A London Times correspondent who has extensively traveled the country commented “… much of Afghanistan is like a scene from Mad Max or some futurist [post-holocaust] movie. Everywhere is the debris of war; Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers with their turrets torn off; the wrecks of former clinics, schools and shops; razed walls, cratered and mined roads.”
In 1996 the Taliban took control of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. They banned all opposition groups, political parties and trade unions. They introduced a brutally repressive form of sharia law. Music, movies, TV, card playing, singing, dancing, boxing, and even kite flying are outlawed. Homosexuals are buried alive. Women are virtually enslaved.
One of the Taliban’s major financiers is Osama bin Laden. He calls for a war of the “believers” against the “non-believers.” “Non-believers” includes non-Muslims and Muslims who do not subscribe to his particular form of “pure Islam,” Wahabism. It’s a puritanical trend of Sunni Islam imported from Saudi Arabia.
Islamic fundamentalism is a completely reactionary ideology that seeks to turn the wheel of history backward to establish theocratic dictatorships. The Taliban’s sharia law has nothing in common with Afghan culture. Most Afghan Muslims belong to the Hanafi school of thought, the most tolerant denomination of Sunni Islam. The Taliban fighters were recruited and educated at madrisas, Islamic religious schools in Pakistan.
