The agony of Afghanistan: no music, no TV, no dancing--and that's just the beginning of the hardships of life under the Taliban.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: International

THE DEFINING FEATURE OF AFGHANISTAN IS despair. Clusters of widows, cloaked head to toe in blue shrouds, wander the streets, begging. Skeletal men, unable to afford donkeys, pull overloaded carts. Bands of children--some missing legs or arms--play in the rubble where buildings once stood.

The people of this landlocked Central Asian nation have known little but misery for decades. They have endured four years of punishing drought that has turned farmland into dust. They have suffered through 22 years of war--first an invasion, then civil war--that has destroyed the country's limited infrastructure and left more than 1 million dead and 750,000 disabled.

And since 1996, most Afghans have lived under the harsh rule of the Taliban, a group of Muslim clerics whose uniquely rigid version of an Islamic state seems to have little to do with providing government services or with the way Islam is practiced elsewhere by its 1 billion followers worldwide.

"In essence, what the Taliban have created is a police state," says Vikram Parekh, who monitors Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, an independent, nongovernmental organization. "The ordinary functions of government have really taken a back seat to enforcing edicts that regulate personal conduct."

The results have been disastrous. Some 3.6 million Afghans have fled the country as refugees, and another 758,000 are displaced within Afghanistan, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. One out of every four children dies before age 5, and 70 percent of the population cannot read. Relief workers estimate that about 4 million of Afghanistan's 28 million people rely on international aid organizations for food.

Life for the people of Afghanistan took another turn for the worse last month, when the United States began military strikes in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, whom U.S. authorities accuse of masterminding the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The U.S. acted after the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden and leaders of his militant Islamic group, Al Qaeda.

Even before the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon focused international attention on Afghanistan, the Taliban had done plenty to provoke world outrage. In March, they demolished the priceless Buddhas of Bamiyan, two giant statues carved out of a cliff more than 1,500 years ago, saying they were an offense to Islam. In May, they ordered the country's Hindu minority to wear yellow identity labels to distinguish them from Muslims, a move reminiscent of the Nazi requirement that Jews wear yellow Stars of David. And in August, the Taliban jailed eight foreign-aid workers, including two American women, accusing them of trying to convert Afghans to Christianity. The Taliban did, however, earn grudging respect for virtually eradicating Afghanistan's poppy crop in a single year. Until 2000, Afghanistan had grown 75 percent of the world's opium.

IN THE CAPITAL, LITTLE MORE THAN RUBBLE

In the meantime, everyday life has become more strained. The civil war has left at least one third--some say as much as three quarters--of Kabul, the capital, as little more than rubble, as ruined as the World Trade Center in New York. The country's roads have been largely destroyed, and the bridges were long ago blasted away. Electricity, where it exists at all, is intermittent. Clean drinking water is hard to come by. As many as 10 million land mines remain from the previous wars, rendering hundreds of square miles of grazing and agricultural land useless. The U.S. State Department estimates that land mines in Afghanistan have killed more than 20,000 people and injured at least 400,000 since 1992.

And still the country remains mired in civil war. As of October, the Taliban controlled about 90 percent of Afghanistan, but remained opposed by the Northern Alliance, a loose band of former resistance fighters and ethnic militias, who control the northeastern corner of the country.

NO BEARD TRIMMING, NO NAIL POLISH

In the territories they control, the Taliban have imposed a series of harsh measures that govern every aspect of life. Music, television, and dancing are banned. So are possession of...