One of the very few funny bits in A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini's much less successful follow-up to The Kite Runner), features the novel's two heroines burying a television in their backyard in Kabul, the Afghan capital. By then the two women, Mariam and Laila, are not just dealing with the brutality of the man imprisoning them in his house, but with the Taliban, which rules the country by the noose of its prohibitions: Singing is forbidden, dancing is forbidden, playing cards, playing chess, flying kits, writing books, painting, watching films, listening to music--all strictly forbidden.

The Taliban had taken to raiding homes to ensure that every prohibition was being followed. People found with a television were liable to be whacked or publicly beaten with "lashings of soles and palms." So there they were, the two women, lowering their plastic-wrapped television into the hole they'd dug. "When it was safer, they'd agreed," Hosseini writes, "when the Taliban cut down on their raids, in a month or two or six, or maybe longer, they would dig the TV up."

Tallying the Taliban's Repressions

Its own fictional fantasies about establishing a caliphate over and done with five years after its regime took hold of Afghanistan, the Taliban, of course, was routed from Kabul and at least a few parts of Afghanistan with the 2001 American-supervised invasion and subsequent infusion of NATO troops. Afghanistan after that was supposed to be the "good war," the example from the West to the East of what an enlightened occupation could bring--democracy, pluralism, peace, stability. It hasn't turned out that brightly.

An Embarrassment of Failures

On Friday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was raging against the Bush administration and the British government for flouting Afghan independence and killing too many civilians in heavy-handed attacks. "I want an end to civilian casualties,” he told The New York Times. “As much as one may argue it’s difficult, I don’t accept that argument.”

Two days later, while Karzai was out celebrating Afghan Mujahideen Day, gunmen attempted to assassinate him. He escaped. But three people were killed. Instead of celebrating the nation's pride and military, the event turned into a national embarrassment--the more so for having unraveled so soon after Karzai had dressed down western forces for not letting Afghans assume more authority for their country.

The attack on Karzai should be no surprise: leaders in the region, and those who visit them, routinely live in fear of assassination and make it a habit not to wander out of their fortresses. Even when they're supposedly safe inside those fortresses, they occasionally have to duck and take cover, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did last week in another contrived, surprise visit to Baghdad.

Return of Prohibitions

But less known to Western eyes and ears is the degree to which Afghanistan has regressed to its old, Taliban self. The Taliban doesn't have to be in power for retrograde clerics to keep the country's morality police busy, and to ensure that old bigotries thrive.

A few days before the assassination attempt on Karzai, the ministry of information and culture, the Times reported, "ordered television networks to stop broadcasting five soap operas." The reason: they're not in keeping with "Afghan religion and culture." We're not talking General Hospital or Passions here, nothing like Starr learning of her unwanted pregnancy in General or Eve in Passions explaining how Julian could die if he gets aroused (that's from an episode last week).

The fare on Afghan airwaves is much tamer. It's all the product of Indian television--"Will Prina on “Life’s Test” convince her husband that she is not having an affair with a tycoon, Mr. Bajaj? Can Tulsi, the heroine of “Because the Mother-in-Law Was Once the Daughter-in-Law,” ward off the schemes of her husband’s former mistress?"--but even that is too much for dour mullahs, especially after a local television station, Tolo TV (which is perennially in trouble with the authorities), showed men and women dancing together at some sort of awards ceremony. Multisex dancing in Afghanistan is still taboo.

Cosmetic Controls

The country is struggling to rebuild. The Taliban still controls huge regions. Al-Qaeda is across the hills and in nearby Pakistan. The US-NATO counter-insurgency war is in a rut. And Afghan authorities can't keep control of their own military parades long enough to keep them from being infiltrated by insurgents. In light of all that, the country's self-righteous brigades imagine they can manufacture a sense of order out of impositions and prohibitions. The most they'll be doing is joining the crowd of those attempting to rule and repress Afghans from above. But haven't Afghans spent the last 35-odd years proving to what extent they'll refuse to submit to authority, especially the irrational, heavy-handed kind? With or without television, Afghans are adept at one thing: changing the channel they don't like.