AFGHANISTAN Honoring dead: Taliban graves become shrines

The men have been called martyrs because 'they died on a holy spot.'
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
MATA CHINA, Afghanistan -- Standing before the rows of graves, Afghan men open their hands to the sky. Their lips move in silent prayer to honor the dead.
These dead are fighters of the Taliban and Al-Qaida, killed in 2001 when an American bomb crushed the mosque nearby where they had mustered outside the eastern Afghan city of Khost. Since then, U.S. officials have paid for the mosque to be rebuilt -- and it stands freshly painted but empty, a few hundred yards down the road.
There has been building, too, at the militants' gravesite. Donations by visitors have paid for brick walls and decorative iron grates around the graves, and there are plans for a roof over the enclosure. Unlike the American-funded mosque, the shrine draws a steady stream of visitors from eastern Afghanistan and from neighboring Pakistan.
Three years after America's military defeat of the Taliban and Al-Qaida, graves of their dead -- here and elsewhere -- have become shrines for the ethnic Pashtuns who live in much of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The shrines underscore a reality for the U.S. effort to encourage democracy in both countries -- an effort that formally defines the Taliban as an enemy.
Considered heroes
While Afghanistan's Taliban are reviled by the international community and by most Afghans for their brutally oppressive rule here in the 1990s, they remain heroes for many Pashtuns, Afghanistan's most powerful ethnic group. And even for Afghans and Pakistanis who oppose the militants' aims and violence, there is deep respect for their spiritual commitment to a religious faith that many Muslims feel is under attack by the Christian and secular West.
The shrine at Mata China has 40 graves -- most of them for Arabs and Pakistanis who died alongside the Afghan Taliban.
The shrines "are a sign that people respect the Taliban and want them to have a place in our government even now," said Niyamatullah, a merchant who stopped to pray at the Taliban shrine in Kandahar early this month. (Many Afghans go by only one name.) Around him, standing amid headstones and flags dedicated to the martyrs, Pashtun men in turbans acclaimed the idea that President Hamid Karzai, who is cruising to an overwhelming victory in the vote count from this month's presidential election, should include Taliban members in the new government he is expected to form in coming weeks.
Possibility of reconciliation
Karzai has said that reconciliation with such Taliban members is possible in principle.
At the Kandahar shrine, the other demand of Karzai was that he get prisoners -- many of them Taliban -- released from Afghan or U.S. jails.
Afghanistan's roughly 12 million ethnic Pashtuns are divided between north and south, and talk of a political role for the Taliban seemed more widespread in Kandahar, where the movement was born, than here in more northern areas.
At the Mata China shrine, the discussion was not of politics, but of the spiritual power that arises from the Taliban's commitment to its faith.
The men buried here had gathered in the mosque to prepare an attack on an Afghan faction allied with the Americans, residents said. "They died in a mosque, on a holy spot, and so they are martyrs," said Noor Wali Khan, a peasant from a nearby village.
The men were martyrs, and their souls blessed, because they had been fighting non-Muslims in defense of a Muslim land, some of the worshipers said. Such men were surely guaranteed a place in heaven, even if their struggle against foreigners was in defense of Muslim tyrants, they said. But since they had been fighting other Muslim Afghans, people were divided on whether their combat earned them martyrdom.
Two local men, one of them mentally disabled, keep the shrine swept clean. They provide salt for worshippers to sprinkle on the graves and rice that can be bought to feed doves that live on the site.
Shrine's splendor
But the splendor of the shrine comes from the cloths of every color that are strung, knotted, tangled and stretched in a web that nearly covers the gravesite like a roof. Each cloth represents a prayer, brought in hopes that barakat -- spiritual power such as that of martyred souls -- might help a request to be better heard and answered by God.
The appeal to God through miracle-working saints and martyrs is a tradition in much of the Muslim world -- but the men buried here would almost certainly be horrified at having been made part of it. The puritanical interpretation of Islam for which they fought rejects such customs as a corruption of the faith.
But Afghanistan's deep Islamic traditions have outlived them. "I saw a kuchi [nomad] whose legs could not work and who came with his family to pray for the martyrs' souls," said Khan, the peasant. "After some time, he got up and walked. ... He said, 'These men truly are martyrs in paradise that they have healed me."'