by Ahmed Rashid
As international and domestic pressure mounted on Pakistan to explain its position, Bhutto made the first formal denial of any Pakistani backing of the Taliban in February 1995. ‘We have no favourites in Afghanistan and we do not interfere in Afghanistan,’ she said while visiting Manila.15Later she said Pakistan could not stop new recruits from crossing the border to join the Taliban. ‘I cannot fight Mr [President Burhanuddin] Rabbani's war for him. If Afghans want to cross the border, I do not stop them. I can stop them from re-entering but most of them have families here,’ she said.16
The Taliban immediately implemented the strictest interpretation of Sharia law ever seen in the Muslim world. They closed down girls’ schools and banned women from working outside the home, smashed TV sets, forbade a whole array of sports and recreational activities and ordered all males to grow long beards. In the next three months the Taliban were to take control of 12 of Afghanistan's 31 provinces, opening the roads to traffic and disarming the population. As the Taliban marched north to Kabul, local warlords either fled or, waving white flags, surrendered to them. Mullah Omar and his army of students were on the march across Afghanistan.
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HERAT 1995:
GOD'S INVINCIBLE
SOLDIERS
In March 1995, on the northern edge of the Dashte-e-Mango – the Desert of Death – plumes of fine white dust rose in the air above the narrow ribbon of the battered highway that connects Kandahar with Herat, 350 miles away. The highway, built by the Russians in the 1950s skirted through the brush and sands of one of the hottest and most waterless deserts in the world. After years of war, the highway was now rutted with tank tracks, bomb craters and broken bridges, slowing down the traffic to just 20 miles an hour.
The Taliban war wagons – Japanese two-door pick-ups with a stripped-down trunk at the back open to the elements – were streaming towards Herat laden with heavily armed young men in their bid to capture the city. In the opposite direction a steady flow of vehicles was bringing back wounded Taliban lying on string beds and strapped into the trunk as well as prisoners captured from the forces of Ismael Khan who held Herat.
In the first three months after capturing Kandahar, the Taliban had broken the stalemate in the Afghan civil war by capturing 12 of Afghanistan's 31 provinces and had arrived at the outskirts of Kabul to the north and Herat in the west. Taliban soldiers were reluctant to talk under the gaze of their commanders in Kandahar so the only way to learn something about them was to hitch lifts along the road and back again. In the confines of the pick-ups where a dozen warriors were jam-packed with crates of ammunition, rockets, grenade launchers and sacks of wheat, they were more than eager to share their life stories.
They said that since the capture of Kandahar some 20,000 Afghans and hundreds of Pakistani madrassa students had streamed across the border from refugee camps in Pakistan to join Mullah Omar. Thousands more Afghan Pashtuns had joined them in their march northwards. The majority were incredibly young – between 14 and 24 years old – and many had never fought before although, like all Pashtuns, they knew how to handle a weapon.
Many had spent their lives in refugee camps in Baluchistan and the NWFP provinces of Pakistan, interspersed with stints at imbibing a Koranic education in the dozens of madrassas that had sprung up along the border run by Afghan mullahs or Pakistan's Islamic fundamentalist parties. Here they studied the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed and the basics of Islamic law as interpreted by their barely literate teachers. Neither teachers nor students had any formal grounding in maths, science, history or geography. Many of these young warriors did not even know the history of their own country or the story of the jihad against the Soviets.
These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the 1980s – men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages, remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and recounted legends and stories from Afghan history. These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace – an Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbours nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland. These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's surrender on the beach of history.
They had no memories of the past, no plans for the future while the present was everything. They were literally the orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat.
Moreover, they had willingly gathered under the all-male brotherhood that the Taliban leaders were set on creating, because they knew of nothing else. Many in fact were orphans who had grown up without women –mothers, sisters or cousins. Others were madrassa students or had lived in the strict confines of segregated refugee camp life, where the normal comings and goings of female relatives were curtailed. Even by the norms of conservative Pashtun tribal society, where villages or nomadic camps were close-knit communities and men still mixed with women to whom they were related, these boys had lived rough, tough lives. They had simply never known the company of women.
The mullahs who had taught them stressed that women were a temptation, an unnecessary distraction from being of service to Allah. So when the Taliban entered Kandahar and confined women to their homes by barring them from working, going to school and even from shopping, the majority of these madrassa boys saw nothing unusual in such measures. They felt threatened by that half of the human race which they had never known and it was much easier to lock that half away, especially if it was ordained by the mullahs who invoked primitive Islamic injunctions, which had no basis in Islamic law. The subjugation of women became the mission of the true believer and a fundamental marker that differentiated the Taliban from the former Mujaheddin.
This male brotherhood offered these youngsters not just a religious cause to fight for, but a whole way of life to fully embrace and make their existence meaningful. Ironically, the Taliban were a direct throwback to the military religious orders that arose in Christendom during the Crusades to fight Islam – disciplined, motivated and ruthless in attaining their aims.1 In the first few months the sweeping victories of the Taliban created an entire mythology of invincibility that only God's own soldiers could attain. In those heady early days, every victory only reinforced the perceived truth of their mission, that God was on their side and that their interpretation of Islam was the only interpretation.
Reinforced by their new recruits, the Taliban moved north into Urozgan and Zabul provinces which they captured without a shot being fired. The marauding Pashtun commanders, unwilling to test their own supporters’ uncertain loyalty, surrendered by hoisting white flags and handing over their weapons in a mark of submission.
In the south the Taliban moved against the forces of Ghaffar Akhunzadeh, whose clan had controlled Helmand province and its lucrative opium poppy fields for much of the 1980s. Here they met with fierce resistance, but by propping up smaller drug warlords against Akhunzadeh and bribing others, the Taliban captured the province by January 1995. They continued westwards reaching Dilaram on the Kandahar–Herat highway and the border of the three western provinces controlled by Ismael Khan. At the same time they moved north towards Kabul, easily slicing through the Pashtun belt where they met with more mass surrenders rather than resistance.
The chaotic and anarchic Pashtun south, where there was only a mob of petty commanders, had fallen to the Taliban easily, but now they came up against the major warlords and the political and ethnic comple
xities that gripped the rest of the country. In January 1995 all the opposition groups had joined hands to attack President Rabbani's government in Kabul. Hikmetyar had allied with the Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum in the north and the Hazaras of central Afghanistan who held a portion of Kabul. Pakistan had helped broker the new alliance as Hikmetyar was still Islamabad's clear favourite and at the beginning of the year he had received large quantities of Pakistani-supplied rockets to bombard the capital. But even Islamabad was surprised by the rapid Taliban advance. Although the Bhutto government fully backed the Taliban, the ISI remained sceptical of their abilities, convinced that they would remain a useful but peripheral force in the south.
Hikmetyar was clearly worried by this rival Pashtun force sweeping up from the south and tried to halt the Taliban while at the same time launching massive rocket attacks against Kabul, which killed hundreds of civilians and destroyed large tracts of the city. On 2 February 1995, the Taliban captured Wardak, just 35 miles south of Kabul and Hikmetyar's bases around Kabul came under threat for the first time. The Taliban continued to advance in lightning moves, capturing Maidan Shahr on 10 February 1995, after heavy fighting which left 200 dead, and Mohammed Agha the next day. Hikmetyar was now trapped by government forces to the north and the Taliban to the south; morale among his troops plummeted.
On 14 February 1995 the Taliban captured Hikmetyar's headquarters at Charasyab, creating panic among his troops and forcing them to flee eastwards towards Jalalabad. President Rabbani's troops, under his swordarm Ahmad Shah Masud, withdrew into Kabul city. The Taliban then opened all the roads, allowing food convoys to reach Kabul after the months of blockade imposed by Hikmetyar. It was a popular step, raising the Taliban's prestige amongst the sceptical citizens of Kabul and fulfilled a key demand of the transport mafia backing the Taliban. Appeals for a cease-fire by the UN Special Representative for Afghanistan, the Tunisean diplomat Mehmoud Mestiri, were ignored as Masud and the Taliban now confronted each other.
Masud had another problem even closer to home. Although Hikmetyar had been forced to flee, Masud still faced the forces of the Shia Hazaras under the Hizb-e-Wahadat party, which held the southern suburbs of the capital. Masud tried to buy time and met twice with the Taliban commanders, Mullahs Rabbani, Borjan and Ghaus at Charasayab. These meetings were the first time that the Taliban were to meet with their greatest rival, who was to persist in punishing them for the next four years. The Taliban demanded Rabbani's resignation as President and Masud's surrender – hardly a negotiating stance that would win them support. The Taliban also began negotiating with the Hazaras.
The Taliban also met with Mestiri, the UN mediator, setting down three conditions for their participation in any UN-sponsored peace process. They demanded that their units form a ‘neutral force’ in Kabul, that only ‘good Muslims’ form an interim administration in Kabul and that representation be given to all 30 provinces in the country. The Taliban's insistence that only their forces dominate any new government in Kabul, obliged the Rabbani government and the UN to reject their demands.
Masud decided to deal with his enemies one at a time. On 6 March 1995, he launched a blitzkrieg against the Hazaras, sending tanks into Kabul's southern suburbs, smashing the Hazaras and driving them out of Kabul. In desperation the Hazaras cut a deal with the advancing Taliban, yielding their heavy weapons and positions to them. But in the ensuing handover and mêlée, the Hazara leader Abdul Ali Mazari was killed while in Taliban custody. The Hazaras subsequently claimed that Mazari was pushed out of a helicopter to his death by the Taliban, because he tried to seize a rifle while he was being taken to Kandahar as a prisoner.
The death of Mazari, accidental or intentional, was to forever condemn the Taliban in the eyes of the Afghan Shias and their main patron Iran. The Hazaras were never to forgive the Taliban for Mazari's death and took their revenge two years later, when the Hazaras massacred thousands of Taliban in the north. A bloody ethnic and sectarian divide, between Pashtun and Hazara, Sunni and Shia bubbling just below the surface now came into the open.
In the meantime Masud was not going to allow the Taliban to replace the Hazaras in southern Kabul. On 11 March 1995 he launched another punishing attack, pushing the Taliban out of the city after bloody street fighting that left hundreds of Taliban dead. It was the first major battle that the Taliban had fought and lost. Their weak military structure and poor tactics ensured their defeat at the hands of Masud's more experienced fighters.
The Taliban had won over the unruly Pashtun south because the exhausted, war-weary population saw them as saviours and peacemakers, if not as a potential force to revive Pashtun power which had been humiliated by the Tajiks and Uzbeks. Many surrenders had been facilitated by pure cash, bribing commanders to switch sides – a tactic that the Taliban were to turn into a fine art form in later years and which was sustained by the growth in their income from the drugs trade, the transport business and external aid from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In their advance they had also captured massive quantities of small arms, tanks and even helicopters enabling them to deploy more troops. In the areas under their rule, they disarmed the population, enforced law and order, imposed strict Sharia law and opened the roads to traffic which resulted in an immediate drop in food prices. These measures were all extremely welcome to the long-suffering population. The defeat in Kabul came as a major blow to the Taliban's prestige, but not to their determination.
The Taliban then turned their attention to the west in a bid to capture Herat. By late February 1995 after heavy fighting they captured Nimroz and Farah, two of the provinces controlled by Ismael Khan and advanced on the former Soviet airbase at Shindand, south of Herat. The Kabul regime was clearly worried by the Taliban advance and Ismael Khan's failure to hold the line against them. Masud's aircraft from Kabul began a bombardment of the Taliban front lines while he airlifted 2,000 of his battle-hardened Tajik fighters from Kabul to help defend Shindand and Herat. With no airpower, poor logistical support from their bases in Kandahar and a weak command structure, the Taliban began to take heavy casualties as they mounted assaults on government positions around Shindand.
By the end of March 1995, the Taliban had been pushed out of Shindand. They retreated losing most of the territory they had captured earlier, suffering at least 3,000 casualties. Hundreds of wounded were left in the desert to die because the Taliban had no medical facilities at the front and their lack of logistics made it impossible for them to provide water and food to their troops. ‘We have never seen such an inhospitable environment. Every day we are bombed, 10 to 15 times. There is no food or water and my friends have died of thirst. We lost communication with our commanders and we don't know where our other troops are. We ran out of ammunition. It was a great misery,’ Saleh Mohammed, a wounded Taliban told me, as he was transported back to Kandahar.2
The Taliban had now been decisively pushed back on two fronts by the government and their political and military leadership was in disarray. Their image as potential peacemakers was badly dented, for in the eyes of many Afghans they had become nothing more than just another warlord party. President Rabbani had temporarily consolidated his political and military position around Kabul and Herat. By May 1995 government forces directly controlled six provinces around Kabul and the north, while Ismael Khan controlled the three western provinces. The Taliban's initial control over 12 provinces was reduced to eight after their defeats. But Herat continued to remain a tantalizing prize, not just for the Taliban, but for the Pashtun transport and drugs mafias who were desperately keen to open up the roads to Iran and Central Asia through Herat for their business.
Few Mujaheddin commanders had the prestige of Ismael Khan and few had sacrificed more than the people of Herat during the war against the Soviets. Ismael Khan was an officer in the Afghan army when the Russians invaded Afghanistan and he had strong Islamic and nationalist leanings. When the Soviets occupied Herat, they viewed the Persian-speaking Heratis as docile and unwarlike and the
most cultured of all Afghans. The last time the Heratis were forced into a fight had been more than a century earlier when they had resisted a Persian invasion in 1837. Fearing no resistance, the Soviets developed the Shindand airbase as their largest airbase in Afghanistan and allowed the families of their army officers to settle in Herat.
But on 15 March 1979, the population of the city rose up against the Soviets in an unprecedented urban revolt. As the population killed Soviet officers, advisers and their families, Ismael Khan staged a coup in the city garrison, killing Soviet and communist Afghan officers and distributing arms to the people. Hundreds of Russians were killed. Moscow, fearing copycat uprisings in other Afghan cities, sent 300 tanks from Soviet Turkmenistan to crush the revolt and began to bomb one of the oldest cities in the world indiscriminately. Fifteen years later, large tracts of the city still looked like a lunar landscape with rubble stretching to the horizon. More than 20,000 Heratis were killed during the next few days. Ismael Khan escaped to the countryside with his new guerrilla army and tens of thousands of civilians fled to Iran. For the next decade Ismael Khan waged a bitter guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation and set up an effective administration in the countryside, winning the respect of the population. This was to prove invaluable to him when he was to re-establish himself in Herat after the departure of Soviet troops.
Herat was the cradle of Afghanistan's history and civilization. An oasis town, it was first settled 5,000 years ago. Its 200 square miles of irrigated farmland in a valley rimmed by mountains, was considered to have the richest soil in Central Asia. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described Herat as the breadbasket of Central Asia. ‘The whole habitable world had not such a town as Herat,’ wrote the Emperor Babar in his memoirs. The British likened its beauty to England's home counties. ‘The space between the hills is one beautiful extent of little fortified villages, gardens, vineyards and cornfields, and this rich scene is brightened by many small streams of shining water which cut the plain in all directions,’ the British adventurer and spy Captain Connolly wrote in 1831.3