A Fat Life in a Starving Land

Mullah Mohammed Omar’s pad in Kandahar apparently wasn’t much to look at, even before U.S. bombs remodeled it with new skylights and windows. But in a country where thousands of families bed down on the ground, huddling together in canvas tents against whipping winds, the Taliban’s spiritual leader lived large. Call it lifestyles of the rich and infamous, Taliban-style.

The Omar family home may have been devoid of marble and without a private screening room, de rigueur for even minor Hollywood moguls these days. But until those bombers flew over, Omar, his three wives, his mother and his children had what millions of Afghans lack: walls, running water and electric lights--plastic chandeliers, no less.

It seems the man revered for his humility and austerity hankered (surprise!) for the finer things in life. Thanks in part to his good friend Osama, he had the money to buy them.

A fountain gurgled in the front yard of Omar’s 10-acre compound. Its elaborate bronze work depicted a forest of intertwined trees with a brook running through. Although millions of his countrymen may starve this winter, Omar had his own vegetable and herb gardens, surrounded by walls painted with colorful, bucolic scenes. Most Afghans dream of indoor plumbing. The mullah washed each morning in his pink-tiled bathroom, which had imported faucets.

Ever has it been so. Louis XVI partied on at Versailles while the French people struggled to buy bread, let alone the cake that--at least according to Rousseau--his wife suggested they try as a substitute. During the inferno he created, Adolf Hitler took refuge at Berghof, the chalet he built into the Bavarian Alps at the cost of 12 lives. And in the 1980s the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, like cult figures through the ages, shook down his followers in order to furnish his Oregon digs with crystal goblets, gold-leaf furniture and his trademark Rolls-Royces.

Who knows how Omar will decorate whatever cave he’s crawled into? But in a nation no longer blind to hypocrisy, the one-eyed mullah will find it harder to live like a king.