July 14, 2001

Sir,

I could not restrain myself from adding another link to the chain of articles initiated in your Observer's Column by Mr. K. Roshan titled, Is It Fair? and Mr. Ezat Yosafi's response, The Afghanistan Quagmire.

Initially, it seems that in his article, Mr. Yosafi has employed all of the typical defenses and arguments that the pro-Talib clique uses over and over to make a basically erroneous point. These arguments are:
(1) If you can create a positive situation, you are entitled to a negative one too. One can not deny the fact that in the few years prior to the creation of the Taliban, our country and people fell victim to an unheard-of anarchy that more or less sprang from the bottom of our society. To their credit, the Taliban's first act after consolidation of power was to disarm those anarchists. But, today, that very same anarchy is imposed upon us from the top, which is the Taliban regime itself. In Kabul, when you get out of your home in the morning (if you have one), you do not know who will beat you, torture you or where you will spend the night and why. The city of Kabul alone boasts over thirty jails and prisons.

Yes, the Taliban have confiscated the arms in their territory (and have given them to their warriors to be used against their brothers). But this fact can by no means be accepted as a justification for the Taliban's policies towards women's issues. Mr. Yosafi is in error by thinking that the Chaderi issue is merely a local one. First off, It took our illiterate nation decades to educate these hundreds of thousands of women as doctors, teachers, nurses, and bureaucrats. In fact, we are at a juncture in our nation's history that if dogs and cats could read and write, we should put them to work behind desks. But, by a single slight of his hand, Mulla Omar has paralyzed them to the status of flightless birds. Secondly, we have lost a couple of million Afghans to the Jihad against the Soviets. A great majority of these victims were men. This tips the balance of our population mix heavily in favor of women. Thirdly, the city of Kabul is no longer a town it used to be. It is home to millions of Afghans. And, finally, other cities such as Mazar, Heart, Kunduz, Shibirghan etc. which were formerly populated by much less than 100,000 people each, are also jointly home to millions of Afghans today. More than half of these are women folks.

To say that the chaderi was a cultural icon among us is the truth but by far miles away from being the whole truth. It was an icon in a few of the pre-jihadi towns mentioned above. But it did not exist in the rural areas. The rural areas in those days made over 90% of our population. By contrast, today the urban population is in millions. In short those teachers, doctors, nurses and intellectuals that are under house arrest at present, add up to quite a few million unfortunate souls. They are not a mere few hundreds or thousand that Mr. Yosafi can shake a stick at (*). By definition, a place where the majority of its residents is in chains but a minority is free to govern over them is called a prison. It is as simple as that.

The argument of the justification of our women's house arrest by the fact that they are safe from being raped is also as baseless as saying that keeping a bird in a cage is OK because it is safe from predators and is fed well there.

It is an undeniable fact that the Taliban portray and pride themselves in being the perfectionists in the observation of Islamic rules and traditions. If your pant sleeves cover your ankles, if your skirt does not hang a foot below your knees, if your beard is not unkempt and wild, you are sure to be stopped on the street and even tried and punished on the spot. But from the inception of Islam over 1400 years ago to the present day and from the western tip of Africa to southern Philippines, we fail to find a single other Islamic country that enforces the chaderi as women's attire. Could it be that the entire Muslim community of over a billion (save the Taliban) has fallen prey to the enticement and allure of none other than the devil himself?

(2) As things are, we Afghans are no more than mere puppets in the hands of the Western media in their war against the Taliban. Let us assume that all the conditions in our country remain the same as they are now, but the Western media, Mrs. Leno, Christiane Amanpour, the West and the UN takes the side of the Taliban. Will Mr. Yosafi and his pro-Taliban cronies still complain of their meddling in our internal affairs? For almost two decades these very same parties were on our side in our struggle against communism and nobody shouted foul.

When we talk to the Taliban hierarchy, we find that they think of the UN organization as just another insignificant non-Muslim country which is at odds with their regime. In fact, of the 52 Islamic members of that organization, 51 of them (barring Pakistan) have joined hands with the rest of the world to condemn the policies of the Taliban.

We must keep in mind that there is a significant difference between the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Saddam, Milocievitch etc. and our own Taliban. The former very well knew that what they were doing to their adversaries added up to crimes against humanity. But, they committed them anyway for political advantage. By contrast, the Taliban firmly believe (as a matter of faith) that they are not only on the right path, but the very salvation of mankind solely rests upon their social agenda. This single fact robs us of all the elements of hope (for educating the Taliban) that Mr. Yosafi has so artlessly suggested.

The forgoing should not be interpreted to say that among the Taliban, one can not find elements whose faith is subservient to their politics.

There is a beautiful prayer: "O Lord, give me the strength and guidance to seek the truth constantly. But, keep me from those who think they have found it." Unfortunately, the Taliban are those among us who consider the rest of us no more than a bunch of uneducated Ummis (illiterates) and therefore, not worth talking to. Leave alone, consulting with.

For most of us, a civilized way to solve a mutual problem with an opponent is to sit with him/her at a level table and try to reach a compromise through respecting mutual frames-of-mind, limitations and beliefs. To achieve this, we need to believe in the possibility of starting with a common rationale. I had several opportunities to do so with the Taliban. But the first shocking fact that I encountered was that what I thought to be the table was a bicycle in their eyes and its purpose was to be burned as firewood. This in fact, is the single most dangerous aspect of the Talib mentality. So, we are left with only one alternative which is the same used by the Taliban themselves: Force them out of power.
Mohammad Ali (the boxer) was once asked by a reporter why he called himself "The Greatest"? The reply was "If I told you, you won't understand". "Why not?" The reporter asked again. To which Ali replied "Because you ain't the greatest."

They say the most debilitating burden attributed to ignorance is the fact that when ignorant, we do not know that we do not know. If we could be made aware of our ignorance, we would undoubtedly knock on some doors and as the Farsi poet has said "sprinkle some dust over our heads."

Maybe, in the final analysis of this game, we the so-called educated are in fact the ignorant.

(*) This harsh policy of the Taliban mostly stems from the fact that they themselves are products of camp life in Pakistan. In the traditional Afghan rural communities, mostly all of the members of a village were members of the same tribe or ethnic community and their women openly worked side by side with men in the fields. But, when they immigrated to Pakistan, members of diverse groups of tribes and ethnic communities shared the same camp-grounds. Therefore, women were restrained from going out face to face with "strangers". Continuation of this practice for a period of over two decades gave it the shape of tradition in the eyes of the generation that was born and raised in those camps. Today, the Taliban enforce this rule even in the rural communities of the north who never left Afghanistan during the jihad or had a taste of camp life.