The Taliban are attempting to impose a new moral order in Afghanistan and they are doing it at gunpoint. The Afghan experience has lessons for the rest of South Asia, rent by violent dissension everywhere.
Would Islamic fundamentalism take over northern Afghanistan? Would it enter Panjshir, which, in the 1980s, had kept out the Russians themselves? What would happen to ex-communists in Balkh and Mazar-i-Sharif, including Babrak Karmel and Anahita Ratebzad? Would the new alliance in the internal game of "round and round the mulberry bush" between Ahmed Shah Masood and Rashid Dostam, succeed, where previous improbable heavy dancers had "all fallen down"? Were northern ethnic warlords going to drive Pathan mullahs from the south and east out of Kabul and re-establish a relatively modern, and less sexist government?
By October-end, the press, notoriously quick on the draw with conclusions about future scenarios was predicting that the Taliban would have Kabul imploding in their faces. The city had blown down previous rulers who sought to change traditional ways of political culture and had seen internecine warfare from the times of Amanullah and Bacha-i-Saqao in 1929 to those of Prince-President Daud, and then Nur Muhammad Tarakki, Hafizullah Amin, and latterly, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Najibullah.
The Western journalists, who live on Chicken Street (Kabul´s version of the pony-tailed foreigner-infested Thamel of Kathmandu), had begun to be cynical about old stories, that Afghan politics was paradigmatic of buzkashi, the crude form of polo where horsemen grab after a disembowelled sheep´s carcass. They had started to look forward to the days when bottles of Scotch would be easier to get, and women could once more be glimpsed unveiled.