> Stabilizers only. After they had castrated Najibullah and thrown acid
> into the faces of a few unveiled women, I never heard any arguments
> that the Taliban were "liberators"--only the Hobbesian argument that
> *any* government is better than *no* government...
.
Yes, but that's not nothing. If you're one of the millions of Afghans who's
been surviving on UN-distributed food aid, your attitude toward the Taliban
is likely heavily colored by gratitude that they provided enough security
for aid trucks to get to your isolated village. And now that the aid trucks
can't get where they're going, your memory of the Taliban is probably
colored by a certain amount of nostalgia.
According to Ahmed Rashid, , there's a local legend within Afghanistan about the Taliban's emergence. As I remember it, one day in 1994-95, two local warlords in Kandahar were fighting over who was going to get to sodomize a particular teenage boy. The boy was getting roughed up in the brawl. His distraught father sought help from the village mullah, who organized a posse of religious students ("taliban") to kill the warlords and take over security in the town. Thus the Taliban was born.
It's probably apocryphal, but probably with a large grain of truth. Under the Taliban, you could beaten for stepping out of line. But under the warlords, you could get beaten for no apparent reason at all. Humans like a certain degree of predictability in their affairs.....
Seth