Psychiatrist for the Taliban talks about his clients

JEFFREY GETTLEMAN LOS ANGELES TIMES

MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghan- istan -- 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 31/2 years ago, Alemi was stuck in the 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.

His Taliban patients are gone now. But Alemi, who deposits a soft touch and a gigantic "Ho-bas!" (Good!) on each person he meets, is still very busy. Every day, a line of 50 patients lines up outside his office: kids traumatized by bomb blasts, soldiers who were tortured, schizophrenic shopkeepers, sleepless farmers worried about drought, sleepless girls worried about marriage.

Alemi's work is no Freudian analysis. With five to six patients an hour, many of whom have journeyed for days to see him, there's no time to sit alongside a couch and download an entire life story.

Often, he dispenses practical health advice. To a farmer with insomnia and high blood pressure: "Eat less fat and nuts."

Treating Taliban

During the Taliban days, Alemi, 46, was careful to refer to many ailments as "nervous problems," not as mental or emotional ones.

Because Alemi grew up in the city of Jalalabad and is the only psychiatrist in northern Afghan-istan to speak Pashto, the language of most Talibs, he became their shrink after they captured Mazar-e-Sharif in August 1998.

Taliban forces used the city of 200,000 as a base for military operations across the north, and Alemi, an ethnic Tajik, 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 recalled. "One soldier once told me: 'This is great. Finally I meet a doctor who suffers from the same thing I do.' "

One night, a few weeks before Mazar-e-Sharif fell last November, Alemi was whisked from his house to see Aktar Osmani, the most powerful Taliban commander in Mazar-e-Sharif.

"The commander was hearing voices," Alemi said. "He was schizo."

Alemi scribbled out a prescription for haloperidol, an antipsychotic medication that the man would be able to obtain, 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."

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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