Free Taliban by James Fergusson Page A

although it looked like blatant provocation to the aid agencies. Some feared that, far from improving their security, a concentration of foreigners in one place would actually make them more vulnerable to attacks and kidnappings.They also complained that they could not afford to renovate the dormitories, which had been uninhabited since 1992.
    Many aid organizations were already struggling to staff their operations thanks to the Taliban’s ban on local women working, which had itself caused much heart-searching in Western capitals. To go on operating under such a ban was to collude with a grave affront to civil rights, but if they quit the capital and its 750,000 inhabitants out of principle, what would become of the estimated 200,000 of them who were dependent on subsidized food, medicine and clothes? The foreigners bore the main responsibility for much other essential work besides. But the relocation order proved the final straw. When the EU Commission in Brussels urged the many aid organizations associated with it to leave Kabul, a mass exodus got under way.
    Human rights organizations, meanwhile, were in full cry over the judicial killings taking place at the Ghazi football stadium – a venue that particularly outraged the West because it had been paid for with aid money from the European Union. Smuggled video footage of these executions found its way into the mainstream Western media, confirming the Taliban’s new status as international pariahs. The stadium was always packed with spectators at these grisly events, which made it look as though the authorities were using executions as a form of public entertainment. The battle-lines were drawn. From 1997 on, the Taliban were almost universally portrayed in the West as a regime beyond comprehension or redemption.
    ‘We are dealing here with a failed state which looks like an infected wound,’ the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi remarked in 1998. ‘You don’t even know where to start cleaning it.’ 4
    But there was another view of the Taliban regime, which wasthat it was not, actually, failing in 1998. Nor, necessarily, was it in need of the cleaning services of the UN. The Taliban used the same metaphor when they described their mission to ‘cleanse’ the country of evil and corruption, and in some respects they were doing a pretty good job.
    ‘No one really
liked
the Taliban,’ said William Reeve, a BBC correspondent who reported from Kabul for much of the 1990s; he was famously in the middle of a live TV interview during the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 when he was blown off his seat by a 2,000lb American smart bomb that landed on the other side of the street. ‘They were never the answer to Afghan government. But they were very clever at carrying out Omar’s promises – unlike, these days, us Westerners, who make lots of promises we don’t or can’t keep. The Taliban did and still do carry out their promises. They very nearly
did
get rid of the warlords and the corruption they brought. They even got rid of the poppies in the areas they controlled. And Kabul and other areas were disarmed. A lot of Westerners got very cross about women’s rights in the 1990s, but the Taliban’s strictures were nothing compared to the rape and slaughter that were going on before. I think it is important to see the Taliban at that time in this context. That is how almost all ordinary Afghans remember them.’
    Reeve knew more than he perhaps cared to about life in pre-Taliban Kabul.
    ‘January 1994 was the worst, when Dostum [the Uzbek leader] changed sides . . . the slaughter of innocents caught up in the fighting was appalling, ghastly. Hundreds upon hundreds were killed and badly injured, week by week. A million people fled Kabul, mostly on foot, carrying what they could. The city’s hospitals were full to bursting. I didn’t see a single Afghan smiling for months.’
    One of the West’s central misunderstandings about the Taliban was a failure to see that their