Nations’ is a network of loosely connected and weakly coordinated
bodies, with their own interests to pursue. The Taliban proved
unexpectedly adept at playing one part of the UN system off
against another. For example, the Secretary-General in his
September 1999 report to the Security Council on Afghanistan
wrote that he was ‘deeply distressed over reports indicating the
involvement in the fighting, mainly on the side of the Taliban
forces, of thousands of non-Afghan nationals, mostly students from
religious schools and some as young as 14 years old’. He went on
to ‘appeal to all parties to respect the Convention on the Rights of
the Child’ (United Nations, 1999: para. 40). Within days, he was
contradicted by the UN’s Relief Coordinator in Islamabad, who
after a visit to Taliban front lines in the company of Taliban offi-
cials, commented, ‘Generally these types of statements are sound
bites and taken by the press as catchy headlines’ (Reuters, 1
December 1999), adding that ‘he regretted the Taliban believed
Annan was personally responsible for the report, which he himself
had not actually written’ (Agence France Presse, 2 December
1999). The impertinence of this intervention was lost on the
Coordinator, who in an interview with a New York Timescorres-
pondent in January 2000 engaged in his usual pastime of detecting
specks of light at the end of a tunnel which other observers found
completely black (Crossette, 2000).
The result was a growing contempt for the UN. This was clear-
ly manifested in the Taliban blockade to prevent food supplies
reaching the central Hazarajat region, implemented despite high-
level pleas from the UN that it not go ahead, and enforced by the
bombing of Bamiyan airport on 1 January 1998 when a clearly
identified UN plane was on the runway. After a series of provoca-
tions, culminating in an assault on a UN official by the Taliban
Governor of Kandahar Mulla Muhammad Hasan, on 23 March
1998, the UN ordered the withdrawal of its expatriate staff in
Kandahar and suspended its humanitarian activities in the south of
the country. Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Under
Secretary-General for Special Assignments, was in Pakistan at the
time of the withdrawal, and sent a very firm message: if the UN
246 The Afghanistan Wars