Taliban Read Online Free PDF

had all been about the economy and political corruption. On the other hand, it was widely suspected that the Taliban were being supported in their revolution by the ISI, Pakistan’s mighty Inter Service Intelligence wing and, it was inferred, by the government too. Two years previously, after all, Benazir’s Pashtun Interior Minister, General Nasirullah Babar, had publicly referred to the Taliban as ‘our boys’. 2 Nevertheless, Benazir evaded the question when I asked her about Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban, saying only that she was ‘monitoring events in Afghanistan closely’ and that we ‘would all have to waitto see what happened’. I took this to mean that support for the Taliban was, at most, a small and possibly experimental covert operation orchestrated by the ISI. It was also clear that she considered it no business of foreign journalists to pry into sensitive matters of national security. So I was surprised to discover that the Taliban were not just lurking in the refugee camps outside Peshawar, as I expected, but were operating quite openly in the city centre. They had even opened an office recently on the Old Bara Road in University Town.
    Their appearance in Peshawar had sent a frisson through the foreign aid community, particularly its female members. An Australian aid worker I met described how a black-turbanned young man had squared up to her the previous week as she came out of a bakery opposite their new office. He hadn’t said anything, but stared and deliberately blocked her way when she tried to step around him on the pavement. His meaning was clear: there were to be no unveiled women in
their
street. Many similar stories were doing the rounds in University Town that summer, when Western outrage at the Taliban’s misogyny in general would reach new peaks. It was widely suspected that their office’s location, highly visible and in the heart of the NGO district, had been chosen for its symbolic value as much as for any practical reason. Western NGOs were in practice responsible for all social welfare in Afghanistan in those chaotic days, so this was taken by some as a direct challenge to that status quo, as if to say: ‘We’ll be running Afghanistan
our
way now.’
    Were they serious? One morning I borrowed an interpreter from the Oxfam office and went to the Old Bara Road to find out. The Taliban office was small and dilapidated: a hastily converted shop, I guessed. Three or four men with beards and black turbans squatted by the entrance watching the passers-by in the street,like so many perching crows. They rose and followed me inside, where another half-dozen men loitered. It was hard to make out what their purpose here was, for there appeared to be no work going on. There was one desk with a telephone on it but no other obvious office equipment, no paperwork, computers or even typewriters. I glimpsed a rack of Kalashnikovs locked behind a grille in a cupboard in a corner, but otherwise the atmosphere was strangely like that of an underworked East London minicab office.
    My interpreter and I were shown to some grubby floor cushions. Tea was brought and eventually their leader appeared. His name, he said, was Amruddin; like nearly all the men here, he was from Kandahar. He was a young man with a straggly beard, clad head to toe in black and outwardly indistinguishable from the others – until you looked at his eyes. These shone with the light of religious conviction so intense that you sensed at once that he needed no other badge of authority. Their clarity was startlingly emphasized –
italicized
, perhaps – by dashes of thick black kohl painted on the lids beneath. He sat down cross-legged on the carpet, and the others all copied him until they had formed a semi-circle around us, silent and expectant, like schoolboys waiting for a story from their teacher. I supposed that as former madrasah students, they gathered this way almost by default.
    Despite his transcendent piety,