Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC with me Max Pearson and the team who

bring you witness history on the World Service.

This week Jane Goodall on her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees and how they shaped their world. At that time we were defined as

man the toolmaker and who we were supposed to be the only creatures on the planet

to use and make tools. So this was a really really exciting discovery.

Also the invention of the jet engine?

When it got overhead I noticed I wasn't a propeller.

So I down cruise and ran in the house to tell everybody I'd seen an aeroplane without a propeller.

Of course nobody believed me.

Plus race riots in Northern England and a young boy caught in the middle of China's Cultural Revolution.

Outside a window, we'd often see red guards parading people in trucks with the dunces camps and the arms pinioned behind their back and so on and being harassed and beaten.

That's all coming up later in the podcast.

But we begin in Afghanistan, where as the US and its allies withdraw their combat troops, once again the Taliban

is gaining ground and threatening to take power.

So we're going back to 1996 when the Taliban first seized power in Afghanistan.

At that time the country had been devastated by years of fighting between rival Mujah Hadin

warlords and so the prospect of stability even under a theologically driven Taliban held some

attractions. Kirstie Reed has been listening to accounts of Afghanis who were teenagers

at the time. The Afghan capital Kabul has fallen to the Taliban Islamic

militia after heavy overnight fighting. Hours earlier, government troops had abandoned

the city. The battle for Kabul was short but savage. The Taliban had been repulsed twice

before but this time it was a route. The Taliban had defeated the government of

...