political benefit from association with the Bin Laden organisation,
but to have surrendered him would have violated deeply inter-
nalised norms which defined how a good Pushtun should behave.
There is some evidence that the Taliban received significant cash
payments from Al-Qaida (Woodward, 2001), which would have
supplied an additional reason for the Taliban to persist in aiding
him, but other sources point to a cash-strapped Al-Qaidaorganisa-
tion (Bergen, 2001b; Cullison and Higgins, 2002).
The radicalisation of the Taliban
That said, from mid-1999, indications began to appear that the
Taliban were becoming more radical. In one sense, they had
always been radical, in that their anti-modernist image of a good
society was not the same as the complex reality of Afghanistan,
but from 1999 they moved in a more radically anti-Westerndirec-
tion. On 13 July 1999, just six days after the USA imposed unilat-
eral sanctions on the Taliban, Abdul Ahad Karzai, moderate leader
of the Popalzai Pushtun tribe, was assassinated in Quetta. Karzai
had been a prominent member of the Meshrano Jirgah, the upper
house of the Afghan Parliament, during the New Democracy
period, and had also served in a four-member contact group set up
by Mahmoud Mestiri when he was head of the UN Special
Mission. This murder was a clear indication that moderate
Pushtuns, once useful to the Taliban, had become expendable. In
December 1999, the Taliban facilitated the escape of militants who
had hijacked Indian Airlines Flight IC814 to Kandahar after it had
taken off from Kathmandu on a flight to New Delhi. While there is
no evidence that the Taliban had advance notice of the hijacking,
their actions at a number of key points worked to the hijackers’
advantage (see Chipaux, 2000; Misra, 2000). And further evidence
of radicalisation came with a raft of measures in 2001 directed at
non-Muslims: the 10 March destruction of the Buddhas of
Bamiyan, a 21 May decree from Mulla Omar that Hindus should
wear an identifying yellow patch, and the 5 August arrest of eight
expatriate Christian aid workers from the NGO Shelter Now
256 The Afghanistan Wars