The Moderate Taliban???

Here's a profile of two moderate members of the Taliban.....

The first was Abdul Hakim Mujahid, whom I met in March 1999. He was then the Taliban regime's ambassador to the United Nations, in New York. I met him in the company of my wife, a writer with The New York Times, who had gone to do an interview with him for the paper's Sunday magazine. She had secured an interview appointment a day earlier, to meet at the Taliban's scruffy offices in an inscrutable section of Queens. She showed up at the appointed hour--given to her by the ambassador's right-hand man after a careful vetting over the telephone--and rang the doorbell to the office, which was in a small building that appeared to house doctors' clinics and the like. There was no answer. She tried again, and again, and after hanging around outside the building for some 20 minutes, she left for home. (Then five months pregnant, she was in sore need of a couch and a cup of tea.)

Once home, she called the Afghans to ask where she--or they--had gone wrong. They answered immediately, and were carefully, even chivalrously, apologetic. There had been "delays," "a cancellation"--but they were sorry, very sorry. Would she come back, please, the next day? In a conversation shortly after, my wife and I wondered whether the pious, bearded men inside the office had espied a heavily pregnant Western woman through the window, and, spooked by the brazen protuberance of her belly, had decided not to answer the doorbell.

My wife returned the next day; but feeling uncomfortable about the circumstances of the change in her appointment, took me along as chaperon. We rang the doorbell, were buzzed in and were greeted by the ambassador, a textbook Talib, heavily bearded and turbaned, and dressed in Afghan shalwar-kameez and waistcoat. My presence was welcomed, and for a while all conversation was directed at me, to the exclusion of my wife, his interviewer. But I retreated to an antechamber after a few minutes, leaving them to talk. An interview ensued, and was published. In it, he criticized American schools, American society (and its "commoditization" of women), and the excess of individualism in the West.

He also discussed--perhaps for urbane effect, and to dispel any notions that the Taliban read only the Koran--Ibsen's A Doll's House and made chillingly unctuous remarks about Jews when discussing the people in his Queens neighborhood: "I think mainly they are Jewish people. With the small hats on their heads. Sometimes they are asking my son, because he wears a small hat, Are you Jewish? So much similarity we have with the Jewish people."
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The interview over, we went to a nearby Afghan restaurant and had lunch. My wife still recalls with indignation that he did not address a single word to her at lunch, talking only to me. I recall that a number of sycophants came to our table during lunch, all bearded men. They greeted me each time, but not my wife, who was fed sumptuously. In a curious distortion of hospitality, she was offered all the kebab and naan she could eat, yet excluded totally from conversation. (The Independent of London reports that Mujahid--the ambassador--is now among the moderate Taliban whom Hamid Karzai is said to be preparing to talk to.)

The second moderate Talib I met was a man called Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the Taliban's roving cultural ambassador in the aftermath of the destruction--on the orders of the mullahs--of two ancient statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan, in Afghanistan. Hashemi had come to meet the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, where I was an op-ed editor, and we gathered eagerly around him in a conference room to hear what he had to say. Breathtakingly, he offered a defense of the destruction, which I wrote up for the paper. One statement he made bears quoting in full:

"We in Afghanistan have many people dying of hunger. Children are starving. But no one in the West is prepared to help. Instead, we had a group of Western diplomats who came to our country and offered us money, lots of money, for the repair and restoration of these statues. We thought, these people care more about the Buddhas than about our children. This made us enraged, so enraged that we decided to get rid of these statues. We had to show the West that their priorities were wrong. So we decided to knock down the statues."

This meeting took place in March 2001, six months before the attack on the Twin Towers. Looking back, I am chilled by the thought that we were in a room with a man who'd most likely met, and plotted ideas with, Osama bin Laden. And the room we were in was but a stone's throw from the World Trade Center, a spectacular view of which Hashemi--the roving ambassador--had admired through a window in our offices. How much of its violent fate had he known at the time? (Hashemi is the man who came to be known to the wider American public as the Talib who went to Yale briefly, with the university's imprimatur, before public opinion forced his departure.)

These, then, are the faces of moderation that I, personally, encountered. I remember them well. These are the people who could soon be talking to Richard Holbrooke--Obama's Great Game Czar--and doing deals with us.

Are you reassured?