File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0111, message 270


Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 05:35:18 +0000 (GMT)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?eldorra=20mitchell?= <manynotone-AT-yahoo.co.in>
Subject: Colours of the Chameleon


Colours of the cornered chameleon are changing
rapidly,
 Taliban style
Robert Fisk in Chaman, on the Afghan border
 27 November 2001
You could call it the smell of surrender, the mullah
talking of compromise, the young Taliban fighters
vainly seeking asylum  as the wind blew the dust and
faeces of this filthy frontier road into their faces.
But I rather suspect we were watching the colours of
the chameleon change, Taliban-style. One turban for
another, you see.Take Mullah Najibullah when he turned
up at this grubby border post yesterday. "We're not
surrendering Spin Boldak,'' he  announced, this from
the man who admitted to me inside the  Afghan border
town just 24 hours earlier that the Taliban had 
ordered him not to spend the night there. "There are
no negotiations going on for the surrender because the
tribal  commanders want too much from us. They want a
complete  surrender of the Taliban along with our
heavy weapons, and  that's not an option.'' This
wasn't quite the spirit of Kandahar whose possession,
so  the Taliban tell us, will never be forfeited to
the Northern  Alliance, nor to the US Marines who
yesterday landed at the  Province's sporting club at
which Saudi Arabia's princes once  arrived to hunt
animals with the Taliban. We're still hearing about a
"last stand" for Kandahar, 66 miles down the main road
 from here. And, say the truck drivers we chatted to
today, still  very much in the hands of the world's
most obscurantist militia. But the local Pakistanis,
Pashtus like the Taliban, suggested  that Mullah
Najibullah might be pulling a bit of a fast one. One 
Pakistani official stated bluntly that negotiations
were going on
 between the mullah's men and those "tribal
commanders",  presumably the same bunch of warlords
and murderers who  ran this place before the Taliban,
a dab hand at killing, took  over in 1996.
Furthermore, he hinted, the surrender of heavy 
weapons might be enough to secure the transfer of Spin
 Boldak to new masters, the Taliban being allowed to
exchange  black turbans for brown ones, a la Kunduz
and keep their
Kalashnikovs providing they headed home to their
villages. Will Kandahar fall? True to Afghan
tradition, the locals  created a little detour
yesterday, driving to the Pakistan border from  their
home city by trekking through the sand and muck around
the town of Takhta-Pul and avoiding the Northern
Alliance  gunmen who have been shooting at the place,
along with their  US Air Force chums, for the past 48
hours. When they turned  up at the Pakistan border,
there was disappointing news for the
Stalingrad-hunting press. Yes, the Taliban were still
in control
of Shah Durani's first royal capital. Yes, the Taliban
were still in  the city's airport (so much for those
first Pentagon reports) and  men and women were still
shopping in Kandahar's market. This, remember, in a
city that is supposed to be feeling the  pinch of real
famine. But things are never what they seem in
Afghanistan. At the  roadside yesterday high in the
Koja mountains, it was possible  to look far across
the plains of Kandahar, to its distant  mountains in
the grey midday heat, its roads fading in the  white
and brown sand, untouched by smoke or the sound of 
gunfire. It had looked like this, of course, back in
the early  Eighties, when the Russians were killing
the "terrorists'' and  civilians of Afghan-istan. And
I'm sure it looked like this when Alexander the
Great's armies tramped across it. Who could  believe,
as the warm breeze drifted up from this antique
landscape that the Americans were also killing the
"terrorists''  and civilians of Afghanistan today. 
There was a touch of reality later, when seven young
Taliban men sans SANS guns, of course, arrived at the
Chaman crossing and begged to be allowed to enter
Pakistan. They said they needed food and medical help.
Whey-faced, they were probably hungry, but the
Pakistanis didn't buy the  "medical" bit. The Taliban
boys didn't have the right documents, whatever papers
these are supposed to be, and were pushed back across
the border. Mullah Najibullah, it  should be added,
was given permission to cross. Just as the local
military commander, Mullah Haqqani, was received and 
sent on to Quetta on Sunday.
What were they fleeing? Surrender? Ignominy? Or had
they  heard the US news reports of the Mazar prison
slaughter,  where Taliban prisoners were, I use the
casual phrase of a US  satellite channel, "executed"?
In our war for civilisation, it is  now apparently
normal for people to be executed while trying to 
escape. War crimes? Atrocities? Think not of it. But I
bet you Mullah Najibullah does. 

 


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