Saira Shah visited the
Afghanistan her father had loved, but found only
desperation and disintegration in the bizarre
world of the Taliban.
I would have felt foolish
if I hadn't been so scared. Dressed in high-heeled
plastic shoes and veiled in a garment with more
than a passing resemblance to a tablecloth, I
hobbled across the border into Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan with my foreign passport and $3,000
strapped under my bra. What I was doing was
entirely illegal. For me, however, going
undercover into Kabul wasn't just the only way to
get the story - it was a personal odyssey.Crossing
the border
Though I was born and
bred in Britain, as I child I was constantly told
that I came from another world: my father's
country, Afghanistan. Now I was relinquishing my
protected status of foreign reporter to enter, for
a brief time, the Kafkaesque world of ordinary
Afghans. A world I had faintly glimpsed from the
vast and squalid Afghan refugee camps that line
the Pakistani border.
'I saw a girl wearing
white shoes,' one woman told me. 'The Taliban came
and said to her: "White is the colour of our
flag. You have dishonoured our flag." So they
beat her.' The woman used to be a schoolteacher.
She finally fled Kabul when the Taliban forbade
female teachers to go to work.
In another camp, a boy of
about 10 years old told me how the Taliban hunted
him with dogs. His transgression: a haircut they
considered decadently Western.
Another little girl
hid in a bread oven and watched the Taliban kill
her father for his wristwatch and waistcoat.
This
was extraordinary brutality even by the standards
of Afghanistan's bloody history.
When I first visited the
country in the 1980s, Afghanistan was already at
war. The people were struggling against a
superpower: the Soviet Union. I saw refugees who
were too proud to beg and a people who displayed
heroism and humour in the face of incalculable
misery. In my idealism, I didn't realise the
extent to which those values were already being
eroded. As society began to break down - 10% of
the country was displaced, two million people
killed - so did the values that had held a fragile
social system together.More than a decade later,
the Kabul I arrived in still bears the scars of
the country's seemingly endless war. After the
Soviets left, the various military opposition
groups fell upon each other. It was a war of
warlords who had forgotten how to do anything but
fight. In the process they trashed Kabul.
From despair to
nightmare
The safe house I was
taken to wasn't luxurious but, unlike many of the
buildings in the capital, it had a roof. The
family who lived there welcomed me. They had
barely survived the dark days of the warlords'
internal fighting.
'Is there a doctor in
England who can help our 18-year-old daughter?
pleaded the mother. 'She used to be the brightest
child I have - but she was so traumatised by the
shelling she hasn't been able to speak or hear for
five years.'It was in the midst of this despair
that the Taliban were born. They had a new
ideology - a purist Islamic state. They said they
didn't want power - they just intended to stop the
fighting and disarm the country. The Taliban had
money (Pakistan is believed to fund them), and
they could buy off warlords and individual
commanders. District after district surrendered
peacefully. At first, the social strictures seemed
a small price to pay for peace.Four years later, I
found people living in a Kafkaesque nightmare - a
world where the lunatics have taken over the
asylum.
A teacher in an illegal school for girls
explained how life in Kabul became dominated by
restrictions. Women can't go outside their homes
without being covered from head to toe. They are
excluded from jobs and medical care. Men may be
imprisoned for not having a beard.
You can't fly a kite, paint your
nails, listen to music or watch
television.The lives of civilians have become more
poverty-stricken than ever.
My hosts in the safe
house used to live middle-class lives. The father
trained as an engineer but nobody is rebuilding
the country's shattered infrastructure, so he ekes
out a living tailoring. I was woken every morning
at 3am, when the electricity came on. The whole
family worked frenetically at their sewing
machines until it went off again at 5am. Then all
day they toiled to find clean water, and food they
could afford in the market.
A punishing regime
The Taliban have other
priorities. One religious scholar explained in all
earnestness that there is a debate raging between
Taliban intellectuals: some believe the correct
punishment for homosexuality is to throw the
perpetrators off a high building while others
insist that a wall should be toppled on them.
I left my undercover
guides with a feeling of profound depression. The
Taliban insist their edicts are based on Islam,
yet the Islam I grew up with was a tolerant faith,
with no place for bigotry and fanaticism. On my
trip to Kabul, I found many devoutly Muslim
Afghans who did not recognise their own religion
in the Taliban's interpretation - and whose
freedom to live according to their own religious
beliefs had been taken away.
Camera shy
To try to unravel the
mystery of what the Taliban actually stand for, I
went to Kandahar - the Taliban's hometown. This
time I was there officially, travelling with my
crew: cameraman, James Miller and producer,
Cassian Harrison.In Kandahar, shiny Toyotas with
tinted windows patrolled the streets. They
contained the Taliban's secret police - men from
the Orwellian-sounding Ministry for the Prevention
of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue.
When we
stopped to film an onion seller, we were spotted
and arrested within seconds. We were taken to the
ministry. James pretended to switch off the camera,
although I knew without having to ask that he was
still filming as Cassian was frogmarched into the
building.We decided to switch tapes. This involved
getting the used tape out of the camera and
replacing it with a blank tape under the watchful
eye of a Ministry for Vice and Virtue goon. I
decided to create a diversion. Propelling myself
to the window, I forced the officer to make eye
contact while I prattled on in Persian. The Talib,
brought up in the segregated society of mosque
school, proved no match for feminine temptation.
He was mesmerised. In the background I could hear
the whirr of the videotape ejecting from the
camera. Two minutes later, our precious tape was
stowed in the last place I reckoned the
puritanical Taliban would look - my knickers.The
next morning we were given a dressing down by the
foreign office. 'You are not allowed to film
anything at all,' an official told us. 'In
fact,
don't even carry a camera with you.
Saved by the tea
In Kabul, we were given a
government minder and told we could film anything
as long as it wasn't alive. After Kandahar, this
seemed positively liberal. We tested out our new
freedom by trying to film the bunches of
confiscated audio-cassette tape that decorate
roadblocks. In seconds we were embroiled in a
religious discussion with the Taliban centring on
whether or not audio tape is a living thing. It
was frightening how quickly we had been sucked
into the Taliban's world.
Once again, we were
frogmarched off. I had a sinking feeling of déjà
vu; we were being arrested. We were taken to a
room full of shaggy-bearded Taliban. Immediately,
an intelligence chief spotted James's hidden
camera. For a moment, things could have gone
either way. Then the head of security of a
district in Kabul offered us tea. I eagerly
accepted: the laws of Pashtun hospitality mean a
guest may not be harmed once he has eaten or drunk.
The tea seemed to take an awfully long time to
arrive.
This time, far from
arresting us for filming, the Taliban wanted us to
film them - in defiance of their own edicts. They
grinned like children as they showed off cassette
recorders they had confiscated and boasted about
their network of spies around the city. It was
difficult to take seriously a regime of such
inconsistency.
Flagging resistance
However, we found
evidence of the real evil of which the Taliban are
capable. The mainly Pashtun Taliban have waged war
against Afghans of other ethnic and religious
groups - particularly the Shi'a Hazaras in central
Afghanistan, and the Tajiks in the North, who
still continue to oppose them militarily. We
travelled to one of the resistance-held areas of
Afghanistan, in the far north-east of the country,
and found that in the lands they have occupied,
the Taliban have used brutal tactics to keep the
people under control - destroying their farms,
killing their menfolk, displacing their
populations.We arrived to find the military
opposition, led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, floundering.
They told us they did not have enough ammunition
to launch offensives. We asked whether we could
visit the front line. Somewhat to my surprise,
they assigned us an open-topped vehicle within the
hour. With true Afghan optimism, our escort,
Mohammed was utterly convinced that he would one
day shoot down a Taliban jet with his Soviet-made
sniper rifle. This, I felt, was an opposition
movement held together with rubber bands and
string.
We journeyed beyond the
frontline, into the edge of no-man's land, to the
village of Mawmaii. The Taliban briefly held this
village before being pushed back again. As in
other villages nearby, they rounded up and
executed groups of civilian men.
The villagers took us to
one house where, the moment I walked into the
courtyard, I felt a physical wall of grief. Three
little girls were hunched under their colourful
scarves, like broken birds. Their father, a
wild-eyed old man, told me they'd been like this
for weeks. The Taliban shot their mother in front
of their eyes. While her body lay in the courtyard,
the soldiers remained alone with the girls for two
days. It defied all the rules of Afghanistan's
segregated society. There was no doubt in my mind
that they had been raped. When I asked them what
the Taliban did, they just wept and wouldn't say.
I left Mawmaii wondering
how men who claim to be devout Muslims could do
such a thing. I believe the key is that the
Taliban do not represent the whole of the country,
they belong overwhelmingly to certain tribes in
the south. Yet they now rule a country of diverse
ethnic groups. Peoples of differing cultures are
treated as less than human. That, ultimately, is
why massacres can take place.
A broken spell
I had one last personal
pilgrimage to make - to my own family's district,
Paghman. While I've visited Afghanistan before,
I've never seen the place I grew up feeling I
belong to. As our van rattled up the hill, I felt
real apprehension. For as long as I can remember,
I have been told that this place is the most
beautiful, enchanted on earth. If it was destroyed,
I felt something in me would die too. Paghman used
to contain pleasure gardens with fountains and
trees. I found the fountains cracked and dried
out, the trees gone. Like Afghanistan itself, it
was still beautiful; the mountains towered
majestically above the petty concerns of men. But
everything that humans had built had been
destroyed by war. It was a metaphor for a country
full of such promise, reduced to so much rubble
and decay.
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