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The militia swept in before anyone realised what was going on. Zalmai, a 20-year-old merchant, was tending to the apples and cucumbers and other produce at his Kabul store when the officers began grilling him.
“Give us the weapons you have,” one demanded.
“We don’t have any,” Zalmai answered. “We’re simple people. We’re just selling fruit.”
The officers didn’t believe him, and suddenly Zalmai found himself thrown into a car with three other young men. Within minutes, the four were hustled to a police station and eventually to prison, where Zalmai was beaten on the feet with sticks and given a choice: Go to the front to fight in the country’s civil war or languish behind bars indefinitely.
It was no choice, he figured. Zalmai’s odyssey began that day some five months ago. It took the young man to the heart of the Taliban military, a machine powered in part by forced conscripts who are threatened with death or ‘ son if they do not fight.
Details about the Taliban military are sketchy, but Zalmai’s story and others like it hint at what opposition leaders believe could be a fundamental weakness of the Taliban armed forces - most of them may not want to fight.
The accounts of the forced conscripts raise a question about what kind of fighting force - one that was strengthened under siege from the West, or an army crumbling from within because of defections from unwilling troops - the U.S. would face if it sent ground troops to Afghanistan. The zeal of the true believers is matched by the reluctance of the rest, according to interviews with defectors, prisoners and opposition spies in the past two weeks. Given the chance to defect or surrender, opposition leaders say they believe the majority of Taliban fighters would gladly lay down arms that were forced into their hands in the first place.
“They’re weak because many of them don’t want to fight on the side of the Taliban,” said Golbashan, another resident of Kabul who was seized by police and sent to the front lines- against his will. He estimated that 60 to 70 per cent of the Taliban troops were compelled into service and would not fight if they had the choice. In his own unit of 45 fighters, he said, “Not one of them wants to fight.”
For now, however, the Taliban’s principal foes, rebels known as the Northern Alliance, have yet to see the mass defections they predicted would follow the beginning of the U.S. aerial bombardment. About 1,000 Taliban troops switched sides in central Afghanistan this week, but fear may be keeping others from following their lead. According to one defector, the Taliban commanders shoot any recruits who refuse to fight. In the Northern Alliance, some of the ethnic warlords have also been accused of brutal behaviour toward their own troops. But the alliance is not known to routinely gather recruits by force.
The stories of the Taliban’s unwilling soldiers come in part from defectors who escaped from the Taliban, and prisoners who were captured by the Northern Alliance, so their accounts may be skewed by their own experiences. Some of them may have been mistreated because they were from ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan, while the Taliban are drawn from the Pashtun who are based in the south.
However, the stories told in recent days by different eyewitnesses have been hauntingly similar and consistent. The days leading up to the U.S. bombing campaign accelerated the Taliban roundups that swept young men off the streets to be pressed into service of a movement that imposes its strict interpretation of Islamic law on its people.
In Kabul, last week, the religious
police went door to door in the pre-dawn hours seizing young men. Much
like Zalmai, Golbashan was arrested by two officers on motorcycles who
stopped him one day outside a bathhouse in Kabul. (LAT-WP Svc.)
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