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32 ~ TALIBANmore Afghan Pashtuns had joined them in their march northwards. Themajority were incredibly young - between 14 and 24 years old - and manyhad never fought before although, like all Pashtuns, they knew how tohandle a weapon.Many had spent their lives in refugee camps in Baluchistan and theNWFP provinces of Pakistan, interspersed with stints at imbibing a Koraniceducation in the dozens of madrassas that had sprung up along the;border run by Afghan mullahs or Pakistan's Islamic fundamentalist par-:ties. Here they studied the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohamnuand the basics of Islamic law as interpreted by their barely literatteachers. Neither teachers nor students had any formal grounding iimaths, science, history or geography. Many of these young warriors diinot even know the history of their own country or the story of the jilagainst the Soviets.These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I hadto know during the 1980s - men who could recount their tribal and clilineages, remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgand recounted legends and stories from Afghan history. These boys wfrom a generation who had never seen their country at peace -Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself. They had no memoriof their tribes, their elders, their neighbours nor the complex ethnicof peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland. Thboys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's surrender on thbeach of history.They had no memories of the past, no plans for the future while thepresent was everything. They were literally the orphans of the war, therootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived withlittle self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupytion they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, pur-]itan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mull:was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives sonumeaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupationstheir forefathers such as fanning, herding or the making of handicrafts^they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat.Moreover, they had willingly gathered under the all-male brotherhoodthat the Taliban leaders were set on creating, because they knew of nothingelse. Many in fact were orphans who had grown up without women -mothers, sisters or cousins. Others were madrassa students or had lived inthe strict confines of segregated refugee camp life, where the normal comingsand goings of female relatives were curtailed. Even by the norms ofconservative Pashtun tribal society, where villages or nomadic camps wereclose-knit communities and men still mixed with women to whom theyHERAT 1995: GOD'S INVINCIBLE SOLDIERS ~ 33were related, these boys had lived rough, tough lives. They had simplynever known the company of women.The mullahs who had taught them stressed that women were a temptation,an unnecessary distraction from being of service to Allah. So whenthe Taliban entered Kandahar and confined women to their homes bybarring them from working, going to school and even from shopping, themajority of these madrassa boys saw nothing unusual in such measures.They felt threatened by that half of the human race which they had neverknown and it was much easier to lock that half away, especially if it wasordained by the mullahs who invoked primitive Islamic injunctions,which had no basis in Islamic law. The subjugation of women becamethe mission of the true believer and a fundamental marker that differentiatedthe Taliban from the former Mujaheddin.This male brotherhood offered these youngsters not just a religiouscause to fight for, but a whole way of life to fully embrace and make theirexistence meaningful. Ironically, the Taliban were a direct throwback tothe military religious orders that arose in Christendom during the Crusadesto fight Islam — disciplined, motivated and ruthless in attaining theiraims. 1 In the first few months the sweeping victories of the Taliban createdan entire mythology of invincibility that only God's own soldierscould attain. In those heady early days, every victory only reinforced theperceived truth of their mission, that God was on their side and that theirinterpretation of Islam was the only interpretation.Reinforced by their new recruits, the Taliban moved north into Urozganand Zabul provinces which they captured without a shot being fired.The marauding Pashtun commanders, unwilling to test their own supporters'uncertain loyalty, surrendered by hoisting white flags and handingover their weapons in a mark of submission.In the south the Taliban moved against the forces of Ghaffar Akhunzadeh,whose clan had controlled Helmand province and its lucrative opiumpoppy fields for much of the 1980s. Here they met with fierce resistance,but by propping up smaller drug warlords against Akhunzadeh and bribingothers, the Taliban captured the province by January 1995. They continuedwestwards reaching Dilaram on the Kandahar-Herat highway andthe border of the three western provinces controlled by Ismael Khan. Atthe same time they moved north towards Kabul, easily slicing throughthe Pashtun belt where they met with more mass surrenders rather thanresistance.The chaotic and anarchic Pashtun south, where there was only a mobof petty commanders, had fallen to the Taliban easily, but now they cameup against the major warlords and the political and ethnic complexitiesthat gripped the rest of the country. In January 1995 all the oppositiongroups had joined hands to attack President Rabbani's government in