KABUL—Taliban authorities detained September 27 on Sunday after the date once again reminded Afghans of the 1996 killing of former president Dr. Mohammad Najibullah and his brother after Taliban forces entered Kabul.
The date was accused of spreading an unauthorized historical narrative by arriving exactly on schedule.
Officials acknowledged that arresting history itself had been considered but abandoned after investigators were unable to locate it.
“We cannot arrest history,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid explained. “So we arrested the calendar.”
Mujahid said September 27 had established links to the former regime, Pakistan, the United Nations and basic arithmetic. “It claims thirty years have passed without first obtaining permission from the Islamic Emirate.”
Investigators said the calendar had displayed suspicious consistency, preserving the anniversary through mujahideen, the Taliban, the republic and the Taliban again.
Speaking from the grave, former Pakistani interior minister Nasirullah Babar rejected allegations of Pakistani responsibility.
“We may have helped create the Taliban, supported the Taliban and ordered them to kill Najibullah, but we do not know why he had to die,” Babar said. “Suggesting that we murdered our enemy no. 1 is exactly the kind of irresponsible historical truths that September 27 is being investigated for.”
In Kabul authorities ordered printers to replace September 27 with September 26B. The reform briefly succeeded until elderly Kabul residents, former combatants and anyone capable of subtraction continued remembering what happened.
A commission then blamed the United Nations for sheltering Najibullah in a compound insufficiently reinforced against the Taliban’s interpretation of diplomatic immunity and Pakistan’s interpretation of strategic depth.
Pakistani officials welcomed the investigation and warned journalists against opening the Babar Files, a legendary archive said to contain intelligence cables, guest lists, telephone records and photographs of Pakistani and Taliban officials who have spent thirty years explaining that they barely know each other.
Mujahid denied the Babar Files existed and threatened to release them if journalists continued asking about them.
By evening, authorities announced that the anniversary had been defeated.
September 28 arrived with a Pakistani postmark.