Posted on 11/13/2001 4:35:13 AM PST by Brandonmark
The New York Times
November 13, 2001
In Fallen Taliban City, a Busy, Busy Barber
By DEXTER FILKINS
ALIQAN, Afghanistan, Nov. 12 — In this town just taken from the Taliban by Northern Alliance troops, the busiest spot was Amon's Barbershop, where men lined up to have their beards shaved off.
One after another they came and one after the other the beards fell to the floor. At the end of the day, Amonullah, the proprietor, stood exhausted in a pile of beard cuttings. He smiled when he realized there was one thing he had forgotten to do.
"Tomorrow, I'm going to shave off my own beard," Mr. Amonullah said. With that, he closed for the night, capping the busiest day he had ever known.
In the 12 hours since the Taliban soldiers left this town, a joyous mood has spread. The people of Taliqan, who lived for two years under the Taliban's oppressive Islamic rule, burst onto the streets to toss off the restrictions that had burrowed into the most intimate aspects of their lives. Men tossed their turbans into the gutters. Families dug up their long-hidden television sets. Restaurants blared music. Cigarettes flared, and young men talked of growing their hair long.
In the most noticeable change of all, women, clad in their head-to-toe burkas, walked the streets alone, no longer required to have a male relative at their side. They walked by themselves and they walked with each other, their blue and white and red burkas blowing open in the afternoon breeze.
"The Taliban, they were cruel people, and the whole city clapped and cheered when they retreated," said Muhammad Humayun, a 23- year-old pharmacist. "The first thing I did was take my turban off and throw it away."
Of course, the ebb and flow of armies always produces some quick adaptations. Behind the enthusiasm of some residents there possibly lurked a cooler calculation of where their best interest now lay. Still, the joy here was palpable.
Taliqan, a valley town in northeast Afghanistan, fell to the Northern Alliance on Sunday, after troops under Gen. Daoud Khan overran Taliban lines and secured the defection of an important local warlord.
The Taliban fled in a hurry. General Daoud and his men rolled into the city at 5:30 p.m., and the townspeople poured into the streets to greet them. The adults threw money and roses, and the children clambered aboard the tanks and trucks.
With that entrance, Taliqan became the second major city to fall to the Afghan opposition in three days, and the first that foreign journalists have been able to enter. As yet, Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest northern city, has remained inaccessible to correspondents since its reported capture by the Northern Alliance.
In the tea shops and food stores that line the main bazaar, the locals said the people here never embraced the Taliban soldiers who captured the city two years ago or the creed they brought with them.
The Taliban imposed the extreme brand of Islam that has brought them condemnation around the globe. All men had to wear beards at least four inches long. No woman could work or go to school or leave the house alone. Television, music and photos of people were banned. Violators were beaten, jailed, mutilated and killed.
Turbaned religious police with rubber whips patrolled the streets in search of the most minor infractions, people said.
But the ideology, it seems, never sank in. When Taliban soldiers arrived they smashed every television set they could find. As they approached his home, Muhammad Asif, a young shopkeeper, rushed his Sharp 17-inch television and VCR to the backyard, where he buried them.
Since then, Mr. Asif has dreamed of the day when he would be able to watch again. That moment arrived today when he unearthed his television and slipped a weathered copy of "Titanic" into the VCR.
"Everywhere people are digging up their television sets," Mr. Asif. Like those of so many other men in Taliqan, his head was bare in public for the first time in many months.
"All the restrictions, on television, on shaving, on women," Mr. Asif said, waving his hand. "The Koran says nothing about such things. The Taliban people are a bunch of illiterates."
Down the street, at Habibullah's Restaurant, the Afghan music poured into the streets. It came from a cassette recorder hidden in a wooden box over the counter. Closed, the box was so inconspicuous that the Taliban police never noticed.
Within hours of the Taliban retreat, Habibullah opened the box, and today the music played so loud that his voice was barely audible. "I haven't listened to music in two years," he said, sitting cross-legged on a pillow. "It's nice."
People like Mr. Habibullah are angry at the Taliban for the things they did, but in the hours after the Northern Alliance takeover, it was unclear whether the people's thirst for vengeance would be slaked.
Amadullah Gard, the local com mander whose defection to the Northern Alliance helped bring about the Taliban's collapse, said that more than 400 Taliban soldiers and their supporters had been detained. He said he was not certain yet how they would be dealt with.
Around town, many people said the Taliban should be judged harshly.
"They brought Osama bin Laden to this country," said Hashmatullah, seated in Habibullah's Restaurant. "We will kill them."
There were some signs that the Afghan tradition of taking revenge on deposed oppressors might stay dormant here. As General Daoud prepared to advance on Taliqan, he broadcast a radio message urging residents to spare Taliban collaborators and ethnic Pashtuns in the city.
Taliqan, like much of northeastern Afghanistan, is dominated by ethnic Tajiks. The Taliban are overwhelmingly Pashtun.
"So far, no one has bothered me," said Gul Agha, a Pashtun trader, who sat in a restaurant amid a mostly Tajik clientele. Even though a Pashtun, Mr. Agha said he never liked the Taliban, in part because they seemed to favor wealthy traders over the poorer ones like himself.
Until they left on Sunday, the Taliban religious police would sit in Amon's Barbershop every day, watching for men who had let their hair grow too long.
If they decided it was too long, Mr. Amonullah said, they would yank the customer out of his chair and take him away for a beating and a night in jail. Under the Taliban's interpretation of Islam, the bangs on a man's head should hang about halfway down the forehead but no more.
"What they said is, `Don't let your hair look like that of an American,' " Mr. Amonullah said. With the Taliban gone, there was no way today to confirm this description of what Taliqan had endured.
Mr, Amonullah's last customer of the day was Ismail Istat, who had come to have his beard sheared off. As Mr. Amonullah swept his straight razor across Mr. Istat's cheeks, his beard joined the large pile of hair on the floor below. When it was over, he gazed into the mirror at the tan lines on this face and then handed over 20 cents to Mr. Amonullah.
"I've got nothing against beards, you know, and as you can see I've kept my mustache," said Mr. Istat, a shopkeeper. "The problem is when someone tells you that you have to have one. That's why I hated it."
:^( Horrid.
Maybe the new order will permit a little retribution. I understand there is a so called man hating artist somewhere in America that enjoys hanging replicas of penis's from a noose, perhaps the repressed women in Afganistan could take heed and hang the real things out to dry, a sort of taliban booty display or sorts. I know-crude. Still.....what's good for the goose and all that!
Kind of like how we feel about seat belts and motorcycle helmets, Mr. Istat.
Nah, the UN doesn't care about human rights unless your skin is white. They seem to like to conveniently ignore mass genocide in Africa, genocide in the middle-east, etc. but they'll be damned if those pesky Americans keep executing them there criminals. It's alright to kill a few hundred thousand of your fellow citizens as long as they are of a d different tribe, but you put a murderer to death, that's just downright evil.
When you start talking nation building, you end up talking MICRO nation building. Impossible in practice but attractive in theory.
Hmmmmmmm....
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
A very interesting outlook on life. The penalty for being found with one would be extreme, yet didn't just get rid of them, they buried them -- saving them for later. So on the one hand they assumed the Taliban wouldn't last, and on the other hand, they had their own version of resistance to the Taliban. They also didn't fight back -- they patiently waited, apparently, for the problem to go away. (A good assumption, given that it's probably what's always happened in Afghanistan.)
I see three conflicting things here: these folks can probably be jollied into accepting a reasonable government, just as they apparently accepted a Taliban government; they will probably not be particularly protective of whatever government they have; but they do have an underlying independent streak that might be tapped somehow.
It also seems to suggest that there's a real difference between the soldiers in Afghanistan, and "normal people." Probably it's always been so. One wonders if it's even possible in Afghanistan to find leaders who aren't involved with armies of one kind or another. And if one can't find a non-army leader, one wonders if a civilized Afghan government will ever exist.
I think they learned a long time ago to wait and see. Sure the Taliban were nasty. But they probably have no idea whether the Northern Alliance is going to be better or worse. Better safe than sorry -- and in winter, a nice burqa is probably cozy and warm.
Well, yes. But as we've seen, if you can actually liberate a country (e.g., Japan or Germany), you've probably done the best possible job of self-defense. We certainly have an interest in removing the conditions that allowed Al Queda to move to Afghanistan in the first place.
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