Word: beards
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That's OK with me. I was across the border at last, heading towards Kandahar. At a roadblock were two authentic Taliban with AK-47s. In a land where all men are obliged by law (and a good beating) to grow a beard two fists long, you can tell the Taliban by their turbans, which are white or a more sinister black. These guys had festooned their rifle straps with ribbons of cassette tape, banned music confiscated from passing cars and buses...
...swear, anyone who counts in the Taliban is either missing an eye, a hand or a leg, or is barely old enough to have grown a beard. This all-powerful vizier, named Tayab Agha, was 25. The Kandahar police chief is the same age, and I've heard that he roars around in a brand new Hi-Lux with a Metallica sticker on the hood. (He got his job a few years back pulling Mullah Omar out of the rubble after truck bomb exploded outside his house.) Maybe now, when his Islamic caliphate is collapsing around...
...others switched sides. One Taliban commander on the front lines secretly arranged to defect with a few hundred of his men and agreed to let the Alliance through his line. The advancing rebels found another Taliban commander, Mullah Qahir, trying to avoid capture by snipping off his beard with nail scissors. He wasn't the only one. "From what I hear," said an Alliance officer, "it's a good time to be a razor salesman in Mazar...
...past," says Haqiq, the Pashtun commander. "They keep saying he will fight to the end, but we don't think that's true." Across Afghanistan, people deserted the regime as soon as it started losing, exposing its shallow hold on them. "The Taliban showed they were good at enforcing beard lengths," says a Western diplomat, "and that's about it." The first, pivotal defeat of the Taliban, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was greased by local Pashtun fed up with taking orders from "these village idiots from the south," as a foreign aid worker put it. Those...
...Taliban militiamen have lost their taste for jihad. Some have returned to their villages pleading for mercy; others tried to slip unnoticed across the Pakistani border. "It's very easy," says Khair Ullah, a resident of the border town of Bajaur. "You remove your black turban and trim your beard, and nobody says you are a Talib...