Thread by @AfghanHistorian

(1/19) I left off yesterday with the #Taliban seizure of #Kabul in Sept. 1996. The #UnitedStates & much of the international community had largely ignored #Afghanistan since the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, so US policymakers, journalists, & others were startled by the Taliban's

(2/19) seemingly sudden seizure of power & were especially troubled by the Taliban's treatment of the people of Kabul. Had the US news been paying attention before Sept. 1996, they would have seen that, although the Taliban initially positioned themselves as wanting to rescue...

(3/19) the Afghan people from the depredations of the mujahideen, once in control of an area they only added to most people's already considerable suffering.

Once they controlled an area, they imposed draconian codes of “pious” behavior based on their twisted view of Islamic...

(4/19) law - the most extreme version implemented in any country in modern memory. After capturing Kabul, the Taliban decreed that all men in the city had to grow a full beard (at least the length of a fist) within 6 weeks. Men with insufficient beards were thrown in prison.

(5/19) Homosexuality became a capital crime; prayer 5 times a day was mandatory. Among other things, the Taliban banned: television; Internet; movies; music; singing & dancing; keeping pigeons; kite flying; making & displaying photographs, portraits, or other images; gambling;

(6/19) long hair for men; alcohol; & charging interest on loans. They outlawed holidays, including religious ones, because they said festivities were unIslamic. Armed Taliban religious police patrolled the streets & beat, imprisoned, & executed people who violated their decrees.

(7/19) Central to the Taliban’s vision was the radical subordination of #women. They essentially tried to erase women from public life. The Taliban prohibited women from working & closed girls’ schools (although the only schools they allowed for boys were typically madrasas).

(8/19) When women left their homes, male relatives had to escort them, & they had wear the #burqa, a traditionally Pashtun style of hijab (usually blue or yellow) that covered the entire body, including the face. A woman wearing a burqa could only see through a mesh panel that

(9/19) covered her eyes. Unaccompanied or improperly veiled women faced severe punishment. Women were also forbidden from wearing makeup, Western-style clothing, or high heels. They were not supposed to laugh, speak loudly, or make noise with their feet as they walked in public.

(10/19) The Taliban shuttered beauty parlors, hair salons, & women’s bathhouses, which by that point were often the only places where women had access to hot water due to the wartime destruction of Afghanistan's infrastructure since 1979. Hospitals were segregated by sex. Male

(11/19) doctors were forbidden from treating women, but because women were not allowed to work (and thus couldn't be doctors), that meant women had no access to medical care.

The Taliban meted out brutal punishments for violating these edicts, including public executions in the

(12/19) Kabul soccer stadium, which RAWA secretly recorded & smuggled out to international news outlets. Although Afghan women’s status had declined a lot since the 1970s due to the many years of war & the policies of fundamentalist warlords, the Taliban’s treatment of women was

(13/19) radically worse than anything before. Prior to 1996, there was no single, universal standard for women in Afghan society. Their roles, practices, and rights varied by region, ethnic or linguistic group, religious identity (Sunni or Shia), economic class, etc.

(14/19) The Taliban, then, invented a single, harshly oppressive standard for women based partially on their Pashtun customs and largely on their extreme version of Islam & then tried to impose it universally in the areas they controlled. They never came to control the entire

(15/19) country (the remnants of the mujahideen consolidated in the NE, eventually becoming the "Northern Alliance" that fought the Taliban alongside the US after the US invasion began in late 2001), but they did control the majority of Afghan territory by late 1996. B/c of

(16/19) Taliban brutality, the international community could no longer ignore their egregious violations of women’s human rights once they seized Kabul. (Note: The Taliban also engaged in other horrific behaviors, including carrying out a genocidal massacre of the Hazara people

(17/19) - an ethnic & religious (Shia) minority - in August 1998 and destroying ancient and irreplaceable sites in Afghanistan, like the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan in 2001. However, those happened after the Clinton Administration policy decisions that I am tracing here

(18/19) & so I will not be focusing on those actions this week).

Stay tuned for upcoming threads on feminists' & Clinton Admin. response to the Taliban seizure of power. - KJS @TheGingerProf

Image credits: All Wikipedia, except execution, which is from rawa.org

(19/19) Also by KJS: For those interested, here's a video on the destruction of the buddhas: nbcnews.com/video/flashbac…