Russias humiliation in Afghanistan may well have hastened the collapse of the Soviet system, but at a huge cost to Afghanistan itself. Even in the mid eighties Soviet policy makers were cautioning the Americans about the genie of fundamentalism which they were letting out of the bottle. But their warnings were ignored. Afghan Arabs like Osama bin Laden emerged, and were armed and trained by the CIA. And when the Russians finally left, Afghanistan was consigned to its fate, torn apart between competing warlords. Afghans turned on each other in an endless bloodbath with shifting front lines across the capital itself.
Order out of chaos
Consider the successes of the movement which emerged out of this chaos. The Taliban disarmed the population, ensured the free and safe movement of goods and people, and united more of the country under a single administration than at any time since 1979. The only area which remained outside Taliban control was the impregnable fortress of the Panjsher valley in the north east, where Ahmed Shah Massood ran a military society, fuelled by the proceeds of most of the heroin factories in Afghanistan.
The Taliban worked with the cultural grain of village Afghanistan, and in their early days were very popular in most of the region they controlled. I spent a lot of time with them, and there was a naive purity to much of their action. It really did feel like a revolution. In particular they were proud of law and order, boasting of leaving caches of petrol or ammunition, and knowing that they would still be there when they returned.
I remember one large and ferocious looking fighter asking to borrow my car so he could go to pray. Since my bag had thousands of dollars in it, not to mention the television equipment inside the car, I went to get my bag out. He grabbed my arm, assuring me it would be safe, and of course it was. This security was no mean achievement in Afghanistan. Every time I have travelled outside Taliban areas in Afghanistan I have been robbed.
The rules of engagement
The wests mistake was not engaging with this movement in any meaningful way. There were always moderate and extreme wings. The main military commander in those early years was Mullah Borjan, who had led their forces ever since they began in 1994, with the modest ambition of clearing armed checkpoints along the road between Kandahar and the Pakistani border.
I spent some time with Mullah Borjan, interviewing him just two nights before he was shot in the assault on Kabul, and it was clear that he never envisaged that the Taliban would take on the harsh repressive tone which it did. His death robbed the movement of a sane voice. And there were other moderates whose voices were drowned in the cacophony of international protest which greeted the fall of Kabul. There was even a significant wing in the Taliban which wanted the return of the King. Their over-riding concern was for stability. But rather than tea at Buckingham Palace and a reception in Washington, the Taliban were shunned and isolated.
At the beginning the wests response was not uniform. Soon after the fall of Kabul, a senior UN negotiator flew to Kandahar armed with a copy of the UN Charter, written in pashtu, which he showed to a roomful of Taliban leaders. His message was plain if you want to join the international community, then this is what you are signing up for.
But his was a rare voice in attempting to engage the Taliban. They were never given a chance to sign up for anything. Even once they controlled ninety per cent of the country, they were not recognised as the government except by Pakistan, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia. I have sat in countless Foreign Office briefings over the years to be told about different countries that recognition does not confer approval, that it is about acknowledging realities on the ground.
Home or the grave
This was simply not true in the case of the Taliban, who were to be treated differently from any other regime. Their enemies continued to take the Afghan seat at the UN, and lived in Afghan embassies everywhere. Suddenly foreign policy was driven by one issue the Talibans treatment of women.
In order to stem some of the angry emails, let me clarify one thing. I believe that the Talibans treatment of women was barbaric and savage. It was based on an old pashtoon proverb, that the only place for a woman is kor or gor, the home or the grave.
I remember the dull boorish one-eyed Mullah Rabbani, who took over Kabul in 1996. When I talked to him of womens education and health issues, he dismissed them as these small things. The Taliban drained the humanity out of Islam, leaving it a dried-out husk which imprisoned women. But did the alienation of the Taliban by the world really help Afghan women? Not a bit.
Apart from women across the country, the other group which suffered most at the hands of the Taliban was the Hazara tribe. The systematic massacres of Hazaras in the north and the centre of the country by the Taliban were war crimes on a Bosnian scale.
Engagement with the people who carried out these actions was the difficult course. I watched the splits and divisions among international NGOs as they tried to continue effective aid programmes faced by the Talibans severe restrictions on how they worked. But at least most found a way to work. In contrast, western governments led by America turned their back on the Taliban, and once demonised, they became demons, acting as hosts to those who would do the west the most harm.
If only they had oil. The Talibans hard line towards women, and intolerance towards any other views were rooted in pashtoon morality, and grew with inspiration from the Wahabi sect in Saudi Arabia. The religious police, the ministry for promoting virtue and repressing vice, the lashings and amputations and stonings, all had their exact models in Saudi Arabia, which supplies most oil, and buys most weapons from the west.
Afghanistan was to be treated differently because it was poor, forgotten when it was no longer useful in the Cold War. The war against terror is a direct consequence of that forgetfulness.
