The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk Page A

me—but there was a kind of law that had been imposed on this angry, tribal society. Humanitarian workers could travel around the town at night—which may be why some of them argued that they could “do business” with the Taliban and had no right to interfere in “traditional culture.” Robberies were almost unknown. While prices were rising, at least there were now vegetables and meat in the market.
    The Taliban had finally vanquished twelve of the fifteen venal Afghan mujahedin militias in all but the far north-eastern corner of the country and imposed their own stark legitimacy on its people. It was a purist, Sunni Wahhabi faith whose interpretation of sharia law recalled the most draconian of early Christian prelates. Head-chopping, hand-chopping and a totally misogynist perspective were easy to associate with the Taliban’s hostility towards all forms of enjoyment. The Spinghar Hotel used to boast an old American television set that had now been hidden in a garden shed for fear of destruction. Television sets, like videotapes and thieves, tended to end up hanging from trees. “What do you expect?” the gardener asked me near the ruins of the old royal winter palace in Jalalabad. “The Taliban came from the refugee camps. They are giving us only what they had.” And it dawned on me then that the new laws of Afghanistan—so anachronistic and brutal to us, and to educated Afghans—were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded sixteen years before.
    The Taliban gunmen had grown up as refugees in these diseased camps in Pakistan. Their first sixteen years of life were passed in blind poverty, deprived of all education and entertainment, imposing their own deadly punishments, their mothers and sisters kept in subservience as the men decided how to fight their foreign oppressors on the other side of the border, their only diversion a detailed and obsessive reading of the Koran—the one and true path in a world in which no other could be contemplated. The Taliban had arrived not to rebuild a country they did not remember, but to rebuild their refugee camps on a larger scale. Hence there was to be no education. No television. Women must stay at home, just as they stayed in their tents in Peshawar. Thus it was to be at the airport when I eventually left; another immigration officer now, perhaps only fifteen, was wearing make-up on his face—he, like many Algerians who fought in Afghanistan, was convinced the Prophet wore kohl around his eyes in Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. He refused to stamp my passport because I had no exit visa— even though exit visas did not exist in Jalalabad. But I had broken a greater rule. I wasn’t wearing a beard. The boy pointed at my chin and shook his head in admonition, a child-schoolmaster who knew wickedness when he saw it and directed me towards the old plane on the runway with contempt.
    On the lawn of the Spinghar Hotel, two children approached me, one a fourteen-year-old with a pile of exercise books. In one of the books, in poor English, was a hand-written grammar test. “Insert the cerrect [
sic
] voice,” it demanded: “ ‘He . . . going home.’ Insert: ‘had’/‘was’/‘will.’ ” I gently inserted “was” and corrected “cerrect.” Was this the new education of the Afghan poor? But at least the boys were being taught a foreign language at their pitiful school. The smaller child even had a Persian grammar which told—inevitably—of the life of the Prophet Mohamed. But girl pupils there were none. One afternoon during the same dreary days of waiting, when I was sitting on the porch drinking tea, a woman in a pale blue burqa walked slowly up the driveway muttering to