10
The Rise and Rule of the
Taliban, 1994–2001
On the morning of 27 September 1996, the residents of Kabul
awoke to a grisly spectacle. Two dead bodies were hanging from a
traffic policeman’s pylon in a downtown square. The dead men
were Dr Najibullah and his younger brother. Just a few days earl-
ier, during a meeting with UN Under Secretary-General Marrack
Goulding, Najibullah had declined to leave Kabul. ‘He had no fear
of the Taliban, he said; his only enemy was Ahmed Shah Masood’
(Boutros-Ghali, 1999: 301). It was the worst, and the last, mistake
of his life. Photographs of the spectacle were flashed around the
world, and although the exact identity of the killers was never
firmly established, it was universally interpreted as a manifestation
of the Taliban character.
Yet who were these Taliban? The word itself is a common one,
simply the Persianised plural of an Arabic word for student, talib.
Students of this sort were well-known figures around the
Northwest Frontier and in Afghanistan. Winston Churchill in 1898
had referred in his book The Story of the Malakand Field Forceto
‘a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, who correspond with the reli-
gious students in Turkey [and] live free at the expense of the
people’ (Churchill, 1990: 7). However, the Taliban who seized
Kabul were more than a mere collection of students: they were a
militarised force with a proper name, in Pushto Da Afghanistano
da Talibano Islami Tahrik, or the ‘Islamic Movement of Taliban’.
The emergence and advent to dominance of the Taliban movement
was one of the oddest things ever to happen to modern