Word: beards
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...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...
...There was a genuine Thanksgiving glow about the meal. The bread is good, and more Taliban fighters come in to partake. One of them, a little man with a beard like a troll's, says he's Mullah Mohammed Omar's nephew. But he hasn't seen his uncle much lately: the Taliban supreme commander has been awfully busy since Sept...
...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...