cared deeply about their own government’s response to the
Taliban’s demands for acceptance, as an important symbol of
the Clinton Administration’s seriousness about gender issues. But
the Taliban treated women as they did not because it was in their
interest to do so, but because it was in their nature. Thus, an
unbridgeable gulf opened between the Taliban and those states in
which gender equality was taken seriously. The tensions over the
gender issue actually reflected a deeper tension – between a vision
of the world as governed by rules of an evolving international
society, and a vision of the world as ruled by the word of God. In
late December 1997, Mulla Omar claimed that the United Nations
had ‘fallen under the influence of imperialist powers and under the
pretext of human rights has misled Moslems from the path of
righteousness’. Increased rights for women would lead to adultery
and herald ‘the destruction of Islam’. ‘We do not’, he continued,
‘accept something which somebody imposes on us under the name
of human rights which is contrary to the holy Koranic law’. The
holy Koran, he concluded ‘cannot adjust itself to other people’s
requirements; people should adjust themselves to the requirements
of the holy Koran’ (Agence France Presse, 29 December 1997).
Seeking recognition
Despite this uncompromising repudiation of the norms of inter-
national society, the Taliban were desperately keen to secure inter-
national status. Upon taking Kabul, they immediately demanded
both recognition from other states as the government of Afghanistan,
and Afghanistan’s seat in the UN General Assembly. However, they
received neither. As far as recognition was concerned, the explan-
ation was political. The reactions in Western states to reports coming
out of Kabul in the days following the Taliban takeover were
extremely adverse, both at mass and elite levels. As a result, states
such as the USA, France, the United Kingdom, and Australia in
which the Rabbani Government had diplomatic or consular agents
opted in the first instance to leave the status quoin place. There was
a firm legal basis for this: as Sir Hersch Lauterpacht observed of
The Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 243