by Ahmed Rashid
It was now becoming difficult for the Clinton administration to maintain its initial sympathy for the Taliban. Powerful US feminist groups lobbied Washington on behalf of Afghan women. In November Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued the harshest criticism of the Taliban ever made by the US. ‘We are opposed to the Taliban because of their opposition to human rights and their despicable treatment of women and children and great lack of respect for human dignity,’ Albright said on a visit to Islamabad on 18 November 1997. Her statement was seen as a significant indicator of the US distancing itself both from the Taliban and Pakistan's support for them. Yet the Taliban appeared least concerned about these international pressures and in fact generated greater anti-Western feeling. The ulema in Pakistan and Kandahar told Omar that he should throw all aid agencies out of Afghanistan because they were spies and the enemies of Islam.17
In a bid to energise UN mediation, Secretary – General Kofi Annan ordered Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian Foreign Minister to tour the region and present a report to the UN Security Council. After visiting 13 countries including Afghanistan between 14 August and 23 September, Brahimi's conclusions were to mobilize greater international pressure on Afghanistan's neighbours to stop aiding the belligerents. In October Annan had set up a Group of Concerned Countries at the UN. The group nicknamed ‘Six plus Two’, included six of Afghanistan's neighbours, Russia and the United States.18 Brahami hoped that this forum would encourage Iran to talk to Pakistan as well as re-engage Washington in a search for peace. Another aim was to implement an arms embargo on Afghanistan and to start talks between the Afghan factions.
Annan followed up these steps in mid-November with a blistering report on Afghanistan to the UN Security Council, in which for the first time he used uncompromisingly tough language accusing regional countries, especially Iran and Pakistan, of fomenting the conflict. He said these states were using the UN as a fig leaf to continue providing aid to the factions.19 ‘Foreign military material and financial support continues unabated, fuelling this conflict and depriving the warring factions of a genuine interest in making peace,’ Annan said. ‘The continued support by these outside forces, combined with the apathy of others not directly involved, is rendering diplomatic initiatives almost irrelevant.’ Neither did Annan spare the warlords. ‘The Afghan leaders refuse to rise above their factional interests and start working together for national reconciliation. Too many groups in Afghanistan, warlords, terrorists, drug dealers and others, appear to have too much to gain from war and too much to lose from peace.’20
Later in Tehran, Annan addressed the summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and bluntly criticized their apathy in trying to resolve the conflict. After years of neglect, Afghanistan now appeared to feature on the international diplomatic agenda, but that did little to satisfy the Taliban who were determined to conquer the north and their opponents who were equallly determined to resist them.
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BAMIYAN 1998-99:
THE NEVER-ENDING WAR
In the Hazarajat, the country of the Hazaras in central Afghanistan, the temperature was below freezing. Under the shadows of the towering snow – covered peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains that surround Bamiyan, Hazara children with extended stomachs and rake-thin features played their version of a cops and robbers game they called ‘Taliban’. The Hazaras were starving and the game involved ambushing a Taliban convoy of wheat and bringing it home to their hungry families. The children were living on roots, berries and a few potatoes their parents managed to grow in tiny, stony fields, dug out from the sides of the steep valleys. Only 10 per cent of the Hazarajat is cultivable and that year's harvests of wheat and maize had failed.
But the Hazaras were also starving simply for who they were. Since August 1997 in a bid to force them to surrender, the Taliban had closed all the roads from the south, west and east that entered their mountain fastness. There was no relief possible from the north, where the breakdown of law and order, the shortage of foodstuffs and the mountain passes closed by winter snow made it impossible for food convoys to travel to Bamiyan, which is situated at a height of 7,500 feet. Three hundred thousand Hazaras in the province of Bamiyan were already hungry, while another 700,000 in the three neighbouring provinces of Ghor, Wardak and Ghazni were also suffering from shortages – one million people in all.
For months the UN and its sister organization the World Food Programme (WFP) had been holding tortuous negotiations with the Taliban to allow relief convoys through, but the Taliban had refused. The UN were even more frustrated with the fact that Pakistan had contracted to provide the Taliban with 600,000 tons of wheat, but had made no humanitarian demand on the Taliban to lift their blockade on Bamiyan. It was the first time in the past 20 years of conflict that one faction had used food as a weapon of war against another and it demonstrated the escalation in the ethnic and sectarian divisions that were consuming Afghanistan.
The Hazaras had always been at the short end of the Pashtun stick, but never to such an extent. These short, stocky people with their distinctive Mongol features were, according to one theory, the descendants of intermarriage between Genghis Khan's Mongol warriors and the indigenous Tajik and Turkic peoples. In 1222 Genghis Khan's grandson was killed by Bamiyan's defenders and, in revenge, he massacred the population.1 For one thousand years before that Bamiyan was the centre of Buddhism in India and an important serai or resting place for the camel caravans on the ancient Silk Route, which linked the Roman Empire with Central Asia, China and India. Bamiyan remained the protector and capital of Buddhism for the whole of Central Asia and India after the Islamic conquests. A Korean monk, Hui-chao who arrived in the town in 827 AD wrote that the King of Bamyan was still a Buddhist and it was not until the eleventh century that the Ghaznavids established Islam in the valley.
The town is still dominated by two magnificent second-century AD Buddha colossi, carved into a sandstone cliff face. The two statues, one 165 feet high, the other 114 feet high, are weathered and cracked while the faces of both the Buddhas are missing, but their impact is stunning. The figures are carved with the classical features of all sub-continental Buddhas, but the figures are draped in Greek robes for they represented the unique fusion of classical Indian and Central Asian art with Hellenism, introduced by the armies of Alexander the Great. The Buddhas were one of the wonders of the ancient world, visited by pilgrims from China and India.
Thousands of Buddhist monks once lived in the caves and grottos carved into the cliffs alongside the statues. These caves, covered with antique stuccoes, were now home to thousands of Hazara refugees who had fled Kabul. The Taliban threatened to blow up the colossi when they captured Bamiyan, generating high-level protests from Buddhist communities in Japan and Sri Lanka. In the meantime they had bombed the mountain above the Buddhas eight times, creating more cracks in the sandstone niches that held the figures.
The Hazarajat had remained virtually independent until 1893 when it was conquered by the Pashtun King Abdul Rehman, who initiated the first anti-Hazara programme, killing thousands of Hazaras, moving thousands more to Kabul where they lived as indentured serfs and servants, and destroying their mosques. The estimated 3-4 million Hazaras are the largest Shia Muslim group in Afghanistan. The sectarian enmity between the Sunni Pashtuns and the Shia Hazaras went back a long way, but the Taliban had brought a new edge to the conflict for they treated all Shias as munafaqeen or hypocrites and beyond the pale of true Islam.
Even more irksome for the Taliban, was that Hazara women were playing a significant political, social and even military role in the region's defence. The 80-member Central Council of the Hazara's Hizb-e-Wahadat party had 12 women members, many of them educated professionals. Women looked after UN aid programmes and Wahadat's efforts to provide basic literacy, health care and family planning. Women often fought in battle alongside their men – some had killed Taliban in Mazar in May. Female professors, who had fled Kabul had set up a univers
ity in Bamiyan, probably the poorest in the world where classrooms were constructed with mud and straw and there was no electricity or heating and few books.
‘We detest the Taliban, they are against all civilization, Afghan culture and women in particular. They have given Islam and Afghan people a bad name,’ Dr Humera Rahi, who taught Persian literature at the university and had emerged as a leading poet of the resistance, told me. Nor did the Taliban appreciate Hazara women's style of dress. Dr Rahi and her colleagues wore skirts and high-heeled boots. The poetry of Humera Rahi seemed to echo the Hazaras’ new found confidence after centuries of oppression at the hands of the Pashtuns.
‘Victory is yours and God is with you, victorious army of Hazarajat. May your foes’ chests be the target of your rifle barrels. You are the winner, the victorious, God is with you. My midnight prayers and my cries at dawn, and the children saying “O Lord, O Lord!”, and the tears and sighs of the oppressed are with you.’2
Despite the siege and decades of poor treatment and prejudice by the Pashtun rulers of Kabul, the Hazaras were now on a roll. They had been instrumental in defeating the Taliban in Mazar in May and again in October 1997. They had also repulsed repeated Taliban attacks against Bamiyan. The Hazaras had once made up the third and weakest link in the Uzbek–Tajik–Hazara alliance confronting the Taliban, but now with the Uzbeks divided and in disarray and the Tajiks in a position of stalemate around Kabul, the Hazaras sensed that their time had come. ‘Our backs are to the Hindu Kush and before us are the Taliban and their supporters Pakistan. We will die but we will never surrender,’ Qurban Ali Irfani, the defiant deputy chief of Wahadat told me, as we sat trying to warm ourselves in front of a log fire in a room that overlooked the Buddhas, spectacularly draped in moonlight.
There was a new found confidence and pride in their organization and their fighting prowess. ‘We saved the north from the Taliban,’ said Ahmed Sher, a 14-year-old Hazara soldier, who had already seen two years of battle and held his kalashnikov like a professional soldier. The Hazaras were not without friends. Iran was flying in military supplies to a newly constructed two-mile-long landing strip outside Bamiyan and Karim Khalili, the leader of Wahadat, spent the winter visiting Tehran, Moscow, New Delhi and Ankara looking for more military aid.
But the Hazaras had also overstretched themselves. There were several factions amongst them, all competing for territory, influence and foreign aid. Separate factions of Hizb-e-Wahadat each controlled a part of Mazar and they fought each other as well as the Uzbeks, turning Mazar into a war zone and the anti-Taliban alliance into a political shambles. Iranian and Russian intelligence officers made several attempts at mediating between Dostum, who was then based in Shiberghan, and the Hazaras, as well as between the Hazara factions, but no side would compromise. In February 1998, as heavy fighting erupted inside Mazar between the Uzbeks and the Hazaras, Masud paid his first visit to Tehran to try and persuade the Iranians to do something to save the anti-Taliban alliance before it was too late. Meanwhile the Taliban sat out the winter, watching their enemies tear each other apart while tightening the siege around Bamiyan and preparing for another attack on Mazar.
Fighting continued through the winter months in the western province of Faryab, where the Taliban carried out another massacre in January -this time of some 600 Uzbek villagers. Western aid-workers who later investigated the incident said civilians were dragged from their homes, lined up and gunned down. International censure against the Taliban's policies escalated as they imposed ever stricter Islamic laws and punishments in Kabul. The public amputation of limbs, lashings, stoning of women and executions became weekly events in Kabul and Kandahar. International Women's Day on 8 February 1998 was dedicated to the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule. A hearing in the US Senate on the Afghan gender issue attracted widespread publicity, as did condemnation of the Taliban's policies by such luminaries as Hillary Clinton.
The Taliban issued new edicts, stipulating the exact length of beards for males and a list of Muslim names with which newborn children had to be named. The Taliban shut down the few home schools for girls that were operating in Kabul, as the religious police went on a rampage forcing all women off the streets of Kabul and insisting that householders blackened their windows, so women would not be visible from the outside. Women were now forced to spend all their time indoors, where not even sunlight could penetrate. Taliban hardliners were determined to force the UN aid agencies out of Afghanistan and they provoked a number of incidents that tested UN patience to the limit.
On 24 February 1998 all UN staff pulled out of Kandahar and halted aid operations there after senior Taliban leaders beat up UN staff and threatened them. Mullah Mohammed Hassan, the usually mild-mannered, one-legged Governor of Kandahar, threw a table and a chair at the head of one UN official and then tried to throttle him, because he had refused to pave a road in Hassan's village. In March, the Taliban refused to allow Alfredo Witschi-Cestari, the head of UN humanitarian aid operations to visit Kabul for talks. And the UN remained deeply frustrated by the Taliban siege of the Hazarajat. ‘In the north there is complete insecurity for our aid operations and in the south we have a hell of a horrible time working with the Taliban. In the north there is no authority and in the south there is a very difficult authority,’ Lakhdar Brahimi told me.3
Despite these problems Brahimi attempted to set up a meeting between the Taliban and the anti-Taliban alliance. Anxious to avoid meeting the opposition's leaders and thereby give them further legitimacy, the Taliban suggested a meeting of ulema from both sides. For several months they squabbled with each other as to who qualified to be an ulema. The UN mustered the help of the US. Bill Richardson, President Clinton's foreign policy troubleshooter and the US Ambassador to the UN, visited Afghanistan for a day of parachute diplomacy on 17 April 1998 and persuaded both sides to convene the ulema meeting.
Both sides were trying to woo the US and the flamboyant Richardson received a rapturous reception. He was deluged with gifts of carpets, saddlebags and turbans. In Kabul the Taliban allowed the accompanying US TV crews to film their leaders for the first time and, as a courtesy to Richardson, they postponed their regular Friday public spectacle of lashings and amputations in the city's football stadium. But although the Taliban leaders in Kabul promised to ease the siege of Hazarajat and discuss their gender policies with the UN, Mullah Omar rejected the agreement just a few hours after Richardson left.
The ulema met in Islamabad under UN auspices at the end of April and after four days of talks each side agreed to nominate 20 ulema to a peace commission, which would decide on such issues as a cease-fire, lifting the Taliban siege on the Hazarajat and an exchange of prisoners. However, the Taliban then refused to nominate their delegation and by May another peace process had collapsed – even as the Taliban prepared a fresh offensive.
Part of these preparations involved a fresh escalation with the UN. In June the Taliban stopped all women from attending general hospitals and ordered all female Muslim UN staff travelling to Afghanistan to be chaperoned by a mehram or a blood relative – an impossible demand to meet, especially as UN agencies had increased the number of Muslim female aid-workers, precisely so as to satisfy Taliban demands and gain access to Afghan women. The Taliban then insisted that all NGOs working in Kabul move out of their offices and relocate to the destroyed building of the Polytechnic College. Twenty-two out of 30 NGOs voted to pull out of Kabul if the Taliban did not retract their demand, but the Taliban said the issue was non-negotiable.
As the EU suspended all humanitarian aid to areas under Taliban control, Brahimi dropped a bombshell by going public on the UN's frustration. ‘This is an organization that hands out edicts to us that prevents us from doing our job,’ he said. ‘The Taliban must know that not only is there a limit to what you can stand but that there are growing pressures on us – in particular from the donor community to say that there's a limit.’4 The Taliban refused to relent and on 20 July 1998 they closed down all
NGO offices by force and an exodus of foreign aid-workers from Kabul began. The same day the bodies of two Afghans working for UN aid agencies, Mohammed Habibi of UNHCR and Mohammed Bahsaryar of WFP, who had been kidnapped earlier, were found in Jalalabad. The Taliban offered no explanation for their deaths.
With more than half of Kabul's 1.2 million people benefiting in some way from NGO handouts, women and children were immediate victims when aid was cut off. Food distribution, health care and the city's fragile water distribution network were all seriously affected. As people waved empty kettles and buckets at passing Taliban jeeps, their reply to the population was characteristic of their lack of social concern. ‘We Muslims believe God the Almighty will feed everybody one way or another. If the foreign NGOs leave than it is their decision. We have not expelled them,’ Planning Minister Qari Din Mohammed insisted.5
Meanwhile the Taliban had persuaded Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to back them in another offensive to take the north. The Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al Faisal visited Kandahar in mid-June, after which the Saudis provided the Taliban with 400 pick-up trucks and financial aid. Pakistan's ISI had prepared a budget of some 2 billion rupees (US$5 million) for logistical support that was needed by the Taliban. ISI officers visited Kandahar frequently to help the Taliban prepare the attack, as thousands of new Afghan and Pakistani recruits from refugee camps and madrassas arrived to enlist with the Taliban. Meanwhile in March, Iran, Russia and Uzbekistan began to pour weapons, ammunition and fuel into the anti-Taliban alliance.6 While Iran flew in planeloads of weapons to the Hazaras directly from Meshad to Bamiyan, the Russians and Iranians provided Masud with weapons at an airbase in Kuliab in southern Tajikistan, from where he transported them into Afghanistan.