FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - My Life with the Taliban

Rant Number 473 16 January 2012

Er...not the priest’s life, actually, but Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s. Former Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan. A chubby, affable, avuncular cove, he was the Taliban’s official voice to the West. Black-turbaned and bearded, he looked the part. After the US onslaught on his country after 9/11 the Pakistanis handed Zaeef over to the Yanks. He spent four years in Guantanamo. ‘Brutalising disrespect’ could sum up his experience there. With pictures now showing laughing US marines peeing over the corpses of Taleban warriors, the saga of own goal-scoring by ‘the West’ appears never-ending.

My Life with the Taliban is Zaeef’s autobiography. Orphaned as a child, from a desperately poor background, the future ambassador is brought up by relatives. Piety is the keynote of his life, so when the Russians invade Afghanistan, he joins the mujahedeen, the Islamic fighters. The holy warriors’ brotherhood when engaged in jihad is his fondest memory. After victory over the Soviets Mullah Omar sends Zaeef, against his wishes, as ambassador to Islamabad. Juicy snippets about his colleagues: the Kuwaiti ambassador, proud and pro-American; the young Saudi, obsessed with Osama bin Laden; the German and Belgian envoys, rude, arrogant and fixated with Muslim women (what’s new?). The nicest diplomat, he says, was the Palestinian ambassador – the moving kindness of the powerless...

The destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamyan, ordered by Abdul Wali, the Taliban minister for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice (why, o why can’t I head such ministry here?), is a kind of watershed. Buddhist countries plead to be allowed to remove the statues to safety. The Japanese offer money and argue: ‘You Afghanis were our ancestors, you gave us your religion: we got Buddhism from you’. Unmoved, Zaeef counters that the Japanese should now follow Afghanis into a higher religion, Islam. Besides, the Buddhas are only man-built stones, why make such a fuss? Whereupon the Japanese point out that the Ka’aba is also made of stone and constructed by human hands: why then do Muslims go around it and pray towards it? Zaeef does not record his answer.

Buddha, however, has his revenge. After the statues are blown up everything goes pear-shaped for the Taliban. Watching the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11, Zaeef’s fellows exult around him but he cries. He knows America’s wrath will spell disaster for his poor country. If true, it shows the ambassador was no fool.

Vengeful US missiles rain down on Afghanistan. Piously, Zaeef combines diplomacy with Islamic counselling. ‘Where is God? Why doesn’t he look after the Taliban? Can’t pray. My faith has gone’ a tearful lady tells him. His response is that ‘God is testing us’. A simple theodicy. Quite right. Invoking, say, Ibn Arabi’s mysteriosophy – even if Zaeef was into that, which he is not – would have been a faux pas. To the simple you should be simple.

It is false, the ambassador claims, that the Taliban encouraged the cultivation of poppies and the production of drugs, quite the contrary. And the Islamic Emirate even offered to have Osama bin Laden put under house arrest, to prevent him from doing any harm. The possibility of sending Osama to the Hague Tribunal was also mooted. Bush would have none of that. The god of war’s votaries would not be placated.

Pakistan, fearful of America, breaks up relations with the Taliban. Still, Zaeef’ status should entitle him to some immunity. Instead, his Muslim brothers betray him. The infamous ISI, the Pakistani Army intelligence, trades him, as a goat, to the Yanks. Hooded, duct tape over his mouth, he is tied up, stripped naked, starved, kicked by the soldiers with their boots, dragged around, sat upon – they even use their rifles to beat him. I’ll spare you the humiliations he and his fellow captives suffer in Guantanamo – the dismal story is all too well-known, anyway.

Of course, if Zaeef’s handlers had been ruthless imperialists like Romans, Mongols or Turks, his ordeal would seem almost like schoolboys rough stuff. After all, they did not cut off his nose and ears, skin him alive or slit is throat. Problems arise when a nation proudly pretends to be on the side of the angels. To embody and uphold universal, high-minded values like democracy (‘democracy by the whip’, Zaeef mocks it), human rights, equality and blah-blah-blah. And signs up to international treaties against torture, mistreatment of prisoners and such trifles. Maybe America is hampered by her own principles? Could be.

Released in 2005, Zaeef is in no forgiving mood. ‘May Allah take revenge for what they did to me in this world and the next’, he says. ‘Barbarous’, ‘beasts’ and ‘Satanic’, he calls his jailers and tormentors. America is ‘a monster’. The UK is labelled ‘diabolical’. Well, now: Tony Blair was indeed that. ‘Stupid’ perhaps fits better Britain’s rulers. What else would you call governments that send their young men to die for a useless, unwinnable war? Moreover, I am naive enough to believe that the Brits would not have been as awful to Zaeef as the Yanks, had the roles been swapped. But, I know, I just am very naive.

The priest also must observe how Zaeef seems to forget that it was thanks to the aid of the ‘Satanic’ Americans that he and his fellow jihadists could beat the Soviets. (On page 47 there is a brief reference to ‘some Western countries’ and their help but none to the US, surely the key supporter.) Americans gave the mujahedeeen modern weapons with which to destroy Russian helicopters and tanks. That way Uncle Sam made a rod for his own back. As Italians say: ben gli sta!

I kind of like Zaeef, though he could hardly be described as progressively-minded. Any hint of concern for females is absent from his narrative (I wonder what the invisible Mrs Zaeef feels about it all) and an agrarian reform implemented by the pro-Soviet regime way back is described as against Islam. However, the Western powers that armed the Taliban against the Russians did not give the status of the poor women a thought either. Power politics is like that: dirty.

Moral? It depends of you, dear reader, but here is the priest’s: beware the Buddha’s revenge!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli