goals. Warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who later became a fervent supporter of the Taliban and who received substantial financial support from the United States, were considered by the United States as “freedom fighters” and were trained in military camps in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
Unlike other liberation movements elsewhere, the Afghan mujahideen never encouraged the active participation of women in jihad. Women in Peshawar who criticized the politics of the mujahideen were threatened and sometimes killed. This is what happened to Meena Keshwar Kamal - almost universally known by just her first name - founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who denounced the gender discriminatory policies of the fundamentalist groups together with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (Moghadam 1994).
Attacks against women did not begin with the Taliban. In the mujahideen-ruled refugee camps in Pakistan, women had to face constant restrictions of movement and threats to their lives. In 1989, a fatwa (religious decree) was promulgated against women who worked for humanitarian organizations. Women were also requested to wear the hijab (head covering) and to strictly respect the rules of purdah. According to the fatwa, “women were not to wear perfume, noisy bangles or Western clothes. Veils had to cover the body at all times and clothes were not to be made of material which was soft or which rustled. Women were not to walk in the middle of the street or swing their hips, they were not to talk, laugh, or joke with strangers or foreigners” (Moghadam 2002, 25). A year later, girls were forbidden to attend school. The United States never reacted to these decrees and simply abandoned the Afghans once their proxy war with the Soviet Union was over.
Under mujahideen control, the camps provided laboratory conditions to experiment with modern forms of gendered repression. The rigorous separation of the sexes was reinforced through the mobilization of men to the cause of jihad and military operations. Separated from their male relatives, women were rooted in the camps, under the control of religious and fundamentalist leaders (Olesen 1996). Therefore, the fundamentalist attitude to women could be summarized as a vindictive application of sharia within the context of a political program aimed at the establishment of a complete Islamic state, justified by what they considered to be a literal interpretation of the Koran. Traditional appeals to modesty and self-effacement were turned into systematic interdiction of any visible form of feminine expression that was interpreted as anti-Islamic. These policies were implemented by the mujahideen when they took control of Kabul in 1992 and further reinforced when the Taliban came to power.
The Civil War, 1992–96
During the years of Soviet occupation, Kabul had been perceived as the origin of all the country’s misfortunes. For the conservative rural-based mujahideen opposition, which had been supported by the United States during the Cold War, Kabul and other cities were perceived to be the centers of “sin” and “vice” precisely because of the high visibility of educated, emancipated urban women. There was a widespread perception that the population of Kabul had collaborated with and had been therefore corrupted by the Soviet regime. Many mujahideen groups shared the idea that the people of Kabul should be punished for their “immoral values” (Kandiyoti 2005). As Tamin Ansary (2001) puts it: “When the Mujahedin finally toppled the last Communist ruler out of Afghanistan and marched into Kabul, it was not just the triumph of the Afghan people against the foreign invaders but the conquest, finally, of Kabul (and its culture) by the countryside.”
One of the first orders of the new mujahideen government was that women should be veiled in public. In August 1993, the government’s Office of Research and Decrees of the Supreme Court went a step further by issuing an order to dismiss all female civil servants from their posts. The decree stated that “women need not leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case, they are to cover themselves completely; are not to wear attractive clothing and decorative accessories; do not wear perfume; their jewelery must not make any noise; they are not to walk gracefully or with pride and in the middle of the sidewalk” (Emadi 2002, 124).
The decrees promulgated under the Taliban regime presented the same recommendations. The Taliban did not introduce a radically new political agenda but officialized dress codes and social conduct for both men and women, which were in any case followed by the majority of the population under the different mujahideen governments for fear of repression.
The high hopes that greeted the arrival of the new mujahideen government were quickly dashed as conflict erupted between the different factions in the coalition. Most of Kabul was reduced to rubble as ceasefires were agreed to and then quickly broken. As alliances changed, the front lines of conflict shifted within the city. There were widespread reports of women being raped as different factions wrested control of opposing neighborhoods of the city. Women, who represented the majority of trained teachers and nurses, lost their employment due to the closing and destruction of most of the city’s infrastructure.
The mujahideen rule was therefore the blueprint upon which the Taliban phenomenon could rise. Instead of a breach in policies, the Taliban regime radicalized the mujahideen legacy. Their success in getting control over the country was not the result of their fundamentalist ideology, which was generally perceived as excessive and unacceptable among the majority of the population, but rather the outcome of a well-trained and properly equipped military contingent gradually gaining strength as the country grappled with war and destruction.
The Taliban Rule, 1996–2001
The Taliban emerged in a political vacuum created by the civil war and people’s longing for security and the end of conflict between the different mujahideen factions. The movement was created in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan where its major figures received religious and military education. Indeed in 1977, Pakistan’s dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, enforced an Islamic constitution, ostensibly to bring legal, social, economic, and political institutions of the country in conformity with the Koran. He unsurprisingly backed the Afghan militants in Peshawar and financed the building of thousands of madrassas in the vicinity of refugee camps with help from Saudi Arabia. Impoverished Afghan widows reassured by the promise of regular meals and a minimum education eagerly entrusted their sons to the care of the madrassas that became the training grounds for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda supporters. Herded in decrepit boardinghouses, cut off from contact with mothers and sisters, they were fed an extremely simplified messianic Islam, which was to become the Taliban creed. Three years after their emergence on the Afghan military scene, the Taliban had taken control of over 80 percent of Afghanistan. As they gradually consolidated their power, security improved in the cities, facilitating exchanges and circulation of goods and therefore reviving the economy.
According to Nancy Dupree (2001, 151), the Taliban’s decision to impose the strict curtailment of women together with their compulsory veiling under chadari in public was a means for the regime to “send a message of its intent to subordinate the personal autonomy of every individual, thereby strengthening the impression that it was capable of exercising control over all aspects of social behaviour, male and female.” When the international community reacted against these measures and denounced what became labeled as “gender apartheid,” the Taliban high authorities argued that their aim was to ensure their sisters’ security in a period when the priority was the establishment of law and order. Whether or not the limitations imposed on women would have progressively disappeared had the Taliban totally eliminated their opponents and had been recognized by the international community remains a difficult question to answer. However, the Taliban policies were marked by many contradictions and inconsistencies that left much room for interpretation and accommodation at the local level.
The Taliban central government was far from functioning effectively. Its base of power lay primarily in a very young militia nurtured in the isolation of ultraconservative madrassas where they imbibed ideas by rote without the encouragement of open inquiry. Most of them had never been exposed to urban living. The weakness of the central government allowed decisions to be made to a great extent at the local level. Women’s condition therefore varied from one
