Afghanistan

H

Civil War

The mujahideen, who did not sign the agreement concerning the Soviet withdrawal, maintained their fight against the Afghanistan central government with weapons that they continued to get from the United States via Pakistan. They rejected offers from Najibullah to make peace and share power, and refused to consider participating in any national government that included Communists. Thus the civil war continued. The United States and Pakistani sponsors prompted the Peshāwar-based rebels to besiege Jalālābād, a strong point for Najibullah in southern Afghanistan. After months of fighting, however, the Afghan government scored a clear victory. A March 1990 coup attempt also failed to bring down Najibullah. He continued to receive Soviet food, fuel, and weapons to help maintain his control. However, rebels persisted in terrorizing the civilian population by rocket bombardment of Kābul and other cities. Finally in late 1991 the USSR and the United States signed an agreement to end military aid to the Kābul government and to the mujahideen rebels.

In 1992 as the resistance closed in on Kābul, the Najibullah government fell, in part because of the defection of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek from northern Afghanistan whose militia had served the PDPA government. Two mujahideen parties from Peshāwar, both considered fundamentalist, joined forces with Dostum and Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik military commander, in the north and central mountains of Afghanistan. They won control of Kābul, and Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, became interim president from July through December 1992, taking office as full president in January 1993. A strong attempt was made to keep the Pashtun leaders, who traditionally held the power in Afghanistan, out of the most important government positions. Kābul was besieged beginning in 1992, first by various mujahideen groups and then by the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, which sought to reestablish Pashtun dominance in the capital.

The Taliban emerged in the fall of 1994 as a faction of mujahideen soldiers who identified themselves as religious students. The movement started in the south and worked its way toward Herāt in the northwest and Kābul in the east. It made outstanding military gains using armor, heavy rocket artillery, and helicopters against government forces. The Taliban’s stated mission was to disarm the country’s warring factions and to impose their strictly orthodox version of Islamic law. Some experts suspected the Pakistani government of supporting the Taliban, in order to keep the combat within Afghanistan and out of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which is a major part of the Pashtun homeland. During the many vagaries of shifting alliances, as Afghans sought a new political equilibrium, one fundamentalist and one moderate party from the Peshāwar-based mujahideen groups contributed considerable personnel to the Taliban.

The term of Rabbani’s government expired in December 1994, but he continued to hold office amid the chaos of the civil war. Factional fighting since the beginning of January 1994 kept government officers from actually occupying ministries and discharging government responsibilities. Most cities outside of Kābul were administered by former resistance commanders and their shuras (councils). In June 1996 Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had resigned as prime minister in 1994 to launch a military offensive against forces loyal to Rabbani, again assumed the post, this time to help Rabbani’s government fight the Taliban threat. Despite their efforts, the Taliban took Kābul in September 1996. By that time, the capital had been devastated by the civil war.

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Rabbani and Hekmatyar fled north to join the northern-based anti-Taliban alliance led by the military commanders Massoud and Dostum. The alliance was a coalition of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras who were opposed to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. The alliance took the name United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, commonly known as the United Front or the Northern Alliance. Massoud was the military commander of its chief political wing, Jamiat-i Islami (Islamic Society). The Taliban advanced north toward the mountain strongholds of the Northern Alliance and by the late 1990s had taken control of almost all of Afghanistan. Northern Alliance forces held a small portion of the country’s territory in the north.

I

Taliban Regime

After taking over Kābul, the Taliban created the Ministry for Ordering What Is Right and Forbidding What Is Wrong to impose and enforce its fundamentalist rules of behavior. The Taliban’s laws particularly affected women, who were ordered to cover themselves from head to toe in burkas (long, tentlike veils), forbidden from attending school or working outside their homes, and publicly beaten if they were improperly dressed or escorted by men not related to them. The Taliban also made murder, adultery, and drug dealing punishable by death and made theft punishable by amputation of the hand. Many of the laws alarmed human-rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. Most countries did not recognize the Taliban regime as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

In 1998, after terrorist bombings struck U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States launched cruise missiles at alleged terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The camps were reportedly connected to an international terrorist ring allegedly run by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian expatriate named by U.S. officials as the mastermind behind the embassy bombings. Bin Laden was active in the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation forces during the 1980s, and toward the end of that war he established al-Qaeda (Arabic for “the Base”), an organization based in Afghanistan that, according to U.S. officials, connects and coordinates fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups around the world. Al-Qaeda also supported the Taliban regime, with its special forces, called the Arab Brigade, fighting alongside Taliban troops in the civil war against the Northern Alliance.

On September 9, 2001, pro-Taliban suicide bombers assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance. Two days later in the United States, terrorists hijacked passenger airplanes and deliberately crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, killing thousands of people (see September 11 Attacks). The U.S. government identified bin Laden as the prime suspect behind the attacks. Mullah Muhammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, refused U.S. demands that the Taliban surrender bin Laden. The U.S. government built an international antiterrorism coalition, securing the approval of many nations for a war on terrorism. American and British forces began aerial bombings of al-Qaeda camps and Taliban military positions on October 7. The Northern Alliance, meanwhile, continued its front-line offensive north of Kābul and other strategic areas. Many Afghans fled to refugee camps in border areas of Pakistan and Iran to escape the bombings, adding to the millions of Afghans already displaced from more than two decades of war.

While the United States and Britain continued the aerial bombardment in November, Northern Alliance forces captured several strategic cities, including Kābul. In late November hundreds of U.S. marines landed near Kandahār in the first major infusion of American ground troops into Afghanistan. The Taliban surrendered Kandahār, their last remaining stronghold, by December 10. The U.S.-led offensive then focused on routing out al-Qaeda forces holed up in the rugged Tora Bora cave region of eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. In March 2002 U.S. troops undertook a mission, known as Operation Anaconda, to clear Taliban and al-Qaeda forces from the Shah-i-Kot Valley, in the vicinity of Gardēz in eastern Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the whereabouts of bin Laden remained unknown.

J

Afghanistan After the Taliban

United Nations-sponsored negotiations in Bonn, Germany, resulted in agreement on December 5, 2001, among four major Afghan factions to create an interim post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, a widely respected Pashtun leader, was chosen to head the interim administration, which took power in Kābul on December 22. An international peacekeeping force maintained a measure of law and order in the capital.

J

1

Transitional Government

Karzai’s administration was given up to six months to prepare the country for the introduction of a broad-based, multiethnic transitional government. In January 2002 international donors—including more than 60 countries, major development institutions, and nongovernmental organizations—pledged more than $4.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan over a period of five years. In April deposed Afghan king Zahir Shah returned to Afghanistan, ending nearly three decades of exile, in order to serve a symbolic role in the country. In June he formally convened the loya jirga, or grand council, which was responsible for electing a transitional government to rule the country for 18 months, until general elections scheduled for 2004. The loya jirga elected Karzai interim president of Afghanistan.

J

2

New Constitution

In January 2004 the loya jirga ratified a new constitution and Karzai signed it into law. The new constitution created a strong presidency, a two-chamber legislature, and an independent judiciary. It recognized Islam as the country’s sacred religion but guaranteed protections for other religions. It also recognized equal rights for women and language rights for minorities.

The adoption of the new constitution paved the way for elections, originally scheduled for June 2004 but then postponed due to the continued lack of security in many parts of the country. The Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies, who had regrouped as a military force despite new U.S.-led offensives to combat them, were waging a sporadic guerrilla campaign against the Karzai government and the international forces stationed in the country. In March 2004 Pakistan conducted a military operation along its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to flush out the insurgents.

About 18,000 non-Afghan troops were stationed in Afghanistan in 2004 to fight Taliban forces and offer protection for the Karzai government. Of these, about 8,500 were U.S. troops, and about 3,000 soldiers came from other coalition partners. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stationed about 6,000 troops in Afghanistan. NATO took charge of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in August 2003 and for the first time played a military role outside of Europe. The ISAF was authorized by the United Nations Security Council to act as peacekeepers in the Afghan capital, Kābul, and surrounding areas. By the end of 2005, about 19,000 U.S. troops and about 9,200 ISAF troops remained in Afghanistan.

In October 2006 about 12,000 of the 20,000 U.S. troops then serving in Afghanistan became part of the ISAF forces as NATO reportedly assumed primary responsibility for international military operations in Afghanistan. The remaining 8,000 U.S. troops were assigned to counterterrorism efforts and to training Afghan security forces as part of Combined Forces Command Afghanistan. The ISAF consisted of about 31,000 troops and faced an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Taliban fighters in October 2006.

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