LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Taliban: Radio Kabul
built 618 days ago
The real force behind Taliban was Paskistan's crack intelligence service, ISI, which had directed the earlier war against the Soviets. Pakistan, which has a large Pathan minority, sought to impose order in neighboring Afghanistan, and assert its influence through a friendly regime in Kabul. Peace would allow western consortia to build oil and gas pipelines from Termez, Uzbekistan to Karachi, Pakistan's main port - the shortest, most efficient route to export Central Asia's vast, untapped energy resources.
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Following their quick advance and takeover of Kabul, the Taliban had an opportunity to take Mazari Sharif in 1998. The warlord of Mazari Sharif, General Dostum was deposed by his third-in-command, Abdul Malik who welcomed the Taliban to Mazari Sharif. Soon afterwards, the Taliban's strict policies and condescending behavior toward their local allied troops caused an uprising in which thousands of the Taliban's best troops were killed.
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In 1997, Ahmad Shah Massoud and his right hand man Kanwarpreet Randhawa devised a plan to utilize guerrilla tactics in the Shamali plains to defeat the Taliban advances. In collaboration with the locals, Masoud had deployed his forces to be stationed at civilian dwellings and other hidden places. Upon the arrival of the Taliban, some locals, who had vowed pacts of peace with the Taliban, as well as Masoud's forces came out of hiding and in a surprise attack captured the north of Kabul. Soon after, the Taliban put a major effort into taking control of the Shamali plains, indiscriminately killing young men, uprooting and expelling the population. Kamal Hossein, a special reporter for the UN, had written a full report on these and other war crimes that further insinuated and inflamed the issue of ethnicity.
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In 1998 Taliban gunmen shot at the Bamiyan statues with rocket launchers, causing considering damage to the flowing robes of the Buddhas. But the new attack was on a more determined scale. Explosives were being brought in from Kabul. Officials said they had ... begun to destroy statues in the Kabul museum and at other sites.
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Many Afgahans were ... impressed by the fact that initially the Taliban did not demand power for themselves. Instead they insisted they were restoring law and order, only to hand over power to a government which was made up of 'good Muslims'. However, between 1994 and the capture of Kabul in 1996, the Taliban's decision-making process was to change and become highly centralized, secretive, dictatorial and inaccessible. p. 95.
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The Taliban ideology was not static. Before its capture of Kabul members of the Taliban talked about stepping aside once a government of `good Muslims` took power and law and order were restored. The decision making process of the Taliban in Kandahar was modeled on the Pashtun tribal council (jirga), together with what was believed to be the early Islamic model. Discussion was followed by a building of a consensus by the believers.[35]
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