Some people outside Afghanistan have reached their own conclusion: the Taliban’s leaders are simply religious fanatics, and it’s no use trying to reason with them. But even some senior Taliban officials were appalled by the abrupt destruction of the Buddhas, which the militia’s spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had once vowed to treat “with serious respect.” “It would have been better if they had killed my child instead of destroying our heritage,” one Taliban official told NEWSWEEK. Such dissent within a totalitarian religious movement raises a question: why did the Taliban’s secretive leaders suddenly decide that Allah had changed his mind and ordered the statues’ demolition?
Sanctions may be the short answer. The Taliban have very few friends, but their most devoted allies are Arab radicals, who provide the regime with money and military assistance. Foremost among them is Osama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist and alleged mastermind behind the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa. According to foreign observers in Kabul, the Taliban now enjoy the services of roughly 3,000 Arab fighters, many supported by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization. But the United States demands that the Taliban relinquish bin Laden for trial. And the United Nations recently imposed a new set of “smart sanctions” to force the Taliban’s hand.
The policy may have backfired. For most of the past two years the Taliban encouraged bin Laden to keep out of the public eye, but since early January he has twice appeared on Qatar’s Al-Jazeera television station, which is widely watched in the Mideast. Most recently he read a poem praising the suicide bombers who attacked the destroyer USS Cole last October. Other recent Taliban decisions also reflect a shift toward more extreme positions. Mullah Omar issued an edict in January requiring death for any Muslim who converts to Christianity or Judaism. Then, a week after the demolition of the Buddhas, Taliban authorities banned the celebration of Nauroz, the Afghan New Year, saying it was a tradition of infidels. When the Taliban opened the National Museum last week for journalists, little remained of the country’s cultural collections but some ancient pots and clay shards. “I knew there was no future for us in Afghanistan,” one former Afghan official lamented. “But now we don’t even have a past.”
