by Ahmed Rashid
Daud’s authoritarianism and communism’s growing appeal in the army led to a coup in April 1978, carried out by Marxist army officers. They overthrew Daud, killed his family and the presidential guard, and then attempted to impose a purist Soviet-style Marxist state in Afghanistan. They were bound to fail. The two parties, Khalq and Parcham, began a bloody internecine conflict, even as they attempted to carry out unrealistic land and educational reforms in a conservative and tribal-based Muslim society. The first Khalqi president, Nur Mohammed Taraki, was murdered by his successor, Hafizullah Amin, who outlawed the Parchamis. The Soviets became increasingly perturbed at the civil war between the two parties and the growing strength of the Mujahedin insurgency and invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979. They murdered Amin and installed the Parchami leader Babrak Karmal.
Afghanistan was catapulted into the center of the cold war as U.S. president Ronald Regan pledged to roll back communism. Afghan mullahs and political leaders declared a jihad against the Soviet Union as five million people fled east to Pakistan and west to Iran. In the next decade, the United States and its European and Arab allies poured billions of dollars’ worth of arms to the Mujahedin, money that was routed through Pakistan and the military regime of General Zia ul-Haq. Zia did not allow the CIA or any other foreign intelligence agency to aid the Mujahedin directly, enter Afghanistan, or plan the Mujahedin’s battles and strategy. That became the prerogative of the ISI, which with its newfound wealth and American patronage had become a state within a state, employing thousands of officers in order to run what was now also Pakistan’s Afghan war.
The Karzai family fled to Pakistan and settled in Quetta in order to be close to Kandahar. Hamid Karzai completed his degree in India and arrived in Peshawar in 1983 determined to help the Mujahedin. Zia allowed only seven Afghan exiled political parties to operate from Peshawar and receive aid from the CIA. All seven were religion based, as Zia forbade Afghan nationalist, democratic, or secular left-wing parties to operate from Pakistan. He insisted that the parties speak of the war as a jihad and not as a national liberation movement. The ISI used the CIA cash and arms as bribes to keep the Mujahedin’s parties in line even as it channeled the greatest proportion of the aid to the most extreme groups, such as Gulbuddin Hikmetyar’s Hizb-e-Islami party.
Rather than throw in his lot with the fundamentalist parties in Zia’s favor, Karzai joined the National Liberation Front of Afghanistan, led by the spiritual leader Sibghatullah Mujaddedi. The Mujaddedis were leaders of the Naqshbandiyah order of Sufism—the spiritual and mystical side of Islam that is widely popular in Afghanistan. The Mujaddedi family was so politically influential in Kabul that they were dubbed the “king makers. ” The communist Afghan president Nur Mohammed Taraki had murdered seventy-nine members of the family, leaving Sibghatullah the eldest survivor. A moderate man, he drew his support from tribal leaders who were Afghan nationalists rather than mullahs and militants, and became a fierce critic of the radical leaders who were favored by the ISI.
Hamid Karzai’s urbane charm, easygoing manner, command of languages, and ability to seek compromise rather than confrontation with his Mujahedin partners won him many friends in Peshawar. He became the spokesman and then foreign policy adviser for Sibghatullah Mujaddedi. I had been covering the war in Afghanistan for the Far Eastern Economic Review, a weekly Asian magazine, and was the only Pakistani and one of the few foreign journalists who was able to visit Soviet-controlled Kabul as well as be welcomed by the Mujahedin leaders in Pakistan. The Soviets invariably refused visas to journalists who cultivated the Mujahedin but I had developed a reputation of giving evenhanded coverage to both sides. We became good friends, especially as I sympathized with many of his views, including his critique of the Afghan extremists such as Hikmetyar, who was to later put a price on my head for criticizing him.
Meanwhile, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was faltering, and with severe political setbacks at home, the Soviets were forced to withdraw their troops in 1989. Two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed. President Mohammed Najibullah, the last remaining communist strongman, hung on to power after Soviet troops left, defying the bickering Mujahedin, until finally a revolt erupted from within his own ranks in the spring of 1992, forcing him to step down. A UN plan to transfer power failed, Najibullah was arrested, and there was a race for Kabul between the Pashtun forces of Hikmetyar and the Tajiks of Burhanuddin Rabbani and his military commander, Ahmad Shah Masud. The Tajik forces won, and the capital fell into the hands of non-Pashtuns for the first time in three hundred years.3 As part of a complex agreement between the Mujahedin in which they agreed to a rotating presidency, Mujaddedi became the president for the first four months of what was now the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and Karzai became deputy foreign minister.
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was followed by another withdrawal—that of the United States from the entire region under George H. W. Bush. Having won the cold war, Washington had no further interest in Afghanistan or the region. This left a critical power vacuum for which the United States would pay an enormously high price a decade later.
The Arabs, the Islamic extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and other jihadis were left to their own devices, but even worse, the Afghan people were abandoned—something they have found very difficult to forgive. There was no funding for international efforts to revive Afghanistan, little help for the five million refugees eager to return, no diplomatic pressure to force the Mujahedin to come to a political compromise. The CIA handed over charge of its Afghan policy to its allies in the region, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. To Afghan eyes, these two states, which had backed the extremists among the Mujahedin and had sabotaged any hope of an Afghan national government’s emerging, were now being rewarded by the Americans. Some Pakistani officials looked upon Afghanistan as Pakistan’s fifth province, while Saudi princes sought out the country as new hunting grounds for bustards, or plains turkeys.
The various Mujahedin parties, never united before, now broke up into warring factions. Of these, the most bloodthirsty and obstinate was that of Hikmetyar, who refused to accept any kind of compromise that did not make him president and who was openly supported by the ISI. His bitterest rival was the Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Masud, now the defense minister in Kabul under Rabbani, who had become president after Mujaddedi. Ethnic rivalries between Pashtun and non-Pashtun that had lain dormant during the war against the Soviets now erupted. A civil war broke out that was to be one of the most brutal phases in the history of the country. In January 1993 the forces of Hikmetyar and his allies began shelling Kabul, and hand-to-hand fighting broke out as Masud’s forces defended the city. In the next few years, Kabul was destroyed, and tens of thousands of civilians were killed by Hikmetyar’s rockets and shells and by Masud’s defensive actions.
Karzai was an early victim. As a Pashtun in a largely Tajik-controlled government, he was arrested on the orders of the interior minister, Gen. Mohammed Fahim, and Mohammed Arif, the head of Masud’s intelligence service, the National Directorate for Security. While Karzai was being interrogated, the directorate building was unexpectedly shelled and in the ensuing chaos, he escaped, fleeing to Peshawar by bus. Rabbani has always claimed he knew nothing about the arrest, and he later telephoned Karzai in Pakistan to apologize, but Karzai did not trust Rabbani or Masud again until 2001. In the way that all the Afghan warlords have been constantly reincarnated, Fahim was to become Karzai’s defense minister and Aref his intelligence chief in the interim government set up after 9/11. When I asked Karzai if he subsequently raised the subject of his arrest with Fahim or Aref, he smiled and said, “Not at all—that is all in the past and forgiven.”4
By 1994 the country was fast disintegrating. Warlord fiefdoms ruled vast swathes of countryside. President Rabbani, who had refused to relinquish the presidency, governed only Kabul and the northeast of the country, while the west, centered on Herat, was under the control of warlord Ismael Khan. Six provinces in the nor
th were ruled by the Uzbek general Rashid Dostum, and central Afghanistan was in the hands of the Hazaras. In the Pashtun south and east there was even greater fragmentation, with one large fiefdom based in Jalalabad, which ruled three provinces bordering Pakistan; a small area adjacent to Kabul controlled by Hikmetyar; while in the south, multiple commanders ruled. Warlords seized people’s homes and farms for no reason, raped their daughters, abused and robbed the population, and taxed travelers at will. Instead of refugees returning to Afghanistan, more began to leave the south for Pakistan.
The Taliban emerged as a direct consequence of these appalling conditions. Frustrated young men who had fought against the Soviets and then returned to madrassas in Pakistan to resume their religious studies or to their villages in Afghanistan gathered around their elders demanding action. “We would sit for a long time to discuss how to change the terrible situation. We had only vague ideas what to do, but we believed we were working with Allah as his pupils,” Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, the one-eyed former Taliban foreign minister, told me.5 These young men named themselves Talibs, which means religious students who seek justice and knowledge. They chalked out a minimum agenda: to restore peace, disarm the population, enforce Sharia, or Islamic law, and defend Islam in Afghanistan. Pledging to cleanse society of its ills, they chose as their leader the man they considered the most pious and least ambitious among them, Mohammed Omar, a thirty-nine-year-old itinerant mullah born in a poor village outside Kandahar with no social status or tribal pedigree. During the Soviet occupation, he had been wounded four times, once in the right eye, which was permanently blinded.
Just before he disappeared into Afghanistan in October 2001, Hamid Karzai described to me his first association with the Taliban:
Like so many Mujahedin I believed in the Taliban when they first appeared in 1994 and promised to end warlordism, establish law and order, and then call a Loya Jirga to decide who should rule Afghanistan. The first Taliban I met told me that the jihad had become a disgrace and the civil war was destroying the country. After the Taliban captured Kandahar, I gave them fifty thousand dollars to help them out, and then handed them a cache of weapons I had hidden near Kandahar. I met Mullah Omar several times and he offered to appoint me as their envoy to the UN. They were good people initially, but the tragedy was that very soon after they were taken over by the ISI and became a proxy. When the Taliban captured Ghazni, I began to receive reports about foreigners in their ranks who were encouraging them to shut down girls’ schools.
I realized what was happening when I was called into the Pakistan Foreign Office to discuss the modalities for my becoming the Taliban envoy at the UN. Can you imagine? Pakistan was setting up the Taliban’s diplomatic corps. I refused and walked out. Later the Taliban were to come under the influence of al Qaeda. That is when I began to organize against them. In 1998, I warned the Americans and the British many, many times that Osama bin Laden was now playing a leadership role within the Taliban, but who was listening? Nobody.
The Taliban soon consolidated their power into a successful military force, seizing Kandahar in the winter of 1994 and then rapidly spreading north and west, capturing Herat in 1995 and Kabul in 1996. Pashtun warlords threw down their arms rather than confront the Taliban, who appeared to be invulnerable. With its ties to the Taliban leaders, Pakistan persuaded Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to give support, cash, and recognition to the movement, money that was channeled through the ISI. The Taliban’s first defeat, in May 1997, when they were driven out of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif with huge losses, convinced many Afghans that the group was just one more warlord faction. By now the Taliban had dispensed with the idea of calling a Loya Jirga and determined that they alone would rule the country and enforce Sharia. Their definition of Sharia—influenced by extremist Islamic teachings in Pakistan and a perversion of Pashtunwali, or the Pashtun code of behavior—and its harsh enforcement across the country were utterly alien to Afghan culture and tradition.
The Taliban leaders’ intellectual shortcomings were later to allow them to come under the influence of al Qaeda’s global jihad philosophy. Al Qaeda’s conscription of thousands of young men to fight their wars created widespread public resentment, especially among the Pashtun tribes. The Afghan civil war had again become an openly ethnic conflict between the Pashtun Taliban and the non-Pashtuns of Masud’s Northern Alliance (NA), also called the United Front. Masud commanded his own Tajik troops, drawn largely from the Panjsher Valley and called Panjsheri Tajiks, but he also had the allegiance of other commanders, such as Herat’s Ismael Khan, the Hazara commanders in central Afghanistan, and Gen. Rashid Dostum, the commander of Uzbek forces in northern Afghanistan.
In 1998 the Taliban captured Mazar and northern Afghanistan, squeezing the forces of the Northern Alliance into a sliver of territory in northeastern Afghanistan and another front outside Kabul. Masud gallantly resisted the onslaught, but his allies in other parts of the country crumbled. Ismael Khan was defeated and fled to Iran, where the Hazara leaders had also taken refuge. Dostum fled to Turkey. The Taliban’s success, helped by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia’s ability to lavish massive support to the movement, was due largely to Washington’s silence.
During this period the Clinton administration simply stood by, allowing Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to pursue their own protégés in Afghanistan. Instead of putting forward peace plans to end the civil war, the U.S. State Department openly backed the American oil company Unocal in its plans to build an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Taliban-controlled southern Afghanistan to Pakistan. Unocal began to provide humanitarian aid to the Taliban, while inviting Taliban delegations to the United States. The Americans believed, rather naïvely, that a pipeline would bring peace between the warring factions.6 U.S. policy regarding the Taliban shifted only in 1996, after the capture of Kabul, when the U.S. media focused on the Taliban’s brutal policies toward women, and Osama bin Laden arrived in the country.
The Clinton administration stopped well short of creating a strategic policy toward the region even when Taliban leader Mullah Omar invited bin Laden to live with him in Kandahar in the autumn of 1996. The CIA already considered bin Laden a threat, but he was left alone to ingratiate himself with Mullah Omar by providing money, fighters, and ideological advice to the Taliban. Bin Laden gathered the Arabs left behind in Afghanistan and Pakistan from the war against the Soviets, enlisted more militants from Arab countries, and established a new global terrorist infrastructure called al Qaeda.
The Taliban handed over to al Qaeda the running of the training camps in eastern Afghanistan that the ISI and Pakistani extremists had earlier run for Kashmiri insurgents. Bin Laden now gained control over all extremist groups who wanted or needed to train in Afghanistan. In return, he began to fund some of Mullah Omar’s pet projects, such as building a grand mosque in Kandahar and constructing key roads. Until then, the Taliban had not considered America an enemy and showed little understanding of world affairs. But now Taliban leaders began to imbibe the ideas of global jihad.
In his strategic alliance with the Taliban, bin Laden received an entire country as a base of operations. He was able to gather around him thousands of Islamic extremists and extend his operations around the world. His main logistical support came from Pakistani extremist groups, who could provide the kinds of supplies and means of communication with the outside world not available in Afghanistan. This support base in Pakistan was to prove critical to al Qaeda’s survival after 9/11. Between 1996 and 2001, al Qaeda trained an estimated thirty thousand militants from around the world.
From their separate perches, Masud and Karzai were the first to see the inherent dangers for the world in allowing al Qaeda control of Afghanistan, and both men repeatedly warned Western governments of this, especially the Americans. But nobody was listening. Less than two years after moving to Kandahar, bin Laden launched his first major attack on U.S. targets: the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on Augus
t 7, 1998, which killed 224 people and wounded nearly 5,000. Each terrorist attack was to spur the Taliban on to greater conquests. A day after the bombings, the Taliban captured Mazar-e-Sharif and much of northern Afghanistan, massacring more than four thousand Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks. A few days later, when President Clinton retaliated by launching seventy-five cruise missiles on training camps in eastern Afghanistan, al Qaeda members had already fled. Some twenty-one people, mostly Pakistani militants and several ISI trainers, were killed.
The near-useless U.S. retaliation was only to further embolden al Qaeda and convince an already paranoid Mullah Omar that the Americans were scared of the Taliban. Washington now stepped up diplomatic pressure on the Taliban to hand over bin Laden. In their meetings with the Taliban, U.S. officials tried to drive a wedge between the Taliban and al Qaeda and to persuade Pakistan to do the same—but nothing seemed to work. The Taliban were promised everything, including at times formal U.S. recognition, if they handed over bin Laden. Meanwhile, Karzai, Masud, and other Afghans were openly critical of an American policy that offered no support to the anti-Taliban resistance, left the Taliban in place, and put no real pressure on the Taliban’s main sponsors, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Karzai joined his father around 1994 in Quetta, where both men ruefully watched as their country was taken over by al Qaeda. They understood that the key to saving Afghanistan was to undermine the Taliban’s grip in the Pashtun belt. At clandestine meetings in Quetta, the younger Karzai began to build an underground opposition among his own tribe and elders from other tribes. The Taliban swiftly reacted. In 1999, assassins shot dead Abdul Ahad Karzai in broad daylight as he came out of a Quetta mosque—a move that created revulsion among the Popalzai and other Pashtun tribes. Hamid Karzai was both shattered and energized by his father’s assassination. He took a daring step. Assembling a three-hundred -vehicle convoy of family members, mourners, and tribal chiefs in exile, he defied Pakistani and Taliban authorities and drove with his father’s body from Quetta to the family graveyard outside Kandahar. The Taliban scowled but dared not intervene, fearing that an all-out civil war could erupt.