Re: NEW BREAK, PRINCE HARRY SERVING IN AFGHANISTAN FOR MONTHS, HE IS MY HERO
Under Taliban, money-changers never had it so good
The good times rolled for the money-changers of Kandahar under Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers.
But since the overthrow of the fundamentalists late last year, it has been downhill all the way for the southern city’s money men – and it’s getting worse.
“It was our best time in my 20 years as a banker,” said Gul Ahmad, a turbanned trader in downtown Kandahar’s busy Shapak Bazaar. “Whatever you say about the Taliban, they brought stability and didn’t interfere in business.”
Huge piles of banknotes are stacked up on makeshift tables, the money-changers squatting on the muddy, fly-blown sidewalk, or sitting in tiny kiosks along the shopfront. But the impression of simplicity and general decay is grossly misleading.
“There are about 100 money dealers in this street, serving import-export businesses trading with Japan, the Gulf and Europe,” said another trader, Abdul Salaam. “Commerce is the foundation stone of Kandahar, and we Kandaharis have a reputation for a straight deal and for keeping our word.”
Ahmad agreed. “In good times, we money changers collectively handle the equivalent of about (Pakistani) Rs 5 billion a day. That’s about $83 million dollars.”
But things have changed since Northern Alliance forces, allied with the United States and its B-52 bombers, toppled the Taliban for protecting Saudi-born militant Osama in Laden, the prime suspect in the September 11 attacks on the United States.
“Now business is down 90 per cent,” Ahmad said.
People were hoarding their cash, holding back on investment and new trading ventures.
Abdul Salaam said businessmen were waiting to see what monetary policy the interim government would adopt. Would it devalue, or scrap the existing currency altogether?
Both traders agreed the most important factor was insecurity – a combination of uncertainty about the future, and a nagging sense of physical danger.
“Business hates insecurity. If there are bandits on the roads, levying illegal taxes, we suffer. If we suffer, everyone else does too,” Saleem said. Law and order were essential.
“Traders need safe roads to the capital Kabul, north to Herat and south to Chaman on the Pakistan border. If the routes aren’t safe, business won’t flourish,” he said.
The local currency, the afghani, had hardened with the fall of the Taliban.
Under the Taliban, a Pakistani rupee bought afghanis 1,200. Now, under the Western-backed interim government led by Hamid Karzai, one rupee would buy some afghanis 475.
Both dealers said wild fluctuations in the national currency did not bode well for the future.
The exchange rate swung from afghanis 300 to 500 to the rupee on a daily and even hourly basis, and that was worrying. Ahmad said Afghans were quite capable of creating a vibrant economy with a little foreign assistance to help revive the battered infrastructure.
“Leave us to build the economy. We can do it ourselves. All we need is peace and security.”
There is an official curfew in the city, from 2100 to 0600 (local time).
The streets are patrolled by forces controlled by the city’s new chief, former governor Gul Agha, in the form of pickup trucks flying the red, green and black national flag and packed with gunmen wearing NATO-style camouflage uniforms.
Rusty T-55 tanks stand guard at the approaches to the city, and white-capped traffic policemen in shabby brown uniforms blow their whistles at traffic clogging city intersections shrouded in fumes from motorised rickshaws.
But the population at large is well-armed after more than 20 years of war, and ancient tribal and ethnic loyalties along with a general scramble for lucrative jobs in the new administration make for a combustible atmosphere.
Down the money changers’ street, an automotive spare parts trader is feeling the pinch.
“My customers aren’t doing new deals,” said Mohibullah. "They are holding onto their afghanis. They want to buy cheaply and sell dear, and they don’t know what the future will bring.
"None of us do.
and…
“The biggest achievement of the Taliban is they have brought sharia [Islamic law] to Afghanistan,” says Abdul Qudus, an ethnic Afghan and religious scholar who runs a madrassah, or religious school, for young Afghans in the Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan. “They have made a very good peace, they have collected weapons from the people, they stopped poppy cultivation [a source of opium], they stopped foreign interference - and especially religious conversions of our Muslims - and they started electricity in Afghanistan. That is their legacy.”
Nasir, a taxi driver in Kabul, takes a much dimmer view, and one shared by many of the Persian-speaking citizens of Kabul toward the Pushtu-speaking Taliban rulers. (Afghanistan has two official languages, Pushtu and Persian, and a variety of ethnic groups. These include majority Pashtuns, as well as Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmen.)
“These people don’t have any home, any food, any income,” Nasir says, gesturing at a group of widows and their children begging in a busy Kabul market. Like most Afghans interviewed for this story, Nasir asked that his name be altered to protect his identity.
“With the Taliban, the first thing they build is a mosque and a madrassah,” he says. “We need mullahs, but we also need other things too: engineers, doctors, teachers.”
When Karim saw his first Taliban soldiers, driving in on Toyota pickup trucks on Sept. 26, 1996, there was little to indicate that the public mood might turn against them. The Taliban, unlike the fractious mujahideen rebels who ousted the Soviets, was able to unify a majority of the country under one regime and bring a level of peace that hadn’t existed here for almost two decades.
In Kabul, and the five other Afghan metropolises under Taliban control, this newfound peace allowed Karim and his family to rebuild their home. Around the country, Afghans returned by the thousands, restoring a semblence of the lives they had led in the 1970s, before the troubles began. Hundreds of foreign-aid groups began setting up food-for-work programs; establishing medical clinics, bakeries, and schools; and beginning the long, dangerous task of clearing away millions of landmines and tons of unexploded ordnance.
Today, the Taliban claim to control up to 90 percent of Afghanistan, but this figure must be tempered somewhat by the fact that Taliban forces still face fighting in more than half - 17 out of 32 - Afghan provinces. As recently as yesterday, fighters from Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance - the main Taliban foe - launched a helicopter attack on Kabul itself, destroying two civilian airliners and detonating tons of ordnance at an ammunition dump.
Even so, in those areas where the Taliban is firmly in control, Afghans say they feel safer than in previous years.
“When the Taliban came in, the fighting stopped,” says Ubaidullah, head of a food-for-work program that is rebuilding homes in a destroyed section of Kabul. “Now, it is OK, there is no fighting, no thieves, no rapists. There is also no work and no money, therefore there are a lot of poor people.” As fellow workers gather, he pauses. “We have a lot of feelings about the Taliban that I can’t tell you.”
A ‘pure’ Islamic state
But more than anything else, the Taliban aimed at remaking Afghanistan into a nation that adhered to its interpretation of the pure Islamic society envisioned by the prophet Muhammad. Part of this came from the utter disappointment many of these young Taliban felt as they watched the mujahideen turn from liberators into bickering warlords, creating an anarchic state where robbery, rape, and extortion became the rule rather than the exception.
“If you look at the constituency of the Taliban, they are mostly the lower rungs of society, those who have little trust in where the world is going,” says a Western diplomat in New Delhi with extensive experience in Islamic societies of the Middle East. “So when the Taliban come in, they say, 'You have no food? We’ll build a bakery. No mosque? We’ll go build one. No school? We’ll build one, and we’ll even give your son free education in the Koran.”
“When the son comes home, fed and in new clothes, the first thing he tells his mother is, 'Mother, I have done bad things to you. I should honor you. I wish you to forgive me,” the diplomat adds. “What mother is not going to be ecstatic about that?”
Now go suck on a lemon!