by Ahmed Rashid
Malik's troops swiftly retook four northern provinces (Takhar, Faryab, Jowzjan and Sari Pul), which the Taliban had captured only five days earlier and there was heavy fighting for control of three other northern provinces (Balkh, Samangan and Kunduz). With their escape routes closed, thousands of Taliban troops and hundreds of Pakistani students were captured and subsequently shot dead and buried in mass graves. In the south, Masud seized the opportunity to launch his own counter-attack, once again capturing Jabal ul Seraj at the southern entrance of the Salang tunnel. He blew up the entrance of the tunnel, trapping the Taliban who were still in the north and were trying to escape down the road to Kabul.
Masud recaptured more territory around Kabul and several towns in north-eastern Afghanistan that had fallen to the Taliban just a week earlier. Hundreds more Taliban were either killed or captured. Meanwhile the Hazaras, spurred on by the Mazar victory also counter-attacked, breaking the nine-month Taliban siege of their homeland, the Hazarajat. Taliban forces at the entrance to the Bamiyan valley were pushed back and Khalili's forces moved south towards Kabul, forcing thousands of Pashtun villagers to flee to the capital.
It was the worst ever Taliban defeat since they had emerged just 30 months earlier to conquer the country. In ten weeks of fighting between May and July the Taliban suffered over 3,000 casualties, killed or wounded, and some 3,600 men were taken prisoner.6 More than 7,000 troops and civilians were wounded on both sides according to the ICRC. Even more embarrassing for Islamabad, over 250 Pakistanis had been killed and 550 captured during the May–July period. Morale amongst the Taliban plummeted as they had also lost some of their best and most experienced front-line units.
Mullah Omar gave an urgent call for students in Pakistan to come and help the Taliban. Once again Pakistani madrassas were closed down as 5,000 new recruits – both Pakistani and Afghan – arrived to enlist with the Taliban. The situation for the Taliban was deemed so serious that even the reclusive Mullah Omar was forced to leave his sanctuary in Kandahar and visit Kabul for the first time to meet his commanders and raise morale amongst his troops.
The Taliban were also forced to recruit increasing manpower from the Ghilzai Pashtun tribes of eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan. But they demanded a political price which the Taliban were not prepared to pay. The Ghilzais, who had dominated the anti-Soviet war effort were not prepared to be used as cannon fodder by the Taliban without adequate representation in the Durrani-dominated Taliban Shuras. They would come if they were given a share of power. Ghilzai commanders with the Taliban were extremely critical of Taliban tactics in Mazar. ‘There were too many mistakes made in Mazar. The initial agreement between Malik and the Taliban happened in too short a time. They should have discussed the agreement for a longer time and built up a dialogue with each other. They also made many military mistakes,’ Jalaluddin Haqqani, the leading eastern Pashtun commander with the Taliban told me in Kabul in July 1997.
Haqqani, who commanded Taliban troops on the Kabul front, was a veteran Pashtun commander from Khost in Paktia province who had joined the Taliban in 1995. He was one of the most celebrated commanders from the anti-Soviet war. Although Haqqani was made a minister in Kabul, he and other non-Kandaharis remained extremely bitter that they were kept out of the decision-making process that took place in Kandahar under Omar, rather than in Kabul.7 After the Mazar defeat the Taliban gave Haqqani a large sum of money to recruit 3,000 Ghilzai tribesmen. Haqqani arrived with his men on the Kabul front, but being powerless to make military decisions and the fact that they were led by Kandahari officers at the front led to mass desertions. Within two months Haqqani had only 300 of his new recruits left. Even more disturbing was that villages around Kandahar were refusing to send their sons to enlist with the Taliban. For the first time the Taliban had a recruitment problem and a manpower shortage.
For the Central Asian states the bloodshed on their doorstep created a paranoid reaction as they considered the spectre of the war crossing into their territories and the thousands of Afghan refugees fleeing across their porous borders. In an unprecedented move, military security was heightened throughout the region. Some 3,000 Russian troops on the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border, 25,000 Russian troops on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border, Russian border guards in Turkmenistan and local army divisions all went on a high state of alert. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan closed their borders with northern Afghanistan. At Termez, Uzbek helicopter gunships flew patrol as troops laid tank traps and fortified the bridge that crosses the Amu Darya river, which divides Afghanistan from Central Asia.
Russia offered to send ten battalions of troops to Kyrgyzstan after an appeal by Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev, even though his country has no border with Afghanistan. Russia and Kazakhstan organized an emergency meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to discuss the crisis, where Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov promised ‘very tough and effective actions by Russia’, if the Taliban advanced further. Turkmenistan, a self-declared neutral state which bordered western Afghanistan, had developed working relations with the Taliban but the Turkmen were unnerved by the fighting around Mazar. For the first time 9,000 Afghan Turkmen crossed the border into Turkmenistan seeking shelter from the fighting.
Iran said it would continue to support the anti-Taliban alliance and appealed to Russia, India and the Central Asian states to help them also. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayti urged the UN to intervene. The Taliban were furious with all of their neighbours. ‘Iran and Russia are interfering and supporting the opposition. They have given aircraft to the opposition to carry out bombardments. Iran is flying up to 22 flights a day to Mazar carrying arms,’ said Mullah Mohammed Abbas, the Taliban Minister of Health.8
Iranian and Central Asian diplomats bitterly accused Pakistan of not only supporting the Taliban, but of lying and betraying a solemn commitment made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif just a week before the Taliban offensive. At a summit of regional heads of state in Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, Sharif had promised to reign in the Taliban and prevent the war spreading to the north. ‘Pakistan's credibility in Central Asia is zero right now,’ a senior Uzbek diplomat told me.9
However, the arrival of the Taliban in the north did have a salutary effect on the four-year-old civil war in Tajikistan as it forced both sides in the conflict to quicken the pace of negotiations out of fear of the Taliban. A peace settlement between the Tajik government and the Islamic opposition, brokered by Russia and the UN was finally reached in Moscow on 27 June 1997. The settlement provided a major boost to Masud as Russia could now re-supply him from bases inside Tajikistan. Masud was given the use of the airport in Kuliab in southern Tajikistan where he received Russian and Iranian supplies which he then flew into the Panjshir valley.
The anti-Taliban alliance now tried to cement their unity by reformulating a new political alliance, which had to take into account Dostum's departure from the scene. On 13 June 1997 they set up the ‘United Islamic and National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan’ and declared Mazar as their capital. They reappointed Burhanuddin Rabbani as President and Masud as the new Defence Minister and promised to form a new government which would include tribal and Islamic leaders as well as technocrats. But the pact was doomed to failure as again differences between Malik, Masud and Khalili prevented the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras from working together.
At the root of the split was the other leaders’ suspicions of Malik after his string of betrayals. Malik had been unable to prevent a force of some 2,500 Taliban, who had remained behind in the north, from capturing the city of Kunduz which had an airport. The Taliban reinforced this enclave with daily flights of men and materials from Kabul. While Malik could not or would not drive the Taliban out of the north, Masud was moving closer to Kabul.
In mid-July, Masud broke the military stalemate north of Kabul, by recapturing Charikar and the Bagram airbase, killing hundreds more Taliban troops. By September, Masud's forces were once again positioned only 20 mil
es from Kabul. Both sides traded artillery and rocket bombardments, which forced nearly 180,000 civilians to flee the lush Shomali valley just north of Kabul and now on the front line. As the Taliban retreated from the Shomali, they poisoned water wells and blew up small irrigation channels and dams in a bid to ensure that the local Tajik population would not return in a hurry. The war was now not just uprooting and killing civilians, but destroying their very means of livelihood and turning Kabul's agricultural belt into a wasteland.
The anti-Taliban alliance had now created a huge 180-degree arc that surrounded Kabul. To the west and north of the city were Masud's forces while to the east and south were Khalili's Hazaras. As speculation mounted that they may launch an attack on Kabul, the Taliban remained confident that the opposition was too divided to attack Kabul. ‘We have divided the opposition into two parts by putting our forces into Kunduz. The northern groups are disunited against each other. The other Uzbek generals cannot rely on Malik. He has already betrayed them once and now he is just trying to save himself. No group has enough forces to fight the Taliban on their own, so they have to try and unite but they can never unite,’ said Haqqani.10
Doubts about Malik's loyalty to the alliance appeared to be justified, when in September the Taliban force in Kunduz took him by surprise. The Taliban broke out of their Kunduz enclave and with the help of Pashtun tribes in the area launched another attack on Mazar. On 7 September 1997 they captured the town of Tashkhorgan, creating panic in Mazar. As the Taliban advanced on Mazar, heavy fighting broke out between Uzbek troops loyal to Malik and others loyal to Dostum. Malik's house was burnt down by Dostum's troops and he fled to his base in Faryab province and then escaped to Turkmenistan from where he went on to Iran.
In a dramatic turnaround, Dostum returned to Mazar from exile in Turkey and rallied his troops to defeat Malik's supporters and push the Taliban out of the Mazar region. Mazar descended into chaos as the Uzbeks again looted parts of the city and the offices of UN aid agencies forcing humanitarian aid-workers to abandon Mazar for the second time in a year. As the Taliban retreated they massacred at least 70 Shia Hazaras in Qazil Abad, a village south of Mazar, and perhaps hundreds more. ‘The Taliban swept through this village like storm. They killed about 70 people, some had their throats slit, while others were skinned alive,’ said Sohrab Rostam, a survivor of the massacre.11
With the Taliban retreating back to Kunduz, Dostum tried to consolidate his position, but Mazar was now virtually taken over by Hazara groups and Dostum was forced to abandon the Uzbek capital and set up his base in Shiberghan. Acute tensions between the Uzbeks and the Hazaras undermined the anti-Taliban alliance and Dostum still had to win over Malik's supporters. He did so by exposing the atrocities committed by Malik. Dostum's troops unearthed 20 mass graves near Shebarghan in the Dash-te-Laili desert in Jowzjan province where more than 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war had been massacred and buried. Dostum accused Malik of the massacres, offered the Taliban help to retrieve the bodies and called in the UN to investigate. He released some 200 Taliban prisoners as a gesture of goodwill.12
Subsequent UN investigations revealed that the prisoners had been tortured and starved before dying. ‘The manner of their death was horrendous. Prisoners were taken from detention, told they were going to be exchanged and then trucked to wells often used by shepherds, which held about 10 to 15 metres of water. They were thrown into the wells either alive or if they resisted, shot first and then tossed in. Shots were fired and hand grenades were exploded into the well before the top was bulldozed over.’ said UN Special Rapporteur Paik Chong-Hyun who inspected the graves.13
Later there were eye-witness reports which made it clear that vicious ethnic cleansing had taken place, ‘At night when it was quiet and dark, we took about 150 Taliban prisoners, blindfolded them, tied their hands behind their backs and drove them in truck containers out to the desert. We lined them up, ten at a time, in front of holes in the ground and opened fire. It took about six nights,’ said General Saleem Sahar, an officer loyal to Malik, who had been arrested by Dostum.14 The use of containers was particularly horrific and they were to be used increasingly as a method of killing by both sides. ‘When we pulled the bodies out of the containers, their skin was burned black from the heat and the lack of oxygen,’ said another of Malik's generals, who added that 1,250 Taliban had died a container death.
The catastrophe in the north and the heavy fighting that followed through the summer only further widened the ethnic divide in Afghanistan between the Pashtun Taliban and the non-Pashtuns. The country was now virtually split along north–south lines and also along Pashtun and non-Pashtun lines. All sides had carried out ethnic cleansing and religious persecution. The Taliban had massacred Shia Hazara villagers and forced out Tajik farmers from the Shomali valley. The Uzbeks and Hazaras had massacred hundreds of Taliban prisoners and killed Pashtun villagers in the north and around Kabul. The Shia Hazaras had also forced out Pashtuns on the basis of their Sunni beliefs. More than three-quarters of a million people had been displaced by the recent fighting – in the north around Mazar, on the Herat front and around Kabul – creating a new refugee crisis at a time when UN agencies were trying to persuade refugees still living in Pakistan to return home. Moreover, the divisions inside Afghanistan were manipulated and exacerbated by its neighbours, as all countries stepped up aid to their various Afghan proxies. This only worsened the ethnic and sectarian divide.
Apart from the suffering civilians, the biggest casualty of the stepped-up fighting was the UN. The UN mediator Norbet Holl failed to persuade the Taliban that the UN was a neutral peace broker or the opposition that the UN would protect the interests of the ethnic minorities. Nor was Holl able to put pressure on regional countries to stop arming the factions. Nobody trusted the UN and everyone ignored it. Holl made a blunt statement blaming outside powers for continued interference and the inflexibility of the belligerents. ‘We have a standstill in the negotiating process, we just cannot continue business as usual. I do not see the Afghan leaders as puppets but they need to get ammunition from somewhere,’ Holl said.15A month later Holl had resigned.
The Taliban leadership, unversed in UN procedures and even the UN Charter, proved to be the greatest obstacle. Mullah Omar refused to meet Holl, creating resentment within the UN team while other Taliban leaders publicly mocked UN efforts at promoting a cease-fire. Taliban resentment against the UN increased after the débâcle in Mazar and more so after the UN Security Council refused to take action against the Mazar massacres or hand over Afghanistan's seat at the UN, which was still occupied by President Rabbani.
The Taliban harboured several unrealistic suspicions about the UN, which no amount of diplomacy could dispel. They were convinced that the UN, in league with Western powers, was conspiring against Islam and their imposition of Sharia law. They also accused the UN of being influenced by regional countries in blocking recognition of their government. The crisis within the UN came at a time when it faced dwindling funds from wealthy donor countries for aid programmes because of ‘donor fatigue’ over the continuing war. Donations were decreasing further because of the Taliban's discrimination against Afghan women. The future survival of aid operations in Afghanistan depended on the UN agencies convincing the Taliban to moderate their gender policies, which the Taliban refused to do. Several Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs) halted their programmes in Kabul because of the Taliban's refusal to let them continue helping women. In the north the fighting had forced the NGOs to pull out twice and they did not return.
Moreover, Taliban hardliners were doing their utmost to promote a crisis with UN humanitarian aid agencies so that they could kick them out of Taliban-held areas, under the pretext that the agencies were imparting Western secular ideas to the population. At the end of September, heads of three UN agencies in Kandahar were ordered to leave the country after they protested that a female lawyer for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was forced to talk to Taliban offic
ials from behind a curtain so her face would not be visible. In November, the UNHCR suspended all its programmes when the Taliban arrested four UNHCR Afghan staff. Save the Children shut down several programmes because the Taliban refused to allow women to participate in mine-awareness classes. It was becoming impossible to provide humanitarian aid to the population anywhere, even though winter was approaching and there were growing food shortages.
The Taliban's treatment of women drew enormous adverse publicity and international criticism when Emma Bonino, the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs and 19 Western journalists and aid workers were arrested and held for three hours by the Taliban religious police in Kabul on 28 September 1997. They had been touring a female hospital ward funded by the European Union (EU), when journalists accompanying Bonino were arrested for taking photographs of women patients – all photography was banned by the Taliban.
‘This is an example of how people live here in a state of terror,’ Ms Bonino told reporters in Kabul.16 The Taliban apologized, but Western enthusiasm for funding aid to Afghanistan was dealt another blow. The Taliban then declared that they would segregate Kabul's hospitals and not allow women to be treated together with men – and there was only one women's hospital in the city.