In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

by Seth G. Jones

  The U.S. interest in neighboring Pakistan also waned with the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union. To make matters worse, growing Pakistani efforts to build a nuclear weapon—a process monitored by the CIA—triggered an American law known as the Pressler Amendment. Named after Larry Pressler, a deft Republican senator from South Dakota, it banned the sale or transfer of military equipment and technology to Pakistan unless the U.S. president could annually certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device. In October 1990, President George H. W. Bush was unable to issue this certification. As Robert Oakley recalled, “I had the unfortunate pleasure of handing President Bush’s letter to the Pakistanis.” The result, Oakley believed, was devastating: “The Pakistan military accused us of betraying them and leaving them defenseless against the Indians. And we lost any possibility of working with Pakistan in Afghanistan, even if we wanted to.”29 The United States declined to be a major player in the region.

  Through the mid-1990s, Afghanistan remained under the control of various warlord commanders. In the north, the militias of Sayyid Mansur Nadiri and Abdul Rashid Dostum controlled vital roads and economic facilities. The Afghan government in Kabul did not have enough loyal troops or party members to defeat them. Nadiri’s forces dominated the area north of the Salang Tunnel, and Dostum’s forces guarded the natural-gas fields and the roads along the Uzbek steppe around Mazar-e-Sharif. Ismail Khan controlled the western provinces around Herat, and the areas to the south and east of Kabul were in the hands of mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar. The eastern border with Pakistan was held by a council of mujahideen, and the south was split among scores of mujahideen and bandits who used their control of the roads to extort money from the cross-border trade with Pakistan.

  In 1992, a collection of mujahideen groups led by Burhanuddin Rabbani overthrew Afghan President Muhammad Najibullah. Shortly afterward, Beirut-style street fighting erupted in the city, especially between the Pashtun Hezb-i-Islami and the Tajik Jamiat-e-Islami. Kabul, which was left virtually untouched under Soviet occupation, was savagely bombarded with rockets, mortars, and artillery by Hekmatyar. Entire neighborhoods, including mosques and government buildings, were destroyed, reducing Kabul to shambles. In Kandahar, fighting among mujahideen groups resulted in the destruction of much of the traditional power structures. In the rural areas, competition among warlords, drug lords, and criminal groups triggered a state of emerging anarchy as the tribal leadership system began to unravel.

  In 1993 and 1994, the fighting continued around Kabul and throughout the rest of Afghanistan, and a vagabond government in Kabul shifted among surviving buildings. At one point during the heaviest fighting, the government operated from Charikar, the capital of Parwan Province in northern Afghanistan, roughly forty miles from Kabul. On January 1, 1994, Hekmatyar, Dostum, and Abdul Ali Mazari launched one of the most devastating assaults against Kabul to date. Their attack took several thousand lives and reduced Kabul’s population—which had numbered more than two million late in the Soviet War—to under 500,000.30 During the first week, government units lost ground in both southwestern and southeastern Kabul, but they soon regained most of their positions. In June, Massoud led an offensive that drove Hekmatyar’s rocket units off two strategic hills.

  As the fighting settled into a stalemate, several peace initiatives were attempted. The United Nations renewed its peacemaking role in April 1994. Ismail Khan hosted a conference in July 1994 that pushed for a transition to a new government, but Hekmatyar, Dostum, Mazari, and other commanders blocked the move. Iran and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) hosted a poorly attended peace conference in Tehran in November. On December 28,1994, Rabbani’s presidential term lapsed. But with no resolution of conflict and no consensus reached on a mechanism for transferring authority, he kept the office by default, pending a new political settlement engineered by the United Nations.31

  The View from Afar

  By the mid-1990s, Afghanistan was in tatters. Viewed from afar, the reports were troubling. In 1994, Ronald Neumann watched the civil war unfold from Algeria, where he had just been named U.S. ambassador. “The city of Kabul, which I had visited and where my father had been ambassador, was reduced to rubble,” he told me. The city no longer had the splendor of the “compact and handsome” city described in the nineteenth century by Mountstuart Elphinstone, a Scottish statesman and historian:

  The abundance and arrangement of its bazaars have been already a theme of praise to a European traveller. The city is divided by the stream which bears its name, and is surrounded, particularly on the north and west, by numerous gardens and groves of fruit trees…. The charms of the climate and scenery of Caubul have been celebrated by many Persian and Indian writers. The beauty and abundance of its flowers are proverbial, and its fruits are transported to the remotest parts of India.32

  As Kabul crumbled during the fighting, Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, became perturbed at the waning U.S. interest in the region. “America has not helped Afghans and our friends in the region make the right decisions,” Khalilzad wrote in a scathing 1996 opinion piece in the Washington Post. “After the fall of the Soviet Union we stopped paying attention. This was a bad decision. Instability and war in Afghanistan provided fertile ground for terrorist groups to train and hide,” he noted cryptically. And he concluded by arguing that, “given the sacrifices made by the Afghans in the Cold War’s final struggle, we had a moral obligation to assist them in achieving peace. We did not.”33 The sheer chaos in Afghanistan provided a window of opportunity for a new force to emerge, and a group of young religious zealots from southern Afghanistan seized the moment.

  CHAPTER FOUR The Rise of the Taliban

  IN APRIL 1996, Mullah Muhammad Omar orchestrated a propaganda coup that rippled across the mujahideen community in Afghanistan. Omar was the leader of the Taliban, an upstart band of Islamic students who began to conquer territory in the mid-1990s from their base in southern Afghanistan. By April, they had captured Kandahar and its surrounding provinces and were preparing their siege of Kabul. In order to establish his ideological credentials and attract new recruits, Mullah Omar turned to the legend of the Prophet Muhammad’s cloak. The cloak was supposedly in Kandahar, housed in a shrine with ornate walls inlaid with intricately crafted tiles of bright blue, yellow, and green. Referred to as the Khirka Sharif, the shrine was considered one of the holiest places in Afghanistan. Behind the shrine stood the mausoleum of Ahmed Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani dynasty and, for many Afghans, father of the modern Afghan state.

  For generations, Afghans in Kandahar had passed down legends about the cloak and Ahmed Shah. According to one version, Ahmed Shah traveled to Bokhara, a major center of Islamic scholarship and culture, and now a modern city in Central Asian Uzbekistan. He saw the sacred cloak of the Prophet Muhammad and wanted to bring it home. Ahmed Shah asked to “borrow” the cloak from its keepers, who politely refused, suspecting that he might not return it. After pondering for a few minutes, he pointed to a boulder in the ground and made a promise to the keepers. He said: “I will never take the cloak far from this boulder.” Relieved, the keepers let him take the cloak. Ahmed Shah kept his word, in a sense. He had the boulder taken out of the ground and carried back to Kandahar, along with the cloak, which he never returned. And he built a pedestal for the boulder next to the shrine. While the cloak has normally been hidden from public view, it has been worn on rare occasions. For instance, King Dost Muhammad Khan wore it when he declared jihad against the Sikh kingdom in Peshawar in 1834.

  In April 1996, Mullah Omar, who had limited religious education but had fought with the Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islam during the Soviet War, attempted to legitimize his role as a religious leader.1 He removed the cloak from the shrine and perched himself atop one of the buildings in the center of Kandahar City. As a large crowd gathered and the cloak flapped in the breeze, he wrapped and unwrapped the cloak from aro
und his body. An Afghan legend decreed that whoever retrieved the cloak from the chest would be Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful). Others in the Muslim world, however, had adopted this title even without the cloak. Hassan II, for example, who ascended the throne in Morocco in 1961, claimed direct descent from the Prophet and adopted the title Commander of the Faithful.2 For Mullah Omar, claiming the authority of the cloak gave him influence among some Afghans who would now support the Taliban as a legitimate Muslim entity. The cloak ceremony ended with a declaration of jihad against Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government, and those present swore bayat (allegiance) to Mullah Omar. For many Afghans and Muslims, however, it was an outrageous insult. Omar was a poor village mullah with no scholarly learning, no prestigious tribal lineage, and no connections to the Prophet’s family.3

  Mullah Omar’s self-appointment as Commander of the Faithful was supported by a few other organizations, including al Qa’ida. In his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, al Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri warmly referred to Mullah Omar as the Commander of the Faithful.4 Zawahiri later wrote: “May Allah grant long life to the people of Jihad and Ribat in Afghanistan, and may Allah grant long life to the Commander of the Faithful, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who didn’t sell his religion for worldly gain.”5 When Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid was announced as al Qa’ida’s new leader for the Afghan front, he began by pledging his personal allegiance to Mullah Omar as the Commander of the Faithful. Even Osama bin Laden swore allegiance, stating that the Taliban “are fighting America and its agents under the leadership of the Commander of the Believers, Mullah Omar, may Allah protect him.”6 This was perhaps done to ensure that the insular and xenophobic Afghans saw the insurgency as being led by Afghan mujahideen, and not by foreign Arabs.

  Roots of the Taliban

  The Taliban’s roots go back to Deobandism, a school of thought emanating from the Dar ul-Ulum madrassa in 1867 in Deoband, India, just north of Delhi. In some ways, the Deobandi approach was similar to that of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Deobandism followed a Salafist egalitarian model, seeking to emulate the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad. It held that a Muslim’s primary obligation and loyalty were to his religion, and loyalty to country was always secondary. Some Deobandis also believed they had a sacred right and obligation to wage jihad to protect the Muslims of any country. The Deobandi madrassas were prominent and well established throughout northwest India, notably in the territories that would later become Pakistan.7 The Deobandis trained a corps of ulema (Islamic scholars) capable of issuing fatwas (legal rulings) on all aspects of daily life. The ulema would monitor society’s conformity with the prescriptions of Islam and rigorously and conservatively interpret religious doctrine.

  Following Pakistan’s independence in 1947, a variety of religious factions campaigned for full Islamization of the new nation. One faction was rooted in the works of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, whose first book, Jihad in Islam, was published in the 1920s. His family had a longstanding tradition of spiritual leadership, and a number of his ancestors were leaders of Sufi orders. Maududi, born in India in 1903, was homeschooled and became a journalist, writing for Indian newspapers such as Muslim and al-Jam’iyat. Maududi favored what he called “Islamization from above,” in which sovereignty would be exercised in the name of Allah, and sharia law would be implemented in society. He declared that politics was “an integral, inseparable part of the Islamic faith, and that the Islamic state that Muslim political action seeks to build is a panacea for all their problems.”8 For Maududi, the five traditional pillars of Islam—shahada (profession of faith), salat (prayer), sawm (fasting during Ramadan), hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), and zakat (almsgiving)—were merely phases of preparation for jihad. To carry out jihad, Maududi founded Jamiat-e-Islami in 1941, which he saw as the vanguard of an Islamic revolution. The party envisioned the establishment of an Islamic state governed by Islamic law and opposed such Western practices as capitalism and socialism.

  In addition to Jamiat-e-Islami, there were several political parties that gave expression to the special interests of their own professional groups and networks of pupils. One of the main groups was Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Deobandi offshoot. Established in 1945, it was the largest Deobandi-based party. Its two principal factions were led for a long time by Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Maulana Sami ul-Haq. The radicalization of the Deobandi movements was later nurtured by Pakistan to support militant Islamic groups in Kashmir and Afghanistan, as well as to counter Shi’ites in Pakistan.9 The Deobandis also benefited from Saudi bankrolling since the Saudis were keenly interested in helping build madrassas. Prominent Deobandis embraced an impoverished younger generation with little hope of climbing the social ladder, and violence became their main form of expression.10

  Deobandi madrassas flourished across South Asia during this period, but they were not officially supported or sanctioned until Pakistan President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a fervent admirer of Maududi, assumed control of the Pakistan government in 1977. He remained president until August 1988, when he died in a mysterious plane crash that also killed U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel and General Herbert Wassom, the senior Pentagon official in Pakistan.

  Zia made implementation of sharia law the ideological cornerstone of his eleven-year dictatorship. One of his most significant steps was the creation of the International Islamic University in 1980 in Islamabad, where the leading Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood gathered. Zia promoted Islamism to the status of an official state ideology, and Jamiat-e-Islami was rewarded with ministerial responsibilities and significant aid. Zia adopted several Islamization measures, including an examination of all existing laws to verify their conformity with sharia, the introduction of an Islamic penal code that included corporal punishment, and the Islamization of education.11 In addition, Zia’s government levied a 2.5 percent tax on bank accounts each year during Ramadan for zakat. This “legalized” almsgiving had previously been treated as a private matter in most Muslim countries. The funds raised by zakat served to finance the madrassas, which were controlled by the ulemas, many of whom were linked to the Deobandi movement.12 Indeed, Zia encouraged the financing and construction of hundreds of madrassas along the Afghan frontier to educate young Afghans and Pakistanis in Islam’s precepts and to prepare some of them for anti-Soviet jihad.

  The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent jihad against Soviet forces, was critical to the further radicalization of Deobandi and other militant groups. First, the jihad provided a training ground for young militants. Second, Pakistan’s ISI supervised and assisted in the development of these movements to pursue its regional policies. From the hundreds of resistance groups that sprang up, the ISI recognized approximately half a dozen and established offices for them to channel covert support. Although most had a strong religious ethos, the groups were organized primarily along ethnic and tribal lines. Significantly, three of the seven were led by Ghilzai Pashtuns and none by their rivals, the Durrani Pashtuns, who were deliberately marginalized by the ISI. Third, following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Pakistani government officials had became concerned that the Iranian government was using the Shi’ites in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a “fifth column” to pursue its interests.13 Consequently, Shi’ites were targeted. In 1985, for example, a Deobandi militant group sprang up called Sipah-e Sahaba-e Pakistan (Soldiers of the Companion of the Prophet in Pakistan), which pronounced all Shi’ites infidels and conducted a range of attacks against them. Several years later, another group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Army of Jhangvi) was established and waged jihad against Shi’ites.

  After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia invested heavily in the region. It funded madrassas in Pakistan that sought to spread the conservative Wahhabi version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi money flowed to Saudi-trained Wahhabi leaders among the Pashtuns, producing a small following. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had temporarily settled in Saudi Arabia, moved to Peshawar and set up a Wahhabi
party. Pakistan’s Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam also helped build a network of Deobandi madrassas to extend their influence. These madrassas would eventually serve as an important educational alternative for the refugees from the anti-Soviet jihad and the subsequent civil war, as well as for poor families along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier who could not afford the secular schools.

  The Knowledge Seekers

  In late 1994, a new movement emerged in southern Afghanistan. Many of its members were drawn from madrassas that had been established in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan during the 1980s. Their primary objectives were to restore peace, enforce sharia law, and defend the integrity and Islamic character of Afghanistan. Since most were part-time or full-time students at madrassas, they chose a name for themselves that reflected their status. A talib is an Islamic student who seeks knowledge, which is different from a mullah, or member of the Islamic clergy, who gives knowledge. The new movement, called the Taliban, began by seizing control of Kandahar before expanding to the surrounding provinces.

  The Taliban leaders who emerged in the mid-1990s were an odd lot. As Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid pointed out, the organization’s leadership could “boast to be the most disabled in the world today and visitors do not know how to react, whether to laugh or to cry. Mullah Omar lost his right eye in 1989 when a rocket exploded close by.”14 In addition, Nuruddin Turabi, who became justice minister, and Muhammad Ghaus, who became foreign minister, also had lost eyes. Abdul Majid, who became the mayor of Kabul, had lost a leg and two fingers. Mullah Dadullah Lang, a Taliban military commander (who was killed by U.S. forces in May 2007), lost a leg when fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.