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A few articles from 2001 about the Taliban make interesting reading. These were written after the destruction of the Buddhas, but before 9/11.

First from NY Times - an interview of the Taliban envoy who visited the US in 2001 and met with the US goverment and spoke at universities etc. Interesting facts about the destruction of the Buddhas - they were initially protected by the Taliban and people were punished for seeking to destroy them... read for full story - note particularly the last sentences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/world/19TALI.html?ex=1157428800&en=040513261f60adde&ei=5070

Another insight is from a Jason Burke, an extract copied below.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n06/burk01_.html

The key point is that, for many in Afghanistan, the Taliban are a great improvement on what went before. An Amnesty Report covering the (pre-Taliban) period from 1992 to 1994 was entitled 'Women in Afghanistan: A Human Rights Catastrophe'. For those who find it difficult to understand why there should be any sympathy for the Taliban the report makes challenging reading. Over that period, it says,

armed groups massacred defenceless women in their homes, or have brutally beaten and raped them. Scores of young women have been abducted and raped, taken as wives by commanders or sold into prostitution . . . Scores of women have . . . 'disappeared' and several have been stoned to death . . . The perpetrators are the main Mujahideen groups . . . As territory changes hands after long battles, an entire local population can be subjected to violent retaliatory punishments. The conquerors often celebrate by killing and raping women and looting property.

These days, rape - at least by strangers and soldiers - is relatively rare in Taliban-controlled areas. So is the widespread theft and abduction referred to in the report. The Taliban soldiers are on the whole well-behaved. Wrong-doers in the ranks are punished, often savagely, which wasn't the case among the Mujahideen groups who preceded them. In much of the country the dismal security situation has been turned round. There is a system of justice and rudimentary policing which, whatever its manifest flaws, does function. I once asked the owner of a roadside tea stall near the eastern town of Ghazni what he felt about the Taliban. 'Now you could leave a bar of gold in the street overnight and it would be safe,' he said.

The idea that the Taliban are a universally hated military regime ruling through fear and violence simply doesn't hold up. The occasional revolts are mostly to do with conscription, which is very unpopular. The repressive edicts that so outrage the West have long been the practice in most of rural Afghanistan, where 80 per cent of the population live. In the rural regions around the western city of Herat a year before the Taliban took control, there were, according to Save the Children UK, nearly 75,000 boys at school and fewer than 2000 girls. In the Afghan countryside women have never gone to school, left the village unaccompanied or chosen their husbands. There is no need to ban television - there aren't any sets. The 1994 Amnesty Report also says that 'women have been prevented from exercising several of their fundamental rights . . . to association, of expression and employment - by Mujahideen groups who consider such activities to be un-Islamic.' So you couldn't really say that the Taliban are innovators.



And finally a page which links to many stories about the destruction of the Buddhas:
http://www.asiasource.org/news/at_mp_02.cfm?newsid=46971

Sorry mods - looks like a double posting. Can you delete this one.

cheers
Shafique