ight ideals of ridding Afghanistan of disorder and crime. However, as time passed, the true nature of the Taliban was revealed. The Taliban movement began in September of 1994, in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. At that time, they say Kandahar was plagued by groups that robbed, killed, and raped the populace. One man by the name of Mullah Mohammad Omar wanted to end these reprehensible acts, and so founded the Taliban as a means to combat it. Today, the Taliban is something perverted from that original dream. Their leaders have gone as far as to lay allegations that the government led by President Rabbani was illegitimate and non-Islamic and therefore blasphemous. They even branded the famous Mujahideen Commander Ahmad Shah Masood a criminal. Wherever the Taliban conquered, destruction and oppression has followed. Author Asta Olesen summed up the Taliban’s activities saying that many thousands of people had died, and anarchy had reigned because of the Taliban’s imposition of excesses against the female gender as well as the rest of the civil population (295). So far, they have destroyed historic artwork in Herat, burned villages, committed atrocities against the Shias of Afghanistan, closed schools for girls, banned women from work, started an opium boom, and oppressed men not belonging to their group. In Kabul, they even gathered up hundreds of young men to use as human mine shields. The Taliban may have begun as a movement to reform human rights atrocities, but has instead descended into a group who generates its own human rights violations. The religion of Islam teaches that men and women are equal in the sight of their god. The Muslim faith also tells us that “individuals should not be judged according to gender, beauty, wealth or privilege” (Mustafa 480). The Taliban believes that woman belong in seclusion in the home, where no man may see them and lust after them. They believe that God has dictate...
