Last we checked in on the Swat Valley, women were reveling in the removal of Taliban restrictions while suspected Taliban supporters were being tortured and lynched by locals or receviing much the same from the military. As one embittered hotel owner in Swat said, “Even the Israelis have not done such bad things to the Palestinians as the Taliban did to us.”
Now the leader of the Swat Taliban has reappeared in Afghanistan, and he’s promising vengeance.
“I have reached Afghanistan safely,” Maulana Fazlullah told BBC Urdu.
“We are soon going to launch full-fledged punitive raids against the army in Swat.”
….He issued a warning to the North West Frontier Province’s information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain.
“The authorities should beware, especially Mian Iftikhar Hussain, whose fate will be like that of Najibullah,” he warned, referring to Dr Najibullah who was Afghan president before the Taliban hanged him in 1996 when they took Kabul.
Najibullah* was tortured, castrated and executed without trial by the Afghan Taliban in 1996, after which his body was dragged through the streets and hung from a lamp post.
* Juan Cole today linked an article by a UN official who spent some time visiting with Najibullah just before the Taliban killed him. The official asked Najibullah if he regretted the blood on his hands from his time serving as head of the Afghan secret police under the communists.
“Dear Alan, do not be naïve about what you are facing. They will bring a destruction you cannot imagine.”
His message to me, at our New Year meeting in 1995, was one of no regrets for whatever he had done to stand against the Islamists. He was absolutely clear about that; he would do it again.
johnpi 7:57 pm on November 17, 2009 Permalink |
I guess the ‘narrative theme’ or what stuck out to me across these accounts was the decent into atrocity of all sides at all times in war, and that they seem to pass it around to each other.
Tec15 5:54 pm on November 18, 2009 Permalink |
Huh, apologia for the “secular and progressive” PDRA. Haven’t seen that in a while. Back when they weren’t busy closing down Mosques wholesale, using aerial bombing against civilian demonstrators, employing torture techniques that makes Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib look like what their apologists claim they are (I.e harmless fraternity pranks), I guess they were inculcating “Western values”. Either that or the regime’s brutality were simply expressing “Western values”, as the article implies that Najibullah’s torturing and repression were only directed at the eeeevil Islamists.
I love how the article also implies that Najibullah was simply a sensitive intellectual whose serious overtures were rejected by the West, instead of being a ruthless and sadistic Moscow trained thug who was still being backed by the “Reds” even as he was supposedly proclaiming their death in letters to Bush. Also glossing over his time as a sadistic torturer, and the fact that more Afghans actually fled his “secular and progressive” rule then they did the Taliban’s. Not to mention the laughable claim that Najibullah’s tirade was directed at only “Islamists” and not Islam. Sure, I find that believable coming from a guy who when not busy getting drunk, expressed shame at the reference to Allah in his name and proclaimed his willingness to fight against the “Greens” with the United States (Green is apparently only a colour of the eeevil Islamists and not regular Muslims).
What this attempt to rehabilitate Najibullah as a secular prophet of the dangers of “Islamo-Fascism” does, is that it tells me that if he were still alive, the United States may well be using him as their puppet dictator instead of someone like Karzai. Hell he expresses his willingness to play that particular role in that very article. No doubt he would be more effective at garnering liberal Western supporters than Karzai is. He could regale them with tales of his heroic resistance for “secular and progressive Western values” against the diabolical Islamists and they would probably lap it all up.