Kabul minus Taliban: Mixed blessing?

Luke Harding, Guardian News Service, Kabul

In Kabul's football stadium Sunday, two teams were slugging it out on the grassy pitch. A modest crowd had turned out to watch; and from a loudspeaker in the stands, a once banned pop song drifted across the terraces. Football matches did of course take place here during the dark Taliban years -- but there were a few differences. The players, for example, were not allowed to wear shorts. They had to make do with baggy trousers -- one of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan's many eccentricities. And the bearded spectators were never quite sure whether they were going to watch their favorite sides compete -- or observe a group of Taliban empty their Kalashnikovs into a criminal.

"I don't think people will miss the Taliban," Hanibullah Neizi, a member of Afghanistan's Olympic committee said, as we wandered past the kick-off spot where the Taliban used to chop off the hands of thieves. Neizi is right: Few people in Afghanistan want the Taliban back. Three weeks after their departure, Kabul has reverted to a normal city. TV antennae have sprouted from the rooftops, and music blares from every corner. Shops now sell posters of female Indian film stars.

Women, still in blue burqas, have even been spotted buying ghetto blasters. Kabul has become more free and, in a perverse way, more boring. The regime that transformed the Afghan capital into the most joyless place on earth is rapidly vanishing into history.

The Taliban's surrender of Kandahar means that the movement no longer has a presence in any of Afghanistan's major cities. Osama bin Laden may be able to elude his American pursuers for a bit longer. And his Arab fighters will continue to cause trouble from the bleak mountains of Zabol province. But the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan -- a utopian experiment that went wrong -- is effectively finished.

Amid the general rejoicing, however, western strategists should perhaps now ask themselves whether the new regime will be better than the old one. The uncomfortable answer is possibly not. Afghanistan now looks pretty much like it did in 1994, when Mullah Mohammad Omar and a handful of like-minded provincial clerics decided to free the country from the excesses of mujahidin rule. Kabul may now be enjoying itself again, but Afghanistan as a whole is in danger of sliding back into the chaos that characterized the mujahidin years between 1992 and 1996.

When the Taliban first swept into Kabul in September 1996 they too were initially welcomed as liberators. Some 50,000 people had died in the previous four years, as warring mujahidin factions shelled the city from the surrounding snow-covered mountains.

Even their most grudging critics conceded that the Taliban had one major virtue: They brought peace to a country racked by warlordism and disorder. After two months of American bombing, Afghanistan has gone back to where it was.

In the now frozen north, the Uzbek warlord Gen. Rashid Dostum once more controls his own mini-state. Last week he rejected the Bonn agreement establishing a new interim authority for Afghanistan, an ominous development. The Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance again occupies Kabul. A Jalalabad shura or council controls the country's strategic eastern provinces. And in Herat, the ancient city's former governor, Ishmael Khan, is back. All the old warlords have returned from exile, and Afghanistan is experiencing its own deja vu.

Were it not for Mullah Mohammad Omar's disastrous decision to allow foreign volunteers to join his Islamist revolution, the Taliban would almost certainly still be in power. That is why the regime collapsed. It was a very big mistake to make, Mullah Mohammad Khaksar, the Taliban's recently defected former interior minister, reflected Sunday. The regime also failed because, like most revolutionary movements, it overestimated its capacity to change human nature.

Five years of Taliban rule had transformed Kabul into a miserable, gloomy place; everybody was fed up. With music and TV banned, and a 9 p.m. curfew, the city's terrified population crept into bed soon after dark. But during the Taliban years it was possible to take a yellow Toyota taxi from Kabul to Jalalabad without being robbed. Now the Taliban have gone, bandits have taken up residence in the hills above Sarobi.

Even the mayor of Jalalabad travels only with a heavily armed convoy. On the rough 420 km (260-mile) road between Kabul and Kandahar it is the same story. Local villagers armed with Kalashnikovs have set up their own roadblocks; robbery has become a new cottage industry. Non-allied Pashtun militias and former Taliban soldiers have seized control of their own areas. Suddenly southern Afghanistan has become a very dangerous place indeed.

If American spy-planes were to hover over the eastern Nangarhar province, or the fertile southern Helmand valley, they would spot villagers planting opium seeds once again. Last year Mullah Mohammad Omar outlawed opium production in Afghanistan on the grounds that it was unIslamic. It is not clear whether his motives were genuine or cynical. But either way his edict was ruthlessly enforced. Farmers using cows and tractors ploughed up their smallholdings of poppy and planted wheat. Afghanistan, previously the world's largest exporter of heroin, produced virtually no opium last year.

With the Taliban gone, Afghanistan's farmers are going back to their old, lucrative ways. In the tribal areas of Pakistan, where most of the opium is processed, prices have plummeted in expectation of a bumper crop.

Few people feel much nostalgia for the Taliban and their totalitarian methods. But their departure has left a vacuum, which at the moment is being filled by megalomaniac warlords, local bandits, drug barons and opportunistic crooks.