LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Taliban: Power
built 617 days ago
Once in power, the Taliban instituted a particularly harsh and oppressive form of Islamic law, leading to loud complaints from the international community and human rights watch organizations. While the Taliban may have led a reform of government, the replacement government had no governmental experience, and most appointed local leaders had little education according to Western standards and many were barely literate.
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The Taliban is now a disparate assemblage of radical groups estimated to number several thousand, far fewer than when it was in power before November 2001. The fighters operate in small cells that occasionally come together for specific missions. They're unable to hold territory or defeat coalition troops.
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Barring a political miracle, the Taliban will retain power for the foreseeable future. That miracle might take the form of a domestic economic disaster, an internationally armed and financed destabilization campaign, the fragmentation of the Taliban into competing groups, or some combination of these elements.
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The gruesome public execution was the young men's sentence, under Taliban law, of having been found guilty of engaging in sodomy. They were hardly the first to receive that kind of punishment for same-sex sexual transgressions: Just a month earlier three men found guilty of the same infraction had a stone wall collapsed on them in public just outside the city of Kandahar (purported to have had a large homosexual community before the Taliban seized power in 1996). Amazingly, all three survived and were taken to the hospital with fractures to most of the bones in their bodies; they were later given their freedom. (According to the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law, if you survive such a punishment, you're free to go.)
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On May 17, 2001, the Bush administration announced an increase of $43 million in drought relief to the Taliban in reward for this achievement. After the Taliban lost power in late 2002, the opium cultivation increased dramatically.
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"If the Taliban want to be shareholders in the government, they should come in through the election process. But if they want to take power directly, this is against the law, and parliament will never accept it. And if the government does agree to negotiate, it will face many internal problems."
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