Taliban set to reignite civil war

By Burhan Wazir

FAIZABAD: The uneasy quiet in the Afghan civil war is about to end. Troops of the Northern Alliance are preparing to resist a Taliban offensive that they believe is imminent.

Last week the alliance's leader, ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani, sat in his stronghold here, spoke of the coming conflict and urged Pakistan to end its support for the Taliban regime.

He said: "Preparations are being made for the forthcoming war. The hunger and deaths will continue. We need aid. Those countries that are influencing the fighting in Afghanistan for their own gains only make the problems worse."

In recent weeks military activity has been building up in the mountains of Badakshan, the province held by the alliance. Its military leader, Ahmed Shah Masoud, who recently attracted widespread publicity during a visit to Europe, has met fellow rebel commander Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum to try to redraw a front line against the expected Taliban offensive.

The Taliban, backed by Pakistan, is pushing north to drive out resistance. The alliance, which controls about 30 percent of the countryside, is aided from nearby Tajikistan -- from where Iranian jets bring in fuel and arms.

When the frail-looking figure of Rabbani arrives at governor's house, a shabby double-storey building on the outskirts of the city, the guards snap to attention. He emerges from a Jeep and slowly climbs the stairs to the conference room.

These are his wilderness years. He was declared president in 1993 after Mujahideen factions took control of Kabul in April 1992. But the coalition quickly collapsed and, when the Taliban ousted Rabbani's government in September 1996, he escaped to the ethnically distinctive north and to Faizabad, where he was born in 1940.

By Taliban standards, he is a religious moderate. He was elected head of the alliance, or Jamiat-i-Islam, in 1972 and began to organize anti-communist rallies,which eventually led to the war against the Soviet Union.

"He hated the communists," says Abdul Wahab, a school-friend who remembers Rabbani as an impassioned orator. "And there is some case for saying that his revolt led to the destruction of the Soviet Union."

An attempt was made by the Soviet-backed regime to arrest him in 1974, but, aided by students, he escaped -- and returned only after the Mujahideen had won the Soviet-Afghan war.

Sitting in the governor's house, Rabbani rebukes Pakistan for its support for the Taliban. "People call this a civil war," he says. "But they have to realize that the fighting in Afghanistan has external factors. Pakistan has made its case clear -it will support the Taliban against us."

In the UN league table of the world's poorest nations, Afghanistan comes 170 out of 178. But Rabbani does not heap draconian Islamic puritanism on top of poverty.

Soldiers patrol the streets only to monitor any Taliban offensive. In stark contrast to the rest of the country, girls study beside boys in mixed-sex schools.

At the Saeda Makhfi School in Faizabad, 60 teachers, mostly women, teach mathematics, English literature and Arabic to 1,080 students. Men and women are known to date before marriage -- although, out of respect for religious customs, the couples hide their romantic liaisons from their parents.

"Girls are naturally better educated here than the boys; they don't have the same distractions," says Muhammed Qadir, 48, the school's principal. "You find that most of the educated workforce is composed of women."

-- Observer News Service