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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2003
Our Life and Times
Taliban regroups
A short battle in the mountains bordering Pakistan in
January pitted U.S., European, and Afghan government forces against Islamic
fundamentalists allied to the Taliban and former mujahedeen commander Gulbuddin
Hekmatyr. Such a regroupment is believed to be taking place with the help of
elements of Pakistan's sinister Inter-Services Intelligence, which backed
Hekmatyr during the 1980s and later with the Taliban. Mullah Muhammad Omar, the head of the previous Taliban
regime who has successfully eluded the U.S., reportedly differs with Hekmatyr on
tactics. Where Hekmatyr has called for an immediate jihad against the new
government and the U.S., Omar's emissaries have fanned out into Pashtun areas of
Afghanistan urging quiet organizing rather than confrontation with overwhelming
U.S. power, hoping that mass anger will eventually build against the U.S.
Indiscriminate bombings and arrests have begun to build that anger, but not to
the point of creating much support for the widely discredited Hekmatyr or Omar. The situation in government-ruled areas is also very
troubling. While some advances have been made since the Taliban was dislodged in
2001, there is also evidence of a slide back toward fundamentalism by the
warlords the U.S. used to oust the Taliban. In Herat, ruled by the warlord Ismail Khan, a newly-formed religious police harasses those few women brave enough to go in public without the full covering of the burqa. Women have been most outraged, however, by a new law enacted on Jan. 10 that bans them from receiving private lessons from male teachers, something they have been using to catch up on their studies after five years of a Taliban ban on women's education. |
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