country.
It was hardly surprising if he was behind the times. Like everything technological, basic television came very late to Afghanistan, in the 1980s. Afghan society was still coming to grips with the new medium when satellite television arrived in 1991. The civil war that raged in Kabul from 1992 destroyed its electricity supply, but with the arrival of the Taliban in 1996, power was miraculously restored. The capital’s bazaars were suddenly flooded with electronic goods imported from China, cheap and shamelessly cloned. The return of television threw open a window on to an outside world that astounded Afghans, and millions of them were now badly hooked. They watched anything, without discrimination: cheap Italian game shows, soap operas from Brazil, twenty-year-old American crime series like
Kojak
. In the Taliban’s view, the citizens’ time would be much better spent praying in the mosque. The stricter sort of mullah naturally thought the television habit was a direct enticement to apostasy.
Kojak
was one thing, however. The Taliban were far moretroubled by another kind of imported show which was easily the most popular in Afghanistan: the steamy, Hindi-language romances of Bollywood, the Mumbai-based film-making centre that outstrips the world in productivity. Afghans, the inhabitants of a dun-coloured land, were drawn to Bollywood like magpies to tinsel. I saw the power these movies held over the people for myself, once, in a Mazari
chaikana
– a teahouse – where a hundred or so men had crowded around a set suspended from the ceiling, gazing in open-jawed silence as a scantily clad starlet sashayed around a Mumbai car park filled with expensive sports cars.
Bollywood threatened society’s morals far more seriously than comparable material from Europe or America. It made a big difference to the Taliban that this licentiousness was going on not in the other-worldly white West but right here in south Asia, a few hundred miles to the south-east, among men and women of a skin colour worryingly like their own. In Pashtun society, women do not dance semi-naked in car parks, or even go out in public much unless veiled and accompanied by a husband or relative. This challenge to the Pashtun sense of female decorum, furthermore, came not from some random regional neighbour but from Hindu India, the mortal enemy of the Taliban’s brother Muslims in Pakistan. According to
namus
, one of the tenets of Pashtunwali, the honour of women must be defended at all costs: another means, perhaps, of controlling men’s desire for them. The poet Ghani Khan observed that a Pashtun ‘cannot think of love without marriage. If he does, he pays for it with his life – and therefore all his love poetry is about those who dared it. The Pashtun may shoot the lover of his daughter but sing to the glory of love.’ Bollywood’s invasion was cultural rather than military, though not necessarily less dangerous for that in the Taliban’s eyes. It played to the old Pakistani fear ofencirclement by India – as well as to the old Pashtun suspicion of any foreign interference in their country.
In times of external pressure the Pashtuns have historically survived by turning inwards, falling back upon and rigorously upholding the ancient cultural values that had served them so well in the past. Loyalty to the Pashtun nation, or
hewad
, is another important tenet of Pashtunwali, as is the obligation to defend it against any type of foreign incursion. Protecting Pashtun culture, the
dod-pasbani
, from disintegration or dilution by outside influence is also important. For this reason, an ability to speak Pashto is considered not just important but essential. Not speaking it is often taken, quite unfairly, as an inability to comprehend anything to do with Pashtun culture. International television, with its assumption of global values and its tendency to linguistic homogeneity, endangered both the hewad and the dod-pasbani.
The demands of
It was hardly surprising if he was behind the times. Like everything technological, basic television came very late to Afghanistan, in the 1980s. Afghan society was still coming to grips with the new medium when satellite television arrived in 1991. The civil war that raged in Kabul from 1992 destroyed its electricity supply, but with the arrival of the Taliban in 1996, power was miraculously restored. The capital’s bazaars were suddenly flooded with electronic goods imported from China, cheap and shamelessly cloned. The return of television threw open a window on to an outside world that astounded Afghans, and millions of them were now badly hooked. They watched anything, without discrimination: cheap Italian game shows, soap operas from Brazil, twenty-year-old American crime series like
Kojak
. In the Taliban’s view, the citizens’ time would be much better spent praying in the mosque. The stricter sort of mullah naturally thought the television habit was a direct enticement to apostasy.
Kojak
was one thing, however. The Taliban were far moretroubled by another kind of imported show which was easily the most popular in Afghanistan: the steamy, Hindi-language romances of Bollywood, the Mumbai-based film-making centre that outstrips the world in productivity. Afghans, the inhabitants of a dun-coloured land, were drawn to Bollywood like magpies to tinsel. I saw the power these movies held over the people for myself, once, in a Mazari
chaikana
– a teahouse – where a hundred or so men had crowded around a set suspended from the ceiling, gazing in open-jawed silence as a scantily clad starlet sashayed around a Mumbai car park filled with expensive sports cars.
Bollywood threatened society’s morals far more seriously than comparable material from Europe or America. It made a big difference to the Taliban that this licentiousness was going on not in the other-worldly white West but right here in south Asia, a few hundred miles to the south-east, among men and women of a skin colour worryingly like their own. In Pashtun society, women do not dance semi-naked in car parks, or even go out in public much unless veiled and accompanied by a husband or relative. This challenge to the Pashtun sense of female decorum, furthermore, came not from some random regional neighbour but from Hindu India, the mortal enemy of the Taliban’s brother Muslims in Pakistan. According to
namus
, one of the tenets of Pashtunwali, the honour of women must be defended at all costs: another means, perhaps, of controlling men’s desire for them. The poet Ghani Khan observed that a Pashtun ‘cannot think of love without marriage. If he does, he pays for it with his life – and therefore all his love poetry is about those who dared it. The Pashtun may shoot the lover of his daughter but sing to the glory of love.’ Bollywood’s invasion was cultural rather than military, though not necessarily less dangerous for that in the Taliban’s eyes. It played to the old Pakistani fear ofencirclement by India – as well as to the old Pashtun suspicion of any foreign interference in their country.
In times of external pressure the Pashtuns have historically survived by turning inwards, falling back upon and rigorously upholding the ancient cultural values that had served them so well in the past. Loyalty to the Pashtun nation, or
hewad
, is another important tenet of Pashtunwali, as is the obligation to defend it against any type of foreign incursion. Protecting Pashtun culture, the
dod-pasbani
, from disintegration or dilution by outside influence is also important. For this reason, an ability to speak Pashto is considered not just important but essential. Not speaking it is often taken, quite unfairly, as an inability to comprehend anything to do with Pashtun culture. International television, with its assumption of global values and its tendency to linguistic homogeneity, endangered both the hewad and the dod-pasbani.
The demands of
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