Taliban made mistakes, but modernising: Former official Saturday, 04 February 2012 00:13

Kabul: Sitting cross-legged on a blood-red Afghan carpet in a house perched on a Kabul hillside, the bearded man gazes out across the sprawling city where he was once one of the most feared men in town.

Now, Maulavi Qalamuddin, former chief of the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” squad which whipped women without burqas and jailed men without beards, lives behind a battered green door set in a mud wall at the top of a narrow track.

The low-slung city that he looks over towards snow-covered mountains is not the same one that he policed with such ferocity from 1996 until the Taliban were overthrown by a US-led invasion after the 9/11 attacks.

Not far from his door women in high-heeled boots and jeans step briskly through the icy streets -- hair covered and curves hidden by coats but provocative enough to have outraged the old Qalamuddin.

And young girls carry schoolbooks, exercising a right to education that was denied them under the Taliban, where a woman’s place was at home or under an all-enveloping light-blue burqa. Qalamuddin, relaxed in a lavishly carpeted room centred on a wood-burning stove and hung with curtains bearing a striking similarity to burqa blue, says he has changed too.

“The Taliban had a lot of positive achievements, but there were mistakes made,” says the heavily bearded 60-year-old, wearing a traditional loose-fitting shalwar khameez, dark pin-striped waistcoat and grey turban.

With Washington and its NATO allies preparing to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan in 2014, fear of a Taliban return is widespread in Kabul and refugee agencies say increasing numbers of people are fleeing abroad.

Asked whether they are right to be afraid, Qalamuddin contemplates the gently twitching intertwined thumbs in his lap and says no. “The people should not be afraid at all. There are only a small number of people who are afraid, and those are the ones who don’t like the Islamic laws,” he said.

Qalamuddin, who was jailed for two years after the Taliban were routed, is now a member of Hamid Karzai’s government-appointed High Peace Council seeking to end the brutal, decade-long Taliban-led insurgency. He says the mistakes the Taliban made while in power could be put down to the fact they were either peasants or uneducated former mujahideen fighters during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and the subsequent civil war. “I for instance did not know what a computer was, but now I have almost learned computers,” he said, as one of his three sons -- all university students -- served green tea and sweets.

AFP

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