Taliban seeks legitimacy by running schools and hospitals
THE Afghan government is funding schools and hospitals run by the Taliban as the militant group seeks to establish itself as a legitimate administration in large swaths of the country, a new film has found.
A report by a BBC team granted rare access to the group’s stronghold in Helmand province found the Taliban has been forced to present itself as somewhat modernised since Afghans have grown used to government services and a different way of life after the group was ousted from official power.
The Taliban has grown in confidence in the years since Western troops withdrew from the country.
“They are trying to set up a ministate – if not the actual state – in Helmand,” Auliya Atrafi, a journalist from the BBC Afghan service who made the film, told The Daily Telegraph.
“When we sat with the elders and the local leaders, they asked us ‘where do you think we will be in 10 years time?’ We knew what they were thinking: they see themselves in ten years time as the government.”
The Taliban swept to power in 1996, ending a brutal civil war that followed the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. They imposed a harsh version of sharia, including public executions and mutilations, forbidding women from taking part in public life, and banning television.
The group was overthrown by Nato intervention after the September 11 attacks in 2001, but has made gains since Western troops withdrew two years ago. It now controls more than 80 per cent of Helmand Province, where hundreds of British soldiers died fighting the group.
Mr Atrafi, a native of Helmand, spent more than a year negotiating access to Taliban-held Sangin and Musa Qala, the group’s de facto capital. The team visited a boys’ school and a Taliban-run hospital funded and supplied by the government in Kabul.
A school administrator told the crew that the Taliban do not interfere with government school inspections and allow teachers to follow the curriculum issued by the Kabul government.
However, a doctor at the hospital said the dual arrangement had “failed”. He said: “I haven’t been paid in the past six months – not only me but also the entire staff of the hospital.”
However, the group appears to be flirting with modern technology as it struggles to build legitimacy.
“People have hidden television sets, we were told there are about 20 wi-fi spots even though mobile and internet communications are banned,” he said. “These are the sorts of modernity that frighten the Taliban. But at the same time they realise they cannot do without it, so for them it is a kind of to-beor-not-to-be situation.”
However, elements of the Taliban’s puritanical rule remain in place. Mr Atrafi and his team saw no women on the streets, mobile and internet communications are banned, and they spoke to a teenager who received 40 lashes for watching a Bollywood film.