Girls may not attend school, although a recent loosening of the law has permitted, or at least tolerated, girl-children attending privately run classrooms. But even boys receive an education that teaches them little beyond the recitation of the Koran and other approved Islamic texts. Women may not hold jobs, except for female doctors working in all-female hospital wings. The Taleban does not allow photographs of any human image, which they consider sinful by their reading of the Koran, just as they forbid all graven images of artwork - the basis upon which the Bamiyan Buddhas were ordered dynamited. Music is forbidden.
TV is forbidden.
Videotapes and cassettes are forbidden. What the Taleban gave Afghans was a measure of peace and security that many had never before known, so decimated had this country become by violence and inter-tribal warfare. And the only reason the Taleban was able to assume power is because the West permitted it. It was the West, specifically the United States, that propelled the Taleban to ascendancy in the first place. Only a decade ago, the U.S. funnelled arms and military expertise to the mujahideen guerrillas because it was strategically imperative to thwart Russian imperialism and Moscow's lust for the rugged jewel that is Afghanistan, with all its economic riches and its geographic situation in the heart of Central Asia.