which can be lethal to homeless families sleeping on frigid floors of abandoned, shell-marked buildings, is just months away.

A ban on women working, if prolonged or permanent, would hamstring or render impossible many relief and humanitarian aid efforts underway to help civilians, officials said.

For instance, Save the Children has employed 30 women to teach Kabul children to recognize unexploded ordnance left by the war, including the estimated 10 million land mines still peppering the Afghan landscape. Until now, more than 42,000 pupils have taken the potentially life-saving course. But since last week, the American charity’s female teachers have been afraid to report to work. “Until the Taliban came, the program was running smoothly,” said Asmiae, Save the Children’s project officer.

Terry P. Pitzner, who heads the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees here, said that without his female Afghan employees, who make up 60% of his office staff, “I can’t work.”

Who’ll Run Schools?

In Kabul schools, the vast majority of teachers are women. “If these 70% [the female teachers] don’t go to the schools, how will it be possible to run them?” asked an Afghan working for a humanitarian relief group.

And many relief officials, foreign and Afghan, expressed special concern for a tragic group left by the war: widows who must now support families. In Kabul alone, these women--whose spouses died in the shelling or in combat--are believed to number 50,000. “If these women cannot work, as the Talib say, how will they and their children survive?” asked an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Before taking control of Kabul, the Taliban had lobbed artillery shells and rockets at the city for a year, killing and wounding thousands of civilians. People were understandably apprehensive about what occupation by the Taliban would bring. One of the Islamic militia’s first acts--the slaying last week of Najibullah, the former Communist president, and the stringing up of his corpse from a traffic post outside the presidential palace--left many rattled.

Stanekzai accused Najibullah of killing many Afghans and destroying the country during his terms as president and head of the Communist regime’s secret police. But he blamed his death on local Taliban commanders, not on the movement’s leaders. “At the time, our leadership, our shura, was in Kandahar. They were not in Kabul,” he insisted.

Over the last five days, the Taliban have been occupying homes of former moujahedeen commanders and government officials and seizing their vehicles; they appear not to have carried out indiscriminate looting. Abdul Rehman Zazai, a Kabul car dealer, has come to the conclusion that Kabul’s new rulers are more honest than the enemies they evicted.

Unlike moujahedeen commanders, who often extorted vehicles from him, the Taliban have only confiscated cars without proper registration papers, Zazai said. When he produced documents for a $22,000 four-wheel-drive vehicle, the Taliban returned it, he said.

“I’m optimistic and happy. I’ve been given assurances by the Talibs that the security will begin functioning again and there will be law and order in the city,” Zazai said.

Stanekzai said Kabul’s new rulers want good relations with Afghanistan’s neighbors and “good and friendly relations” with the United States. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan will not serve as a training base or haven for Islamic terrorism, he said, noting, “Now with the grace of almighty God, peace and security is maintained in this area; 99% of the people are happy with us.”

But apprehensive about what lies in the future, many in Kabul are awaiting the Taliban’s next actions. “If the new generation stays at home, what will become of our country?” one 40-year-old office worker asked.