i just finished reading the kite runner by khaled hosseini. it is raw, graphic, intense, and beautifully written. i highly recommend it. the story takes place in modern-day afghanistan. nothing is held back in this fictional narrative, including the extreme cruelty of the taliban and the harsh reality that it was to live under their rule. what i came away with from this book with was that fighting oppression is not a theory. it’s not simply a war game. this is sobering reality to so many people in the world. we must do what we can to stop this oppression. the taliban isn’t a creation of someone’s imagination. it’s a source of pure evil.
if you have any doubts about that, keep reading. the obvious disclaimer applies to anything linked here: some of the articles are very disturbing and somewhat graphic. there may be more information here than you want to know.
Telegraph | News | I was one of the Taliban’s torturers: I crucified people
“YOU must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.”
from afgha.com – Questions / Answers
“As a military and political force, the Taliban surfaced in Qandahar in 1994 when Afghanistan was plagued by a vicious civil war. The main military struggle at that time was taking place in Kabul between the forces of Burhanuddin Rabbani and his military commander Ahmad Shah Masood and their allies on one side and the forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his allies on the other side. As a result, about two thirds of Kabul was razed to the ground resembling “an archeological site” with a UN estimated deaths of 50,000 civilians. The rest of the country was taken by warlords and petty chieftains who ruled their areas with a free-for-all attitude. The Amnesty International 1995 annual report about Afghanistan begins with these terrifying accounts:
Thousands of civilians were killed and thousands more were wounded in artillery attacks deliberately aimed at residential areas by all factions in the civil war. Hundreds of men, women and children were deliberately and arbitrarily killed by members of the main armed groups during the raids on civilian homes. Torture, including rape of women and children, was reportedly widespread. People were unlawfully imprisoned in private detention centers because of their political opinions, religion, ethnic origin, or as hostages. Journalists covering the war were detained or imprisoned by the warring factions. Hundreds of people “disappeared.” Warlords appointed themselves as so called Islamic judges and ordered punishments including executions.”
civilians were intentionally targeted and killed without cause. women and children were tortured. people with opposing political views, religious beliefs, or an offensive ethnicity, were jailed. this is the mindset of the enemies we face today in the war on terror. this ideological belief system rarely leaves room for any significant negotiation.
The Taliban’s War on Women: A Health and Human Rights Crisis in Afghanistan.
” PHR’s researcher when visiting Kabul in 1998, saw a city of beggars — women who had once been teachers and nurses now moving in the streets like ghosts under their enveloping burqas , selling every possession and begging so as to feed their children. It is difficult to find another government or would-be government in the world that has deliberately created such poverty by arbitrarily depriving half the population under its control of jobs, schooling, mobility, and health care. Such restrictions are literally life threatening to women and to their children.
The Taliban’s abuses are by no means limited to women. Thousands of men have been taken prisoner, arbitrarily detained, tortured, and many killed and disappeared. Men are beaten and jailed for wearing beards of insufficient length (that of a clenched fist beneath the chin), are subjected to cruel and degrading conditions in jail, and suffer such punishments as amputation and stoning. Men are also vulnerable to extortion, arrest, gang rape, and abuse in detention because of their ethnicity or presumed political views. The Taliban’s Shari’a courts lack even a semblance of due process, with no provisions for legal counsel and frequent use of torture to extract confessions. “
Fact Sheet: Al Qaeda and Taliban Atrocities–more than you need to know to be convinced of their motives.
Salon.com Life | The Taliban’s bravest opponents— this salon piece graphically describes a public execution, just like in kite runner. sadly, reality and fiction are too close together when it comes to the taliban. the first page should be enough to understand what’s going on here.
the idea that groups like this deserve mercy and compassion is beyond my comprehension. it doesn’t make sense to me that there are still excuses made for people like this, because there isn’t any valid excuse for their behavior AT ALL. the support of terrorism and terrorists like bin laden make the taliban a legitimate target. everyone benefits from the defeat of groups like this. that is why the question of whether iraq would be ruled by sharia law or not was such an important one, because of its strict interpretation by sunni muslims that would suggest similar punishments in iraq to those in afghanistan under the taliban. i believe that iraq’s new constitution strikes the right balance in this respect, but i’m not any kind of expert on the subject.
are afghanis better off now than than they were under the taliban? the signs seem to point to an affirmative answer to this question.
from the U.S. Embassy-China website, some hopeful words for Afghanistan:
“While the terrorists hide in caves, the Afghan people are emerging into the light of day to face the challenges of their future. The contrast between their life under the Taliban and their life without the Taliban is crystal clear. Where the Taliban have fled, they can no longer terrorize the population. Afghans–men, women and children–are rejecting what the Taliban stood for. Afghans are once again taking control of their own lives. As the Taliban fled Kandahar on December 7, witnesses reported that joyous residents poured into the streets and tore down the Taliban flag.
Soccer stadiums, once used for public executions, floggings, and amputations are once again used for sports. Children fly kites. Women go to the market without fear of being beaten. Men are no longer required to wear regulation-length beards; women may choose whether or not to wear the burqa. Girls are flocking back to schools after five long years of being barred from public education.”
these are hopeful signs. of course there is still work to be done in afghanistan, but it is headed in the right direction. i hope that we would have the patience to continue the progress being made in iraq as well, but i have a feeling that public opinion may short-circuit that process at some point. i would very much like to be wrong about that.