Free Taliban by James Fergusson Page B

conservatism differed from the rest of the country not in kind, but in degree. Women had always been abused by Afghan men – and not just by Pashtun men, either, but in the villages of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras too. The main difference was that the Taliban were more systematic than the mujahideen ever were in the way they exerted their power; and when their religious police beat a woman with their switches for showing her ankles, they did so openly, in public. It certainly didn’t look good. But the maltreatment of the capital’s long-suffering women came as less of a shock to most of them than the horrified West ever properly grasped. Beatings, however cruel and outrageous, were also infinitely preferable to murder and rape: common crimes in the years preceding the Taliban, but which virtually disappeared once they were in charge.
    Even the apparently barbaric judicial killings at the football stadium were not quite as they appeared. The Taliban were anxious that Sharia justice was not just done, but seen to be done. The people who filled the stadium were not there for their entertainment, but at the insistence of the authorities. The first ever execution in Kabul, interestingly, was not of some apostate but of a young member of the Taliban who had tried to disarm a citizen and ended up shooting him. This was perhaps a deliberate show of impartiality, the Taliban’s way of demonstrating that everyone was equal under Sharia law. The accused – whom neighbours from his area suggested was a teenager with learning difficulties – was despatched by a single shot to the head in accordance with
qisas
, the Sharia equivalent of the Old Testament principle of an eye for an eye. The audience – and the young Talib – were submitted to a lecture on the virtues of Sharia justice for two whole hours before the fatal shot was fired.
    The executions were grisly, but there weren’t actually that many of them: dozens, rather than hundreds, were carried out in the years of Taliban rule. ‘The West made a great fuss about it but we don’t seem to object much when the same thing happens in Saudi Arabia,’ commented one observer. ‘And it was pure hypocrisy, coming from America! There have probably been more judicial executions in the state of Texas than there ever were under the Taliban.’ 5
    The regime was accused of brutality, but it was not they who had invented the penalties of Sharia law. In the execution cases, furthermore, it was not they but almost always a bereaved relative who carried them out. This, too, was in accordance with the retaliatory principle of qisas. In fact, the system prefers forgiveness to retaliation; the death sentence is supposed to be applied only as a last resort. At the second public execution in Kabul, the Taliban repeatedly asked a man whose son had been killed in a knife fight if he would not pardon the two accused, who had been brought on to the pitch in chains in the back of a Hi-Lux truck. The man glanced across at them and insisted that he would not, before marching over and swiftly sawing off their heads with a butcher’s knife. When a convicted thief had his hand chopped off it was done surgically by a doctor in a balaclava. The thief would then be rushed off to hospital in the back of a pick-up truck to have the stump treated and sewn up. The real point, perhaps, was that these punishments were effective. The dismembered hands were sometimes hung up in the town as a warning to others. Crime very soon tailed off. One foreigner living in Kabul remembered that it wasn’tlong before you really could leave your keys in the ignition of your car and know that no one was going to steal it.
    Most Westerners only saw what they wanted to see, and read the Taliban wrong from the start. An edict preventing kite-fighting, for example, seemed typical of the Taliban’s joylessness, and became famous in the West following the publication in 2003 of
The Kite Runner
, the best-selling novel by Khaled