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Vice Creeps Back to Kandahar
Friday, February 22, 2002
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Associated Press Writer

"After 20 years, people are tired of it all," said Ahmad, a Kandahar commander. "Opium is banned now, hashish is banned. Don't worry. Everything will be banned."

In this city whose storied excesses gave rise to Mullah Mohammed Omar and his puritanical Taliban, the old vices of the past are making a spirited comeback.

Gambling, opium smoking and -- in male-dominated Pashtun society, pedophilia -- have all re-emerged as strict Taliban rule has disappeared.

"Kandahari card trick!" a merchant exclaims on a night of card-playing -- one of many well-known addictions of Kandahar's people, and one of many banned by the one-eyed Omar during the Taliban's five-year rule.

Slapping down cards, the merchant comes to the point after several minutes of patter, saving the queens but tossing all the one-eyed jacks and kings out of the deck.

"No more Mullah Omars!" the merchant cries. "Ha! Kandahari revenge!"

To western eyes, Kandahar looks like no den of iniquity, just an overgrown version of any market town outside Kabul, the capital. Women bustle about on errands only under cover of silky full-length cloaks; there are no bars, or even teahouses, no movie theatres where men and women might mingle.

But to Central Asians, Afghanistan's second-largest city is Babylon with burqas, Sodom and Gomorrah with sand. Security forces now are closing opium stalls and seeing to it that the racier selections in newly reopened video stores are kept under the counters.
(More: The Guardian News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

“Don't worry. Everything will be banned.”

I wonder if we’ll finally get prohibition to work...

Dan