The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [129]
There were three streams that fed the Taliban, which flooded across Afghanistan with such extraordinary rapidity. One was the material support—money and arms—from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Some of the Taliban had been students in a vocational school that Ahmed Badeeb, Prince Turki’s chief of staff, had established during the war; so from the beginning there was an intimate connection between Saudi intelligence and the young insurgents.
The second stream drew from the madrassas across the Pakistan border, such as the one that Ahmed Badeeb had established, which were crammed full with the sons of Afghan refugees. Such schools were desperately needed because Pakistan, with one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world, had failed to create a public school system that would adequately instruct its own children, much less those of the three million Afghan refugees who had fled to Pakistan after the Soviet invasion. (There was an equal number of refugees in Iran.) Typically, the madrassas were funded by charities from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which channeled the money through local religious parties. As a result, many of the indigenous Sufi shrines were closed down and turned into schools that taught the Wahhabi doctrine. Naturally, the madrassas created a powerful political constituency for the local Wahhabi parties, since they not only provided free room and board but actually paid a monthly stipend—a vital source of support for many of the students’ families.
These boys had grown up in an exclusively male world, separated from their families for long periods of time. The traditions and customs and lore of their country were distant to them. They were stigmatized as beggars and sissies, and often preyed upon by men who were isolated from women. Entrenched in their studies, which were rigidly concentrated on the Quran and Sharia and the glorification of jihad, the talibs imagined a perfect Islamic society, while lawlessness and barbarity ran rampant all around them. They lived in the shadow of their fathers and older brothers, who had brought down the mighty superpower, and they were eager to gain glory for themselves. Whenever the Taliban army required reinforcements, the madrassas in Peshawar and the Tribal Areas simply shut down classes and the students went to war, praising God as the buses ferried them across the border. Six months after Kandahar surrendered, there were twelve thousand fighters in the Taliban, and twice again that number six months later.
The third stream was opium. Immediately after capturing Kandahar, the Taliban consolidated control of Helmand province, the center of opium cultivation. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan became the largest poppy grower in the world. The smugglers and drug barons depended on the Taliban to keep the roads clear of bandits; in return, they paid a 10 percent tax, which became a principal source of income for the Taliban.
In Kandahar there is a shrine that houses what is said to be the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed. The ancient robe is removed from its silver box only during periods of catastrophe—the last time had been during a cholera epidemic seventy years before. On April 4, 1996, Omar took the Prophet’s cloak to a mosque in the center of the city. Having announced on the radio that he would display the relic in public, he climbed on the roof of the mosque and for thirty minutes paraded around with his hands in the sleeves of the cloak, while a delirious crowd cheered his designation as Amir-ul-Momineen, the leader of the faithful. Some people in the crowd fainted; others threw their hats and turbans into the air, hoping that they would brush against the sacred garment.
Of course, it was the dream of Islamists everywhere that their religion would again be unified under the rule of a single righteous individual. Kings and sultans had bid for the role, but none had wrapped himself in the mantle of the Prophet as had this obscure mullah. It was a gesture both preposterous and electrifying. Omar gained