Doomsday nation

IN 1994 a group of religious students from a madrassa in Kandahar banded together to take on the vicious warlords who then ran southern Afghanistan. About 30 young men with 16 rifles stormed a military camp where two girls were being held and raped, rescuing the girls and hanging the camp's commander from the gun barrel of a tank, or so the story goes. Created by the Pakistani military and intelligence services, the Taliban now is bent on destroying its benefactor Thus began the movement known as the Taliban, from the word talib, meaning student. As Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid wrote in his seminal book, Taliban: "They saw themselves as the cleansers and purifiers of a guerilla war gone astray, a social system gone wrong, and an Islamic way of life thathad been compromised by corruption and excess." Within months, 12,000 volunteers had joined the new organisation. The Taliban would likely have been just another in the plethora of Afghan militias scrabbling for power except that it found itself a powerful sponsor in the government and military establishment of neighbouring Pakistan. Keen to have a biddable ally in Kabul, Islamabad provided the weapons, ammunition, funding and logistical support that enabled the Taliban -- "our boys", as Pakistan's interior minister famously called them -- to seize power and rule Afghanistan for five years. Read more...