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Taleban A Monument to Western Folly
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Taleban A Monument to Western Folly
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by Rosie DiManno
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DON'T BOTHER crying over limestone Buddha statues if you've no tears for living - and dying - Afghan children.
It must say something about us, both in the West and in Islamic Arab nations, that more outrage has been expressed over the demolition of two monolithic monuments - which only students of antiquity had heard of a fortnight ago - than 2 million Afghans on the verge of starvation.
It's indeed hideous that the one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar, spiritual leader of the ultra-orthodox version of Islam at the heart of the ruling Taleban movement, issued the obliteration order against the historic twin Buddhas, carved from an isolated mountainside 1,500 years ago. The Buddhas were doing no harm and had few worshippers in a country where Buddhism died out a millennium ago. Even if Afghanistan were a nation that encouraged tourism, it's doubtful whether many would make the arduous journey to Bamiyan at the southwestern juncture of the nearly untraversable Hindu Kush.
What public indignation exists towards the Taleban, particularly in the sophisticated West, has been aimed - and with good reason, I don't disagree - at the theocracy's crushing decrees against its own population, specifically the denial of basic human rights to females. This is a country which, since the Taleban seized power by overrunning the capital Kabul in 1996, has forced women into a rigid form of house arrest. Females must wear the traditional burqah, the head-to-toe blue (not black) covering that hides even their eyes, whenever they step outside their homes, which they can do only in the company of male family members, a husband or a brother. Girls may not attend school, although a recent loosening of the law has permitted, or at least tolerated, girl-children attending privately run classrooms. But even boys receive an education that teaches them little beyond the recitation of the Koran and other approved Islamic texts. Women may not hold jobs, except for female doctors working in all-female hospital wings. Not that the career prospects are all that much better for male doctors, who earn about $4.50 a month working under appalling conditions in government-run hospitals.
The Taleban does not allow photographs of any human image, which they consider sinful by their reading of the Koran, just as they forbid all graven images of artwork - the basis upon which the Bamiyan Buddhas were ordered dynamited. Everyone must pray five times a day - a customary practice for Muslims, except in Afghanistan those found to be neglecting their religious duties are flayed on the spot by the roving ``soldier-monks'' of the Taleban. Music is forbidden. TV is forbidden. Videotapes and cassettes are forbidden. Only the proscription against kite-flying - an expertise elevated to an artform in Afghanistan - has been quietly dropped by the government, which is now also allowing its citizens to keep pet birds, another avid pursuit of Afghans.
What's happened is that Afghanistan's educated class, or at least those who can afford the $20,000 to $25,000 required for forged documents and exit papers, have fled their homeland. But what must be remembered by those of us in the West who can't even imagine such a strict existence is this: For the majority of Afghans, having come through two decades of horrendous civil war and Russian occupation verging on genocide, the Taleban's edicts are not so insupportable. What the Taleban gave Afghans was a measure of peace and security that many had never before known, so decimated had this country become by violence and inter-tribal warfare.
And the only reason the Taleban was able to assume power is because the West permitted it.
It was the West, specifically the United States, that propelled the Taleban to ascendancy in the first place. Only a decade ago, the U.S. funnelled arms and military expertise to the mujahideen guerrillas because it was strategically imperative to thwart Russian imperialism and Moscow's lust for the rugged jewel that is Afghanistan, with all its economic riches and its geographic situation in the heart of Central Asia.
The mujahideen, in rather spectacular fashion, pushed the Russians back over the border. When the Russians turned tail, the Americans lost their keen interest in Afghanistan and the glorious mujahideen fell into a decade of factional, tribal and ethnic warfare, Sunni versus Shiite, fundamentalist versus secular. Now the most fierce of all the mujahideen military commanders, Ahmad Shah Massoud, is isolated in a small corner of Afghanistan while the Taleban, enjoying the endless military and political succour of Pakistan, controls 90 per cent of the country and official recognition from only two other nations.
The Americans, who had encouraged Islamic militancy when it meant thwarting Russia, allowed Pakistan to take the lead of political influence in Afghanistan. Strategically, the U.S. is more preoccupied with bringing oil out of neighbouring Turkmenistan via a pipeline that would go through Afghanistan and Pakistan, but at all costs not Iran. Meanwhile, the Taleban - which cannot feed its own people - reaps the stupendous profit from its newfound distinction as the world's largest producer and exporter of opium poppies and heroin.
For those of us who love Afghanistan - a magnificent nation that gets in your blood, with a proud people whose likes may never be seen again - there is an abiding faith that the country will endure and survive the ravages of the Taleban, if merely by its sheer obstinacy, just as it has always endured and survived - on its own. Politically, the Taleban will go into eclipse, eventually. There are many who believe if foreign aid was shut off, the Taleban would be ousted from power by an enraged citizenry, most of whom practise a form of Islam that takes its lifeblood from tribal and regional cultural affiliations.
But three consecutive years of devastating drought have left the Afghan citizenry weak and dying. Hundreds of thousands are starving and freezing in camps. Foreign aid is a slim lifeline, but all they've got. I've no idea what's to be done, except that the West, the U.S., should hold itself accountable for what it has wrought.
By comparison, why all the wailing about two stone Buddhas reduced to rubble?
Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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