Today, the green banner of Islam inspires almost as much fear as the red Soviet flag did several decades ago. This fear is not entirely unjustified. Of course, it would be silly to label Muslim culture "aggressive" or "intolerant"; yet too many acts of aggression and intolerance have been conducted under the green banner in the last 50 years. Christian fundamentalism rarely, if ever, crosses national borders. Admittedly, people who oppose a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy do feel a certain solidarity with people of similar beliefs elsewhere in the world. They go to all sorts of international conventions; they try to influence the "global village" through the Internet; they distribute their flashy brochures worldwide. But it is unimaginable that a Christian fundamentalist group would form an army of its own, unleash civil war at home and then threaten to export warfare to foreign lands. Yet this is precisely what is happening with the Islamic Taliban movement. Having gained control over Afghanistan after a ferocious civil war and imposed the strictest fundamentalist regulations on its own people, the Taliban has begun exporting its model of militant Islamic statehood to neighboring countries.

In terms of prospective expansion, the Taliban does not have many choices. Pakistan to the east and south is too advanced a nation to be lured into any kind of Islamic fraternity. Also, though its capital is called Islamabad, Pakistan is more interested in conflict with India than in its own religious identity. To the west lies troubled Iran, the nation that coined the concept of an Islamic state 20 years ago and is now paying for this dearly, as it slowly and painfully locates the path leading back to the modern world. So if the Taliban is to expand (and its powerful ideological charge says it might), its only likely targets are the nations to its north: the five post-Soviet Muslim republics of Central Asia.

Currently, the Taliban stands accused of training guerrillas to operate in that part of the world and exporting weapons and jihad instructors to stir up trouble in the region. The trouble is there, indeed. The governments of the five Central Asian countries have been terrified by recent fundamentalist insurgencies, suspecting that they might gain even more momentum and therefore apply for foreign help. Russia is already planting mines on the border between Central Asia and Afghanistan. Military commanders in Moscow do not exclude direct military clashes between Russian troops and Taliban militants in the very near future.