By Jeffrey Gettleman
Los Angeles Times
MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan – They strutted around in black turbans, they drove big pickups, they looked tough. But on the inside, the Taliban were actually a bunch of pretty depressed guys.
At least, that’s what their shrink says.
“I remember one Taliban commander telling me he hadn’t seen a sunny day his whole life,” said Dr. Nader Alemi, director of mental health at Mazar-e-Sharif’s General Hospital.
Another commander, Alemi recalled, wanted to commit suicide but couldn’t because of Islamic strictures. “Every time he went to battle – and this was a big general – he hoped someone would shoot him.
“I don’t think the Taliban needed more guns,” the doctor said, “but more Prozac.”
When the hard-line Islamic Taliban invaded this northern Afghan city 3 1/2years ago, Alemi, 46, was stuck in the unenviable position of dispensing mental health care to a group of people who, with their appetite for war-waging and medieval punishments, would seem certifiable almost anywhere else.
Alemi was careful to refer to many ailments as “nervous problems,” not as mental or emotional ones.
“These guys were warriors,” he said. “They couldn’t be marked as mad.”
Because Alemi grew up in the northeastern city of Jalalabad and is the only psychiatrist in northern Afghanistan to speak Pashto, the language of most Talibs, he became their shrink after they captured Mazar-e-Sharif in August 1998. He estimates he treated at least 1,000 soldiers and commanders of the regime.
“Sometimes when they’d cry, I’d cry, and when they’d feel down, I’d feel down,” he remembered. “One soldier once told me: ‘This is great. Finally I meet a doctor who suffers from the same thing I do.’ “
Alemi has a simple diagnosis for the Taliban: They were sick of war. Most wanted to go home and see their families, except a few leaders who really were quite ill.
One night, a few weeks before Mazar-e-Sharif fell in November, Alemi was whisked from his house to see Aktar Osmani, the most powerful Taliban commander in Mazar-e-Sharif and a confidant of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the group’s spiritual leader.
“The commander was hearing voices,” Alemi said. “He was schizo.”
Alemi scribbled out a prescription for haloperidol, an anti-psychotic medication, and left.
“I would treat anybody who was sick,” Alemi said. “But I was not neutral. These people caused a lot of pain in our society.”
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