In the early 1980s, Mohammad Najibullah was the head of the Afghan secret police, and responsible for mass-scale political arrests, assassinations, and torture.
In the late 1980s, as president of Afghanistan, he ended one party rule, and enacted a more inclusive National Reconciliation program, trying to bring his country out of war.
Mohammad Najibullah’s daughter Muska had an op-ed in the Guardian yesterday, titled “My father was brutally killed by the Taliban. The US ignored his pleas for help.”
Digressing a bit, before getting to Muska Najibullah’s personal story of the previous time that the Taliban took Kabul, and brutally killed her father: Obaidullah Baheer is a grandson of the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is among the worst human rights violators in modern Afghan history.
Obaidullah is also the son of Ghairat Baheer, who was disappeared by the United States for six years, including six months at the Salt Pit, an unimaginable dungeon of unrelenting total darkness and chains. The United States national security establishment as a whole, is also among the worst human rights violators in modern Afghan history.
By my take, Obaidullah is the best commentator and analyst on Afghanistan today. His twitter stream is essential, for anyone still having any interest in Afghanistan at all.
Here is Obaidullah Baheer, wrestling a bit, I think, with Mohammad Najibullah’s mixed legacy:
Perhaps we might wrestle a bit as well, with the mixed legacy of the United States in Afghanistan.
For example, we can admire Joe Biden’s speeches on Afghanistan, and his restoration of government institutions more generally. But it is unfair to disregard the brutality of his “counterterrorism plus” policy — essentially night raids and drone strikes — implemented after the failure of Barack Obama’s Afghan surge.
Afghanistan deserves better, but we are among all those who failed to deliver.
In the Guardian yesterday, Muska Najibullah, Mohammad Najibullah’s daughter, told her personal story of the day in 1996 when the Taliban took Kabul.
How the Taliban had pulled her father out of the United Nations compound, where he had been holed up in refuge from the mujahideen for four years, tortured him, mutilated his body, and strung him from a traffic light.
Her story deserves to be read in whole, including of her larger life beyond that one day. I don’t want to just quote snippets.
She links to a very good 9/11-prompted account by Terence White, who was in Kabul for AFP at the time of the fall. I am more comfortable quoting snippets from that:
Their first victims were women, whom they beat with wire cables and hose-pipes when found on the street in violation of the Taleban's first decree, which stated that women could no longer work and must stay at home.
This decree illustrated the Taleban's ignorance and bigotry, being a reflection of their Pashtun tribal culture rather than Islam, which does not ban women from work or school.
The associated social haemorrhage caused by staff shortages in hospitals and government offices, where women could no longer work, underscored their abysmal lack of organisation and planning.
I found the Taliban’s 1996 language about “no right to complain” quite haunting:
"Violators have no right to complain," was the facile Taleban explanation, and when jobless war-widows bravely demanded how they could feed their children, they were told God would provide.
Here is the current Taliban, using the same “no right to complain” language, quoted by the AP today:
“If anyone violates the rule (they) will be punished and no one has a right to complain,” said the order issued to the barbers. It wasn’t immediately clear what penalties the barbers could face if they don’t adhere to the no shaving or trimming rule.