Word: kabul
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Despite its reputation for brutality, the Northern Alliance was behaving better than expected. "We've been impressed by the way they comported themselves in Kabul," says the State official, "and we have reason to believe they'll take a constructive role in Bonn," where the main factions meet this week to thrash out a power-sharing arrangement. Washington will do business with the warlords, however thuggish or politically grasping they might be. That's partly by necessity but also because the Pentagon wants people in power with enough authority to locate bin Laden and assist in killing...
...streets of Kabul, you can see something these days that has not been glimpsed there for almost five years--women's faces. Now that the Taliban has fled the city, a few brave women have shed the burka--the head-to-toe garment, to Western eyes a kind of body bag for the living, made mandatory by the defeated religious leadership. Men sometimes look in astonishment at these faces, as if they were comets or solar eclipses. So do other women. From the moment in 1996 that the Taliban took power, it sought to make women not just obedient...
...houses that they once could not leave except in the company of a male relative. Some are returning to the jobs they had to give up when the Taliban barred them from all employment except for a small number of health-care jobs dedicated to women. Even more remarkable, Kabul's sole television station now features a woman announcer. In a country where people were required to paint their windows black so that passersby could not see the face of any woman who might be at home, the announcer appears onscreen without a veil...
...just as the meltdown of Taliban military power has not brought real peace to Afghanistan, neither has the disappearance of its hated religious police brought women freedom overnight. Afghan society is tribal and conservative. Except for a small minority of educated professionals in Kabul, women have long been relegated to a subservient role. In rural areas of northern Afghanistan that are under the control of the Northern Alliance, the burka is still universal, though no law requires it. Even in Kabul, where Western-style skirts were not uncommon before the Taliban, many women say the burka is the least...
...Taliban's ability to resurrect itself as a Pashtun guerrilla force depends on Mullah Omar staying alive. If he lives, and if the Allied forces cannot broker a lasting, stable government in Kabul that passes on immediate benefits to the Pashtuns, then the Taliban fighters will dig up their hidden weapons and descend from the mountains, probably in six months time. The U.S. may indeed have "fractured" the Taliban's command and control structure, as the Pentagon claims, but the militia's lower echelons remain intact, along tribal lines. A commander usually recruits from his own village or town, even...