[But in most ways, the social restrictions that made the Taliban
international pariahs during their reign have been resurrected in full in
Baghran. Women leave home only with their husbands or male family members, and
then only to visit a doctor or a few other authorized destinations. There are
no girls’ schools, and education for boys is limited, too. The Taliban here
converted schools to madrasas, which boys typically attend for perhaps three
years before returning to family farms.]
By Joseph Goldstein and Taimoor Shah
 |
In
half a kilogram of opium. Credit Emmanuel Dunand /Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
|
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan
At international conferences, delegates from the Taliban —
infamous for outlawing girls’ schools during their rule from 1994 to 2001 —
have made a point of being willing to meet and talk with female officials. Old
hard-line stances against music and photography have been softening.
But for insight into how the Taliban might rule if they succeed
in holding large stretches of Afghanistan province of Helmand
There, where the Taliban were scarcely ever out of power, the
harsh old policies of the ’90s are still in full swing. Men are hauled into
jail if they shave beards, and spot turban checks are still in place to expose
any fancy haircuts. And there is still no freedom for women to travel or learn.
The Taliban in Baghran are not an insurgent force but the
government, and a long-established one at that.
“In Baghran, you feel like you are in a mini-emirate of the
Taliban,” said a 45-year-old shopkeeper, Esmatullah Baghrani, referring to the
Taliban’s formal name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. “When I am out of
Baghran, I feel like I am in a different world.”
There is no cellphone service in Baghran, reflecting the
Taliban’s wishes. Instead, people communicate with the outside world through a
handful of “public call offices” — phones in stores near the bazaar.
Through more than a dozen interviews with the men who answered
these phone lines, as well as men standing nearby, a rare sketch of life in the
Taliban’s most secure stronghold began to emerge. The New York Times also
interviewed Baghran residents in person in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.
There is probably nowhere else in Afghanistan
“You have to obey the rule of the Taliban, and you have to be a
good man and not even think of bad things,” said Omar Khan, a shopkeeper. “You
have to live the way Taliban want you to live: You have to wear the proper
clothing, and a turban, and grow your beard, and offer your prayers in a mosque
five times a day, avoid listening to music, and avoid unnecessary chats with
people. You can’t meet friends at night for card games.”
But the Taliban’s rule has still proved attractive, or at least
tolerable, to many rural Afghans who have endured decades of war. Residents of
other parts of Helmand , who find themselves caught in the cross hairs of the war, have
sought out Baghran’s relative security, migrating away from the front lines.
“People are suffering under constant war, but we don’t suffer those
kinds of problems,” said Hasti Khan, a farmer in Baghran.
Some things have changed. Public executions, a feature of the
Taliban’s national rule, were halted in Baghran in 2007 after an American
airstrike killed a large number of Taliban fighters and residents who had
assembled for one, residents recalled.
The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of
Vice, once famous for pummeling women who went out and men who played music, is
back on patrol in Baghran. Vice-prevention officers often carry scissors so
that they can deal, on the spot, with haircuts deemed excessively vain.
Despite the rules, many in Baghran take a few risks, here and
there, continuing to meet for card games. Radios are ubiquitous and tolerated
for their news stations like BBC Pashto, Mashal radio and even
Voice of America. “We are not supposed to listen to music, but sometimes when
the Taliban are all inside we do listen to music,” one man in Baghran said.
But Baghran’s main mud-brick prison often has 100 and sometimes
twice that many transgressors, like Nazir Ahmad, 19, who served three days for
his curly bangs. “It’s a style I like,” he said in an interview in Lashkar Gah,
where he had come to find work.
The Taliban, which have a robust propaganda arm and a news
website featuring lengthy interviews with local commanders across Afghanistan
That may be in part because of its importance in the
insurgency’s lucrativenarcotics business. For years, it was home to an unusual
concentration of heroin processing plants, so many, in fact, that they
occasionally attracted Afghan military and counternarcotics raids. As the raids
intensified, the Taliban ordered heroin production to move out of Baghran so as
not to undermine security there, one local man explained.
Baghran has not been entirely untouched by the war. Western and
Afghan troops have occasionally conducted forays into Baghran, initially in
search of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, who Western
military officials suspected might have sought refuge there after his
government was toppled in late 2001. Mullah Omar died more than two years ago
in a Pakistani hospital, the Afghan government recently announced.
The post-2001 Afghan government lost Baghran in a matter of
three years. When a Taliban insurgency began to take shape, elders simply asked
the 15 police officers in the province to quit and return home, recalled a
tribal elder, Hajji Wali Mohammad, an uncle of one of those officers. With that,
the Taliban became the dominant force.
“The government did not
last long,” Omar Khan, a 35-year-old shopkeeper in Baghran, said. “People were
getting used to democracy, and then the Taliban came again.”
Some Taliban officials, particularly those sent to international
conferences, have grown savvier during their long exile, and they suggest that
the movement has grown more moderate.
For example, the group no longer puts much effort into stamping
out television or music recordings now that cellphones have become a fact of
life across much of Afghanistan
Where the Taliban remain an insurgency competing with the
government for the people’s loyalties, the group’s social restrictions do in
fact appear to have mellowed slightly, particularly in the country’s north.
“The Taliban have realized imposing Islamic laws by force will
not make people admire us,” a Taliban commander named Fazlullah, who operates
in Afghanistan
Although the harsher ways have prevailed in Baghran, residents’
complaints often had less to do with the Taliban’s treatment of them than the
deprivations that have taken hold: the lack of good doctors and the need to
travel to other districts to buy staples, like cooking oil. And some said they
were saddened by the lack of opportunities for their children, many of whom
tend to work in the opium fields alongside their fathers.
Many residents who were interviewed said they were mostly
satisfied with the Taliban’s rule. Some agree with the Taliban’s principles, others
have come to accept them.
“I think I like the way of the Taliban,” Mr. Baghrani, the
shopkeeper, said. “You live simply, the way you have been created.”
Not everyone, however, has been able to live simply. Ethnic
Hazaras had been allowed relatively safe passage through Baghran, on several
important market roads, in recent years. But over a month ago that suddenly
changed: Hazara elders and other residents said that the Taliban’s district
commander, Mullah Ghulam Hazrat Shahidmal, warned that Hazaras would no longer
be allowed through, in what was seen as a troubling step back toward the
targeting of minorities by the insurgents.
The only link remaining between the Kabul
His main responsibility is to occasionally remind others that
the government lost Baghran long ago. He did so last year, when a new security
adviser for Helmand Province
“I told this man: ‘You are an amazing security adviser. You
don’t even know which districts are under the control of the Taliban.’ ”
Joseph Goldstein reported from Lashkar Gah, and Taimoor Shah
from Kandahar , Afghanistan
