Afghanistan Militia Exacts a Strict Price for Peace

Peace has finally come to this city and most of Afghanistan, and with it the order that people longed for during the long, nightmare years of civil war. But there has been a price, unbearably high for some.

“Now I can walk out onto the street and feel safe,” said Ismail, 21, an office worker for the International Committee of the Red Cross who is the sole source of support for an eight-member family. He pointed to his worn, Western-style trousers. “But if I go out in these, I might be beaten.”

In a middle-class house decorated with sumptuous Afghan carpets and silk flowers carefully arranged in vases, a female surgeon in her 30s, the mother of a 3 1/2-year-old girl and a 1 1/2-year-old boy, agonized over recent lifestyle changes she has been forced to make.

“Even when there was fighting, I was not so afraid as I am now,” the physician said. “We’re like prisoners here. It’s not a life, just being at home, cooking and looking after the kids. My daughter asks me every day: ‘Mommy, Mommy, why aren’t you taking me to school? Is it because of the Taliban?’ She is very intelligent. She knows what’s going on.”

With the bulk of Afghanistan’s territory now under its control, the Islamic militia known as the Taliban has offered the war-weary population of this country a Faustian trade-off of sorts.

There will be peace; but under Taliban rule, Afghans will have to conform to a harsh interpretation of Muslim Sharia law that even dictates what they should wear and whether men should shave. (They shouldn’t.)

It is a bargain many Afghans appear ready to accept.

“At least we are not hearing the sound of rockets or explosives, and we are now sleeping with the assurance that we will not be robbed in the night,” said a Foreign Ministry official who is no fan of the Talibs. “At the moment, peace and security are the essential thing.”

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Under the Talibs, who captured Kabul last week, life in the capital has returned to some semblance of normalcy.

The markets are thriving, prices are down, electricity has been switched on, and Ariana Afghan Airlines, the national carrier, has resumed flights abroad.

But the Taliban have inherited a bankrupt and ineffective government, a countryside laid waste by 17 years of fighting, a capital bombarded into ruins and a population afflicted with appalling levels of injuries, poverty and joblessness.

The Koran may have inspired the Talibs on the battlefield for the last two years, but their tasks now will be different: reviving the state bank, wooing friends and donors abroad, forging a foreign policy and rebuilding an economy and government devastated by war.

“We want help only from our great God,” Mullah Lambat, commander of a Taliban unit stationed in the Hindu Kush mountains 60 miles north of Kabul, replied this week when asked how the Taliban will deal with the weighty responsibilities of government. “God will help us.”

“Most of their leaders are village mullahs [Muslim clerics]; they don’t understand anything about such things,” the Foreign Ministry official said. “These mullahs are not capable of running the country. They’re just not educated enough. And their commanders want to go back to their villages. They don’t like the cities.”

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To have a hope of governing effectively, the Taliban will be forced to call upon the 130,000 government employees in Kabul who served the Communist leaders who ruled this country from 1978 to 1992 and the feuding victors of the anti-Soviet jihad who succeeded them.

Those bureaucrats, secretaries and even the gardeners who tend the lawns and flower beds are still coming to work, minus the women, whom the Taliban have told to stay home.

In the halls and offices, the civil servants are now joined by Taliban fighters, illiterate rural youths in the main, who wander around in wonder, their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.

In the country’s north, Afghanistan’s would-be government still faces two formidable foes: Ahmed Shah Masoud, defense chief of the ousted government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, master of six of Afghanistan’s 26 provinces.

For the time being, the Taliban plan has been to seek talks with Dostum, a former Communist general whom the Talibs now cynically describe as a “good Muslim,” and to make simultaneous preparations to carry the war against Masoud and his troops into their formidable hide-out in the narrow, steep-sided Panjsher valley.

More battles appear inevitable, and Dostum’s force, with an abundance of Russian-supplied arms, would be an especially potent foe.

For the Talibs, Afghanistan’s fractious past offers a sobering lesson. The population is diverse and fragmented: About 90% of Afghans are Muslims, with about 80% Sunni and 20% Shiite; ethnically, there are Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and members of other ethnic groups, often further subdivided into a bewildering maze of tribes and clans.

History has shown that these groups fiercely resist central authority and challenges to their way of life.

Although they are in the main traditional people living to the centuries-old rhythms of the rural village and encampment, many do not share the Taliban’s zealous opposition to music, videocassette recorders or female labor.

Conscious of the need to forge some sort of consensus, the Taliban--whose core leadership consists of Pushtuns, who make up about 55% of the population--are now talking in general terms about summoning a loya jirga, or traditional assembly of all the tribes, to choose a permanent national government.

So far, however, the Talibs have sent mixed signals about their flexibility and willingness to compromise.

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They offered an amnesty to soldiers and moujahedeen commanders who opposed them, for example, but soon after taking Kabul, Talibs hunted down and killed Najibullah, the former Communist president who had been living under U.N. protection, and strung up his body.

The blood of the former Kremlin-backed dictator and his brother, who was killed at the same time, stained the pavement in front of the presidential palace. At the site, an unknown hand scrawled this warning in chalk: “This is where guilty Dr. Najib and his brother were hanged on Sept. 29. Take a lesson from this.”

“After they hanged Najib, no Afghan politician will trust them,” an Afghan physician predicted.

Norbert Holl, the U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan, was sufficiently wary of the Talibs that during his first meeting with their six-member Kabul shura, or council, he introduced the heads of U.N. offices in the city and asked Taliban leaders to protect them.

“It’s frightening [that] this is going to be the government, because these men have obviously had no experience but fighting,” recalled a ranking U.N. official who attended the session with Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, the Taliban’s No. 2 leader, and other members of the Kabul shura. “I felt they were very insecure. They’ve taken the city--and now what?”

Privately, many Afghans express the hope that the Taliban’s victory will bring the return of the exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who turns 82 this month. The monarch, who was overthrown by his cousin Mohammed Daoud in 1973, lives in Rome.

“Many Kabulis are not showing a very strong reaction to the Taliban because they hope they will bring the king back,” an office worker said. “I think he must come back or there is no way to rule Afghanistan. He alone is above these narrow-minded differences and prejudices that divide our people.”

The Taliban, however, have made ominous noises about what might happen to the king if he comes home.

Zahir Shah, like any Afghan exile, is free to return, but the people will have to decide what to do with him, Shirmohammed Stanekzai, deputy foreign minister in the Taliban’s interim government, said this week.

“Maybe they want him as a president or as a king,” Stanekzai said. “Or as a criminal.”

Kabul’s newest conquerors have been trying to present themselves to Afghans and the world as staunch Muslims who at the same time are not fanatics.

Keenly aware of the international condemnation aroused by the killing of Najibullah and Taliban bans on women working, attending school or showing an inch of skin when outside their homes, officials of Kabul’s new government have voiced their commitment to due legal process and women’s right to work and education.

In his meeting with the Kabul shura, Holl said, he linked respect for such human rights to the international community’s willingness to donate money for Afghan reconstruction.

Peace and order are what the Taliban are now offering Afghans, but the evolution of the Afghan state, with its mix of centralized government and autonomous local social structures, means that will not suffice. If they want to hang on to and extend their power, they will have to modify their fundamentalist agenda to take into account what Afghanistan’s social mosaic wants.

In 1809, the first British emissary to the court of Kabul, Mountstuart Elphinstone, told a tribal elder that what this country needed was an absolute monarch. The sage, Elphinstone wrote later, disagreed violently, in words that still ring true of Afghans today.

“We are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood,” the old man said. “But we will never be content with a master.”