The Taliban Troubles

By Johanna McGeary

In a bleak fortified compound few non-Muslims have ever seen sat a man few non-Muslims have ever met mulling over the future of a wanted man, his own nation and much of the world beyond. Not often in history is anyone given such a moment to affect the world's course, but the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, is that man. As American warplanes converged on the region surrounding Afghanistan, he had a stark choice to make. He could call by radio to the Taliban fighters in Osama bin Laden's personal security guard and order them to hand over their "guest" to justice. Or he could refuse and make Afghanistan the fiery center of President Bush's declared war on terror.

At this moment of crisis, the fortyish former village prayer leader was probably sitting as he often does, cross-legged on the floor, praying and reading the Koran, which has guided him, since the formation of the Taliban in 1994, from scholarly obscurity to spiritual leader of the movement and temporal ruler of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan. Yet Omar may find little explicit instruction there for a decision that could equally satisfy his tribal ethics, his puritanical version of Islam and his nation's interests. If he delivers bin Laden to the West, he betrays the man who helped bring him to power and sustains his rule now. If he follows his faith in Islamic jihad or his country's tradition of protecting guests, he condemns Afghanistan to another onslaught in the savage wars that have brought abject misery to its people for the past 22 years. Even if he does hand over bin Laden to American authorities tomorrow, he has no guarantee that the U.S. will not make his regime pay for its sins of the past.

A TIME reporter who talked to Omar several months ago says he was pondering such dangers. "Did we invite him in?" said Omar of bin Laden. "He was already here. But we don't know how to get rid of him or where to send him." Now Omar's dilemma has reached cataclysmic proportions, and no one knows if he has any real-world grasp of the consequences.

By Saturday, Omar had made up his mind: "No, no, no." He overruled even the tempering recommendation of a 600-man body of senior clerics last Thursday to "encourage" bin Laden to leave Afghanistan "in his own free will" at a time and to a place of his choosing. Now, said the Taliban, Afghanistan is ready for a "showdown of might."

As the U.S. moved steadily toward launching an assault on Afghan territory, Taliban soldiers armed with AKs trundled antiquated rocket launchers into position, while citizens fled to the barren countryside or the Pakistani frontier. No one was sure where the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, might be: in a fortified network of caves tunneling under the eastern mountains, "riding off on a horse," as newspapers in Pakistan reported, or even alone on the run?

If bin Laden is the bull's-eye in America's target, the Taliban is the next concentric ring, the masters of a country that has played host not just to the world's most wanted terrorist but also to thousands of jihadis who flock there to learn the tricks of the trade. Out of their harsh version of "pure" Islam and to keep themselves in power, the Taliban has made of Afghanistan a mecca of terrorism, a land whose aura of Islam ascendant lures volunteers from a vast pool of Muslims who want to partake of Afghanistan's great victory. Many are drawn not simply to bin Laden and his gang but also to the idea of Talibanizing the Muslim world. The CIA estimates that of tens of thousands of fighters who have graduated from Afghan terror camps, only 3,000 or so are loyal directly to bin Laden. Yet the ties of like mind and mutual interest between bin Laden and Omar, between the cells of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, are so entwined that no quest for freedom from terror can win with the elimination of just one.

No country ever illustrated the law of unintended consequences as well as Afghanistan. The story began in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded the eternally warring country to prop up a puppet communist regime. Through the prism of the cold war, the U.S. saw a chance to confront its nuclear rival more conventionally on the ground. So the U.S. armed and financed a proxy army. The band of mujahedin, or holy warriors, that the U.S. backed came not just from the fractious, ethnically diverse Afghan tribes but also from cadres of Muslim volunteers--including Osama bin Laden--who saw resistance against the Soviets as a God-ordered defense of Islam. And they won, sending the utterly demoralized Soviet army home in 1989.

For the U.S., the Afghan war was over, a last deciding battle on the way to cold war victory. Finished too was American interest in the shattered nation. Afghanistan's endemic feuding between the dominant Pashtuns and the ethnic minorities had hampered the anti-Soviet fight, and then it demolished what was left of Afghanistan. The country fell into bloody, lawless chaos--political leaders formed fighting brigades; warlords bit off fiefdoms; and rivals shelled one another's villages, routinely robbing and killing civilians. Smuggling and drug trafficking were the only sources of revenue as farmlands turned to dust, cities crumbled into ruin and an estimated 5 million citizens fled the country.

In their misery, many Afghans came to blame "the great American betrayal." They had fought on the front line of America's war; then America had walked away leaving them with a desolated country. The U.S., and the democratic West, did virtually nothing to reconstruct Afghanistan, too busy with post-cold war demands to pay attention to the needs of a landlocked, Texas-size country of 25 million tucked far away in Central Asia.

Then came a day in mid-1994 when Omar, around 35 and preaching at a mosque in his native village of Singhesar, near the religious center of Kandahar, put down his Koran to act. Like so many saints and tyrants before him, Omar says he discovered his destiny in a dream: God was calling him to save his country from the warlords. He had already given his right eye as a young mujahedin to Soviet shrapnel. Now, according to Taliban lore, he gathered together 30 like-minded men to avenge the abduction and rape of two young women; the guilty warlord was captured and killed. A movement was born, in the rare words of Omar, as "a simple band of dedicated youths determined to establish the laws of God on Earth and prepared to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that goal."

The little group, calling itself the Taliban--literally students of Islam, more poetically seekers of knowledge--set out to bring vigilante justice to the city. Its vow was to bring peace, law and order and "pure" Islam to Afghanistan. Led by Omar's extreme interpretations, the Taliban subscribes to a unique extremist model, based on harsh interpretations of Muslim law and a profound belief in never-ending jihad. Its fundamentalist view follows the radical Deobandi branch of Sunni Islam, named for an Indian town housing an influential madrasah, or religious academy, that deems women "biologically, religiously and prophetically" inferior to men. The Taliban laced its faith with the hard customs of Pashtun tradition, like the one that makes hospitality toward guests an irrevocable obligation. And faithlessness must be punished with unprecedented severity in applying Shari'a commands for amputation, stoning and execution.

War-weary Afghans flocked to the Taliban banner. Young men displaced to the wretched confines of refugee camps across the border in Pakistan had spent years being radicalized in the deeply conservative frontier Islamic schools where Pashtu speakers memorized the Koran in Arabic and imbibed the rhetoric of jihad. They went home to rally behind the one-eyed mullah. Pakistan's Haqqania madrasah, alma mater of many Taliban leaders, awarded its one and only honorary degree to Omar. Other Afghans from the Pashtun south, who knew nothing of the world beyond their ravaged hinterlands, were inspired to join up by the Taliban's steady successes.

Later in 1994, the Pakistani government of Benazir Bhutto needed help setting up trade routes to Central Asia through unruly Afghanistan. A convoy of Pakistani vehicles was hijacked by an Afghan warlord, and Bhutto sent a minister to ask for the Taliban's help. Omar's men rescued the convoy, opening the door to Pakistani money, arms and military assistance. Now the Taliban could bankroll fighter training, recruit from Pakistan's conservative madrasahs, get weapons and fuel.

The Pakistan connection gave the Taliban the muscle to turn its aspirations for law and order into a quest for national power. The students picked up popular support in 1994 when Kandahar fell to the Taliban with barely a shot fired. Local warlords often surrendered as the now amply armed troops marched toward Kabul, some holding Korans to their foreheads.

Before Omar left Kandahar, he opened the marble vault in the city's most venerated shrine and held up the Respectable Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, seen publicly only two times previously in more than a millennium. The sight inspired Taliban foot soldiers for a final assault against Kabul in 1996. By then even the U.S. was quietly encouraging Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to back a movement they hoped might eliminate the heroin trade, open access for a gas pipeline and confine Shi'ite Iran.

Not every Afghan welcomed the Taliban, product of the deeply conservative southeastern region, powered by Pashtun pride. Equally toughened ethnic minorities and religious dissenters loosely linked in the Northern Alliance fought them, especially for control of the cities, the capital and the non-Pashtun north. To this day, the Taliban rules only 90% of Afghan territory and is still engaged in fierce fighting to capture the rest. So far, however, the alliance's often feuding units do not have the numbers, the ethnic backing or the political skill to constitute a serious opposition.

Stalled at the gates of Kabul, the Taliban found an enthusiastic new benefactor. Osama bin Laden, who had spent some of his family fortune to finance the anti-Soviet mujahedin, needed a new home after Sudan succumbed to U.S. blandishments to kick him out. In exchange for a haven in Afghanistan's switchback valleys and rugged passes, bin Laden offered the Taliban money and fighters. Afghan and Western sources say he gave $3 million that helped push the Taliban into control of the capital and the country in September 1996. It was, according to intelligence reports, one of the last times Omar set foot in Kabul.

The Taliban remains one of the world's most inscrutable regimes, fanatically loyal to one of the world's most mysterious leaders. The devout Omar, self-declared "Amir-ul-Momineen," or Commander of the Faithful, has lived in seclusion in a Kandahar compound ever since a 1999 bomb killed 40 people near his old mud-brick home in his former village. He permits no photographs and rarely appears in public. He is said to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall, heavily bearded and imposing despite his stitched-shut eye. He is thought to confer personally with perhaps eight or 10 men whom he has known and trusted for years. His whisper-soft voice wields absolute authority. Yet when a Pakistani delegation arrived for an audience several weeks ago, Omar greeted its members simply, outside, seated on the gravel.

Omar prefers to rule from the shadows of Kandahar, while his feared Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice enforces Taliban law through religious police with kohl-rimmed eyes, wearing black turbans, who crack whips at recalcitrant mosquegoers and banish women to the window-blocked confines of their homes. Life is severely constricted by an endless list of rules creating a variant of Islam never seen before, say Muslim scholars. In a country in which there is no television and only Islamic radio, Omar shows little knowledge of or concern for the outside world. When officials and clerics of the Taliban, under international pressure, debated whether to destroy the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddha statues early this year, Omar is said to have issued the order: Go ahead; it's only breaking stones.

Bin Laden has steadily extended his influence with the Taliban while it lets him turn Afghanistan into a training ground for terror. It was bin Laden, says Ahmed Rashid, longtime reporter and expert on the Taliban, who brought anti-Americanism to the nationalistic Taliban ideology. Intelligence sources say bin Laden's men have infiltrated the Taliban's top ministries, especially Virtue and Vice, where they are said to have argued vigorously for the destruction of the Buddhas. Russia's Foreign Ministry has even reported that bin Laden was unofficially serving as the Taliban's Defense Minister. Bin Laden has allied himself with the Taliban hard-liners; the moderates--and there are some--would prefer to see him vanish over the desert horizon.

Non-Afghans drawn to bin Laden are said to make up a 1,000-strong brigade fighting as part of training on the front line in the Taliban's ongoing war with the Northern Alliance. The soldiers are not just Arab militants from dozens of Middle Eastern countries aspiring to change secular regimes into Taliban-style states but are revolutionaries from Uzbekistan and Uighur separatists from China as well. U.S. officials believe that bin Laden masterminded the Sept. 9 assassination of the leading military commander of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Taliban's chief rival for national power. In return, bin Laden and the militants are guaranteed sanctuary, plus room to set up camps to train their supporters and help to recruit fresh talent.

Many Muslim scholars say the Taliban brand of Islam falls far outside most interpretations of Koranic writ. And the Taliban's civic reign of repression has made it a pariah even in the Muslim world. Only three nations--Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates--accorded the Taliban diplomatic recognition, and the U.A.E. rescinded it last week.

The events of Sept. 11 have uncoupled Pakistan from the Taliban as nothing previously could. Now that bin Laden's activities have forced the U.S. to take a stand against the Taliban, Washington must decide how to eradicate the terrorist threat emanating from a land that has proved to be the graveyard of every previous foreign invader. Afghanistan is a place where warfare is a way of life and fighters use battle toughness and treacherous terrain to compensate for lack of equipment. "Ours is a jihad against those who brought suffering on the Afghan people and violated Islamic teaching," Omar has said. "The Taliban will fight until there is no blood in Afghanistan left to be shed." That would not be just Afghan blood, but American too.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch and Tim McGirk/Islamabad, Massimo Calabresi and Douglas Waller/Washington

TIME.com To read the 1999 TIME interview with Osama bin Laden, go to time.com/binladen

With reporting by Hannah Bloch and Tim McGirk/Islamabad, Massimo Calabresi and Douglas Waller/Washington