By the time the Soviets had crossed the Amu Darya, Zia’s army and the ISI had already created the key Islamist groups that would become the cornerstone of the anti-Soviet jihad. Throughout 1978, Lt. Gen. Fazle Haq worked (under Zia’s orders) to reduce the more than 50 Afghan resistance groups to a smaller, more manageable number. The ISI was tasked with deepening the links between Pakistani and Afghan Islamist groups. With the assistance of the Frontier Corps, these efforts resulted in seven major Sunni Afghan Islamist militant groups. (Shia groups that enjoyed Iran’s support also operated in Afghanistan.) These groups were developed solely under Pakistan’s direction and with Pakistani funds; in fact, American overt assistance to the mujahideen effort did not begin to flow until 1981.21 Thus, for more than a year after the Soviet invasion Pakistan “continued to support the Afghan resistance … providing it modest assistance out of its own meager resources” (Sattar 2007, 159).
The reasons for Pakistan’s firm support are clear, as Abdul Sattar explains: “the Mujahideen would be fighting also for Pakistan’s own security and independence” (Sattar 2007, 157). Arif (1995) echoes this conviction when he writes that “of her own free will, Pakistan adopted the … option to protect her national interest and to uphold a vital principal” by providing “… covert assistance to the Mujahideen” (314).
One of the seven Sunni mujahideen groups was the Afghan National Front (Jubha-i-Melli-i-Najat Afghanistan), led by Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, which established an office in Peshawar (in what was then the NWFP) in June 1978. Mujaddidi remained in touch with the ISI until the mid-1990s, when Pakistan stopped supporting his group in favor of more effective organizations. Another group was the Islamic Revolutionary Movement of Afghanistan (Hezb-e-Harakat-e-Inqelab-e-Islami Afghanistan), which was formed in Quetta in late 1978 by Mawlawi Muhammad Navi Muhammadi. This group represented Pakhtun mullahs from the southern Afghan provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabol and had links to Pakhtun clergy in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar, Logar, Ghazni, and Paktika. Muhammadi had close ties with the JUI. The third and fourth groups were the two factions of the Party of Islam (Hizb-i-Islami): one led by Yunus Khalis and the other by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Khalis began operating in Pakistan in summer 1978. (Mullah Omar, the future leader of the Afghan Taliban, was a subcommander in the Khalis’ faction.) Hekmatyar came to Pakistan in 1973, and, with Pakistani help, began operations against the PDPA in late 1978. His fiercely anti-Soviet views made him a favorite of Zia, and his militia received more Pakistani support than any of the other groups. Hekmatyar had a close relationship with the JI, but it is important to note that the party, a critical partner of the Zia regime and an influential player in its foreign policy, maintained ties with all the Afghan groups (Hussain 2005; Rubin 2002).
The fifth group was the Islamic Society of Afghanistan (Jamiat-i-Islami-i-Afghanistan), which was one of the largest Islamic parties. Many of its cadres were Dari-speaking Tajiks from Afghanistan’s north. While it established an office in Pakistan in 1974, it did not reach its full strength until 1978, when Professor Barhanuddin Rabbani became its leader. Under the famed commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was trained by Pakistan’s military, the Jamiat-i-Islami had been conducting intermittent guerilla operations in Afghanistan even before the Soviet invasion. Despite the pro-Pakhtun bias of the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies, which prevented the Jamiat-i-Islami from receiving the same resources as Hekmatyar, the Jamiat was perhaps the best organized of the Afghan Islamist parties and was able to put up the most effective resistance to the PDPA (Hussain 2005; Rubin 2002).
A sixth group was the Islamic Unity party (Ittihad-i Islami), led by Abdur Rab Rasul Sayyaf. A former lecturer in theology at Kabul University, Sayyaf formed this group in early 1979. Sayyaf espoused the Salafist interpretative tradition and received substantial support from Saudi Arabia, a fact that likely prompted Pakistan to support his group. The final group was the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (Mahaz-i-Milli Islami ye Afghanistan), led by Pir Sayed Ahmad Gaylani, which opened its offices in Peshawar in 1978. Gaylani tried to forge an alliance with the Shiite Hazara population of Afghanistan (Hussain 2005; Rubin 2002).
As is well-known, the exiled Islamist parties in Pakistan afforded the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, among others, the opportunity to muster an Islamist resistance in the guise of mujahideen. Money from the United States and Saudi Arabia, funneled through Pakistan’s intelligence agency and military forces, funded mushrooming madrassahs, burgeoning refugee camps, and other institutions designed to produce mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. In addition to formal financial support from the United States and Saudi Arabia, several Arab individuals began arriving in theatre to support the mujahideen as freelancers. Preeminent among these were Dr. Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. Because Pakistan sought to minimize Pakhtun nationalist aspirations, it insisted on routing military as well as humanitarian assistance through the seven explicitly Sunni Islamist organizations (Roy 1990). This resulted in disproportionate support to the Pakhtun Islamist militant groups, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s faction of the Hizb-i-Islami (Magnus and Naby 2002; Maley 2002).
In April 1988, the Soviet Union signed the Geneva Accords, which obligated it to make a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. The war had resulted in nearly 1 million deaths, physically disabled more than 1.5 million, and created over 6 million refugees. At the time of the Soviet withdrawal, the Afghan state, which was unable to pay its bills on its own, could not function with any degree of autonomy. Afghanistan verged on collapse. Mohammad Najibullah, the president installed by the Russians, faced the daunting challenge of reviving political institutions and restoring their legitimacy. The makeup of the political elite had also changed during the war: on the regime side, traditional authority figures had been supplanted by party cadres, while armed militant activists filled the ranks of the opposition (Goodson 2001; Maley 2002).
Despite these difficult circumstances, Najibullah managed to retain power until 1992. He was able to do so, in part, because the Soviet Union continued economic assistance as well as the provision of equipment and fuel, enabling him to purchase the allegiance of numerous militia commanders. Najibullah sought to make Afghan nationalism the basis for his support and abandon the communist rhetoric of the PDPA. (In 1990 he changed its name to Hizb-e-Watan, Party of the Homeland.) But he was unable to forge a national consensus, and opposition to his rule within communist and resistance circles intensified. Moscow continued to provide assistance until September 1991, when, amid serious turmoil in the USSR, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all lethal support to Kabul on January 1, 1992. Without Soviet resources, Najibullah succumbed to anti-regime militants in April 1992. He barely escaped assassination and took refuge in the UN compound in Kabul (Maley 2002; Rubin 2002). He spent the rest of his life virtually imprisoned at the compound; he was brutally murdered by the Taliban, who hanged him from a lamppost when they seized Kabul in September 1996.
Various militia factions fought to control the state, with Pakistan supporting Hekmatyar. In April 1992, a temporary political solution was forged (the Peshawar Accord) according to which the major militia commanders would serve as rotating presidents. Sibghatullah Mujaddidi was to serve for two months followed by Barhanuddin Rabbani for four. While Rabbani clung to power for four years, the various mujahideen parties failed to cohere around a single approach to governing and engaged in sanguinary, protracted civil war that destroyed Kabul. Rabbani’s government lasted until 1996 when it fell to the Taliban.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TALIBAN
The Taliban first appeared in 1994 in Kandahar, where they gained fame by opposing the local branches of the various armed groups that had become formed during the Afghan jihad. By the mid-1990s, these groups were known as warlords (jangbazi in Dari) because of the destruction they wreaked on Kabul in their struggle for control. (The principal jangbazi were the Northern Alliance, led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Hekmatyar Hizb-e-Islami.)
The Taliban, in contrast, attracted considerable popular support, at least in part because they promised security, freedom of movement without harassment, and swift justice.
While the members of the movement, which began in southern Afghanistan, were ethnically Pakhtun and relied on kinship networks in Afghanistan and key madrassahs near Ghazni and Kandahar, perhaps their most significant organizational and ideological connections were to Pakistan. During the 1980s, Pakistan had created hundreds of madrassahs in the NWFP and FATA to produce mujahideen for the anti-Soviet jihad. These schools, particularly those linked to the Deobandi movement, educated a generation of displaced Afghans who were divorced from their tribal structure and therefore less inclined to acknowledge tribal authority.
The Afghan Taliban’s first recruits came from this generation of madrassah students. They were led by Mullah Omar, a veteran mujahideen commander who had been running a madrassah in Kandahar. To indicate its madrassah links, the movement named itself the Taliban, the Persian plural of talib (student). (Tuleba, the plural form in Arabic, is occasionally used as well.) During their time in the madrassahs and refugee camps, where Saudi charities and the Deobandi movement had a significant presence, many members of the Taliban were exposed to and became sympathetic to Salafism, and jihadi Salafism in particular (Johnson and Mason 2007; Rashid 2000; Sinno 2008).
The Taliban first came into contact with the Pakistani political establishment through their ties to a faction of the JUI, the Pakistani Deobandi political party, which at that time was headed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman. Rehman, an important political partner of Benazir Bhutto, facilitated contacts between the Taliban and Maj. Gen. Naseerullah Babar, Bhutto’s Minister for the Interior. Babar, who had been in charge of Afghan policy during the tenure of Bhutto’s father, Z. A. Bhutto, began providing logistical and other support to the Taliban. The ISI, which had concluded that Hekmatyar could not deliver a stable, pro-Pakistan government in Afghanistan, also welcomed their emergence.
Amid the chaos produced by the warlords’ struggles for control of the state, the Taliban were intent on establishing an Islamic government in Afghanistan. Afghans, exhausted by war and the predations of the mujahideen, generally welcomed the Taliban and their promise of security and peace. The Taliban made reestablishing law and order a top priority. Mujahideen commanders had established checkpoints along the highways that collected bribes in return for safe passage, and some of the armed groups even raped women and young boys. The Taliban put an end to these practices and were widely credited as having restored safe passage along Afghanistan’s roads. (They particularly enjoyed the support of traders and truckers, who had long been victimized by the warlords.) As they moved out from Kandahar, the Taliban co-opted local warlords and institutions to expand their area of control (Johnson and Mason 2007; Rashid 2000; Sinno 2008).
With the help of massive covert assistance from the ISI and the Pakistan Army and Air Force, the Taliban were able to expel the largely Tajik Northern Alliance regime from Kabul by 1996, and by 1998 they controlled most of Afghanistan. But as the Taliban consolidated their power, Afghans began to fear them. The Taliban used excessive physical punishment to enforce their version of sharia, denied women educational and employment opportunities, and forced men and women alike to abide by their harsh edicts. While the Taliban controlled much of the country, an important pocket of resistance remained in the Panjshir Valley, which was under the control of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance enjoyed the support of India, Russia, and Iran, among other regional actors increasingly concerned about the rise of the Taliban (Fair 2007; Johnson and Mason 2007; Rashid 2000; Sinno 2008). In retrospect, the Taliban did not deliver on Islamabad’s most capacious hopes. The Taliban did not settle the international border. The Taliban harbored many of Pakistan’s sectarian and criminal elements. They brought disgrace upon Pakistan, which was one of only three states that supported the regime. Yet they did deliver one very important thing for the Pakistan Army: the Taliban managed to keep the Indians away from sensitive parts of Afghanistan. During the Taliban’s regime, the presence of the Indians was restricted to the Panjshir Valley, where they aided Massoud.
Massoud remained the Taliban’s only serious adversary until September 9, 2001, when al-Qaeda assassinated him in the first suicide attack ever to occur in Afghanistan—a possible preparation for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. After 9/11, Pakistan was forced to formally distance itself from the Taliban. But few, in the US government or elsewhere, believe that Pakistan has abandoned the Taliban, as I discuss in the conclusion of this chapter.
The Army’s and the Internal Threat on the “Frontier”
While Pakistan sought to manage direct and indirect threats from Afghanistan, its Pakhtun territories and populations in the KP and the FATA have also received significant attention from Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies. These populations continue to be seen as potential proxies for external actors (India, Russia/the Soviet Union, or even Afghanistan) who seek to destabilize the state. During the colonial period, the frontier served as an internal buffer, separating the core of the Raj (which lay east of the Indus) and Afghanistan (beyond the Durand Line). British management of the frontier “meant dealing with the tribes outside areas of direct rule by paying allowances for good behavior, manipulating intertribal relations, and using punitive expeditions, blockades, and baramtas [seizures of animals or other property belonging to a tribe or individual] in response to offenses” (Titus 1998, 660).
After independence, Pakistan largely retained these governing concepts as well as many of the Orientalist characterizations of the Pakhtuns as “unruly,” “fiercely independent,” and “religiously zealous” and of the Baloch as unruly, dangerous, and even lazy (Titus 1998). While those territories west of the Indus are viewed as troublesome badlands, to be managed at best, Pakistan’s heartland is still believed to be the lands that lie east of the Indus—most notably the Punjab but also Sindh. (In contemporary Pakistan the four regular provinces are often referred to as the settled areas, implying that the other areas are not settled.) One consequence of this view was that Pakistan’s strategy for defending East Pakistan was “the defense of the east lies in the west.” This obsession with Pakistan’s strategic core was not lost on the Bengali citizens of East Pakistan: in the 1965 war, the military showed no interest in or capability for defending the east. This was yet another catalyst for the movement for an independent Bangladesh. The enduring nature of this worldview is reflected, in some measure, by the simple fact that until 2010 Pakistan retained the name North-West Frontier Province, suggesting that this heavily populated province was only a frontier for the rest of Pakistan.
Reflecting the continuity in the Pakistani and British views of the frontier populations, at independence Pakistan chose to retain the FCR as the legal code governing the entire frontier (although with some alterations, made in 1947 and after).22 There are multiple possible reasons for why Pakistan chose to retain this colonial-era legal regime. First, Jinnah had promised to respect the traditions and autonomy of the Pakhtuns in exchange for their agreement to join Pakistan. (Pakhtun consent to accession was necessary because the tribal areas, like the princely states, had a distinct legal status and could have become independent after decolonization.) This bargain required the new government of Pakistan to enter into agreements with the tribal maliks, using the political agents, who had been responsible for governing the agencies during the Raj, as intermediaries. The maliks affirmed that their agencies were a part of Pakistan, pledged to support the country when needed, and promised “to be peaceful and law abiding and to maintain friendly relations with the people of the settled districts” (Khan 2005, 27). In exchange, the government of Pakistan agreed to continue the benefits paid to the tribal chiefs by the British. On August 15, 1947, Jinnah legally declared the tribal areas to be part of Pakistan (ibid.). These agreements were subsequently revised (in 1951–1952) to provide greater government
control over the tribal areas (ibid.).
A second explanation for Pakistan’s retention of the colonial governance structure stems from its assimilation of the essentializing colonial narrative that the tribes were “ungovernable.” As White (2008) notes, this belief ignored reality, particularly with respect to the Pakhtuns, “millions of [whom] had already been successfully assimilated into a robust system of local governance in the settled areas” (228). A third motivation was the long-standing desire of Pakistan’s security managers to use the tribal areas as a buffer between Pakistan’s settled areas and the disputed border with Afghanistan, the Durand Line. Finally, the tribal areas, and even the NWFP, were useful to the Pakistani security establishment because they served as sites for training and recruiting the Islamists, and even Islamist militants, whom the state would deploy to achieve its foreign policy objectives in Afghanistan and in India.
At the time of independence, the frontier, including Balochistan, was home to several different kinds of tribal areas, each with their own tribal governance structures (Tripodi 2009). In 1955, the government promulgated the One Unit Scheme, which consolidated all of West Pakistan into a single administrative unit.23 After sustained protests throughout western Pakistan, in 1970 the government reversed course and reestablished the provinces of the Punjab, Sindh, NWFP (now KP), and Balochistan. The tribal areas of Dir, Swat, Chitral, the Malakand protected areas, and the Hazara territory were incorporated into what was then the NWFP (Khan 2005).
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