Pashtunwali alone were probably motivation enough for Omar to approve the banning of television, although there was also no shortage of justification to be found in the Koran – at least in the way the Taliban interpreted it. Early Islam forbade the portraiture of all living things on the grounds that it encouraged idolatry, and both Hollywood and Bollywood, with their attendant and highly developed celebrity cultures, undoubtedly smelled of that. The Taliban’s ambition to turn the clock back to the time of the Prophet was often problematic, though. As Mary Whitehouse discovered, controlling television in the modern world is like trying to turn back waves on a beach.
In time, the Taliban learned that it was more useful to exploit the power of Western information technology rather than to try to destroy it. By 2001 even Omar was developing his own website in Kandahar. The Taliban made propaganda films, appointed cleverpress spokesmen, courted television channels such as al-Jazeera, and learned to manipulate public opinion in myriad ways that continue to bamboozle the Nato Coalition today. They were capable of adaptation when necessary, in other words. However literally some among them were inclined to interpret the Koran, the rules could still be relaxed. The emotive tag of fundamentalism, with all the crazed inflexibility implied by that word, and which the Western media bandied about so often and easily in the early days, was never quite accurate or fair.
This is not to say that they weren’t sometimes guilty of terrible intolerance. In 1997 the leadership was still at the bottom of a steep learning curve, and by their own later admission they made many mistakes. The sum total of their ambition when they started out in 1994 had been to save two small provincial districts from bandits. Now they found themselves in charge of an entire country, almost, and they were frankly struggling to cope. Like the Americans in Iraq in 2003, the Taliban sought regime change. Also like the Americans, their preparations for running the country once they had taken the capital were almost non-existent. In fact, forming a government themselves had never been a part of their agenda. The idea rather was to install one that would govern according to Sharia law, and then to go home. But ‘mission creep’ within the movement, combined with the pressures of civil war and the influence of their Pakistani and Saudi sponsors, drove them much further than they first intended. In that sense, the Taliban were the victims of their own success.
Before 1997, most of the leadership had never even been to Kabul, a city whose customs and mores were very different from those of conservative Kandahar. It was the most outward-looking city in the country, a seething, multi-ethnic conurbation of perhapsa million and a half people in 1997, about half of whom were ethnic Tajiks and only a quarter were Pashtun. It wasn’t just television that kept its citizens entertained. Kabul in the past had been a city of music and flowers, of cinemas and nightclubs. The children flew kites, the men gambled on partridge fights. In the 1960s, female students at the university had worn trousers, even mini-skirts. In the 1970s, the city had been a popular staging post on the hippy trail from Europe to India.
Kabulis had also flirted with Western modernity earlier, in the 1920s, under the modernizing Shah Amanullah, who had been the city’s Governor before he ascended the throne. He kept a fleet of Rolls-Royces, introduced co-education in schools, and promoted a constitution based on equal rights for women. He campaigned against the burqa and even decreed that Afghan men in the capital had to wear Western clothes, complete with a European hat. For all these reasons, Omar both distrusted and disliked Kabul. He might have been expected to take up residence in the Arg, Kabul’s presidential palace, but instead he appointed his close colleague Mullah Mohammad Rabbani to head the
In time, the Taliban learned that it was more useful to exploit the power of Western information technology rather than to try to destroy it. By 2001 even Omar was developing his own website in Kandahar. The Taliban made propaganda films, appointed cleverpress spokesmen, courted television channels such as al-Jazeera, and learned to manipulate public opinion in myriad ways that continue to bamboozle the Nato Coalition today. They were capable of adaptation when necessary, in other words. However literally some among them were inclined to interpret the Koran, the rules could still be relaxed. The emotive tag of fundamentalism, with all the crazed inflexibility implied by that word, and which the Western media bandied about so often and easily in the early days, was never quite accurate or fair.
This is not to say that they weren’t sometimes guilty of terrible intolerance. In 1997 the leadership was still at the bottom of a steep learning curve, and by their own later admission they made many mistakes. The sum total of their ambition when they started out in 1994 had been to save two small provincial districts from bandits. Now they found themselves in charge of an entire country, almost, and they were frankly struggling to cope. Like the Americans in Iraq in 2003, the Taliban sought regime change. Also like the Americans, their preparations for running the country once they had taken the capital were almost non-existent. In fact, forming a government themselves had never been a part of their agenda. The idea rather was to install one that would govern according to Sharia law, and then to go home. But ‘mission creep’ within the movement, combined with the pressures of civil war and the influence of their Pakistani and Saudi sponsors, drove them much further than they first intended. In that sense, the Taliban were the victims of their own success.
Before 1997, most of the leadership had never even been to Kabul, a city whose customs and mores were very different from those of conservative Kandahar. It was the most outward-looking city in the country, a seething, multi-ethnic conurbation of perhapsa million and a half people in 1997, about half of whom were ethnic Tajiks and only a quarter were Pashtun. It wasn’t just television that kept its citizens entertained. Kabul in the past had been a city of music and flowers, of cinemas and nightclubs. The children flew kites, the men gambled on partridge fights. In the 1960s, female students at the university had worn trousers, even mini-skirts. In the 1970s, the city had been a popular staging post on the hippy trail from Europe to India.
Kabulis had also flirted with Western modernity earlier, in the 1920s, under the modernizing Shah Amanullah, who had been the city’s Governor before he ascended the throne. He kept a fleet of Rolls-Royces, introduced co-education in schools, and promoted a constitution based on equal rights for women. He campaigned against the burqa and even decreed that Afghan men in the capital had to wear Western clothes, complete with a European hat. For all these reasons, Omar both distrusted and disliked Kabul. He might have been expected to take up residence in the Arg, Kabul’s presidential palace, but instead he appointed his close colleague Mullah Mohammad Rabbani to head the
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