The return of the Taliban

After a lugubrious living room, the Mullah Alhaj Khaksar He remains almost motionless, squatting on a carpet of exquisite texture. When incorporated, a tall figure appears, dressed in black from head to toe, surrounded by stacks of religious books. He is the only senior official of the Taliban regime to remain in Kabul. waiting for the entrance of pro-Western forces of the Northern Alliance, supported by the aviation and US special commandos.

Until three days ago, he had been Deputy Minister of the Interior and previously Minister of Information. At that time, his disciples escaped through the mountains to the south. That happened in early December 2001 and three months after the fatal 11-S, the attack of the twin towers of New York.

The perpetrators of the attack had left there, from Afghanistan, where they had been trained as part of the al-Qaida terrorist network under Taliban protection. Khaksar, with a black silk turban ending with a tail that reaches his waist and deep eyes that before any uncomfortable question turns into steel, tells me that he met Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, although he claims to have seen him only once at a meeting. May the mullah Mohammad Omar, the maximum leader of the Taliban, "he is an honest Muslim who has administered only religious matters"And that it is acceptable to force women to wear the burqa, which covers them from head to toe, and to the entire population to go to mosques five times a day. Khaksar was tried and his bank accounts were frozen, but three years later, he was already "clean" although he was accused of several crimes. He went to live in the Pakistani city of Quetta. And from there he kept walking on that thin line this allowed him to rub shoulders with his former Taliban comrades and the successive democratic governments that were installed in Kabul with the support of the United States.

Khaksar was a key figure in the process that was opened nearly two years ago between ultra-religious rebel representatives and Washington officials to finally pull American troops out of the Afghan sand. Last week, it was announced that they had reached a principle of agreement. There is nothing written yet. But the negotiations taking place in Doha, Qatar, ended in very good conditions. An announcement of the unprecedented peace agreement is expected in the coming days. The special envoy of Washington, Zalmay KhalilzadHe went directly to Kabul on Monday to inform President Ashraf Ghani of the talks and rebadure him that the agreement is considering an exit "dialogue"among the Afghans and by no means a fall of the government, but many in Afghanistan suspect that part of it is cooking and that the feared Taliban may soon return to power.

A return of the Taliban regime, running enemies at halftime football matches and banning girls from going to school, seems unlikely. Although Afghanistan remains a country where primitivism continues to fly above various ethnic groups and many of its leaders. Anyway, the students of the madrasas (Koranic schools) who formed this Taliban movement and took power in 1996 to bring a coveted peace after years of internal war, they will not reach the same provincial capital and be destroyed by the bombs of that time.

Today, Kabul is a metropolis of six million residents packed with expanding shopping centers and apartment complexes, new generation cell phones and the Uber service. It is difficult to imagine the agents of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, with bad in hand, again striking women on the street because they wore a short burka. Now, girls study at the university, wear jeans and surf the net like any other teenager in the world..

But it is not necessarily impossible for the Taliban to return to power. In June of last year, when a temporary ceasefire decree was decreed, Taliban fighters politely mixed with westernized townspeople. But one could clearly see that they had not at all softened the puritanical beliefs of the Sunni militia. Its purpose, though now hidden by diplomatic language, it's still the full imposition of Sharia law, Islamic law of the sixth century.

"For the Afghans who had to live under the Taliban regime, we remember this ghost town full of zombies, and for someone like me who investigated their brutality and their crimes, it's hard to believe that They have changed, "he said. Washington Post, Ahmad Nader Nadery, close badociate of President Ghani and former head of the Independent Commission on Human Rights in Afghanistan. Like most Afghans, Nadery worries about the possibility that US officials, eager to reach an agreement and bring back the remaining 14,000 troops to Afghan territory, will allow the Taliban to return to despise democratic progress this has been achieved in the last 18 years. "The Taliban say they want to talk to all Afghans, not to the government," Nadery said. "And that would undermine the foundations of the state, the constitution, the structures we built with the support of international organizations and the sacrifice of dozens of lives, Afghan and American, that we can not afford." Young people born with the democratic process agree with this position. "They can not intimidate people anymore, it's a democratic moment and they can not take us back twenty years, it's not the same thing, we know what it means to live in freedom and we will not tolerate the return to a society dominated by an extreme and archaic Islam vision, "said Faisal, a two-year-old accounting student when the Taliban was defeated.

When the exaggerated beards and black turbans left Kabul on December 7, 2001, the Mullah Omar – a man who had lost an eye and a part of his body while walking on a mine – the leader of the insurgency of his Taliban (students in religion), returned with his lieutenants in the mountains of l & # 39; Hindu Kush, on the border with Pakistan. And from that moment, his men went down every summer to conquer territory and wills. Today & # 39; hui, they are still the most important military force in Afghanistan and the only one with whom to negotiate a withdrawal from the US Marines. "The most worrying issue that we, the Afghans, are asking is who could guarantee potential deals after the withdrawal of the US military, they can promise anything and not respect them. risk going back many years and returning to another war, "he said. Raihana Azad, member of parliament of the Hazara ethnic minority.

Some believe that another mullah, Abdul Ghani Baradar, founder of the movement with Mullah Omar and who now leads the Taliban delegation in the Doha negotiations, will honor any agreement reached. He is a moderate man who had already tried a dialogue of peace in 2009 with the then President, Hammid Karzai. and indirectly with the Pentagon. But at that moment, Pakistan's powerful secret services intervened to prevent the installation of the Taliban on its territory. Baradar was arrested in February 2010 in the Pakistani city of Karachi and spent eight and a half years in prison until they were forced to release him under pressure from the United States and become the chief negotiator of the Taliban. He still wears his towering black turban and maintains extreme beliefs, but understands that they can not impose them on the new Afghan society, that they will have to moderate their positions if they want to return to power. He was in contact with the Mullah Alhaj Khaksar, the man I interviewed when the Taliban fled Kabul. They are part of a moderate line that could accept the liberalization of customs and a market economy open to the world, provided that certain religious codes of an Islamic republic are respected.

The Taliban had forbidden to have canaries in the houses because their trills were diverted from their religious obligations. Also live music and on discs. The television broadcasts only sermons and prayers. The many widows of the fighters were begging in the street with their tattered burkas. The other women lived locked up in the houses for fear that the religious police will stop them for lack of "virtue". The men had to leave the long beard and the older ones had to cover their gray hair with reddish henna. Girls could not receive education. Much of the city was impbadable, strewn with antipersonnel mines. A situation that was only possible thanks to the sufficiency of the Afghans in the face of the violence of the "warlords" who fought to fill the power vacuum caused by the withdrawal of the Soviet Red Army that had invaded the country. . The order imposed by the Taliban brought some relief at that time. Five years later, the situation was unbearable. The US intervention and the advance of the pro-democracy forces of General Ahmad Mbadoud of the Panjshir Valley have made part of the Afghans' former resistance.

At that time, I was present at a restaurant that reopened five years later and where only a few tea shops had been operating. There was only one dish to share: lamb stew covered with fat. But the atmosphere was extraordinary. The joy of "liberation" was immense. At one point, the musicians came out of exile. For the first time in five years, they could play again in public. The rabab (a kind of 12-string guitar) was played with great talent by a man from Peshawar, the mystical Pakistani city, where he played in the group of a hotel. The drums on the table marked the percussion in the hands of a tall, muscular man. And the Maharaja, a harmonium like a big accordion, the rhythm that gave him another, emaciated and with deep green eyes. The bells of Ghungroo made the rest younger than the others, on the feet and hands of a boy. All with their shawls, their long shirts over their wide trousers and the brown pakul, the Afghan beret, slightly elevated on the forehead. The joy was such that several people were frantically dancing between the tables, as if it were a Bollywood movie scene.

The small group of journalists who had the privilege of living this moment, we knew, like all the Afghans present, that We were in front of a spectacle as festive as historical. For this place, at that time, it floated around the libertarian spirit that identifies this people who, in history, could never have been dominated. The Afghans did not surrender to Alexander the Great, the Mongolian Grand Baboon, or the British troops. Nor in front of the Americans. And, children of this weak Afghan democracy, they say that now they will not do it with the Taliban.