In Kandahar, Taliban are not a bad memory

KANDAHAR—From the dusty shops in the bazaar to the austere halls of the universities, the people of Kandahar say they want only one thing: security.
Some in the volatile southern Afghan city even say they sometimes miss the puritan Taliban regime that “knew how to keep order”. In the market, business has collapsed after a wave of suicide attacks, bomb blasts and assassinations that have struck the Pashtun-majority southern capital this year.
Businessmen are hoping for a return to peace even if it is with those who are responsible for much of the insecurity, the extremist Taliban. “We want peace, whether it is with the Americans or the Taliban,” says young carpet seller Mohammed Shafik with a smile. “We didn’t have problems with the Taliban.
“Lots of people who returned after the fall of the Taliban have in the past months gone back to Pakistan because of the insecurity. It’s not good for business,” he says.
It is from this ultra-conservative city that the Taliban launched the campaign that took it to power with the capture of Kabul in 1996. And it is in this region that the men in black turbans are focussing a bloody insurrection against foreign forces and the Afghan authorities five years after they were chased from power by American bombs.
A town of more than 400,000, Kandahar is all but cut off from the rest of the world as civilian flights have been suspended and road access is made dangerous by “checkpoints” operated by Taliban, bandits and corrupt policemen.
Most of the development projects here only limp along with the majority of foreign organisations closed or employing only Afghan staff who, fearful of abductions and reprisals, try not to tell anyone where they work.
Hadji Ramdullah, who wears a turban and a full white beard, rails against “the high price of rent, corruption, crime and violence”. “In the time of the Taliban, Sharia (Islamic law) was applied in line with our culture and our traditions, and we did not see all these thefts, these kidnappings, these murders.
“In Kandahar, it is still ok, but as soon as you leave the city, it is very dangerous. It was for the young that the Taliban regime was difficult,” he adds, sitting cross-legged in his shop. Outside, the road is the domain of men and boys. Nothing much has changed for women in the burqa.
Fingering a rosary, passer-by Haji Mohammed complains about the “people in the government who are only thinking about filling their pockets”. “And those who are not with the government have lost their rights,” he says.
At a university campus set back from the city and across the sky-blue dome of a mosque built on the orders of Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, students refuse to point fingers at the insurgents. They blame instead a “corrupt government” and the international community.
“It is difficult to find work. The Pashtuns form the majority in this country but they are underrepresented (in the administration),” says Delawar Baraki, an engineering student from neighbouring Helmand province. He makes the claim even though President Hamid Karzai is himself Pashtun.
“The Taliban were very good at first. But their system was perverted by bad people,” he says. The head of the Kandahar student body, Ismatullah Mansour, mainly blames the foreign forces for “lost dreams of prosperity”.
“The Americans and the Canadians act like the Russians,” says the frail young man, referring to the Soviet occupiers of the 1980s. “What they should be doing is helping people, not bombing them. We don’t want the Taliban but the international community is partly responsible for the violence by supporting a corrupt government”.
The Taliban said on Sunday it had shot down a U.S. civilian helicopter chartered by NATO that crashed in bad weather in southern Afghanistan. “The chopper has crashed and there have been mortalities. We do not know how many,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said, adding that the cause of Saturday’s crash in a remote area of southern Kandahar province was not known.
Asked about a Taliban spokesman’s claim of responsibility, he said: “I cannot deny or confirm that.” NATO said on Saturday contact with the chartered aircraft had been lost as it was flying supplies from Kandahar to neighboring Uruzgan province.
It is not known how many people were aboard, nor their nationalities. Bashary said the helicopter belonged to U.S. security firm Dyncorp International. A NATO spokesman on Sunday could not confirm the helicopter had crashed, nor how many people were on board and said the search was continuing.
Dyncorp describes itself as a provider of “specialized mission-critical outsourced technical services to civilian and military government agencies.” Its operations in Afghanistan also include police training.—Agencies