Afghanistan to the Taliban, women and torture: what happened in 1996

Former president Najibullah tortured and hanged from a lamppost, men forced to grow a beard, women to wear burqas, girls’ schools closed. This happened starting in September 1996, when the Taliban imposed their regime in Afghanistan. Now that the ‘Koranic students’ have regained control of the country, again called as it was then the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”, it is necessary to remember what happened to imagine what will happen in Afghanistan, although some analysts believe that in the meantime the Taliban leaders have expanded their horizons during the periods spent in Pakistan and the Gulf. Read also Between 1996 and 2001, when the Americans invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban imposed on the whole territory a strict interpretation of the sharia, the Islamic law. This translated, the Washington Post recalls, “into a deeply violent, repressive and unstable nation that welcomed transnational terrorists.” In 1996, after conquering Kabul, the Taliban deployed teams of “moral police” under the orders of the agency for the Promotion of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice. “Women who went out unaccompanied by men were beaten in the street. football and music were banned. Kabul stadium was used for public executions. Images were banned, but dramatic photos and videos leaked from the country: an Afghan mother shot dead between the goalposts of the stadium, children dying of treatable diseases in abandoned pediatric hospitals, the large statues of Buddha in Bamiyan destroyed because they were believed to be idolatrous. Meanwhile, a sea of ​​refugees fled the country. The government of Afghanistan was entrusted to a small circle of Taliban leaders who had fought against the Soviets. The ministers, the governor of the Central Bank, were former military commanders or came from the madrassah, the Koranic schools. sporadic initial attempts to gain international accreditation by sending an envoy to the UN. Mullah Omar, who led the country, also wrote to the United States offering good relations. But the regime remained isolated, with a 1998 attempt by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to negotiate for access to humanitarian aid. But the same instability that had facilitated the Taliban’s victory prevented them from maintaining control over the country. Omar rarely left his Kandahar base and his militias waged brutal military campaigns, burning entire villages and persecuting the Shiite minority. Meanwhile, the hospitality offered to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden put Afghanistan in the crosshairs of the United States. Even before the military intervention of 20011, Bill Clinton’s United States had launched cruise missiles against Afghanistan in response to the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Will we go back to 1996? This is not necessarily the case. “The post-2001 Taliban proved to have become a more political organization, capable of learning, more open to the influence of external factors,” wrote Thomas Ruttig in an analysis for the Combating Terrorism Center in West Point. “Many Taliban leaders have spent more than a decade in Pakistan or the Gulf, which has enormously broadened their horizons compared to their provincial past in southern Afghanistan”, noted already in 2016 Borhan Osman and Anand Gopal in the essay “Taliban Views on to Future State. “