Part
Tragedy,
Part
Farce
By
PAMELA CONSTABLE
Washington
Post Foreign Service
cials
began
KABUL,
Afghanistan
T
o the outside world, the Taliban wasa
forbidding,
mysterious clique
of
Is-
lamic
militiamen
who
shut
women
away,
enforced
puritanical rules with
whips and
crushed
all
military rivals until
U.S.
bombers drove them from power in2001.
s
But as
seen
from the
inside,
the
Taliban's
five-year
reign over most
of
Afghanistan
was
also
one of
bumbling comedy,
fatal
militarymistakes,
1
disabling preoccupation with mi-nor religious matters, deep internal
splits
and
awkward
relationswth
the
Arab
fighters
who flockedtn
thf
mowmont'n
nid
heed
Mojda,
a
former
official
in the Ta
liban Foreign Ministry, has written a
40,000-
word
account of the Taliban years that pro-vides both hilariousand
painful
insights into
a
short-lived Islamic regime that
left
no
writ-
ten
records, rarely explained its actionsand/
hunnedcontact
with
outsiders,.,
„-'
-According"
to
"Mojda's
unpublished
ap>>
count,written
in Dari,,ffi?Tali6ia5f
s~exfferne
"notions
01
JSJam~lea
to
many bizarre
mo-
ments.
When
Mohammad Omar,
the
move-
ment's religious leader, was
offered
a toy
camel
by visiting Chinese diplomats, he
re-coiled
like
"someone holdingapieceofred-hot coal," because he believed all likenesses
of
living
creatures
to be
un-Islamic.
In another
passage of Mojda's account, a
Kabul
man desperately
tries
to secure a reli-gious order
from the
Supreme Court
to
have
his
teeth pulled because
he had his
cavitiesfilled
by
a dentist but was told by a
Taliban
cleric
(hat having
filled
teeth "would make
my
prayers and
ablutions invalid."
MojdajjjSO wrote
about'h^yr
an internal
spfiTbetween
the
moderate andjundamental-
__
A
dispute overwhether
to
destroy
a
valuable Europeanpaintingof ahunting scene becamea tug ofwar among
officials
in five separate min-
istries.O"
He
described
the
crisis
that erupted when
I
Omar ordered
the
demolition
of two
majestic
/
Buddhas carved into
the
cliffs
of
central
Af-
Cghanistan.According
to
Mojda,
many
officials
were
unhappy
about the order. Some tried to warn
foreign
conservationists, while others
ducked
responsibility.
p~
Taliban Foreign Minister
Wakil
Ahmad
(
Muttawakil was
"depressed"
over
the
demoli-
(
tion
but had to
defend
it to the
foreign
media.
"A
great tragedy
occurred,"
Mojda wrote.Military explosives were transferred to Ba-
mian,
where the Buddhas had been carved 13centuries
before,
and thestatues were ren-
f
^dered
jacelessJNot
even senior Taliban
offi-
/
cials
nad
dared
defy
Omar,
whose
spirit,
Moj-
/
da wrote, "always hung over meetings like a
i
shadow."
While
much of the outside world recoiled,
Mojda
noted,
the symbolic.sinashing
of the
Buddhasattracfedsficre^donations
from
for-
;
eignMuslim
synjjiathfc^jS3[afres¥16w
of
Arab
fighters
eager
toi
join
~Qie~
struggleagainst
the
oppressive
West.
•
I
Mojda,
48, a conservative, scholarly
Mus-
/lim
who is now a
senior aide
in the
SupremeCourt, never joined the Taliban, but he was
fan
activist with other
Afghan
Islamic groups
(that
fought
Soviet
forces
in the
1980s,
In an
interview this week,
Mojda
said
he (
had no
desire
to
make
fun
of the
Taliban,
but
rather sought
to
point
out the flaws and fa-
naticalaberrations that gradually disillu-sioned
him—and
ultimately alienated
many
other
Afghans
from the initially popular
movement.
"In Afghanistan, history is never writtensoon enough, and no one is neutral," he
saic
"I
felt
I
needed
to
write what
I
had seen
of
thi
Taliban,
both
bad and
good." Friends
tolc
him
he was
taking
too
great
of
a risk, but
Moj
da said several former Taliban leaders whcread his book privately acknowledged he
had
"said some true things."Mojda's book contains observations
previ-
ously made byseveral
foreign
experts,but his
firsthand
descriptions and anecdotes
contrib-
ute new and
colorful
detail to the emerging
story
of thereclusive Taliban's rule.
"~
most
serious
Taliban
mistake,
Mojda
writes, was the arbitrary
power
given to itsreligious police, mostly illiterate village gunmen who had neither the legal nor Islamicknowledge tocarryoutsuch work.In one incident, he recounted, a police squad
forced
aSikh
man to
pray
in a
mosque, insisting that"whatever
else
hewas,he wasstillaMuslim."Sikhs, have their
own
faith,known
as
Sikh-
The
Taliban's obsessions with religious lit-
mus
tests
and personal
loyalty
repeatedly un-dermined its administrative competence, ac-cording
to
Mojda.
The
ability
to
"reciteverses from the
Koran beautifully"
wasenough
to
obtain senior administrative posts,while
transferred
officials
took along large
coteries
of
followers,
known
as
"andivalis,"
forcing
agencies
to
start
from
scratch.
/
The
Taliban's permanent
conflict
with ethnic militias from northern
Afghanistan
alsoprevented
it from
evolving
into
a
real govern-ment. Senior
officials
were ordered to thefrontlines, leaving their ministries
drifting
fand
leaderless.
Military commanders
wield-
ed far
more power
and
enjoyed
greater per-
/
quisites
than their civilian counterparts,
r-
'The
Taliban leadership
had no
plan
but
|
war," wrote
Mojda,
and
yet
its
battle plans
of
i
ten
went
awry..Even
seasoned commanders
lr£
; ; ;
See
TALIBAN,
A16,
Coll
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