It was a winter’s day in 1999 and the Taliban were coming to dinner. Well, two representatives of the Taliban were coming to Maharaja Restaurant near the United Nations for a talk. Back then, I was running SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, a group of hundreds of journalists of South Asian origin across the US and Canada. SAJA had invited Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the ambassador to the UN and N Zadran, first secretary, to one of its monthly gatherings.
“Pakora-eating meeting”, we called those gatherings, a chance to network and listen to guest speakers (authors Jhumpa Lahiri, Marina Budhos, Chitra Divakaruni, Bapsi Sidhwa, Abraham Verghese and many other journalists and experts would all be speakers later that year). In those days, it wasn’t so easy to meet other South Asian professionals, so the gatherings often attracted those looking to build business or romantic relationships. The restaurant gave us their backroom and pakoras and samosas for free, along with happy hour prices at the bar, and I would end each event holding a tip jar, trying to collect a dollar or two to give to the waitstaff.
Everything was light and informal at our meetings, but not on the day we are revisiting now. Some were critical of our decision to host the Taliban’s first major meeting with journalists in the US. This was before social media, so the criticism consisted of a couple of phone calls to the landline at my Columbia Journalism School office and a gently-worded email or two.
Electric atmosphere
We certainly knew of serious problems with the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime, especially their severe suppression of women and girls. They had banned music when they took over in 1996, destroying cassette tapes and stringing the insides on trees. Their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was still 26 months away, and 9/11 was 33 months in the future.
I believed the benefits of listening to – and questioning – the Taliban directly outweighed the dangers of giving them a platform like ours. They had promised to respond to all questions. They asked that women be seated in a separate section (we refused, as you can see in the photo below) and that the bar be closed while Mujahid spoke (this we agreed to; the alcohol flowed before and after).
The atmosphere was electric that night as about 70 people gathered in the main area of the restaurant (we were too many for our typical venue, the backroom). Non-journalists were always welcome at SAJA events, but this time, dozens of new folks came, including representatives of women’s organisations, many of them making it a point to sit in the front row.
The late Arthur Pais, a wonderful journalist who died in 2016, wrote about the Taliban event for SAJA’s website; the article is reproduced below.
These two paragraphs capture the gatherings and explain why, 22 years later, I am still glad we were able to host this event:
Mujahid faced tough questions from the audience, almost all of them sceptical of the Taliban’s motives. He managed to respond to each question with respect, while clearly disagreeing with what he called “propaganda”.
At one point, a very stern observation came from a Pakistani woman journalist who noted that the Taliban policies on women had caused havoc in Afghanistan and forced many women flee to Lahore and other Pakistani cities in search of security and jobs.
Mujahid and the Taliban continued their press blitz that year. See this New York Times interview by Amy Finnerty; and this visit by filmmaker Michael Moore to their makeshift consulate in Queens. After 9/11, Mujahid disappeared and many journalists asked me for his contact info.
Last thing I read about Mujahid was a 2013 interview with Sanjay Kumar in The Diplomat, having emerged as part of the Karzai government’s High Peace Council, still unrepentant of his association with the Taliban.
Arthur Pais’s report
Abdul Hakeem Mujahid may one day be recognised as the official ambassador of Afghanistan to the United Nations. But right now, this senior diplomat of the Taliban – the fundamentalist movement that controls most of Afghanistan, but is not recognised by most other governments – is a man with a very long list of enemies. These “conspirators,” he says, either do not want to accept the achievements of Taliban or perpetuate the media distortions about his country.
“The seat of Afghanistan is in the hands of representatives of warlords,” he told a meeting of the South Asian Journalists Association tonight at Maharaja Restaurant with more than 70 journalists and others interested in the region. Mujahid’s presence drew an unusually large number of non-South Asian reporters, attesting to the news-worthiness of the event. This was the first major meeting with a group of journalists that the Taliban has held in the United States.
He was joined by N Zadran, a Columbia University graduate and filmmaker, who has the title of first secretary in the Taliban’s New York office. Mujahid asserted that the Taliban, which had brought about security and tranquility to the country, is the legitimate representative of the Afghan people.
In an hour-long civil, but spirited, defense of Taliban policies on women, education and relations with its neighbours and the United States, Mujahid complained that there is “a great propaganda against us”. The Taliban, which started as a spontaneous Islamic student movement in 1994, “was not anybody’s puppet” and had sought to involve all ethnic factions of the country. But the neighboring countries – ”we are all Islamic countries” – wanted to back warring factions.
He said the United States, the most important ally of the Afghans during the war against the Soviet Union, had abandoned the friendship after the Russian withdrawal, and particularly during the rise of Taliban. In the Afghan tradition, a friend is a friend for life, he said, and a person who is the guest of the country will remain so forever.
And that was one of the reasons why the Taliban leadership has refused to turn over to the United States Osama Bin Laden, the reputed mastermind behind the American embassy bombings in Africa. “It is a question of human rights,” he said, adding that America has not proved Bin Laden’s guilt. Even if America gives proof of Bin Laden’s involvement, Mujahid said, he could only be tried in Afghanistan.
Chiding the Americans for creating a larger-than-life picture of Bin Laden, Mujahid said the Saudi billionaire, who has lived in Afghanistan for over 15 years, was never a hero in that country. But the persistent American complaints against him made him a hero among Muslim nations. The media went along with the American assertions, he said. “I read that Bin Laden has issued fatwas,” Mujahid said, his voice cracking with incredulity. “How he can issue a fatwa? He is not a religious person.”
Religion and culture were on Mujahid’s mind throughout the talk. The Afghans fought and defeated the Soviet Union in a long Jihad (holy war) but could not rearrange their own destiny, he said, adding that the subsequent governments following the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from his country were consumed by factionalism, greed and personal ambitions.
The Taliban movement was a second jihad, Mujahid suggested, this time against the warlords and former resistance heroes whose personal ambitions let thousands die in Afghanistan.
Mujahid faced tough questions from the audience, almost all of them sceptical of the Taliban’s motives. He managed to respond to each question with respect, while clearly disagreeing with what he called “propaganda”.
At one point, a very stern observation came from a Pakistani woman journalist who noted that the Taliban policies on women had caused havoc in Afghanistan and forced many women flee to Lahore and other Pakistani cities in search of security and jobs.
Mujahid said while the Taliban believed in the Koranic endorsement of equal education for the sexes, the government knows culturally – and irrespective of the country being ruled by a monarch or a religious party – Afghans have opposed educational and job opportunities for women.
But thousands of women worked in hospitals, schools and government agencies, he said, adding that the “peace and security” the Taliban has produced helped the women report for work. He did not explain how given the alleged cultural bias against women’s education and jobs, and the hesitancy of Taliban to question it, women could study and work in great numbers. Anyway, at present, women are not working because most places of employment, such as factories were destroyed in the civil war.
And yet journalists who seldom asked the status of women during the previous regimes drill his government on the same issue, he said.
Sree Sreenivasan, host of a weekly pandemic show on Scroll, is Marshall Loeb Visiting Professor of Digital Innovation at Stony Brook School of Communication & Journalism and co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association.