Persuasion once held a very different meaning for Mullah Abdul Salam Rocketi. As a leading Taliban commander — so senior he once dined with Osama bin Laden — Rocketi was famed for his ability to annihilate enemies with a carefully aimed missile. Hence his name.
”I was famous for firing the rocket-propelled grenade,” he said at his home in Zabul, a violent southern province of Afghanistan. ”It still gives me a pain in my ears.”
But as a candidate in next Sunday’s Afghan parliamentary election, Rocketi has been forced to adopt less brutal tactics — and ideas — to win the argument. For weeks, the retired warlord has wooed key voters with free lunches and flowery speeches. He promises economic reform, ethnic harmony and a return of the Taliban.
A peaceful return, he adds hastily.
”I will try to bring them back into government through a genuine peace process,” he said, raising his voice to a shout as an American helicopter clattered overhead. ”That is better than just fighting, fighting, fighting.”
A year after their first presidential election, millions of Afghans are returning to the polls this weekend for another faltering step towards a new nation. Voters will choose from about 5 800 candidates to fill both the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga, or Lower House of Parliament, and 34 provincial councils.
It is a troubled blossoming. Although President Hamid Karzai’s United States-backed government hails the vote as a democratic milestone, analysts warn of critical flaws: political parties are forbidden, the Parliament will be chaotic and some of Afghanistan’s most unsavoury warlords have been allowed to compete.
Controversial
The presence of ”good” Taliban candidates on the ticket is among the most controversial aspects. Half-a-dozen senior officials have been allowed to contest the poll, including Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, the former foreign minister who spent three years in US custody, and Muhammad Khaksar, a former deputy interior minister.
But the candidacy that churns most stomachs is that of Al-Haj Maulvi Qalamuddin, a stern-faced cleric once considered Afghanistan’s most feared man. As head of the notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Qalamuddin promulgated many of the Taliban’s harshest decrees.
On his orders, religious police roamed the streets, thrashing beardless men and women who refused to wear the burka. Girls’ schools were closed, television and kite-flying were banned and adulterous couples were buried up to the waist and stoned to death. As Afghanistan regressed into the Middle Ages, Qalamuddin sat in his Kabul office obsessing over the height of women’s heels.
”Some women want to show their feet and ankles,” he told a reporter in 1997. ”They are immoral women. They want to give a hint to the opposite sex.”
But the new Qalamuddin, released from jail a year ago, claims to be a leopard with radically changed spots. As a candidate in the four-seat province of Logar, 90 minutes south of Kabul, he is infused with a new-found humility. The Taliban’s excesses were ”misunderstood”, he said over a breakfast of yoghurt, biscuits and sweet tea as he prepared for another day’s campaigning.
”We were never against girls’ education, we just didn’t have the budget to pay for it. And I have nothing against television, as long as it shows proper Islamic programmes,” he said.
A tall man with a tightly wound turban and a piercing stare, Qalamuddin met The Guardian in the upstairs study of his Logar home, surrounded by shelves groaning with gold-embossed Qur’anic texts. Freshly printed election posters sat in a corner.
”My message to voters is that we have had 24 years of jihad. Now it is time for peace,” he said.
His ideas appear to be a bag of contradictions. He renounces the Taliban but favours a return of its one-eyed fugitive leader, Mullah Omar. He praises Karzai’s reforms but refuses to buy a TV.
And although still subject to European Union and United Nations sanctions, he has a curiously warm attitude to the foreign powers he once blasted as infidels.
”You know, if the American army left Afghanistan this morning, there would be war by the afternoon. They are the reason we have peace,” he said.
Other Taliban candidates are also glossing over their antediluvian images. Last week, Mutawakil published a book denouncing Bin Laden as a miser who never helped poor Afghans and criticising the 2001 demolition of the historic Bamiyan Buddha statues.
In Zabul, one of the bloodiest flashpoints between Taliban and coalition forces, Rocketi’s election literature ignores his Taliban past and has omitted the honorific ”Al Haj” from his title. He claims he was never keen on their radical strictures anyway.
”See my driver over there?” he said, gesturing to a man eating nuts. ”I can’t remember how many times he was arrested by other Talibs for playing music in our car.”
Like other ex-Talibs, Rocketi has received death threats from former colleagues.
”They say if they catch me they will kill me,” he said. As a result, he carries a small German pistol.
Karzai is gambling that the participation of Taliban heavyweights will blunt the insurgency, which spiked alarmingly this summer. More than 1 100 people have died, mostly in pulverising US air strikes. But Taliban roadside attacks on coalition forces have become increasingly deadly, a development Afghan officials blame on al-Qaeda assistance.
On Wednesday morning, suspected Taliban killed seven men carrying voting cards in Urzugan, the southern home province of Mullah Omar. The provincial governor said rebels launched similar attacks against ”innocent Muslims” before last year’s poll.
Simultaneously, however, there are hopes the rebellion may be waning. About 350 mostly middle-ranking Talibs have defected to the government via reconciliation initiatives; Karzai hopes the example of candidates like Mutawakil will bring in more from the cold.
”I am happy we have an Afghanistan where anyone can be a candidate,” he told elders in Herat on Tuesday.
Critics say this approach is dangerously mistaken. The Taliban must first account for past atrocities, said Ahmad Nader Nadery, of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
”There is no such thing as a moderate Talib. People like Qalamuddin were violating human rights every day,” he said. ”Ignoring such abuses encourage impunity, which creates a very fragile, short-term peace.”
Divisions
The divisions reach into the heart of Karzai’s Cabinet.
”Many ministers do not agree with this decision,” said a senior official in Karzai’s office, who requested anonymity. ”They say the so-called moderates want to bring back fundamentalism.”
Some believe Karzai is currying Taliban support to build a political base among fellow Pashtuns. But a more likely explanation is that he is under US pressure to end the insurgency. This week, Pentagon planners are debating a 20% cut in troops from next spring.
The furore is part of a wider controversy about the failures of Karzai’s presidency. Although more than 200 former warlords applied to contest Sunday’s election, only 32 were disqualified.
But despite the many problems with Sunday’s poll, at a local level it has reinvigorated debate about Afghanistan’s past and future. In the bazaar at Qalat, opinions were sharply divided about the candidacy of Rocketi.
”If someone has fired even one bullet, how can we vote for him? Those men have destroyed our country,” said Rahmat Ullah during a heated teashop debate. But Muhammad Zaman, a vegetable seller with black kohl under his eyes, praised the Taliban.
”They are good men. We want them back in power again,” he said.
Outside town, Rocketi was holstering his pistol before heading off to another meeting.
”The past is the past, a book that has already been written,” he said. ”Now it is time to write a new one.”
Back story
Led by the enigmatic cleric Mullah Omar and nurtured by Pakistani intelligence, the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 1996. Its initial popularity in restoring security to a nation racked by civil war was soon overshadowed by its repressive edicts inspired by a fundamentalist reading of the Qur’an.
The West paid little attention to the Taliban until 1998 when Bin Laden, whom the organisation was sheltering, directed the bombing of two US embassies in Africa. Mullah Omar refused numerous appeals to surrender Bin Laden and in late 2001 the Taliban regime was rapidly toppled by a coalition of US bombers and Afghan militia fighters.
The Taliban rump fled into the southern mountains and across the border to Pakistan where it regrouped to launch an insurgency that continues today.
American claims that the rebellion was on its last legs last winter proved premature. The Taliban killed 16 soldiers aboard a US helicopter in July, regularly bombs military convoys and has rendered swathes of the south ungovernable.
The US has responded with massive aerial bombardments, killing hundreds. Omar’s whereabouts remain unknown. — Guardian Unlimited Â