Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25120
GHOST OF A TOWN I had read that Kabul was one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Sitting at 5,900 feet, surrounded by sheer mountains, Kabul has been impressing conquerors since the Aryans arrived in 1,500BC. It is now of the most destroyed. In an ancient, yellowed book on Afghanistan, I come across a quote that seems appropriate today: "With one stroke a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate and the regions thereof a desert... The mighty were humbled and immersed in the calamities perdition." This was written by a traveler to Kabul in 1,251AD, 30 after Genghis Khan laid waste to the city. Even Genghis Khan would h been impressed with the destruction wreaked on Kabul by warrin factions before the Talibs took over in 1996. More than three quarters the city has been razed. Kabul is traditionally a Pashtun stronghold, but not of rough southern variety the Taliban sprung from. Ever since the Taliba ousted Massoud in 1996, Kabul has been a town under milita occupation. Tanks are parked outside all military positions, trucks mounted with antiaircraft batteries and Talib fighters race up and the streets in their Toyota 4x4s. Although the Taliban ignore existence of the official government, the Northern Alliance, Massou wages war just 20 minutes north of town. Poorly-aimed rockets rai down and no one dares swear full allegiance to either side. All that really stands in the way of the Taliban dominance 0 Afghanistan are the forbidding mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush an the Taliban's own equally forbidding and icy views on how to run country. Although the Taliban movement is only four years old the product of two decades of constant warfare. Hard times breed people. MIDNIGHT EXPRESS In the elegantly sandbagged UN compound, I chat with expat resi are concerned about the blind eye the Taliban turns to the There is talk of a new drug route from the poppy fields Helmand in southern Afghanistan. The reality is that Afghani farmers make much more mon growing poppies than any other crop. And they have devised an method of transportation. Camels are fed opium until they addicted to it, then the route is seeded with opium. Camel caravans wal without human guidance across the well-fortified border with Iran. Although the drug industry is a shadowy question mark, it abundantly clear that the Taliban are doing their best to eradicate crim in Kabul. Yes, there are still murders and robberies, but the penalties a severe and absolute. Every Friday afternoon in the soccer stadium (th the UN helped rebuild) there are punishments or executions. While I am in the city a man is convicted for stealing $313 of goods from a store and sentenced to amputation. An ambulance brings the man and three doctors to the soccer field. He is anesthetized, the hand is s removed and the arm is sewn' up. You have to be kind to be cruel PARANOIA The Taliban and many locals here will tell you that the UN and most Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have their own agenda, that are a law unto themselves. The UN has chosen to wage a PR war agai the Taliban and using the situation of women as its weapon. Kabulis will tell you that nobody cared when thousands of women were being raped and killed every day in Kabul before the Taliban arrived, but now the UN and NGOs are suddenly rabid about demanding women's rights in a country where warfare, death, hunger and poverty are equal opportunity killers. . What most outsiders, including the heavy-handed, gen junket journos, overlook is that the dreaded burqa, full female covering, was actually just one of many rules brought back by American-supported warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, long before the Taliban ever rolled Kabul. The Taliban hate Hekmatyar, like Massoud, because of thei foreign support. This focus on women's rights in a country that has government, let alone any infrastructure, is an odd choice. But it succeeded in turning the Taliban into pariahs in the global eye. I learned that the unabashed affluence and hypocrisy of NGOs i both male and female Afghanis in Kabul. The negative publicity NG have generated has effectively killed any chance Afghanis have at getti basic necessities of life. LET'S TALK I meet with the Taliban's Deputy Minister of Culture and Information learn more about the group. His office is an unlit, dusty, half-aba shelled building. Meeting with the Taliban is never an upscale affair. usually occupy looted, unheated government buildings and their taste furnishing is rummage-sale retro. I hear the whiny non-instrumentally backed vocals of music blaring through truck-mounted loudspeakers outside. Rahman Ahmad Otaki is a slim man around 40 from Kandahar. formal and elegant in his manner, but his dead brown eyes disturbing. He answers my questions about the Talibs and their plans formally and without humor. He is painstaking in his honesty. I ask him a warm-up question: "What do the Taliban think of land mines?" He tells me the Taliban support the Ottawa Treaty and believe land mines are a global tragedy. He supports the UN's de-mining effort but comments that if the de-miners worked in consultation with the Taliban, they could dramatically reduce the cost of de-mining from $300 a mine to $30. When asked how, Otaqi says they drive a tank back and forth over anti-personnel mines and can explode thousands in a day. I ask him what happens when they hit an anti-tank mine. "Our method has not been perfected," he replies without a flicker of humor. T ALIBAN GALS I shift to the "gender issue." What about the rights of women? responds that all the Taliban asks is that the West view their position women within the context of the recent conflict and the reality Afghanistan. He insists that the current ban on women working is on temporary. The edict is based on the instability of the region and Taliban views on equality. He tells me women are equal to men and