page_49 < previous page page_49 next page > Page 49 gious, ethnic, and linguistic mosaic of prewar Afghan society was shattered. None of the Afghan leaders or warlords knew how to reassemble the jagged, jumbled pieces of what had once been a country. Unseen by the West, the Soviet KGB’S campaign to promote tribal turmoil had been a deadly success. The result was violent civil war in which all Afghanistan’s neighbors, including Russia, intervened. In 1995 a new force burst upon the scene. An army of supposed seminarians, or �śTalibs”�"from Islamic madrassas�"suddenly took the field armed with tanks, artillery, and even a small air force. With AK-47s in one hand, and the Holy Koran in the other, Taliban quickly captured the important western cities of Herat and Kandahar. Then they advanced on Jalalabad, and finally took Kabul. Their enemies seemed to melt away before the Islamic host. Taliban was yet another product of the inventive military minds at Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence. The ISI boys had somehow cooked up the idea of Taliban as a sort of crusading army that would rid Afghanistan of anarchy, rapine, and banditry, all very real plagues at the time. Talibs from the many madrassas in Pakistan, some of them members of the old Islamic International Brigade, were trained and armed by the ISI, then sent into battle. Led by the one-eyed Sheik Omar, the new faction preached a medieval faith that often employed Islamic terminology to foster the most archaic customs of tribal Afghanistan. The heavily armed Talibs did not give a hoot for foreign opinion or diplomatic niceties. These wild mountaineers did as the pleased, and told the rest of the world, in particular horrified Western aid agencies and their idealistic workers, to go straight to the devil. Women were to work only in the home, and be veiled from head to toe when they went out, lest they cause good men to sin by rousing their lusts. Men had to wear beards to show they belonged to the faithful, and were not sissified, Westernized Afghans or, worse, Communists. Taliban’s medievalism was a direct reaction to the Communist era. The Afghan Communists had championed social modernization, education, and women’s equality. Communist Afghan men shaved their beards; Communist Afghan women went unveiled, and worked in offices, stores, schools, and hospitals. They were thoroughly modern Marxists. In Kabul, leftist intellectuals drank whiskey and vodka, which traditional Muslims view with as much disapproval, or even horror, as Westerners do the public consumption of addictive drugs. < previous page page_49 next page >