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108 ~ TALIBANa single one remained. Thus the Taliban's gender policies only worsenedan ongoing crisis. Within three months of the capture of Kabul, the Talibanclosed 63 schools in the city affecting 103,000 girls, 148,000 boys and11,200 teachers, of whom 7,800 were women. 5 They shut down KabulUniversity sending home some 10,000 students of which 4,000 werewomen. By December 1998, UNICEF reported that the country's educationalsystem was in a state of total collapse with nine in ten girls andtwo in three boys not enrolled in school. 6The Afghan people's desperate plight was largely ignored by the outsideworld. Whereas in the 1980s the war in Afghanistan attracted attentionand aid, the moment the Soviets withdrew their troops in 1989, Afghanistandropped off the radar screen of world attention. The ever dwindlingaid from wealthy donor countries, which did not even meet the minimumbudgetary requirements of the humanitarian aid effort, became a scandal.In 1996 the UN had requested US$124 million for its annual humanitarianaid programme to Afghanistan, but by the end of the year, it hadonly received US$65 million. In 1997 it asked for US$133 million andreceived only US$56 million or 42 per cent and the following year it Iasked for US$157 million but received only US$53 million or 34 percent. By 1999 the UN had drastically scaled down its request to justUS$113 million. In the words of scholar Barnett Rubin: 'If the situationin Afghanistan is ugly today, it is not because the people of Afghanistanare ugly. Afghanistan is not only the mirror of the Afghans: it is themirror of the world. "If you do not like the image in the mirror do notbreak the mirror, break your face," says an old Persian proverb.' 7When Kabul's women looked at themselves in the mirror, evenbefore the Taliban captured the city, they saw only despair. In 1996I met Bibi Zohra in a tiny bakery in Kabul. She was a widow wholed a group of young women who prepared nan, the unleavened bakedbread every Afghan eats, for widows, orphans and disabled people.Some 400,000 people in Kabul depended on these bakeries funded bythe WFP, which included 25,000 familes headed by war widows and7,000 families headed by disabled men. Zohra's mud shack was pockmarkedwith shrapnel and bullet holes. It had first been destroyed byrockets fired by Gulbuddin Hikmetyar's forces in 1993, then shelled bythe Taliban in 1995.With six children and her parents to support she had donated part ofthe tiny plot of land where her house once stood to WFP for a bakery.'Look at my face, don't you see the tragedy of our lives and our countrymarked all over it?' she said. 'Day by day the situation is worsening. Wehave become beggars dependent on the UN to survive. It is not theAfghan way. Women are exhausted, depressed and devastated. We arejust waiting for peace, praying for peace every minute of the day.'A VANISHED GENDER 109The plight of Bibi Zohra's children and other kids was even worse. Ata playground set up by Save the Children in the battered, half-destroyedMicroyan housing complex, rake-thin Afghan children played grimly onthe newly installed swings. It was a playground littered with reminders ofthe war - discarded artillery shell cases, a destroyed tank with a gapinghole where the turret once was and trees lopped down by rocket fire.'Women and children face the brunt of the conflict,' Save the Children'sDirector Sofie Elieussen told me. 'Women have to cope with no food andmalnutrition for their children. Women suffer from hysteria, trauma anddepression because they don't know when the next rocket attack willcome. How can children relate to a mother's discipline or affection whenthey have seen adults killing each other and mothers are unable to providefor their basic needs? There is so much stress that the children don'teven trust each other and parents have stopped communicating with theirkids or even trying to explain what is going on,' said Elieussen.A UNICEF survey of Kabul's children conducted by Dr Leila Guptafound that most children had witnessed extreme violence and did notexpect to survive. Two-thirds of the children interviewed had seen somebodykilled by a rocket and scattered corpses or body parts. More than 70per cent had lost a family member and no longer trusted adults. 'They allsuffer from flashbacks, nightmares and loneliness. Many said they felt theirlife was not worth living anymore,' said Dr Gupta. Every norm of familylife had been destroyed in the war. When children cease to trust theirparents or parents cannot provide security, children have no anchor inthe real world.Children were caught up in the war on a greater scale than in anyother civil conflict in the world. All the warlords had used boy soldiers,some as young as 12 years old, and many were orphans with no hope ofhaving a family, an education or a job except soldiering. The Talibanwith their linkages to the Pakistani madrassas encouraged thousands ofchildren to enlist and fight. Entire units were made up of kids as loadersfor artillery batteries, ammunition carriers, guarding installations and asfighters. Significantly a n\ajor international effort in 1998 to limit the ageof soldiers to 18, rather than the current minimum age of 15 met withresistance by the US, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. A 1999 AmnestyInternational report said there were over 300,000 children under 18enlisted as soldiers worldwide. 8 The plight of women and children wouldget much worse after the Taliban capture of Kabul.Every Kabuli woman I met during 1995-96 - and reporters could theneasily meet and talk to women on the street, in shops and offices — knewtheir precarious lives would only get worse if the Taliban captured Kabul.One such woman was Nasiba Gul, a striking 27-year-old single womanwho aspired to be part of the modem world. A 1990 graduate of Kabul