Taliban face obstacles in unifying Afghanistan

'Will of God'

Taliban leaders defend their practices and brush off Western criticism.

"We will carry out the will of God!" shouted Syed Ghaisuddin, Taliban's education minister and a member of the six-man council ruling Kabul as he addressed a crowd of worshippers.

In an attempt to explain restrictions on women, Ghiasuddin compared females to a flower that needs to be nurtured at home.

"You water it and keep it at home for yourself to look at it and smell it. It is not supposed to be taken out of the house to be smelled," he said.

This has been particularly hard on Kabul's estimated 25,000 war widows, many of whom were employed in government jobs or involved in food-for-work programs run by relief agencies.

No guarantee of peace

The Taliban started two years ago as a rural student group. Their opponents say they are a creation of Pakistan's secret police, an assertion in line with the group's spectacular military success.

Afghanistan's complex ethnic and religious makeup also is a factor. The Taliban are Sunni Muslims, the country's majority sect. And they have been fighting a Shiite government that has been supported by Shiite Iran. The Taliban's recent success does not guarantee peace. They control about two thirds of the country, and they are opposed by two factions.

Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum controls a large area in the north, and his heavily armed troops are backed by Russia and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

The Taliban are negotiating with Dostum, but the two camps have differing viewpoints, and fighting between them could break out. Dostum was allied with the former Communist government in Kabul and has a far more liberal interpretation of Islam than the Taliban.

"It's hard to see how the negotiations can succeed. I think fighting will start again," Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics told CNN.

Then there are the forces of former government military chief Ahmad Shah Masood. He has withdrawn his defeated army to his home base in the rugged Panjsher Valley northeast of Kabul.

The Taliban so far have focused their efforts on hunting down Masood, along with former President Burhanuddin Rabbani. If captured by the Taliban, they are expected to be put to death.

Controlling the heroin

With complete control over Afghanistan's south, the Taliban now rule most of Afghanistan's heroin-producing poppy fields. This is no small factor in an impoverished country that annually exports $80 billion worth of heroin.

The Taliban have accused Rabbani's government of being corrupt, but it remains to be seen whether the hard-line student group will be able to shut down the country's hugely lucrative drug trade.

The United States, which has struggled to resist a massive heroin influx from Afghanistan, could benefit from Taliban stability. And the Taliban have been less hostile to the U.S. than the preceding government, with its close ties to Iran.

To the north, the formerly Soviet Central Asian republics also are watching developments closely.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan, five former Soviet republics voiced concern Friday over the Taliban's rise to power and said they would take steps to prevent fighting from spilling across the border. The meeting was also attended by Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

The group denounced the Taliban's atrocities, and Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov identified Dostum as the only buffer between the Taliban and the Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Soviet countries, some of which are now battling Islamic rebels.

"We don't know how far they may go," Karimov said of the Taliban.

A key question at the summit was whether or not to aid the Afghan warlord. Karimov favored aiding Dostum, but Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev disagreed, a position the group as a whole endorsed.

Said Nazarbayev: "We call upon all sides to stop hostilities and restart peace talks."

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