Telegraph

All of a sudden, women are in the picture (Filed: 01/11/2001)

The regime is breaking its own taboos to try to sway Western opinion, writes Ahmed Rashid

THE Taliban's newly discovered concern for civilian victims of US bombing raids has left many Afghans appalled.

In seven years of Taliban rule, the regime has been characterised by an almost complete indifference to the welfare of the vast majority of the population. Around 90 per cent of the country's tiny budget is spent on making war, while opponents are tortured and summarily hanged. Munitions are routinely aimed at civilian areas and the air force often targeted non-combatants before it was destroyed by the Americans.

"The Taliban have not fed a single hungry Afghan, created a single job or done anything that would remotely resemble a sense of responsibility that rulers should have for their own people," said a former professor of Kabul University, who is now a refugee in Peshawar and asked not to be named.

"These media events that the Taliban are now staging for Western reporters are ironic to say the least. But they are for people who do not know anything about how the Afghan population have suffered over the past seven years," he said.

The Taliban have long been criticised for their lack of respect for basic human rights and their lack of any economic agenda for the country since they seized power in 1996. Taliban ministers who proposed creating an economic and job creation agenda in 1997 and 1998 were quickly sidelined and then sent to the front.

The only attempts at rebuilding Afghanistan's shattered infrastructure have been the repair of roads and the setting up of petrol pumps in some cities, although that may have been designed to improve the working conditions of smugglers who trade goods and drugs between Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.

More than 60 per cent of the Taliban's estimated £60 million budget is raised through taxes on smuggling. As drought, starvation and the collapse of agricultural production have worsened over the past year, UN and other relief agencies have fought running battles with the Taliban's religious police to keep working.

Since the US bombing began, the Taliban have looted the offices of all major relief agencies and terrorised their Afghan staff. Now for propaganda purposes the Taliban have broken a seven-year taboo against allowing women and children to be filmed.

"The whole world knows how the Taliban treat women and children, depriving them of food, education or occupation and they have never allowed women to be shown on TV before," said an Afghan female aid worker who is employed by a European aid agency.

"Now they are showing pictures of dead Afghan women and children. Why did they not allow TV cameras to film the living dead who were starving before these events took place?" said the woman. The Taliban have mastered the art of propaganda by allowing selective access for western television crews to destruction caused by bombing. But they have done little to alleviate the people's suffering.

More than 70 per cent of people in all major Afghan cities have fled to the countryside or the Pakistan and Iran borders to escape both the bombing and increased repression and forced conscription.

Ahmed Rashid is the bestselling author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

-- Anonymous, October 31, 2001

Answers

I was just thinking tonight how roundly plump and well-nourished the Taliban ambassador and his henchmen look.

-- Anonymous, October 31, 2001

reminds me of Olive Oyl's song about Brutus, in the Popeye movie.

"He's large."

LOL

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2001