by Ahmed Rashid
Born in 1953 into a military family, Masud studied at the French-run Lycée Istiqlal in Kabul. He became one of the young Islamic opponents of the regime of President Daud and fled to Pakistan in 1975, after he led a failed uprising in the Panjshir. In exile in Peshawar, Masud fell out with his colleague Gulbuddin Hikmetyar and their rivalry for the next 20 years was a determining reason why the Mujheddin never united to form a coalition government. His bitterness against Pakistan for first supporting Hikmetyar and then the Taliban became an obsession. During the jihad Masud argued that the strategic direction of the war should be left to the Afghans to decide rather than the ISI. But Pakistan was supplying all the US-provided weapons, which created an enmity which still lasts today. Islamabad was taken by surprise when in 1992 Kabul fell not from the south to the Pashtuns, but from the north to the Tajiks and Uzbeks.
Peacemaking always eluded Masud. He was a poor politician, incapable of convincing other Pashtun warlords who hated Hikmetyar that a Tajik-Pashtun alliance was the only feasible way to bring peace. Masud may have been a masterful military strategist but he was a failure at building political alliances between different ethnic groups and parties. His major problem was that he was a Tajik. Except for one abortive uprising in 1929, the Tajiks had never ruled in Kabul and were mistrusted by the Pashtuns.
In Kabul he remained aloof and refused to acccept government posts, declining the post of Defence Minister in President Rabbani's government even though he commanded the army. ‘There is an old Persian saying. When everyone is looking for a chair to sit on, it is better to sit on the floor,’ he told me in May 1996, just a few weeks before the Taliban were to drive him out of Kabul. ‘Pakistan is trying to subjugate Afghanistan and turn it into a colony by installing a puppet government. It won't work because the Afghan people have always been independent and free,’ he added.
Working 18 hours a day with two military secretaries, who took it in shifts to keep up with him, he would sleep four hours a night and because of fears of assasination never spent two nights in the same location. He slept, ate and fought with his men and invariably in the midst of a major battle he could be found on the frontline. In the next few months he was to face his greatest challenge as the Taliban swept him out of Kabul and appeared to be on the verge of conquering the entire country. He survived, but by 1999, aged 46 years old, he had been fighting virtually non-stop for 25 years.
Masud's forces now retreated up the Salang highway to his base area in the Panjshir. As the Taliban pursued them, Masud's men blew up the mountains, creating landslides to block the entrance to the valley. The Taliban launched an abortive attack on the Panjshir but failed to make headway. They pushed up the Salang highway capturing towns along the way until they were blocked at the Salang tunnel by Dostum's forces, who had advanced south from Mazar-e-Sharif. It was still unclear whose side Dostum would take and his forces refrained from engaging the Taliban.
Mullah Rabbani met with Dostum on 8 October 1996 in a bid to try and neutralize the Uzbeks while the Taliban went after Masud, but the talks broke down. The Taliban refused to allow Dostum autonomy and power in the north. Pakistan also launched a diplomatic shuttle in a bid to break Dostum away from Masud. However, Dostum realised that, despite his differences with Masud, the Taliban posed the real threat to all non-Pashtuns. On 10 October 1996, deposed President Rabbani, Masud, Dostum and the Hazara leader Karim Khalili met in Khin Jan on the highway and formed a ‘Supreme Council for the Defence of the Motherland’ to counter the Taliban. It was the beginning of a new anti-Taliban alliance that would perpetuate the civil war.
In their rapid advance northwards, the Taliban had spread themselves too thin and Masud took advantage of this, launching a major counterattack along the highway on 12 October 1996. He captured several towns, killing and capturing hundreds of Taliban soldiers as they fled back to Kabul in panic. On 18 October 1996, Masud's forces recaptured the Bagram airbase and began to shell Kabul airport, even as Dostum's airforce bombed Taliban targets in Kabul. The heavy fighting resulted in thousands of civilian casualties and forced 50,000 people to flee their homes in villages along the Salang highway. As these destitute refugees arrived in Kabul, tens of thousands of Kabulis – mostly Tajiks and Hazaras – were trying to escape in the other direction – eastwards to the Pakistan border to escape Taliban reprisals and mass arrests which had begun in the city.
Faced with rising casualties the Taliban began to suffer from manpower shortages and they started conscripting young men from Kabul into their army, entering mosques and seizing worshippers. Thousands more volunteers arrived from Pakistan where some Pakistani ulema closed down their madrassas so that students would have no choice but to enlist en masse with the Taliban. Thousands of Pakistani students and Afghans from the refugee camps began to arrive daily in Kandahar and Kabul on buses hired by Pakistan's Islamic parties. Pakistan waived all passport and visa requirements for them.
Bolstered by this fresh support, the Taliban launched an attack in western Afghanistan, moving northwards from Herat into Baghdis province. By the end of October 1996 Ismael Khan and 2,000 of his fighters, who had been in exile in Iran, were flown into Maimana on Dostum's aircraft to defend the front line against the Taliban in Baghdis. Iran had rearmed and re-equipped Ismael Khan's forces in a provocative and deliberate attempt to bolster the new anti-Taliban alliance. As heavy fighting took place in Baghdis during November and December, with considerable use of air power by both sides, another 50,000 displaced people fled to Herat. This added to what was now a catastrophic refugee crisis for UN aid agencies as winter, heavy snows and fighting prevented the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Despite heavy snowfall, the Taliban pushed Masud back from the outskirts of Kabul. By the end of January 1997, they had recaptured nearly all the territory they had lost along the Salang highway, retaking the Bagram airbase and Charikar. Masud retreated into the Panjshir as the Taliban pushed up the highway to confront Dostum.
The fall of Kabul and the intense fighting that followed created serious apprehensions in the entire region. Iran, Russia and four Central Asian Republics warned the Taliban not to move north and publicly declared they would help rearm the anti-Taliban alliance. Meanwhile Pakistan and Saudi Arabia sent diplomatic missions to Kabul to see what help they could offer the Taliban. Appeals from the UN and other international bodies for a cease-fire and mediation failed to receive any hearing from the belligerents. The region was now deeply polarized with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia allied to the Taliban and the other regional states backing the opposition. The Taliban were still not to receive the international recognition they so desperately wanted. ‘We don't have a friend in the world. We have conquered three quarters of the country, we have captured the capital and we haven't received even a single message of congratulations,’ said a wistful Mullah Mohammed Hassan.17
Yet it appeared that Mullah Omar's refusal to compromise with the opposition or the UN, along with his unshakeable faith and his determination to achieve a military victory, had finally paid off. Kabul, the capital of Afghan Pashtun kings since 1772 which had been lost for the past four years to Tajik rulers, was back in the hands of the Pashtuns. The student movement, which so many had predicted would never be able to take the capital had done just that. Despite their enormous losses, the Taliban's prestige had never been higher. The cost of their victory however was the deepening ethnic and sectarian divide that was clearly dividing Afghanistan and polarizing the region.
‘War is a tricky game,’ said Omar, who remained in Kandahar and declined to even visit Kabul. ‘The Taliban took five months to capture one province but then six provinces fell to us in only ten days. Now we are in control of 22 provinces including Kabul. Inshallah [God willing] the whole of Afghanistan will fall into our hands. We feel a military solution has better prospects now after numerous failed attempts to reach a peaceful, negotiated settlement,’ he added.18 Northern Afghanistan now appeared ready for the taking.
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> MAZAR-E-SHARIF 1997:
MASSACRE IN THE NORTH
Everyone expected a Taliban spring offensive on Mazar-e-Sharif, the last stronghold in northern Afghanistan of the anti-Taliban alliance which was under the control of General Rashid Dostum and his Uzbeks. During the long winter months there was growing panic in Mazar as food and fuel supplies ran out due to the Taliban blockade and the Afghani rate of exchange doubled to US$1 and then tripled as wealthy Mazar citizens fled to Central Asia.
Although most of Afghanistan's population is concentrated in the south and was now under Taliban control, 60 per cent of Afghanistan's agricultural resources and 80 per cent of its former industry, mineral and gas wealth are in the north. During the last century, Kabul's control of the north had become the key to state building and economic development. For the Taliban, determined to conquer the country and keep it united, the autonomy enjoyed by the northern warlords had to be crushed. Yet when the Taliban offensive finally came in May, nobody expected the bloody drama of betrayals, counter-betrayals and inter-ethnic bloodshed which was astounding even by Afghan standards and would send the entire Central Asian region into a tailspin.
Ensconced during the winter in the Qila-e-Jhangi, the Fort of War, on the outskirts of Mazar, Dostum suddenly found himself promoted by neighbouring states and many Afghans as a saviour and the last hope against the Taliban. Mazar, situated in the Central Asian steppe which begins north of the Hindu Kush, is culturally and ethnically as far away from Kandahar as Kandahar is from Karachi. The nineteenth-century fort is a surreal pastiche of a European baronial castle with a moat and defence ditches and a fantasy from the Arabian Nights with its massive, mudbaked ramparts and a blue-domed citadel, which Dostum used as his office. Guarded by tanks and artillery and Dostum's well-turned-out troops, who still wore the uniforms of the communist era, the impressive fort was not the only factor he used to win over visitors such as foreign diplomats who now lined up to see him.
He wielded power ruthlessly. The first time I arrived at the fort to meet Dostum there were bloodstains and pieces of flesh in the muddy courtyard. I innocently asked the guards if a goat had been slaughtered. They told me that an hour earlier Dostum had punished a soldier for stealing. The man had been tied to the tracks of a Russian-made tank, which then drove around the courtyard crushing his body into mincemeat, as the garrison and Dostum watched. The Uzbeks, the roughest and toughest of all the Central Asian nationalities, are noted for their love of marauding and pillaging – a hangover from their origins as part of Genghis Khan's hordes and Dostum was an apt leader. Over six feet tall with bulging biceps, Dostum is a bear of a man with a gruff laugh, which, some Uzbeks swear, has on occasion frightened people to death.
Born into a poor peasant family in 1955 in a village near Shiberghan, he was a farm-hand and a plumber until he joined the Afghan army in 1978. He rose through the ranks to become the commander of the armoured corps that defended the Soviet supply line into Afghanistan from Hairatan port on the Amu Darya river. After the Soviet departure in 1989, Dostum led a ferocious Uzbek militia force called Jowzjan, named after their province of origin, which was used by President Najibullah as the regime's storm-troopers against the Mujaheddin. The Jowzjanis fought all over Afghanistan, often being flown in as a last resort to prevent a government garrison being overrun.
In 1992 Dostum was the first to rebel against his mentor Najibullah, thereby establishing his reputation for treachery and political opportunism. The hard-drinking Dostum then became a ‘good Muslim’. Since then he had, at one time or another allied himself with everyone – Masud, Hikmetyar, the Taliban, Masud again – and betrayed everyone with undisguised aplomb. He had also been on every country's payroll receiving funds from Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran, Pakistan and lately Turkey. In 1995 he managed to be on the payroll of both Iran and Pakistan, then at daggers drawn over the Taliban.1 Although he controlled only six provinces in the north, Dostum had made himself indispensable to neighbouring states. Now Iran, Uzbekistan and Russia who had propped up Dostum as a secular buffer against Pashtun fundamentalism, saw him as the only leader capable of saving the north from the Taliban.2 If there was one consistent trait, it was his deep opposition to the extremist fundamentalism of the Pashtun factions, even before the advent of the Taliban.
Mazar, once a bustling stop on the ancient Silk Route, had regained its pre-eminence as a key staging post in the now massive smuggling trade between Pakistan, Central Asia and Iran. Dostum had inaugurated his own ‘Balkh Airlines’ which bought in smuggled goods from Dubai, while the truck traffic to the border with Central Asia, just 70 miles from Mazar, provided him with a steady income in transit taxes and duties. Mazar's bazaars were stocked high with Russian vodka and French perfumes for the hard-drinking, womanizing Uzbek troops. But unlike the other warlords, Dostum ran an efficient administration with a functioning health and educational system. Some 1,800 girls, the majority dressed in skirts and high heels, attended Balkh University in Mazar, the only operational university in the country.
As a consequence he guaranteed security to tens of thousands of refugees from Kabul, who had fled the capital in several waves since 1992, seeking refuge in Mazar which they saw as the last bastion of peace. Famous Afghan singers and dancers who could no longer perform in Kabul moved to Mazar. It was also a city of pilgrimage. Thousands came every day to pray at the blue-tiled Tomb of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and the fourth Caliph of Islam, whom Shia in particular revere. Ali is believed to be buried in what has become Afghanistan's most magnificent mosque and holiest site. Near Mazar lie the ruins of Balkh, called ‘The Mother of all Cities’ by invading Arabs in the seventh century. Here, Zoroaster preached nearly 3,000 years ago, Alexander the Great set up camp and the Persian poet Rumi was born. Balkh flourished as a centre of continuous civilization and Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Islam before it was destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1220 and the focus of culture and trade shifted to Mazar.
Dostum was revered for the simple fact that his city had not been touched in the past 18 years of war. Mazar's citizens had never undergone the devastating shelling and street battles that had destroyed other cities. All that was about to change. Uzbek clan history is a long litany of blood feuds, revenge killings, power struggles, loot and plunder and disputes over women. The favourite Uzbek sport of buzkushi, a kind of polo with whip-wielding horsemen trying to grab the carcass of a headless goat, is invariably used to describe Uzbek politics. There are no teams and no rules for the sport, an apt analogy for Dostum's relations with his brother officers.
There was a bitter feud between Dostum and his second-in-command General Malik Pahlawan – Dostum was accused of murdering Malik's brother General Rasul Pahlawan, who had been killed in an ambush along with 15 bodyguards in June 1996. This feud, together with fears that Dostum had already ordered Malik's murder, and helped along by Taliban bribes and promises of power, prompted Malik's betrayal of Dostum on 19 May 1997 when Malik called on the Taliban to help him oust his leader.3Joining Malik were three other senior Uzbek generals, his half-brother Gul Mohammed Pahlawan, Ghafar Pahlawan and Majid Rouzi. Moreover, Dostum had not paid his troops for five months and there was unrest in the ranks.
The Taliban moved north swiftly from Herat and Kabul. As the northern provinces fell one after another to this unlikely alliance of Pashtuns and Uzbeks from Malik's power base in Faryab province, Dostum fled with 135 officers and men, first to Uzbekistan and then to Turkey. On the way to Termez on the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border, Dostum had to bribe his own soldiers with US dollars to let his convoy pass. For the Taliban it was a God-sent opportunity, but they had learnt little from their conquest of other cities, where they refused to share power, remained politically inflexible and would not relax Sharia law in the light of ethnic sensibilities. If Malik thought that the Taliban would give him the kind of autonomy in the north enjoyed by Dostum since 1992, he was badly mistaken. It was a deal made in hell that unravelled by the hour.
Pakistani diplomats and ISI officers flew into the city in a bid to help the Taliban renegotiate the terms of the agreement, which was already falling apart. Islamabad then aggravated the situation further by prematurely recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and persuading Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to follow suit.4 The Uzbeks had been led to believe that this was a power-sharing agreement and now they realized it was a Taliban takeover. Malik was caught in the middle and his betrayal of Dostum was made worse when he also handed over Ismael Khan to them, who had been fighting against the Taliban in Faryab.5
On the afternoon of 28 May 1997, a squabble broke out as a group of Hazaras resisted being disarmed. Then all hell broke loose. First Mazar's Hazaras and then the rest of the population rose in revolt. Untrained in street fighting and not knowing the maze of city alleyways, the Taliban were easy victims as they drove their pick-ups into dead ends, trying to escape the withering fire from houses and roof tops. In 15 hours of intense fighting some 600 Taliban were massacred in the streets and over 1,000 were captured at the airport as they tried to flee. Ten top Taliban political and military leaders were either killed or captured. Those captured included Foreign Minister Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, Mullah Razaq and Central Bank Governor Mullah Ehsanullah. Malik's men promptly started looting the city, including the offices of UN agencies, and forced the UN to abandon the city. Dozens of Pakistani students were also killed.