by Lucy Inglis
Zahir Shah and the Afghan government engaged American firm Morrison Knudsen, which had built the Hoover Dam. Work began in 1946 and finished on 4 December 1952. In a bloodless coup in September the following year, Mohammad Daoud, Zahir Shah’s first cousin and brother-in-law, became prime minister, and was in office for a decade. Like Zahir Shah, he was progressive and in favour of women’s rights. His aggressive policies towards Pakistan led to the latter closing the border in 1961, making Afghanistan more dependent on the Soviet Union for supplies such as petroleum. Since the end of the Second World War, the USSR had been in northern Afghanistan looking for oil and minerals, and attempting to win over the locals. The Afghans had, however, seen the steppes round-ups of the 1930s, and so were suspicious about Russia’s presence on their doorstep. So, faced with the huge American project going on in the south, Russia paid to pave Kabul in 1953 as a visible symbol of her good intentions.
The Arghandab Dam and the Kajaki Dam were finished by 1953. The scale of the project is immense: the Kajaki Dam alone is thirty-two kilometres long. The restored irrigation canals were such a success that there was not enough labour to harvest the crops, and from 1954 onwards the government resettled farm labourers in new villages just outside Lashkar Gah. In the first phase, Daoud placed diverse tribes together in an attempt at peaceful coexistence, but they were soon fighting, and after that the villages were separated by ethnicity.
What they hadn’t realized was that the effective irrigation of the Helmand Valley was also dramatically raising the salt content of the land, and soon its productivity fell. In his work A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, the British travel author Eric Newby recounts speaking with an old man in the town of Geresk in Helmand: ‘It is all salt below the American Dam. They did not trouble to find out and now the people will eat hamak [salt] for ever and ever.’8
In 1955, Russia lent Afghanistan $100 million for development; in 1956, the US built Kandahar airport and developed Ariana Afghan Airlines. Aware that the aid being offered was becoming increasingly territorial, Daoud began getting the Russians to pay for projects in the south and the Americans for projects in the north, subverting their notions of involvement with a particular area of the country. He was also encouraging Afghans to become more liberal, and 1960s Kabul was particularly Westernized, with the wearing of veils being a matter of personal choice, and some women even wearing miniskirts, although perhaps not quite as many as the Internet now implies. It had a strong student culture, and many of those studying there finished postgraduate degrees in America, where the left-wing movement was gathering huge momentum.
When Zahir Shah was out of the country for medical reasons, Daoud took the opportunity to seize power on 17 July 1973. (Zahir Shah is now remembered as Afghan leader for the 1964 constitution, which promoted universal suffrage and women’s rights.) Daoud did not, however, call himself king, but instead declared a republic and appointed himself president. He was having ongoing problems with the Pashtun people who straddled the border. They baulked at having had the Durand Line forced upon them and were agitating for independence. In the north, Daoud was aware that the Russians were becoming more influential with the Afghan people, particularly the young, as left-wing ideas spread throughout the 1960s and 70s. In 1977 Daoud went to Moscow and met with Leonid Brezhnev, voicing his displeasure at Russia’s presence in northern Afghanistan, to which the Russian leader replied that Afghanistan would be better off inside the fold of the USSR, to secure the safety of Central Asia. He also warned Daoud that there were too many North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) experts in northern Afghanistan, who Russia regarded with suspicion. Daoud responded derisively, and left. Returning to Kabul, he made arrangements to lessen Afghan ties with Russia, and to increase them with Iran, Saudi Arabia and the West. A year later, the Afghan army and police force were being trained by Egypt rather than Russia, infuriating Brezhnev.
In April 1978, at a socialist ideologue’s funeral, up to 3,000 people came to hear speeches given by the leaders of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, including one by Nur Mohammad Taraki, a former journalist turned politician. Daoud ordered their arrests, but Taraki escaped to the USSR. Then, on 28 April, a coup d’état began at military barracks near Kabul airport, and gathered force over the next few days. In the end, Daoud and twenty-eight members of his family, including grandchildren, were killed by the Communists and dumped into two mass graves on the edge of Kabul. Their remains were discovered in 2008.
After the Saur Revolution, Afghanistan was governed by Nur Mohammad Taraki and his Khalq faction of the PDPA; the Parchams were the opposing faction within the same party, and it did not take long for them to come to grief. In September 1979, Hafizullah Amin overthrew Taraki and had him executed. The PDPA then changed the Afghan flag to a green copy of the USSR one, and banned usury. For the peasant farmers who existed on the salaam credit system to get their crops planted every year, this was a disaster. Agricultural production fell, and the party seized upon land ownership as the real issue. To that end, they would put a stop to feudalism and redistribute Afghanistan’s farmland so that everyone had a share. This was as unworkable as it sounds, and led to a further fall in food production as Afghans began to squabble over who had the best plot. This food shortage, coupled with the bizarre political and social repression implemented by the PDPA, whilst at the same time proclaiming women’s rights, led the Soviet Union to decide that the time was ripe for an invasion.
The Russians Are Coming: Soviet Afghanistan, 1979–1989
Brezhnev deployed the 40th Army on Christmas Eve 1979, and on arriving in Kabul they killed Hafizullah Amin and installed Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal as president. The Islamic Conference, an alliance of the Muslim nations of the world, condemned the action, and demanded ‘the immediate, urgent and unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops’.9 The UN protested the intervention. In excess of 5 million Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran, and Afghan rebels received copious amounts of aid, in Pakistan and China, to train them to fight the Soviets. This aid came from the US via the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, and also from the Gulf States and wealthy individuals, such as Osama bin Laden, who left university in 1979 to fund a training camp for mujahideen in Pakistan. Mujahideen is the plural of mujahid, or fighter. When the Afghan rebels first assumed this group label, it meant ‘to struggle with a noble aim’. The warping of Islamic terminology is a specific feature of the Afghan conflicts and in part reflects the fluid and increasingly violent nature of what it means to exist in modern Afghanistan.
The mujahideen, at this point, were hailed as heroes. President Ronald Reagan dedicated the space shuttle Columbia ‘to the people of Afghanistan’, calling their struggles ‘the highest aspiration of mankind’.10 The mujahideen mainly fought a guerilla war from the countryside, and the majority of the nation remained outside Soviet control, but they dominated the cities and the road network, doling out relentless punishment via airstrikes to villages suspected of harbouring the rebel fighters. Weapons and armaments flooded in from the West, particularly America, to support the rebel efforts.
The Russians also bombed the irrigation canals and the road network. The farmers of Helmand and other agricultural provinces could no longer get their produce to market and a period of severe economic decline set in. Russia rapidly robbed the subsistence farmers of the ability to provide for their families. The melons, peaches, pomegranates and apricots for which Afghanistan was famous, rotted on trucks stuck on broken roads or at checkpoints. The pistachios and dates couldn’t be sold by those growers, who then couldn’t buy enough grain to feed large families that often numbered fifteen or more in one household. So those who were already growing opium poppies increased their planting, because opium latex can be stored indefinitely and was a source of much-needed hard cash.
However, there was one aspect to Afghan farming that the Russians were unfamiliar with. In the highlands, where the opium poppy is the predominant crop, along with enough subsistence farming to get by, i
rrigation, far from the Helmand infrastructure, is done by karezes. These are tunnels running just beneath the surface of the earth and following the natural lines of the land, with channels cut to the sides to irrigate the fields. From the surface they look like large molehills, as the farmers climb inside and excavate silt or rocks that have entered the channels. Otherwise, they are hidden from view. They are maintained by the communities through the system of hashar, where if a field benefits from irrigation, the farmer spends a few days each year clearing silt and rubbish from the tunnels. Karezes are of particular use in the cultivation of opium poppies in difficult terrain, and escaped the destruction that was inflicted on the larger and more visible American-built canals.
For the Afghans who remained in their country during the Soviet occupation, life was desperate, particularly for the rural communities. On the ground, Soviet troops shot livestock and destroyed machinery. Life wasn’t much better in the cities, and in 1987 a concerted effort by the Russians saw Kandahar reduced from over 200,000 inhabitants to under 25,000, with much of the city bulldozed. There is no accurate figure on the number of landmines laid in agricultural land and by roadsides, but the Red Cross puts the figure at somewhere around 15 million, and predicts that the country will never be free of them. To date, tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed or maimed. It is perhaps not surprising that when Afghan Communist sympathisers were exposed, they were executed by stoning, or that there was so much widespread support for the mujahideen.
In the same way that the Afghan tribesmen had picked off Elphinstone’s army in the winter of 1841, the mujahideen picked off the troops of the Soviet army, despite being faced with tanks and artillery that far outmatched their own firepower. As early as 1983, and certainly by 1985 under the aegis of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russians knew they had lost and were looking for a way out. They began offloading the responsibility of fighting the mujahideen to the Afghan army, and those backing the mujahideen such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan saw their chance, upping their levels of aid to the rebel fighters. The Western powers favoured the forces led by the charismatic Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik Sunni Muslim nicknamed the Lion of Panjshir for his military prowess in fighting the Russians. In 1988, aware that Russia was fading, Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda.
Over the following three years, the Russians began a slow retreat from Afghanistan. Sadly, but true to form, things would not run smoothly. Russia was leaving a Communist puppet government in place, in the face of overwhelming hatred from the Afghan tribes. Only the massive artillery Russia supplied them with allowed them to maintain control of the urban centres of the country. Massoud, backed by Western powers, had the stronghold in the north, and a loyal following.
When the Soviet Union began to fall apart in 1992, aid for the PDPA government slowed to a trickle and the army could not continue effectively without food or fuel. That year, all parties came to a power-sharing agreement, the Peshawar Accord. The only mujahid not to agree to it was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious Butcher of Kabul, who wanted to rule alone. Hekmatyar, an extremist by any measure, was funded by the Pakistani Secret Service, the ISI, and is a highly divisive character in Afghanistan’s recent history. His rivalry with Massoud is one of the defining relationships of the end of Soviet-era Afghanistan.
With the withdrawal of Russia from Afghanistan and the threat of Communism no longer immediate, the US interest in the situation waned. In rural Afghanistan the Communist governor of Helmand province announced that he would recognize as police any group of ten or more men who were willing to fight the mujahideen, a policy that created hundreds of miniature police militias that were virtually indistinguishable from rebel militias. For the beleaguered residents of Helmand, it was impossible to tell the difference.
Requests such as this from the waning Communist governments encouraged the rise of the Afghan warlord. In a country prone to tribalism and banditry, and now with the worst standard of living anywhere outside of the poorest African nations, recognition for a private army was exactly what many of Afghanistan’s opportunistic thugs and gangsters needed to found their own small empires. At the same time, during the 1980s, Pakistan had been undergoing a surge in heroin use and addiction, providing an outlet for Afghanistan’s new emergency cash crop. Heroin refineries were flung up along remote stretches of the border between the two countries, providing a cheap, easily accessible supply. Some members of Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Agency) participated in the trade, along with the Afghan traffickers, and the result was a rise from an estimated 5,000 Pakistani heroin addicts in 1980 to over 1 million in 1985.11 Thus, in the early 1990s, more farmers were giving over more land to poppies, and the warlords extorted them for a share of the crop, or control of the crop itself. Many of the farmers, on their knees financially, had no choice, and were soon paying more than one militia. The militias’ reputation for corruption and vice also outraged many, but their propensity for violence kept people in line. Afghanistan, used to existing in chaos, was drowning in it. Into the breach came what seemed like the solution: a group of young Pashtun scholars, talibs, and their strict, one-eyed mullah, Mohammed Omar.
‘There is no god but God; Muhammad is the messenger of God.’12
It was not just the mujahideen who were trained in Pakistan. The Soviets left many orphans, and many families sent their children over the border to Pakistan to get them out of harm’s way. Thousands of boys entered the madrasas of the northern Pakistan refugee camps. Many of these strict religious schools were funded by the Saudi Arabian royal family, a legacy of King Faisal’s dream to spread his version of Islam – known as Wahhabism – throughout the Islamic world. Wahhabism emerged in the eighteenth century as a reductive, literal version of Islam similar to the Protestant Puritanism of the seventeenth century. Its overall world view was nihilistic, and life in the madrasas was little more than bed, board and a rote learning of the Qur’an. In traditional Afghan society, women are responsible for discipline within the home, and the role of fathers is to be indulgent, or at least indifferent, in the face of childish misdemeanours. The absence of women in the madrasas, and, for many of the orphaned boys, in their lives at all, meant that they grew up devoid of female contact, understanding only the Wahhabi religious viewpoint. Their sparse emotional lives, coupled with this youthful, all-male society, led to a kind of passionate fundamentalism that took even the conservative Afghans by surprise on 12 October 1994.
Spin Boldak, meaning ‘white desert’, is an enormous truckstop on the Durand Line in Kandahar province. Ostensibly it’s a legitimate location for goods exchange, as well as a rest stop for truckers routinely driving non-stop for up to twenty-four hours. In reality, it is one of the largest smuggling hubs in Afghanistan. Radio equipment and narcotics are the two main commodities. After the Soviets had torn up the telephone lines, they were left lying on the sides of the roads, and the local people harvested them to sell for the wiring (Afghanistan remains more reliant on radios than fixed-line telephones).
The truck-driving community of Afghanistan is predominantly Pashtun, and they were sick of being robbed and extorted by the warlords, so it is little surprise that the predominantly Pashtun Taliban began in Spin Boldak, taking it over rapidly with minimal resistance. They moved on rapidly to Kandahar, which proved more difficult, but still fell with few losses to the Taliban.
Almost immediately they began to implement their view of Sharia law, which banned education and jobs for women, and imposed the head-to-toe covering, the burkha. One quarter of public-sector jobs had previously been in the hands of women, which meant that the civil service verged on instant collapse. The Taliban smashed every television set they came across and forbade all sports. All men capable of doing so were to grow long beards. Once established as the controlling force in Kandahar in 1996, they conducted a series of calculated massacres of the Hazara people, burned thousands of homes, many thousands of acres of farmland, and destroyed livestock. They did, however, succeed in
suppressing the warlords, often simply by murdering them, although it was claimed that it was done in the name of Islam and Afghanistan. The irony is that many of these young men had never spent time in Afghanistan, having lived all their lives as refugees in Pakistan.
Unlike the Soviets, who never truly controlled the country outside the cities, by 1997 the Taliban controlled 85–90 per cent of Afghanistan, and Mullah Omar had been installed as the emir.13 The same year, the Pashtani Tjarati bank – the Taliban central bank – imposed an at-source tax on 10 per cent of farmers’ profits, and opium merchants had to pay 2.5 per cent on all transactions. The ban on the education of women created a huge pool of free labour that sustained the boom in opium production. Opium poppies were brought down from the mountains, and the farmers of Helmand and Nangarhar provinces in particular were encouraged to give their land over to the opium poppy, in exchange for the reasonable 10 per cent tax or zakat. This tax also bought them and their farms protection. For many farmers, having witnessed the chaos of the preceding government’s collapse and the horrors of the Soviet years, this seemed like a relatively small price to pay. As one small farmer, Wali Jan, said, ‘The Taliban have brought us security so we can grow the poppy in peace. I need the poppy crop to support my fourteen family members.’14 Wali Jan was earning $1,300 per year from forty-five kilograms of raw opium gum, which was enough to lift him out of absolute poverty. These farmers were not necessarily in favour of the Taliban’s draconian interpretation of the Qur’an, but many experienced stability and a new prosperity. This was at odds with the way the world wanted to see life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. As Kofi Annan of the United Nations said, ‘In a country of 20 million people, fifty thousand armed men are holding the whole population hostage.’15 The Taliban’s unique world view was further reinforced by the appointment of their own anti-narcotics chief, Abdul Rashid, who was in charge of rooting out hashish because it was consumed by Afghans and Muslims. ‘Opium is permissible because it is consumed by kafirs [unbelievers] in the West and not by Muslims or Afghans.’16