Doug
----
>These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to
>know during the 1980s - men who could recount their tribal and clan
>lineages, remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with
>nostalgia and recounted legends and stones from Afghan history These
>boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at
>peace - an Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself They had
>no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbours nor the
>complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and
>their homeland. These boys were what the war had thrown up like the
>sea's surrender on the beach of history.
>
>They had, no memories of the past, no plans for the future while the
>present was everything. They were literally the orphans of the war,
>the rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically
>deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was
>the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple
>belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into
>them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on
>to and which gave their lives some meaning. untrained for anything,
>even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as
>farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl
>Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat.
>
>Moreover, they had willingly gathered under the all-male brotherhood
>that the Taliban leaders were set on creating, because they knew of
>nothing else. Many in fact were orphans who had grown up without
>women - mothers, sisters or cousins. Others were madrassa students
>or had lived in the strict confines of segregated refugee camp life,
>where the normal comings and goings of female relatives were
>curtailed. Even by the norms of conservative Pashtun tribal society,
>where villages or nomadic camps were close-knit communities and men
>still mixed with women to whom they were related, these boys had
>lived rough, tough lives. They had simply never known the company of
>women.
>
>The mullahs who had taught them stressed that women were a
>temptation, an unnecessary distraction from being of service to
>Allah. So when the Taliban entered Kandahar and confined women to
>their homes by barring them from working, going to school and even
>from shopping, the majority of these madrassa boys saw nothing
>unusual in such measures. They felt threatened by that half of the
>human race which they had never known and it was much easier to lock
>that half away, especially if it was ordained by the mullahs who
>invoked primitive Islamic injunctions, which had no basis in Islamic
>law. The subjugation of women became the mission of the true
>believer and a fundamental marker that dfferentiated the Taliban
>from the former Mujaheddin.
>
>This male brotherhood offered these youngsters not just a religious
>cause to fight for, but a whole way of life to fully embrace and
>make their existence meaningful. Ironically, the Taliban were a
>direct throwback to the military religious orders that arose in
>Christendom during the Crusades to fight Islam - disciplined,
>motivated and ruthless in attaining their aims.' In the first few
>months the sweeping victories of the Taliban created an entire
>mythology of invincibility that only God's own soldiers could
>attain. In those heady early days, every victory only reinforced the
>perceived truth of their mission, that God was on their side and
>that their interpretation of Islam was the only interpretation.