enforced. The message that there should be no compulsion in reli-
gion, contained in the Koran (Sura al-Baqarah, 2: 256), carried no
weight with them.
The agency for the enforcement of law was the religious
police, or to give it its full title, Amr bil-Maroof wa Nahi An il-
Munkir, the department responsible for ‘the Promotion of Virtue
and the Suppression of Vice’, an expression derived from the
Koran. The religious police proved to be one of the best organ-
ised of the Taliban’s agencies, and also one of the most vicious.
The combination of police powers and religious zealotry is a
frightening one, as European populations learned during the
times of the Inquisition, and under the Taliban the mere exist-
ence of such an agency served the purpose of deterring resist-
ance. In September 1997, the Taliban official Sher Muhammad
Abbas Stanekzai admitted that it ‘is a fact our rules are obeyed
by fear’, which he justified by claiming that ‘people are addicted
to sin’ (Agence France Presse, 23 September 1997). In 1997 in
Kabul, I often heard Afghans whisper the word wahshat(‘ter-
ror’) to describe the situation in what had once been a remark-
ably cosmopolitan city, and other reportage confirmed this
(Burns, 1997). People bitterly resented what they saw as double
standards, for example the toleration the Taliban displayed for a
serial rapist in their ranks (Khan, 2000). The Religious Police
had no concept of due process, let alone a sense that accused
persons were innocent until proved guilty. Those who fell into
their hands could expect to be treated abominably (Amnesty
International, 1999b; Sullivan, 2002).
In common with most totalitarian movements, the Taliban recog-
nised no such thing as a ‘private’ sphere of life, lying beyond the
reach of public authorities. However, they differed from totalitarian
regimes such as those found in Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union in the 1930s in that they did not control the kind of state
instrumentalities that were at the disposal of Hitler and Stalin. The
period of Taliban rule was one in which, for once, the absence of
a state-building agenda might actually have been a blessing in
disguise.
234 The Afghanistan Wars