Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security. This reading shares the jubilation of the short-lived freedom Afghans enjoyed.
Dancing in the Streets
When the Taliban fled the Northern Alliance’s march on Kabul in mid-November 2001, uncontained joy poured into the streets. Young men, who had been forbidden under the Taliban from laughing, dancing, or talking to unrelated girls and women, kicked in the doors of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue and trashed it. Routed in defeat, the rapacious Taliban plundered shops and absconded with whatever they could, fleeing into exile. Some of those who couldn’t escape lay dead in the streets, as their once-cowering countrymen spat on their corpses.
Quickly, entrepreneurs tried to meet the demand for once-forbidden items. TVs, cassettes, and videotapes poured in from Iran and India, and those secreted during the Taliban era were restocked for rental. One shopkeeper had hidden over 500 video cassettes. After half a decade, the boarded-up cinemas of Kabul sprang to life again, as lines formed around blocks. Guards searched moviegoers for weapons. Young men admitted to the theater were compelled to hand over “brass knuckles, switchblades, radios,” and leave their AK-47s at the door.
Then there was Titanic. No movie approached the status of this long-banned, nationally revered film. Titanic became a subculture. Creative vendors, long shackled by mullahs in the marketplace, sold a wide variety of Titanic-themed products. Titanic insect repellents and perfumes to attract lovers were piled on merchants’ tables in Kabul’s central market for all to buy. The lethality of “Titanic Mosquito Killer” could not be verified, nor could the alluring power of “Titanic Making Love Ecstasy Perfume Body Spray,” which would certainly have roiled the mullahs.
In Kandahar, merchants could, once again, offer song birds for sale. Earlier, their caged chirpings were declared un-Islamic by the Taliban. Turbans, one of the many despised emblems of the Taliban rule, were discarded into the trash. In an interview, Diane Sawyer revealed to Kate Winslet that her portrayal of the movie’s heroine, Kate, helped Afghan women endure the darkest hours of Taliban times. A young Afghan said, “Films were banned under the Taliban. But now we can watch brilliant films like this whenever we want.”
Post-adolescent men shorn their beards and rejoiced and, like the younger generation, sang long-forbidden songs. Women and girls could walk the streets of the nation’s capital without fear of being pummeled with leather whips. Some women continued to wear the burka, just as many men kept their full, if trimmed, beards. But for the first time in 5 years, they had a choice. Sufi Muslims, despised by the Taliban, emerged from the shadows and celebrated their Islamic sect through song and dance and laughter.
When Northern Alliance forces poured into the city, they were greeted with roses, and cheery children climbed onto the armored vehicles. Gone were the Taliban’s rubber truncheons and their yawn-inducing, puritanical sermons. Songs once deemed outré by the Taliban now blast from cars and stores in Kandahar. Lyrics sang, “I’m waiting for you here, alone. Please come to me. Let’s run away and get married.” Women could indulge their femininity. An American woman, Debbie Rodriguez, established a beauty school in Kabul. A young Afghan woman said, “I can come here regularly now to make myself beautiful. Before, it was illegal.”
Men played chess again, a game they had long cherished. The threat of arrest had passed, but many of the old chess sets were gone, some buried as hidden treasure and lost forever in the soil. Though it was winter, kites still soared across the skies of Afghanistan. In late fall 2001 and early 2002, the pall of national depression had lifted, and many Afghans once again had hope.
The full extent of Afghanistan’s Generation X’s cultural isolation from the West became clear in December 2001, when an MTV-affiliated journalist posed “man-in-the-street” questions to Afghan youth. Most questions focused on popular culture, and few of the still-shell-shocked Afghan tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings could identify any of the Spice Girls or Backstreet Boys. Nonetheless, one teenage girl, wearing a Titanic head scarf, plaintively asked the roaming former MTV video jockey whether it was true that Leonardo DiCaprio died on September 11, 2001. When assured that he was very much alive, the girl was visibly relieved.
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