Taliban Regime Quotes

Photography of any living being, according to Taliban rule, was illegal. So when I went to Afghanistan, immediately I was worried about photographing people. But it was what I wanted: to show what life was like under the Taliban, specifically for women.

The Taliban Nightmare: A girl with a book.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.

Since 1996, the Feminist Majority Foundation has been immersed in a campaign to support Afghan women and girls in their fight against the brutal oppression of the Taliban.

I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.

The draconian prohibitions of the Taliban years and the gains Afghan women have achieved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001 are now well known and often cited: Today, Afghans lucky enough to live in secure regions can go to school, women may work in offices, and the burqa is no longer mandatory.

The documentary feature film 'Legion of Brothers' tells the stories of the handful of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, went into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and, within a matter of weeks, overthrew the Taliban regime.

Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.

Does the global Left - as well as the Israeli Left - truly not care about the horrific Taliban regime, the terrible oppression of women in Gulf states, and the mass hanging festivals in Iran?

All Kabul males were given just six weeks to grow a full beard, even though some of the ethnic groups - the Hazaras, for instance - have limited beard growth. More, beards could not be trimmed shorter than a man’s fist. The religious police stood at street corners with scissors cutting off long hair and often beating culprits. Men had to wear their salwars above the ankle and everyone had to say his/her prayers five times a day. All conceivable forms of entertainment were strictly taboo: movies, TV, video, music, dance. Even, kite flying! "Nawroz", the traditional Afghan New Year celebrations, were declared un-Islamic. Nobody was allowed to hang paintings, portraits or photographs in their homes. The tragic truth is that the very idea of culture was alien to the Taliban.

The Taliban has not, in my judgment, in any significant way changed their fundamental goal and objective, which is to take over Afghanistan and return to running that country. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have negotiation talks with them. I think we should. But we've got to be clear-eyed about it.

When news of the first plane's hitting the World Trade Center reached them, bin Laden's followers exploded with joy. But shrewder members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan realized that the attacks might not be the stunning victory that bin Laden, and many in the West, took them to be.

The first time I visited Afghanistan in May 2000, I was 26 years old, and the country was under Taliban rule. I went there to document Afghan women and landmine victims.

No possible future government in Kabul can be worse than the Taliban, and no thinkable future government would allow the level of Al Qaeda gangsterism to recur. So the outcome is proportionate and congruent with international principles of self-defense.

The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. Importing polish was banned only in July 2001, which suggests that women were still wearing painted nails within the safety of their homes.

The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens.

My mission was not to assure that little girls could go to school in Afghanistan. My mission was not to establish a legal system in Afghanistan. That was not my mission. My mission was to destroy Al Quaeda and to do that we had to overthrow the Taliban.

The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.

I knew that my interest lied in international stories. I was interested in how women were living under the Taliban, for example.

The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction.

If American forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to do what to America? Don't say you're worried about what they will do to the Afghan people. If that was America's concern, America's operational presence there would be much different.

It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission.

Eighty-five percent cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read.

We have been helping, trying to help Afghanistan in many ways, even from the beginning of... the beginnings of the '20s, 1920s, when he we were fighting our own national struggle.