How the Taliban Began – Afghanistan 1994-97 – John Simpson’s Journal (and how different are they now, really?)

 

Andrew James

The Road to Kabul:

Recent developments in Afghanistan, particularly over the past fortnight, together with this week’s (18th August) emergency debate in the House of Commons, have prompted me to write further on the question of Afghanistan, taking an even longer view of the key issues of the past quarter century. In my last post on this, I went back to 2001, when NATO troops first arrived in the country after the events of 9/11 in the United States. In his 1998 book, Strange Places, Questionable People, John Simpson, the BBC’s chief international correspondent and World Affairs Editor, described his first meeting with Taliban soldiers in 1996. This was soon after ‘the Taliban’ – the name means ‘religious students’ – began in the refugee camps around the Pakistani border town of Quetta and swept across into Afghanistan in 1994, in rage at the then Afghan government’s failure to impose the…

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