> But the Taliban - many of whom were not Afghans, and of those who
> were, were from an ethnic group representing well under half the
> population - forced women to wear the damn things. It's not like they
> were spontaneous expressions of home-grown patriarchy. So who the
> colonizers are, under those circs, gets very murky.
This is an argument my hero Christopher Caldwell has made - that the Taliban are the real foreign occupiers. I don't buy it. True, a lot of foreigners joined their cause. And the foreigners were indeed seen as unwelcome interlopers. But the Taliban movement itself was based around fundamentalist Pashtun refugees and religious students - which is about as representative of Afghans as you could get in 1994. Pashtuns, refugees, fundmantalist religious students - that's three big segments of Afghan society.
Seth