Free Taliban by James Fergusson

early days were gone. Factions had grown up, even within Omar’s inner circle. Mutual trust was replaced by a climate of suspicion.
    Some Taliban officials – though not all – reacted by clamping down on Kabulis and their immoral, big-city ways with unprecedented harshness. One of the worst was Rafiullah Muazzin, the head of the Amr Bil Marof Wa Nai An Munkir, the infamous Office for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Some of the edicts he issued in Omar’s name were so bizarre thatthey have passed into international folklore. As well as television, Rafiullah outlawed ‘the British and American hairstyle’, music and dancing at wedding parties, and the playing of the drum. Chess, cards and partridge-fighting, a national pastime, were early casualties because they encouraged gambling and distracted people from the mosque. Not content with banning women from the workplace and hiding them under burqas in public, the windows of private homes were now ordered to be white-washed to prevent anyone from accidentally peeking in. Tailors were forbidden from taking female body measurements. Women were also stopped from playing sports, from washing clothes in the streams that run through the city, from wearing nail varnish, even from wearing ‘squeaky shoes’. This insistence on sexual propriety seemed deranged to most Kabulis. In Britain, we joke that Victorians covered the legs of pianos to prevent inappropriate stirrings. In Afghanistan, there were reports from the countryside that stallions had been forced into trousers.
    Rafiullah’s edicts were publicized on Radio Sharia, the Taliban’s new music-free radio station. They were then enforced by his deputy, the terrifying Maulawi Inayatullah Baligh, whose 100-strong squad of religious inspectors carried out their duties with the zealousness and, apparently, the impunity of Hitler’s Brown Shirts in the 1930s. Despite his title – a
maulawi
is a kind of senior mullah – Baligh was really a career bureaucrat who had served in the deposed previous government: a little man with an unhealthy liking for the big stick. ‘Whenever we catch them doing immoral things, we can do anything we want,’ he told one foreign journalist. ‘We can execute them, we can kill them.’ 2 His squads would set up spot-checks in the city centre to measure the length of beards. Beard hair, they decided, had to be long enough to poke throughthe gaps of a clenched fist. They also inspected the more private parts of the human body, for cleanliness is next to godliness in Islam, and the Prophet advised that all pubic hair should be shaved. The damage done to the Taliban’s image by all this was incalculable. Internationally, the floodgates of opprobrium were now opened.
    One of the most celebrated confrontations on the issue of women’s rights came when Emma Bonino, the Italian European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, visited the Indira Gandhi mother and child clinic in Kabul. When some journalists accompanying her began filming the proceedings, the Taliban ordered the whole party arrested.
    ‘It is the policy of the Taliban that no unrelated man may take pictures of women,’ said Hajji Habibullah, a security official.
    Bonino was incandescent, even after the Taliban’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sher Abbas Stanakzai, had apologized.
    ‘He said that these questions [of women’s rights] would be decided when they had brought peace and security to the country,’ she said. ‘I said that if they did not take care of women’s health now, what are you going to provide peace and security for – dead bodies?’ 3
    The Taliban’s testy relationship with the international aid agencies reached a new low in July 1997 when these were ordered to close their offices, which were scattered around the capital, and relocate en masse to a complex of abandoned student dormitories on the bombed-out university campus. The move was ordered ‘for the foreigners’ own protection’,