by Ahmed Rashid
For centuries the city was the crossroads between the competing Turkic and Persian empires and its population was an early convert to Islam. The main mosque in the city centre dates back to the seventh century and was rebuilt by the Ghorid dynasty in 1200. In medieval times it was both a centre for Christianity, under the Nestorian Church and a major centre for Sufism – the spiritual and mystical side of Islam. Followers of the Naqshbandi and Chishtyia Sufi brotherhoods became Prime Ministers and Ministers. Herat's patron saint is Khawaja Abdullah Ansari who died in 1088, a celebrated Sufi poet and philosopher who still has a large following in Afghanistan. When Genghis Khan conquered Herat in 1222, he spared only 40 of its 160,000 inhabitants. But less than two centuries later the city had recovered to reach its pinnacle when Taimur's son Shah Rukh and his Queen Gowhar Shad moved the capital of the Timurid empire from Samarkand to Herat in 1405.
The Timurids were the first to merge the Turkic nomadic steppe culture with the refinements of the settled Persian lands, importing artisans from Persia, India and Central Asia to build hundreds of magnificent monuments. Shah Rukh and Gowhar Shad turned Herat into a vast construction site building mosques, madrassas, public baths, libraries and palaces. Herat's bazaars produced the finest carpets, jewellery, weapons, armour and tiles. Bihzad, considered the finest Persian miniaturist painter of all time worked at the court. ‘In Herat if you stretch out your feet you are sure to kick a poet,’ said Ali Sher Nawai, Shah Rukh's Prime Minister, who was also an artist, poet and writer.4 Nawai, who is buried in Herat and is the national poet of modern day Uzbekistan, is considered the father of literary Turkic for he was the first to write poetry in Turkic rather than Persian. The Persian poet Jami was also at court and is buried in Herat while Shah Rukh's son Ulugh Beg, was an astronomer whose observatory in Samarkand monitored the movement of stars. His calendar and tables of the stars were published at Oxford University in 1665 and are still astonishingly accurate.
In 1417, Gowhar Shad, herself a builder of dozens of mosques, completed the construction of a magnificent complex on the outskirts of the city consisting of a mosque, madrassa and her own tomb. The tomb, with its panelled walls of Persian blue tiles bejewelled with floral decorations and topped by a ribbed blue dome with dazzling white Koranic inscriptions, is still considered one of the finest examples of Islamic architecture anywhere in the world. When Byron saw it in 1937, he described it as ‘the most beautiful example in colour in architecture ever devised by man to the glory of God and himself.’5 When Gowhar Shad died at the age of 80 after constructing some 300 buildings in Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia, the inscription on her tomb read simply ‘The Bilkis of the Time.’ Bilkis means the Queen of Sheba.6 Much of the complex was demolished by the British in 1885 and the Soviets later mined the area to keep out the Mujaheddin.
When the Soviets bombed Herat in 1979, they inflicted more damage on the city than even the Mongols had done. ‘Herat is the most destroyed and the most heavily mined city in the world today, yet we get no help from anywhere,’ Ismael Khan told me in 1993.7 Despite the devastation around him, Ismael Khan had disarmed the population and established an effective administration with functioning health care and schools in the three provinces.
Short, shrewd and with an elfin smile that made him look much younger than his 47 years, Ismael Khan had 45,000 children studying in Herat's schools, by 1993 half of them were girls – 75,000 students in all across the three provinces. In 1993 he took me to see the Atun Heirvi school where 1,500 girls studied in two shifts, sitting under the open sky as there were no classrooms, desks, books, paper or ink – their desire to learn only re-emphasising Herat's history of learning. In contrast when the Taliban took over Kandahar, the 45 working schools were closed down and only three remained. When the Taliban were later to capture Herat they were to close down every school in the city and disallow girls from even studying at home.
But by 1995 Ismael Khan faced immense problems. He had disarmed the population and created an unpopular conscript army. To face the Taliban, he needed to rearm the population while his conscript army was riddled with corruption, low morale and lack of resources. Official corruption and high-handedness towards civilians had become rampant in the city and customs officials charged trucks passing through Herat the exorbitant sum of 10,000 Pakistan rupees (US$300) – a sure way to make an enemy of the transport mafia. The Taliban were well informed of the problems he faced. ‘Ismael is weak, his soldiers will not fight because they have not been paid and he is widely discredited amongst his people because of the corruption in his administration. He stands alone and has to be propped up by Masud,’ Mullah Wakil Ahmad told me.8
Ismael Khan also made a serious military miscalculation. Believing the Taliban were on the verge of disintegration due to their defeat, he launched an ill-prepared and badly timed offensive against them. With a large mobile force, he captured Dilaram on 23 August 1995 and parts of Helmand a week later thereby threatening Kandahar. But his forces were overstretched in a hostile environment while the Taliban had spent the summer rebuilding their forces with arms, ammunition and vehicles provided by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and a new command structure created with the help of ISI advisers. The ISI also helped broker an agreement, never made public, between the Taliban and General Rashid Dostum. Dostum sent his Uzbek technicians to Kandahar to repair Mig fighters and helicopters the Taliban had captured a year earlier in Kandahar, thereby creating the Taliban's first airpower. Meanwhile Dostum's own planes began a bombing campaign of Herat.
To meet Ismael Khan's threat, the Taliban quickly mobilized some 25,000 men, many of them fresh volunteers from Pakistan. Their more experienced fighters were deployed in mobile columns in Datsun pick-ups, which harassed Ismael's supply lines. At the end of August at Girishk the Taliban decisively ambushed the intruders and Ismael Khan sounded a general retreat. Within a few days the Taliban pushed back his forces to Shindand, which he inexplicably abandoned on 3 September 1995 without putting up a fight. Then two days later, with his troops in a blind panic as the Taliban mobile columns swept through and around them, Ismael Khan abandoned Herat fleeing with his commanders and several hundred men to Iran. The next day a pro-government mob in Kabul, incensed at the loss of Herat, attacked and sacked the Pakistan Embassy, wounding the Pakistani Ambassador as government soldiers looked on. Relations between Kabul and Islamabad sunk to an all-time low as President Rabbani openly accused Pakistan of trying to oust him from power through the Taliban.
The Taliban now controlled the entire west of the country, the sensitive border region with Iran and for the first time ruled an area which was not predominantly Pashtun. The Taliban treated Herat as an occupied city, arresting hundreds of Heratis, closing down all schools and forcibly implementing their social bans and Sharia law, even more fiercely than in Kandahar. The city was garrisoned not by local defectors, but hardcore Pashtun Taliban from Kandahar and the administration was handed over to Durrani Pashtuns, many of whom could not even speak Persian and therefore were incapable of communicating with the local population. Over the next few years not a single local Herati was to be inducted into the administration. For the sophisticated population, who were now ruled by what they considered gross, uneducated Pashtuns who had no idea of the past magnificence or history of the city, the only thing left was to go to Jami's tomb and read his sad epitaph.
When your face is hidden from me, like the moon hidden on a dark night, I shed stars of tears and yet my night remains dark in spite of all those shining stars.9
The fall of Herat was also the beginning of the end for the Rabbani government. Bolstered by their victories, the Taliban launched another attack on Kabul during October and November, hoping to gain ground before the winter snows suspended further fighting. Masud counterattacked in late November and pushed them back, resulting in hundreds of dead. But the Taliban were to persist and were now to try other means of conquering the city, weakening Masud's front lines by bribes rather than tank fire.
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KABUL 1996:
COMMANDER OF THE
FAITHFUL
Travelling by jeep, truck and horseback hundreds of Afghan mullahs began to descend on Kandahar in the cool spring weather of 1996. By 20 March more than 1,200 Pashtun religious leaders from south, west and central Afghanistan had arrived in the city. They were housed and fed in government offices, the old fort and the covered bazaar, which were turned into enormous dormitories by the simple act of throwing hundreds of carpets on the floor so that the mullahs could sleep.
It was the biggest gathering of mullahs and ulema that had ever taken place in modern Afghan history. Significantly absent were local military commanders, traditional tribal and clan leaders, political figures from the war against the Soviets and non-Pashtun representatives from northern Afghanistan. Only religious leaders had been summoned by Mullah Omar to debate a future plan of action, but more importantly to legitimize the Taliban leader as the all powerful leader in the country.
The ten-month Taliban siege of Kabul had failed to crack the city and as Taliban casualties mounted, there was growing unrest in their ranks. During the long winter months, moderates in the movement openly talked of the need for negotiations with the Kabul regime. Hardliners wanted to continue the conquest of the entire country. There were also broad divisions within the Pashtuns. The Kandaharis grouped around Omar wanted the war to continue, while those representing Pashtun areas recently conquered by the Taliban wanted peace and an end to the conflict.
Everyone outside the country also realised that the Taliban were at a crossroads. ‘The Taliban cannot take Kabul nor can Masud take Kandahar. How will the Taliban evolve if they fail to take Kabul? Even if they do manage to take Kabul how will the rest of Afghanistan accept their type of Islamic system?’ the UN mediator Mehmoud Mestiri told me.1 For more than two weeks the Shura continued with meetings lasting all day and all night. Separate Shuras discussed issues such as the political and military future, how best to impose Sharia law and the future of girls’ education in Taliban-held areas. The discussions were all held in extreme secrecy and foreigners were banned from Kandahar for the duration. However Pakistani officials were there to monitor the Shura, including the Pakistani Ambassador to Kabul Qazi Humayun and several ISI officers such as Colonel Imam, Pakistan's Consul General in Herat.
To patch over their differences, the core group of Kandaharis around Mullah Omar nominated him to become the ‘Amirul Momineen’ or ‘Commander of the Faithful’, an Islamic title that made him the undisputed leader of the jihad and the Emir of Afghanistan. (The Taliban were later to rename the country as the Emirate of Afghanistan). On 4 April 1996, Omar appeared on the roof of a building in the centre of the city, wrapped in the Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, which had been taken out of its shrine for the first time in 60 years. As Omar wrapped and unwrapped the Cloak around his body and allowed it to flap in the wind, he was rapturously applauded by the assembled throng of mullahs in the courtyard below, as they shouted ‘Amirul Momineen.’
This oath of allegiance or ‘baiat’ was a procedure similar to when Caliph Omar was confirmed as leader of the Muslim community in Arabia after the death of the Prophet Mohammed. It was a political masterstroke, for by cloaking himself with the Prophet's mantle, Mullah Omar had assumed the right to lead not just all Afghans, but all Muslims. The meeting ended with a declaration of jihad against the Rabbani regime. The Taliban vowed not to open talks with any of their adversaries and declared that a final decision on allowing women to be educated could only be tackled ‘when there was a legitimate government in Afghanistan’. The hard-liners and Mullah Omar had won.2
But for many Afghans and Muslims elsewhere it was a serious affront to propriety that a poor village mullah with no scholarly learning, no tribal pedigree or connections to the Prophet's family should presume so much. No Afghan had adopted the title since 1834, when King Dost Mohammed Khan assumed the title before he declared jihad against the Sikh kingdom in Peshawar. But Dost Mohammed was fighting foreigners, while Omar had declared jihad against his own people. Moreover, there was no sanction for such a title in Islam, unless all of the country's ulema had bestowed it upon a leader. The Taliban insisted that their meeting constituted the Koranic requirement of ‘ahl al-hal o aqd’, literally ‘the people who can loose and bind’ or those empowered to take legitimate decisions on behalf of the Islamic community.
For Omar the title gave him badly needed legitimacy and a new mystique amongst the Pashtuns that no other Mujaheddin leader had acquired during the war. It would allow him to distance himself still further from day-to-day politics, give him an additional excuse not to meet foreign diplomats and allow him to be more inflexible in either broadening the base of the Taliban leadership or in talking to the opposition. Omar could now always retreat behind his title and decline to meet opposition leaders on an equal footing.
But the ulema meeting had deliberately not come to any decisions on the much more sensitive questions on how the Taliban planned to rule Afghanistan and what if anything they planned for the country's economic and social development. Such questions were to remain permanently unanswered, even after they captured Kabul. ‘We have not gone public yet on our structure because we are not strong enough to decide who will be the Prime Minister or the President,’ said Mullah Wakil, the aide to Omar. ‘The Sharia does not allow politics or political parties. That is why we give no salaries to officials or soldiers, just food, clothes, shoes and weapons. We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1,400 years ago and jihad is our right. We want to recreate the time of the Prophet and we are only carrying out what the Afghan people have wanted for the past 14 years,’ he added.3 Another Taliban leader put it even more succinctly. ‘We can love our enemies but only after we have defeated them.’
Only a day earlier Taliban emissaries had told Mestiri in Islamabad that they were ready to talk to President Rabbani.4 ‘If the Taliban are ready to talk and President Rabbani is ready to talk, then this is really something,’ said Mestiri hopefully. The final result of the ulema meeting was a blow that neither Mestiri nor the UN peace effort was to recover from and in May Mestiri resigned from his job.
The ulema meeting had also been prompted by the regime's growing political successes at wooing other opposition leaders and President Rabbani's increasing international standing. Kabul's military successes at seeing off Hikmetyar, the Hazaras and the Taliban attack had finally persuaded the regime that this was an opportune moment to try and gain greater political acceptability, by broadening the base of their support. President Rabbani began talks with other warlords, holding out the carrot that he was prepared to set up a new government which could include them. In January and February 1996, Rabbani's emissary Dr Abdur Rehman met separately with Gulbuddin Hikmetyar at Sarobi, with General Rashid Dostum in Mazar-e-Sharif and the Hizb-e-Wahadat leadership in Bamiyan. In February all the opposition groups except for the Taliban agreed to set up a ten-man council to negotiate peace terms with Kabul, even as the Taliban continued to demand the surrender of the regime. A few weeks later the council of the Hizb-e-Islami gave Hikmetyar the power to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Rabbani.
Pakistan was worried by Rabbani's successes and attempted to woo the same warlords to join the Taliban and form an anti-Kabul alliance. The ISI summoned Hikmetyar, Dostum, the Pashtun leaders of the Jalalabad Shura and some Hizb-e-Wahadat chiefs to Islamabad to persuade them to ally with the Taliban. These warlords met with President Farooq Leghari and army chief General Jehangir Karamat as negotiations continued for a week between 7 and 13 February. Pakistan proposed a political alliance and in private a joint attack on Kabul with the Taliban attacking from the south, Hikmetyar from the east and Dostum from the north.5 To sweeten the Taliban, Babar offered to spend US$3 million to repair the road across southern Afghanistan from Chaman to Torgundi on the Turkmenistan border. But the Taliban refused to turn up to the meeting, spurning their Pakistani mentors yet again, despite personal
appeals by Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar, the JUI chief Fazlur Rehman and the ISI. The Taliban declined to have anything to do with the other warlords whom they condemned as communist infidels.
Islamabad's failure to create a united front against Kabul, emboldened Rabbani further. In early March, along with a 60-man delegation, he set off on an extensive tour of Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to lobby for international support and increased military aid. Iran, Russia and India, who backed the Kabul regime, calculated that the conflict had now entered a crucial stage as another battle for Kabul could increase political instability and influence the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia. Iran was incensed by the fall of Herat to a Pashtun force that was vehemently anti-Shia and was backed by its regional rivals Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Russia considered the Kabul regime as more moderate and pliant than the Taliban, as it worried about the security of the Central Asian Republics. Moscow also wanted an end to the four-year-old civil war in Tajikistan between the neo-communist government and Islamic rebels, which was being fuelled from Afghanistan. India backed Kabul simply because of Pakistani support to the Taliban.