By Michael Rubin, visiting fellow The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Middle East Quarterly 7, no. 3 (September 2000)
... The Taliban (Arabic for "religious students") have now ruled southern Afghanistan for almost six years and have been in Kabul for nearly four. So how goes life in the Islamic Emirate? Are Hollywood entertainers [1] and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright [2] accurate when they declare the Taliban have driven the country back into the thirteenth century?
To find out, I went to Afghanistan in March 2000. Three months earlier I had met the Taliban's representative in New York, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, at a Middle East Forum event. I expected him to rebuff my request for a visit, and so was pleasantly surprised by his invitation to visit Afghanistan and see the situation for myself. The Taliban permitted me to travel unescorted and without a translator in their territory during a two-week period. I had the opportunity to speak to government officials and the man on the street. I visited major towns and cities: Jalalabad, Kabul, Ghazni, and Kandahar (the last being the seat of the Taliban leadership). This was my second trip to the country, having been there in May 1997, when I guest lectured at Balkh University in Mazar-i Sharif, one of Afghanistan's last coeducational institutions, and was forced to leave when the Taliban attacked the city....
...The Feminist Majority exaggerates the pre-Taliban progress of Afghan women by using pre-Taliban Kabul as an example of women's progress throughout Afghanistan. Using pre-civil war Afghan numbers to describe the demise of women's rights by nature is inaccurate, since the former communist regime massaged statistics to demonstrate its progressive achievements. Furthermore, Kabul was always more progressive and cosmopolitan than the rest of Afghanistan. For example, the Feminist Majority's "Stop Gender Apartheid" campaign still reports that women cannot leave their house unless accompanied by a close male relative. However, women in every city I visited walked around in pairs. While the Feminist Majority claims that women have been banished from the work force, this is only partially accurate. Even in the countryside, I saw rural women working in the fields and with livestock. The situation is bad, perhaps worse than anywhere else in the Muslim world, but it should be addressed with precision.
While the Taliban have prevented vast numbers of girls and women from receiving an education, a token Taliban-funded medical school class for women has opened in Kabul. The question then should become why classes have not opened in other towns and cities. Restrictions continue to occur, but NGO-operated girls' schools are not truly clandestine, as they are often described. Some foreign employees helping to coordinate girls' schools both in and outside of Kabul told me not only of obstacles placed in their way by specific Taliban authorities, but also of assistance they have received from other Taliban government officials. The problem is that there are not enough schools (for men and women) to satisfy demand while Taliban government money continues to be wasted on a war effort. However, while the Taliban regime as a whole must be held accountable for its actions, it would be a mistake to portray the movement as monolithic. Rather, the Taliban include uncompromising radicals, more pragmatic radicals, and bureaucrats whose adherence to the movement's beliefs extends not far beyond the ends of their beards.
It is also untrue that all women wear burkas all the time to cover themselves from head to foot. They do so largely in urban areas but, even in cities, older women and girls up to young teens show their faces and, sometimes, a bit of hair. (The more religious among the Taliban men also cover their face, clutching their cloaks in their teeth like religious women in Iran.) During my previous trip to areas in Afghanistan not yet controlled by the Taliban, many women dressed the same way, although in the university, women did not cover their heads or faces. The problem should not be reduced to the fact that in Afghanistan the women wear the burka, for many would choose to anyway; the problem is that they are forced to do so. The situation of women in Afghanistan is perhaps worse than it is anyplace in the Middle East (though Saudi Arabia and Yemen are close), and the Taliban should be confronted, but exaggeration allows the Taliban regime to dismiss all Western complaints as based on propaganda. And the Taliban do have a point when they ask why few Western governments or celebrity wives went out of their way to condemn the rapes and assaults which characterized the streets and checkpoints before the Taliban disarmed gangs and warlords, including those affiliated with the government then in power.
The same holds true for executions. Human Rights Watch, for example, commented in their 1999 World Report that, "Every Friday, thousands were pressured to witness public executions and punitive amputations in Kabul's stadium." [6] Afghans (including self-described opponents of the regime) said that while the Taliban does carry out public executions, sometimes with shocking cruelty, they are not conducted regularly and probably occur less frequently than in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Massacres which mandate further investigation did occur in 1997 when the United Front took Mazar-i Sharif after a brief occupation by the Taliban and in 1998, when the Taliban took and held the northern city. However, they by no means occur regularly. And while the frontline mirrors an ethnic divide between primarily Tajik, United Front-held areas, and the Pushtun-dominated south, Afghanistan has not become polarized to the extent that Kosovo has. Even in the south, Tajiks and Shi'i Hazaras live and work among Afghans of other ethnicities.
In general, life has relaxed a bit since the initial onslaught of the Taliban. One NGO worker explained that the Taliban officer in charge of "Prevention of Vice" forces and responsible for the worst excesses of the Taliban's restrictions in Kabul had been sacked for watching pornographic videos in his office. In contrast to just a few years ago, young boys and girls play together in playgrounds, boys fly kites, and men play volleyball and soccer in parks. I watched teenage and younger girls march around a city block in Ghazni playing drums, something not imaginable in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen. One Afghan man explained, "Girls are children, too." I heard banned music, even in Kandahar (though I was in a taxi that had its cassettes confiscated and destroyed days later): in Ghazni, I learned how to buy an illegal television. While men have to wear beards, many do illegally trim them, albeit extremely carefully....
<http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/rubinafghn.htm> *****