 You are watching News Made Easy, I am Anandji Chakravarty and today I am going to talk about the Taliban. Who are they? Well, we really don't know who the Taliban are right now because remember the Taliban first came into international limelight sometime in the mid 90s from 94 to 96 is their peak period and after that in 2001 when the American so-called war on terror started the Taliban was beaten out, beaten back moved out of Kabul, thrown out of most part of Afghanistan, continued to run guerrilla campaigns against Americans and the Afghan National Army and many of them went into hiding in Pakistan. There was a Pakistani part of the Taliban which also emerged called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and there was, most of it was outside Afghanistan and parts of southern Afghanistan. But who are they now? It's been 20 years, we don't know what actually emerged. There has been very little available data, much, they must have been studied by experts, they must have been studied by you know secret services of various countries especially of this region but very little is known about the real figures of the Taliban. Let's start with what the Taliban was in the early 90s. The Taliban actually is often mistaken to have emerged out of the anti-Soviet-Mujahideen war, the war of which is called the so-called war of liberation of Afghanistan which forced the Soviet Army to withdraw in 1989 after 10 years of occupation of sorts. It is assumed that they emerged out of that. They did not. They had nothing to do with it. As Ahmad Rashid shows us in this classic book which you should try and get hold of, he shows us and explains that most of the Taliban's core fighters in the 90s actually grew up in Pakistan. They grew up in refugee camps. Many of them were Afghans who had been sent to, who had escaped from Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. And they grew up in Pakistani refugee camps. They were taught in madrassas often run by a semi-literate clerics and all that they learnt was the Quran and a very, very extreme form of the Sharia and a very extreme form of Islam. That is what they learnt. They had, as Ahmad Rashid points out, many of them had never seen or interacted with women. They were Afghans who grew up in all male dominated madrassas in camps where they only saw men and they only saw fighters and they only saw clerics. They only saw certain kind of austere living and they had a general distrust and a fear of women. And which we, which as Ahmad Rashid and others have argued, probably resulted in this extreme anti-women form of Islam which they tried to establish in their Islamic Emirate which they established once they took over Kabul in 1996. And the most important part of this is that large parts of Afghanistan believe that these are Pakistanis. Many of them were actually Pakistanis. They were not even Afghans. They were Urdu speaking Pakistanis who had joined the Taliban and were part of the fighting force of the Taliban. In fact, in several cases in one of the famous battles with the Hazaras in the north many of those who were killed were Pakistani citizens. They were part of, they were people who had nothing to do with Afghanistan. So they were either born and brought up or trained in Pakistan or they were Pakistanis directly. So this was the original Taliban which established an absolutely rigid, uncompromising form of Islamic state in Afghanistan which lasted for about 5 years till 2001 when they were ousted and it all happened because of 9-11. Then the America so called war on terror started when the Taliban basically abandoned Kabul and left and their supreme leader Murla Omar went into hiding, died later and the baton passed on to others who continued a sort of guerrilla warfare often against the Pakistani army in Pakistani Pashtun areas along the northwestern frontier provinces of Pakistan where there was a Pakistani version of the Tehrik-e-Taliban which came out. Now the point is that it's been 20 years now. We really do not know what the Taliban is like, who controls them. One thing is clear that when the Taliban came into existence and gained power it was entirely driven by the Pakistani army and government. Originally by Benazir Bhutto and then the ISI increasingly when it found that the Taliban is their best bet to control Afghanistan especially the land routes to take export to move goods into Central Asia. That is when they backed Taliban over their previous favourites including Gulbuddin Hekmatya who was a Mujahideen leader of one time. Now when the Taliban took over only 3 countries recognized them and one of them on Pakistan's urging which is Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE. The US was accused of continuing clandestine support to the Taliban and there have been various books that have been written about how the Clinton administration was soft on the Taliban till there were these attacks, these terror attacks done by the Al-Qaeda and Taliban had given shelter to Osama bin Laden. That's when the tide turned. But even at during visits by the US Secretary of State in the late 90s to Pakistan they made a very clear anti-Taliban statement. But when George W. Bush came to power in 2000, even in 2001, Taliban's then so-called spokesperson and Foreign Minister Mukhtar Vakil actually did go to the US and meet people and there were attempts to kind of build some kind of a bridge by the petroleum company Unocal with the Taliban to ease their operations and to be able to put natural gas pipelines in Afghanistan. But the Taliban were ousted, they became guerrillas. So we really don't know what the Taliban is like right now. We know in the past the Taliban was an anti-women force. It was an extremely backward looking anti-modern force. It had banned television, radio, photography. Radio was allowed only for but no music was allowed. Men had to wear beards of a certain length. Women could not go out without unless they were accompanied by their blood relatives. Men who were their blood relatives, they had to be fully covered. In fact, when they took over Kabul in 1996, the Taliban forced people to blacken their windows so that even sunlight so that people couldn't look inside and see women. So women spent time inside homes without even sunlight reaching them. And remember this is, we forget that Afghanistan had a democratic period, significant democratic period till about 1989 when women took up important posts. They went to school, got educated. They wore what they wanted to wear. They could do what they wanted to do. Yes, there were restrictions like any other country, patriarchal country, like any other in the world but they had a significant degree of freedom which was taken away gradually as the Mujahideen took over first and then as the Taliban came in, it was completely stopped. There was a certain degree of freedom that was restored. Once the new Afghan government came, the Americans took over and the new Afghan government came into existence after that. Certain degree of, at least on paper but in villages it is well known that that did not exist. Now the point is that the Taliban right now, the person who heads it right now or is the face of Taliban is also another person who was a co-founder of the Taliban, Abdul Ghani Baradar. Abdul Ghani Baradar was incarcerated in Pakistan for several years, apparently because he tried to open a kind of way to speak to Hamid Karzai's government, the American backed government in Afghanistan. He wanted to open negotiations. He was incarcerated. A lot of people say that he is more or less controlled by Pakistan's ISI and the army. We'll have to wait and see how that is. It is clear that the Taliban right now is trying to recreate a new image. This is a group which had first smashed TV sets and said that you can't even take photographs. They are happy to appear on camera and are distributing it. There are even Taliban reporters talking about how everyone is so happy that the Taliban has entered Kabul. You can see footage of them taking over, supposedly peacefully entering the presidential palace in Kabul. So clearly they have understood that the visual medium is important for propaganda. They have issued statements saying that girls will be allowed to study till high school. We have to wait and see whether that happens. They have said that women can participate in government, can even work as long as they follow Sharia rules. What that means? We don't know. Clearly this is a softer image the Taliban is trying to put up right now. The surprise element was the speed with which the Taliban is taken over. But as veteran journalist and former army officer Ajay Shukla, who was the only Indian to enter Kabul when the American forces entered it along with Northern Alliance. Ajay Shukla says that in Afghanistan battles are often won by bribing. So it is possible that many of these people had been bribed and that is how one after the other these cities and districts have fallen. But the point is where did the Taliban get the money? Chances are most of it would have been routed through Pakistan and through Saudi support. It is well known that Saudi Arabians have historically supported the Taliban. The Taliban has started an outreach program. China for instance has said that they are happy to work with a new government which is stable and peaceful as long as they don't support terrorists in China. Which of course probably means the Uyghurs who the Chinese have been trying to suppress. Many Uyghurs are, guerrillas are inside Afghanistan so the Taliban will find it difficult to find. 20 years lot has changed in geopolitics in that region. We will have to wait and see how things work out over the next few weeks. We will keep updating you on this show. This is bound to be worth watching out for.