Afghanistan’ (BBC Summary of World BroadcastsFE/2234/A/1–2,
22 February 1995). However, the Taliban’s notion of security
proved difficult to pin down. In March 1998, a correspondent
laconically reported that while a Taliban spokesman had said in a
statement that there was ‘complete peace and security’ in the
provinces controlled by the Taliban, ‘at the same time, he told
reporters that a lack of adequate security is another serious prob-
lem in providing education to female students’ (Voice of America,
19 March 1998).
There is no doubt that many Afghans did sincerely welcome the
Taliban as providers of ‘security’, although how many is impos-
sible to ascertain. Drug traffickers certainly did (Rubin, 2000:
1795). What is quite clear, however, is that the Taliban’s notion of
‘security’ intersected at best partially with the ideas of ‘human
security’ which now figure prominently in discussions of security
in Western circles, and barely at all with any notion of human
dignity. It was based on fear, not the rule of law. Human security,
Ramesh Thakur has argued, ‘refers to the quality of life of the
people of a society or polity’ (Thakur, 2000: 231). Many aspects of
human security in this sense – for example access to the where-
withal to avoid squalid poverty – interested the Taliban not at all.
In 1998, Nancy Hatch Dupree, a longtime observer of Afghan soci-
ety, noted that ‘For the first time in its history, beggars roam the
streets of Kabul or huddle outside relief agencies’, and continued:
‘One wonders how the authorities can countenance the sight of so
many destitute female beggars while still maintaining that a pillar
of their existence is to guarantee the dignity of women’ (Dupree,
1998: 155).
The Taliban and Sharia law
The Taliban’s ‘answer’ to the issue of security was rigorous appli-
cation of Islamic law (Sharia). Their conception of law was a sim-
ple one: rather than seeing law as a complex tradition or discourse
subject to evolution and reinterpretation (Krygier, 1986), they
viewed it as a rigid code of rules including penalties to be
The Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 233