Taliban on steroids

THE inspired but abortive effort a century ago by a king and his feminist queen to thrust Afghanistan into their vision of modernity offers a stark contrast with the proclivities of that nation’s present rulers, whose mediaeval inclinations are crudely reflected in last week’s codification of an ostensibly faith-based but effectively barbaric ‘moral code’.
Amir Amanullah — whose ascent to the Kabul throne in 1919 was followed by strategic success in the third Anglo-Afghan war (the Rawalpindi peace treaty in August that year removed British influence over the conduct of Afghanistan’s foreign affairs, and established the Durand Line) — and Queen Soraya embarked on a reform programme that focused, among other things, on education (the literacy rate was about two per cent at the time), not least for girls, land reform, lifting the veil, and shaving off beards.
The Taliban last week formalised the denial of education to girls, reinforcing the invisibility of women — who can neither be seen nor heard (their voices apparently trigger irresistible impulses among the Taliban fraternity) without attracting penalties — and specifying the size of beards that men are obliged to sprout. With the partial exception of Iran, given its absurd and occasionally lethal obsession with the nitty-gritty of hijabs, hardly any other Muslim nation goes to the kind of lengths that the Taliban aspire to.
That, too, doesn’t escape their notice. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid lately advised fellow components of the ummah to “take inspiration” from the Taliban’s “Sharia-based systems”. Perhaps the only Muslim nation at risk of doing so is Pakistan. After all, the Taliban in their original incarnation were spawned some 30 years go by a grotesque ménage-à-trois emerging from Saudi-funded and US-approved madressahs along Pakistan’s north-western periphery some 30 years ago, and their initial conquest of an Afghanistan further torn apart following the Soviet withdrawal by the internecine tussles for power among the mujahideen — who had chiefly been backed by the same three nations — was aided and abetted by what are nowadays euphemistically referred to as ‘the agencies’ and guided to some extent by the fanatical former ISI chief Hamid Gul.
Small wonder, then, that many Afghan exiles blame Pakistan for the resurgence and second coming of the Taliban. But even supporters of the present dispensation are ill-disposed towards their neighbour. A New York Times report about the celebrations marking the third anniversary of the 2021 takeover quoted a young man keen “to continue the jihad” as saying, “I want to go to Palestine”, but he is contradicted by an even younger Talib who proclaims: ‘No, it’s Pakistan’s turn. Our first enemy is Pakistan. …”
The blowback has, of course, already been occurring for a couple of decades — and direct Taliban intervention might not be required if the likes of extremists in Pakistan have their way.
Shock and horror, rather than surprise, have been common reactions to Afghanistan’s newly codified morality laws, which give vast leeway in terms of implementation to the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Who, though, would have dared to go as far as the supreme leader of the Taliban, Hibatullah Akhundzada, in proclaiming earlier this year, “You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery … [but] you represent Satan”?
There’s no mention, of course, of the male offenders. Likewise, the latest injunctions against singing, reciting or speaking loudly in public is restricted to wom­en. The sheer ob­­s­cenity of such rules has inevitably ril­ed the various ag­­encies that were still engaged with Afghanistan to some degree. Inte­restingly, though, an aid worker anonymously contributed an article to The Guardian this month, arguing that aid must keep flowing so that she and her colleagues can keep aiding women who are desperately in need of assistance amid a veritable epidemic of mental health challenges.
Amanullah’s broadly well-intentioned but ill-designed reforms in the early 20th century faced a backlash in Khost in 1924, and steady rural resistance that led to his abdication and exile five years later. Subsequent attempts at transcending the status quo, from the Saur ‘revolution’ in 1978 to the misguided Soviet and American occupations, failed to shift the dial — with Pakistan playing a retrograde role, in alliance with the US in the 1980s and, later, on the strength of its own aspirations to ‘strategic depth’.
The consequences cannot be disguised. Afghan women bear the brunt of the retrogressive revival, tragically, but men unaligned with the Taliban are not spared either. Pakistan, meanwhile, has been reaping the whirlwind for many years, yet there could be worse to come.
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Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2024