Kabul Carnival. Julie Billaud
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are not to walk gracefully or with pride and in the middle of the sidewalk” (Emadi 2002, 124).
The decrees promulgated under the Taliban regime presented the same recommendations. The Taliban did not introduce a radically new political agenda but officialized dress codes and social conduct for both men and women, which were in any case followed by the majority of the population under the different mujahideen governments for fear of repression.
The high hopes that greeted the arrival of the new mujahideen government were quickly dashed as conflict erupted between the different factions in the coalition. Most of Kabul was reduced to rubble as ceasefires were agreed to and then quickly broken. As alliances changed, the front lines of conflict shifted within the city. There were widespread reports of women being raped as different factions wrested control of opposing neighborhoods of the city. Women, who represented the majority of trained teachers and nurses, lost their employment due to the closing and destruction of most of the city’s infrastructure.
The mujahideen rule was therefore the blueprint upon which the Taliban phenomenon could rise. Instead of a breach in policies, the Taliban regime radicalized the mujahideen legacy. Their success in getting control over the country was not the result of their fundamentalist ideology, which was generally perceived as excessive and unacceptable among the majority of the population, but rather the outcome of a well-trained and properly equipped military contingent gradually gaining strength as the country grappled with war and destruction.
The Taliban Rule, 1996–2001
The Taliban emerged in a political vacuum created by the civil war and people’s longing for security and the end of conflict between the different mujahideen factions. The movement was created in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan where its major figures received religious and military education. Indeed in 1977, Pakistan’s dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, enforced an Islamic constitution, ostensibly to bring legal, social, economic, and political institutions of the country in conformity with the Koran. He unsurprisingly backed the Afghan militants in Peshawar and financed the building of thousands of madrassas in the vicinity of refugee camps with help from Saudi Arabia. Impoverished Afghan widows reassured by the promise of regular meals and a minimum education eagerly entrusted their sons to the care of the madrassas that became the training grounds for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda supporters. Herded in decrepit boardinghouses, cut off from contact with mothers and sisters, they were fed an extremely simplified messianic Islam, which was to become the Taliban creed. Three years after their emergence on the Afghan military scene, the Taliban had taken control of over 80 percent of Afghanistan. As they gradually consolidated their power, security improved in the cities, facilitating exchanges and circulation of goods and therefore reviving the economy.
According to Nancy Dupree (2001, 151), the Taliban’s decision to impose the strict curtailment of women together with their compulsory veiling under chadari in public was a means for the regime to “send a message of its intent to subordinate the personal autonomy of every individual, thereby strengthening the impression that it was capable of exercising control over all aspects of social behaviour, male and female.” When the international community reacted against these measures and denounced what became labeled as “gender apartheid,” the Taliban high authorities argued that their aim was to ensure their sisters’ security in a period when the priority was the establishment of law and order. Whether or not the limitations imposed on women would have progressively disappeared had the Taliban totally eliminated their opponents and had been recognized by the international community remains a difficult question to answer. However, the Taliban policies were marked by many contradictions and inconsistencies that left much room for interpretation and accommodation at the local level.
The Taliban central government was far from functioning effectively. Its base of power lay primarily in a very young militia nurtured in the isolation of ultraconservative madrassas where they imbibed ideas by rote without the encouragement of open inquiry. Most of them had never been exposed to urban living. The weakness of the central government allowed decisions to be made to a great extent at the local level. Women’s condition therefore varied from one region to another according to the degree of flexibility of the local Taliban authorities (N. H. Dupree 2001).
The management of local affairs was deeply reliant on local Taliban leaders, some of whom allowed a certain level of negotiation on their policies. It is in the cities where women had traditionally enjoyed a greater degree of personal autonomy that the rules imposed by the new regime appeared the harshest. As the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they closed schools and Kabul University to female students and teachers. These policies had a devastating impact on both boys’ and girls’ education as women represented an important proportion of teachers and university professors. Women’s seclusion was announced on Radio Sharia on the day Kabul fell into Taliban’s hands. During the entire length of the Taliban rule, the regime would inform the population about new rules and regulations through this same station: “Women, you should not step outside of your residence. If you go outside the house you should not be like women who used to go with fashionable clothes wearing cosmetics and appearing in front of every man before the coming of Islam Women should not create such opportunity to attract the attention of useless people who will not look at them with a good eye. Women have the responsibility as a teacher and coordinator for her family. Husband, brother, father have the responsibility for providing the family with the necessary life requirements (food, clothes, etc.)” (Rostami-Povey 2007, 24).
But men were not protected from the regime’s hold on their lives. The length of their beard and the appropriateness of their clothes were under the constant scrutiny of the religious police. The regime focused upon punishing them for infractions committed by their female relatives, reflecting the acceptance of male responsibility for controlling women (N. H. Dupree 2001).
In a matter of a few decades, Afghanistan had moved from a regime that in the 1920s, under the reign of King Amanullah, had imposed the wearing of European clothes in Kabul to a regime that wanted to break away from any form of Western influence and return to what it perceived as “authentic tradition.” In both cases, ideas about modernity and tradition were translated in regulations targeting individuals’ physical appearance in public spaces. This disciplining of bodies and the specific emphasis on regulating and controlling women’s appearance in public are symptomatic of the broader struggle between Kabul and its peripheries, on one hand, and the irreconcilable viewpoints of the reformist elite and the Islamists, on the other hand. Women’s bodies stood at the front line of this ideological battle. The failure of the successive governments to carry out positive development projects in the peripheries together with foreign interference in internal affairs had produced a unique form of countermodernity.
As a social, ideological, and political phenomenon the Taliban are indeed utterly modern. The origin of the Taliban movement, its military development, and its political project highlight characteristic features of globalized warfare. Their emergence on the Afghan political scene is not to be interpreted as a simple return to an authentic Afghan tradition. On the contrary, the global assemblages in which the movement was enmeshed provided the fertile ground from which tradition could be imagined and reinvented. These assemblages are partially the products of the influence of external Islamic sources on their political ideology. Educated in madrassas, the Taliban were introduced to the Deobandi school of thoughts by semi-literate Pakistani mullahs associated with Pakistan’s Jami’at-e Ulema-e Islam (JUI) political party (Rashid 2002). A lack of appreciation on the part of the mullahs of the reformist Deobandi agenda brought the schools and their curricula closer to ultraconservative Wahhabism (founded in Saudi Arabia), which claims to teach strict adherence to the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and the Four “rightly guided” Caliphs (Rashid 1999, 26). This interpretation of Islam provided the ideological framework from which the Taliban formulated their opposition first to the Communist government and later on to the mujahideen in cultural terms that were relatively efficient to rally the rural masses, especially in the Pashtun southern part of the country. Deobandi Islam had no roots in Afghanistan; however, it provided a template for reinterpreting the Pashtun code of honor, codifying it through decrees and finally unevenly implementing it at the national level when they came to power. Second, the Taliban political project is quintessentially cosmopolitan. Armed by Pakistan, supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia,