Rock and Hard Places by Andrew Mueller Read Free Book Online

side like everyone else, only more so. They had weapons supplied by local merchants tired of the beatings, robberies and rapes perpetrated by the bandits who preyed on the roads around Kandahar (Noel Spencer had told me that, pre-Taliban, he’d been hijacked several times along the Kabul-Jalalabad road). The Taliban were tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime. They rounded up 50 local highwaymen and hung them off the barrels of tanks.
    To a population as harassed as it was uneducated (53 percent of Afghan men and 85 percent of women are illiterate), this robust approach to enforcing civic order had a definite appeal. Over the next two years, the Taliban annexed swathes of Afghanistan, recruiting as they went from Afghanistan’s uncountable gangs of freelance brigands, who knew a winning side when they saw one. In September 1996, the Taliban hoisted their flag over Kabul, a city which the mostly southern, rural talibs had always regarded with the same pious repugnance that Utah Mormons harbour for Las Vegas. The Taliban’s all-white—or rather, given Afghanistan’s chronic filth, all-grey—banner was alleged to be a symbol of peace. The Taliban removed Soviet-era President Muhammad Najibullah and his brother from their sanctuary in Kabul’s UN compound, and hung them off a traffic observation kiosk.
    Casual brutality and an enthusiasm for Islam were hardly innovations in Afghan politics, but the Taliban really weren’t messing about. They introduced a blizzard of laws. Some were biblically severe (public amputation of hands for theft, public execution for murder, often by relatives of the victim). Some were faintly hilarious (the criminalisation of kite-flying, the compulsory flowing beards for males). Except that
even these really weren’t funny. According to a report in Peshawar’s Frontier Post , 500 Kabuli men were lashed the week before I arrived for having trimmed their beards. Akbar solemnly tells me that he has been warned about his fringe.
    One afternoon, when Akbar is taking me shopping for a rug on Chicken Street, a young, correctly hirsute Afghan approaches me and asks if he can practice his English. Over tea in a nearby cafe, he and Akbar ask me about Australia. I tell them about the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, which I’d been to a few months previously. Their minds boggle almost audibly.
    “What were the police doing while this was going on?” demands Akbar.
    They marched in the parade.
    “You have sodomites in your police?”
    Akbar clearly thinks I’m winding him up.
    “I was in Herat in March,” says our new friend, blandly. “The Taliban caught two sodomites there. They pushed a wall over on them with a tank.”
    The department that enforces these laws is the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The name, like many aspects of Taliban rule, manages to evoke both George Orwell’s satire and Monty Python’s comedy (the Spanish Inquisition sketch comes to mind more than once, especially one morning at the Intercontinental when eight turbaned Talibs appear behind the waiter to hear me order breakfast—Rice Krispies, I decide, to general muttered approval). This Ministry’s operatives are the public presence of Taliban justice, scowling beneath black turbans and behind blacker Ray-Bans as they sip Pepsi and patrol Kabul in Toyota pick-ups with tinted windows.
    Akbar and I go to the offices of Vice & Virtue, which are situated just opposite the roundabout where Najibullah and his brother were killed. I ask to see Alhaj Mawlawi Qalamuddin, the Deputy Minister. I am treated with customary Islamic courtesy, provided with tea and biscuits and kept waiting for ages before being told that Qalamuddin is away at the front line (fighting continues 20 kilometres north of Kabul, against forces loyal to Massoud). This happens every morning for a week, which suggests that one reason nobody can figure the Taliban out is that the Taliban themselves aren’t too clear on what