Wither flowers wither, Kabul is not for you!
Withering flowers and grimy Kabul environment reminds me of this sad story. Wali Jan, an important tribal leader who has met Mullah Omar several times, tells a story about Mullah Omar’s definition of entertainment. Wali Jan asked Mullah Omar "What are people supposed to do for entertainment. 'Look at flowers,' Omar replied coolly. In a sign of God’s wrath even flowers have died today in Kabul; drought has taken a big toll on people and nature.
The chief inspiration of one-eyed Mullah Omar appeared to be able to lead Afghanistan down a blind alley into the middle ages. So far he has been very successful in achieving that under his short span of 6 years of puritan shariah rule. Kabul today is a drab place with stinking open sewers; the wind leaves a thick layer of dust on everything. During the Soviet occupation, the city remained largely untouched, but when the mujahideen took over in the 1990s, heavy fighting between factions flattened much of it, and the capital is now bracing itself for the next attack. Mullah Omar rarely visits Kabul; he prefers his Kandhar power base. When he does venture out, it is in a convoy of Japanese off-road vehicles with darkened windows and gun-toting bodyguards. Kabul is ripe for a takeover and waiting for its new leader that may bring some normalcy to this wicked town, a city turned into a wasteland as a result of extreme ideological delusions of its present masters.
As attacks on Afghanistan have begun the strategic destruction of Talibans is coherently followed with political integration of Afghanistan's fractious tribal and monarchist opposition leaders. They plan to hold a summit of chieftains and commanders within the next 10 days to draw up a strategy for a post-Taliban government, as the country's warlords jockey for power. The life in Kabul shops and chai khanas, the local teahouses, have re-opened after immediate air-strike possibility was discounted. The theory of terrorism, the most important effect it is supposed to have is to cause a draconian response: this is what is wanted most by terrorists, and who better to deliver a draconian response than the entire damned world. The response of carrot and a stick is very imaginative, on one hand hitting them hard where it matters the most, on the other food drops by Pentagon to get the helping Afghan populace breaking the chains and yoke of slavery of Talibans.
It is firmly believed that these terrorists in Kabul wanted, indeed foresaw a nuclear attack on Kabul or if Pakistan could have been implicated, on Islamabad as well. The reason they want that sort of thing is that it would help galvanise the people who they consider to be their potential allies but who are presently not their allies - millions and millions of people across the globe who are Muslim, the terrorist wanted Islam v/s rest of the world war that would have led them to the leadership of the entire Islamic nation by default. They certainly failed to achieve the first objective due to the measured response and promise of a targeted battle from the west. As a result the main bazaar by the muddy Kabul River is now functioning after being abandoned soon after 11th of Sept. The poor Afghan population that is hostage of Omar - Laden axis and their few thousand hardliners is trying to survive with the little they are left with. Drought-stricken Mullah Omar’s Kabul even has no flowers left for the populace to look and enjoy!!
Now the political battle of unseating Mullah Omar has begun in all its earnest. Britain and America are hoping to topple the fragile Taliban regime through diplomatic pressure and replace it with a broad-based government taking in the country's many opposing factions. They are offering support to ex-monarch Zahir Shah, to form an ethnically mixed interim government, restore law and order and bring Taliban leaders to trial. The commanders, mostly former anti-Soviet mujahideen who initially joined the mullahs either out of expediency or because they were bought off, are now crossing the mountainous frontier with their families for the Loya Jirga.
Zahir Shah, the 86-year-old deposed king now based in Rome, and the Northern Alliance of ethnic Tajik and Uzbek fighters will each send 60 delegates to the so-called Supreme Council. The meeting comes as several warlords have already opened new fronts, raising fears that the country will slide back into civil war if American attacks force the Taliban regime's collapse. The Taliban arose in the first place only because Afghanistan became a kind of international black hole, where any lunacy could flourish. This time international efforts are directed to stop that. Abdul Haq, a former mujahideen commander is in Peshawar to promote the king's Loya Jirga, or grand gathering of tribesmen. The prospects of a Taliban implosion have increased after several senior figures in the regime fled across the border to Pakistan. A complex cast of assorted warlords with chequered pasts, backed either by the US or Afghanistan's neighbours, is already fighting for a share of the spoils.
The opposition Northern Alliance, which holds northeastern Afghanistan, is a ragtag assortment of local tribal chiefs united by their opposition to the Taliban. However the recent assassination of their leader, Ahmed Shah Masood, has raised doubts about whether their fragile unity will hold. General Rashid Dostum is a perfidious bear-like Uzbek who regularly switches sides and in the past ran his own airline, visited Scotland to cut a deal with whisky distillers and punished disobedient soldiers at home by running over them with tanks. The general recently launched a fresh offensive to recapture his old northern stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif. But he has acknowledged that his men had suffered heavy losses after the Taliban sent reinforcements to the north to counter possible US attacks.
There is also a report of fighting around the western city of Herat where Ismael Khan, a short, wily former mujahideen commander who escaped from prison in Kandahar two years ago, is attempting to surround the Taliban forces. A third front opened in the snow-capped central Hindukush mountains where Karim Khalili, the short, rotund leader of the Hazara tribes, who customarily presents visitors with an Afghan carpet, is marshalling his fighters against the Taliban. Even Gulbuddin Hekmatayer, the notorious "spoiler" of Afghan power struggles, best known for throwing acid in the faces of unveiled female students while at university, announced his likely return from exile in Teheran.
The regional candidate most strongly promoted by Britain and America is Mr Haq, who laid down his arms after Moscow's pullout in 1989, or Pir Gilani. Mr Haq, who met Margaret Thatcher twice at Downing Street during the guerrilla war against the Soviets, is the only Afghan power broker to have remained aloof from the country's bloody internecine wars. Unlike the tribal opposition in the north, he could command the support of his fellow Pathans, the country's largest ethnic group, and he supports the king's return. He is bitterly opposed to the Pathan-led Taliban, believed to have sent the assassins who murdered his wife, 11-year-old son and a bodyguard in Peshawar in 1999. Mr Haq, who comes from a powerful landowning family in eastern Afghanistan, moved to Dubai for business, but has now returned to Pakistan and met a stream of turbaned tribesmen and ex-Taliban and mujahideen commanders. He is, however, highly critical of plans for an American offensive which he fears will further destabilise the country. He prefers Taliban to be politically toppled.
The political elimination of Taliban sounds impossible and difficult but it would be much more easier than what it is made to look like. A study into the background of Taliban would reveal that this terror based a-human government might be just a house of cards that will collapse once their bluff to seek confrontation is called. The name Taliban, meaning students, was chosen in the summer of 1994. "There were 60 or 70 who decided to disarm the checkpoints where these bandits were taxing people for vast sums of money. At first they had to fight, but soon they just gave in. Many of them were addicted to heroin and hashish.
Legends spread about Mullah Omar: that he lost his left eye in a bold attack on a Soviet position, that he was a deadly shot with a manual rocket launcher. According to confidential reports from his physician who treats him in Kandahar, the one-eyed Taliban leader suffers fits and brain seizures that he claims are ‘visions’, such a mythical status has grown around the man who holds the fate of Afghanistan in his hands, that he is able to pass off his fits as visions during which he receives instructions for creating a pure Islamic state. The Taliban leader suffers from serious depression, alternating with bouts of childlike behaviour where he sits in the driving seat of one of his cars, turning the wheel while making the noise of an engine.
The disclosures according to Telegraph’s Christian Lamb suggests that there is little prospect of the American-led coalition against terrorism being able to enter into any rational negotiation with the man who holds the fate of Afghanistan in his hands. The Taliban swept through southern Afghanistan to capture Kabul in 1996, where for the first time they said they would conquer the rest of the country. That was the moment when Omar first met up with bin Laden and the two became close friends.
Bin Laden introduced Omar to the wider world of Islamic radicalism, global jihad and hatred of the United States. Bin Laden flattered Omar calling him the Amir or leader of the whole Muslim world. While the Taliban granted him sanctuary and facilities, bin Laden built a bombproof house for Omar and his wives, funded the Taliban movement and recruited thousands of Arabs to fight in the Taliban army. He also facilitated business ventures with the Taliban - the smuggling of consumer goods from Dubai and Pakistan and drugs trafficking from Afghanistan. It is rumoured that bin Laden did organise the assassination of the Taliban's worst enemy, leader of the anti-Taliban alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, to further ingratiate himself with Mullah Omar just before the 11th Sept attacks.
Laden whose psychotic hatred sees no bounds in words of Mr Algosaibi, Saudi Ambassador to London: “I was amazed at the intensity of his anti-American rhetoric. It was as if bin Laden had a psychotic hatred of anything American. He simply wanted to kill Americans for being American.” The seizures of Mullah Omar coupled with psychotic hatred of Laden is an explosive mix and strange mad radicalism that has seen its manifestation in most cowardly of acts. These strange bedfellows have unfortunately the most serious of delusions to rule the entire Islamic world; Osama encourages and leads his ambitions on by calling him his Amir. Anyone can target the entire Islamic world as perpetrator of this evil act in NY and they have on their hands a new mix of Sunni-dominated Islamic revolutions with Omar-Laden axis emerging as natural leaders to lead the jihad against the infidels. A very disturbing thought that was diffused and prevented by intelligent piece of diplomacy by UK and US.
Omar in post seizure fit issues edicts like prohibiting kite-flying, football and music, in addition to banning women from working and wearing high heels or shoes that click under their burkhas, the tent-like garments that all Afghan women must wear. Omar has three wives, one a teenager called Guljana whom he married in 1995, and has five children.
Mullah Omar’s Kabul, terrorised by Osama’s psychotic hatred, is no city of joy. It is a derelict city. A cosmopolitan place once where women wore mini-skirts and make-up, and French was the court language, today, it is living embodiment to the notion how ideological radicalism can destroy once stable societies. Much of the time people sit at home, listening to the BBC World Service and Voice of America, the only sources of independent news.
Thousands have left Kabul, food and petrol prices have rocketed and there is no kerosene for lamps. There is electricity in wealthier parts of the city; the poorer mud-walled areas are plunged into darkness at night. Most government servants haven't been paid for six months. And no one has seen the "6,000 Taliban soldiers" that the Taliban radio station reported had been sent to protect Kabul. Bin Laden's Arabs and their families, who were once a feared presence in Kabul have all disappeared. Their two-storey houses, behind high-gated walls in the affluent suburb of Wazir Akbar Khan, are locked and empty. Since Pakistan has frozen the bank accounts of Talebani Afghans and Arabs - wanted by US under the charges of terrorism – the situation of these rich suburbs of Kabul has even further deteriorated. Under two circulars of the State Bank of Pakistan, one each issued in January and August 2001, banks operating in Pakistan have been instructed to freeze and then provide details of accounts and assets, if any, being maintained by 146 leading Taliban leaders, 10 Arabs including Osama bin Laden and three Afghan business entities.
In pursuant to the UN resolution 1333, the Arabs whose bank accounts and assets were frozen include Osama bin Laden, his senior lieutenant, Mohammed Atif Aiman Muhammed Rabi Al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian and a former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad now a close associate of Osama), Sa'ad Al-Sharif (brother in-law and close associate of Osama, Saudi national and said to be head of Osama's financial organization), Saif Al-Haq (an Egyptian national thought to be responsible for Osama's security), Amin Al-Haq (an Afghan who coordinate's Osama's security), Ahmed Sa'id Al-Kadr (thought to be holding dual nationality of Egypt and Canada), Zain Al-Abidin Hussain (holding Saudi/Palestinian and Jordanian nationalities happens to be a close associate of Osama and facilitator of terrorists' travel), Saqar Al-Jadawi (an aide of Osama holding dual nationality of Saudi Arabia and Yemen) and Bilal Bin Marwan (a senior lieutenant of Osama).
Kabul today is a city of only poor people who are left in the city. There is no one who could lead an uprising and people are too tired and frightened to fight. "Few dare question the man declared Amir-ul-Momnein or Ruler of all Muslims in 1998, only the third person ever to receive such a title. Mullah Omar and his cohorts who rule Afghanistan has refused to undergo a brain scan. His doctors believe that these mood swings may be a result of shrapnel lodged in his brain when he lost his eye in 1989 during a Russian rocket attack on his mosque in a village just north of Kandahar.
According to one of the many legends that surround him, he pulled out the useless eye and threw it on to the floor. The Taliban arrived from the villages to rule the city. Their education lies in the Koran and the gun. Mullah Omar is a typical product of a generation raised in rural Madrasas who went on to spend much of their manhood fighting the Soviet forces or, later in the civil war, their countrymen. Southern Afghanistan, dominated by the Pashtun tribe, has always been a bastion of conservatism. The new, more radical fundamentalism was inflamed by bitterness by the betrayal of holy warriors turned bandits after the Soviet forces had been expelled.
Like Mullah Omar, the governor of Kandahar, Mullah Mohammed Hassan, was among a group of Madrasa graduates around Maiwand, the south of Kandahar that forms the core of the movement. Rumour has it that Mullah Omar was spurred to form the Taliban by the rape of three young women by local militiamen. "I don't know what was the final spark, but he was the first man who approached everybody and asked us to fight against corruption, that we should follow pure Islam. We decided he should be our leader," said Mullah Hassan.
One myth is that they always defeat their invaders. In fact a long succession of invaders have been quite successful in Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to the British in the 19th century. But these invaders have been successful only when they carried out a series of quick hits then staged a well-planned withdrawal. When the invaders think of staying on, like the British in the 1840s, or the Russians in the 1980s, the Afghans eventually overcome their own differences long enough to see them off. If the Americans, with British help, attack the Taliban hard from the air, put in special forces to help anti-Taliban forces take on Kabul and someone in an established old-fashioned treachery tradition turn in Osama bin Laden and his associates, in such a case the allies may do really well.
(on eve of Kabul coming under attack)
Iqbal Latif
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