Author: Juan O. Tamayo
Publication: Knight Ridder Newspapers
Date: December 11, 2001
Pishin, Pakistan - The roughly 200
Taliban fighters who have come home to the apple-growing oasis of Pishin
on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan are not getting the hero's welcome
they might have expected when they set off across the border to fight the
holy war. "People blame them for the destruction of Afghanistan," said
shopkeeper Mohammed Akhram.
The U.S. bombing campaign against
the Taliban, who were harboring terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, detonated
massive and often violent anti-American protests across the Muslim world.
But as the Taliban militia collapsed with stunning swiftness it has become
plain that people here have little patience with losers.
That is a remarkable reversal, especially
for a hamlet that looked on with pride not long ago as some of its youths,
filled with Muslim zeal, went off to join the Taliban.
Now police are keeping an eye on
Taliban who returned in defeat. Villagers no longer listen to their views
on religious issues. Only their madrassas, the Islamic seminaries long
accused of turning out zealots, welcome them. Even they are under new pressure.
Sales of bin Laden posters trailed
off, and anti-American demonstrations around Pakistan have dwindled to
small crowds of diehards usually outnumbered by police.
If Pishin is anything to judge by,
defeat has so discredited the Taliban among their hometown neighbors that
they will find it difficult to continue promoting their politics or their
puritanical brand of Islam.
Pishin is a relatively prosperous
agricultural district of 300,000 people, a drab brown town and dozens of
mudbrick hamlets spread around an oasis in the Baluchistan desert, 40 miles
from the border with Afghanistan.
People here are all Pashtuns, the
largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and second largest in Pakistan. Tens
of thousands are refugees from the many Afghan wars.
Over the years hundreds of youths
educated in local madrassas routinely went to Afghanistan to help the Taliban
- a movement born in 1994 in the neighboring province of Kandahar - battle
first the mujahedeen warlords and later the northern alliance, which is
dominated by Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities.
About 200 have now returned home,
according to Pishin journalist Saadullah Taarim, shaving the long beards
and taking off the black or white turbans that marked the Taliban and for
a while became the fashion even among Pishin teen-agers too young to join
the fighting.
A few remain defiant.
"We are not defeated. We were and
are waiting to face the American ground troops," said Jan Mohammed, 24,
a chubby Taliban machine gunner who was visiting his alma matter, the Key
to Knowledge madrassa, for what he said was a home leave approved by his
commanders after five months of combat duty.
Neighbors are showing little sympathy.
"The people are not happy with them.
Due to these Taliban the whole of Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic
situation," said taxi driver Shaista Khan. "Now they have no support among
the people."
Relatives of Pishin Taliban killed
or missing in Afghanistan are angry with madrassa leaders because they
have not returned the bodies of their loved ones, said village elder Niamatullah
Khan, 56, stroking his white 4- inch beard.
"We have three missing in 30 families
here, and nowhere to put the flags," Khan said of the colorful streamers
that Afghan Muslims leave on their relatives' graves as signs that they
have not been forgotten.
Even Afghans in the no-name refugee
camps that dot the oasis, once strongholds of the Taliban, say they no
longer obey the Taliban's admonitions against playing music and flying
kites as violations of Islamic customs.
"Because before they had a government
in Afghanistan, they were all powerful. They even used to harass the people
in the camp," said Abdul Malik Kakar, a 44-year- old bus driver.
"Now their role is passive. They
have kept themselves in their homes, and they do not do business with the
people of the camps," he said as he stared at a young man in his bus whom
he later identified as a Taliban.
"These are the people who for the
sake of one person have destroyed the whole of Afghanistan," he added,
loudly enough for everyone around him to hear him.
"These people have no roots in society
now," said Inayatullah Qaisarnai, deputy Pishin district director, adding
that local police and tribal constabularies are watching the Taliban closely.
"We have received instruction from
our superiors that if anyone creates a mishap in society or disturbs in
any other way, we should deal with them with an iron hand," he said. "We
will give no concession to anyone."
That goes also for the madrassas,
long seen as graduating only semi-literate but zealous village mosque leaders
and stalwarts for Pakistan's half-dozen radical Islamic political parties.
Mullah Humayoun's Rebirth of Knowledge
Madrassa charges students, mostly poor village boys, $16 for a year's tuition,
room and board, and $10 for tuition alone. It teaches only the Koran, Islamic
law and philosophy - no math, no science.
Its "library" is a wooden cupboard
stuffed with maybe 20 well-worn texts and lots of booklets printed by Jamiat-
Ulama Islamia, the party that Humayoun supports and whose striped white
and black flag flies over the madrassa.
"Osama is a hero of Islam," the
bearded Humayoun, wearing a silky black turban and a crisp white knee-length
shirt and baggy pants, told a Western visitor after he denied that his
school imparts a radical version of Islam to its students.
Last week, the government began
drafting a law that would require madrassas to obtain clearances from security
authorities and open their financial books to outside inspectors.
Schools would be required to teach
modern subjects such as math, history and science, and inspectors would
check whether the religious classes are teaching radical or more widely
accepted versions of Islam, said a senior Interior Ministry official who
has seen the draft law.
"We want to make sure that they
can teach Islam, but not extremism," the official, who spoke on condition
of anonymity, said in a telephone interview from the Pakistani capital
of Islamabad.
Back in Pishin, residents said a
test of the Taliban's and madrassas' acceptance among their neighbors will
come Dec. 22, when the schools reopen after nine weeks of vacation around
the Muslim holy month of Ramadan that coincided with the Taliban militia's
collapse in Afghanistan.
"I will not send my son Najib back
there," said farmer Rahmantullah, 49, his blue knee-length shirt filthy
with the dirt of his tiny melon patch.
"Najib came home last year talking
big about the Taliban and Islam. But he's only 15. What does he know? And
next year he will be old enough to join the fighters," said Rahmantullah.
"I will keep him here on the farm."
