The threat from European empires was never far away. The British in India tried to conquer Afghanistan three times but were unable to occupy the country. Instead they paid off the Afghan amirs (kings) and tribal chiefs, turning Afghanistan into a client state rather than imperial domain. Tsarist Russia conquered Central Asia and encroached into northern Afghanistan, buying support in a bid to undermine the British. Both empires vied for influence in Kabul, sparking a clandestine war of wits, bribery, and secret agents dubbed “the Great Game.”
At the end of the nineteenth century the two empires agreed to demarcate Afghanistan’s borders—in the north with Russia, in the east with India, and in the west with Persia—thus dividing tribes and ethnic groups among several states but also defining Afghanistan as a nation-state for the first time. King Abdul Rehman (1880-1901), named the Iron Amir, used British subsidies to establish the first standing army and bureaucracy. Using brutal methods that were later closely copied by the Taliban, he suppressed forty revolts by the Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Tajiks, thus ending their autonomy and bringing them under the control of Kabul. He enticed Pashtun farmers from the south to settle in regions in the north, hoping to dilute their ethnicity and weaken their opposition to a central power. However, neither Amir Rehman nor any subsequent Afghan ruler accepted the Durand Line—named after Sir Mortimer Durand—which divides Afghanistan from the Pashtun tribes in Pakistan.
The two-hundred-year-old Durrani dynasty came to an end in 1973, when King Zahir Shah, who had ruled since 1933, was overthrown by his cousin and brother-in-law, Sardar Mohammed Daud, supported by the nascent communist parties inside the country, and Afghanistan was declared a republic under a presidential form of government. Afghanistan had initially tried to avoid getting involved in the cold war and received aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union, although Moscow was by far the largest aid provider, especially for Afghan officers trained in Russia. Between 1956 and 1978, Afghanistan received some $533.0 million in economic aid from the United States and $2.5 billion from the Soviets in both economic and military aid. It was still a client state, dependent on foreign aid for up to 40 percent of its budget. Even today it cannot raise sufficient revenue to pay for the necessary elements of a modern state.
Afghanistan had always tried to balance regional powers, taking money from the Soviets and the United States and balancing the demands of both Iran and Pakistan. However, Mohammed Daud overrode Afghanistan’s balancing act and tilted decisively toward the Soviets, thereby increasing the influence of the two rival communist parties Khalq (the Masses) and Parcham (the Flag). Daud’s tilt led to a crackdown on the country’s nascent Islamic fundamentalist movement, which in order to avoid arrest fled across the border to Pakistan in 1975. The Afghan Islamists were linked to the “Muslim Brotherhood” and Pakistan’s Jamiat-e-Islami, who gave them sanctuary. However, Pakistan’s intelligence services, infuriated by Daud’s support to Pakistani Pashtun and Baloch Marxists, decided to retaliate by enlisting the Afghan Islamists. They were trained by Lt.-Gen. Naseerullah Babar, the head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, and sent back into Afghanistan to launch a guerrilla movement against Daud, which was quickly crushed. The Islamists included Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Ahmad Shah Masud, who were to become more prominent in the subsequent war against the Soviet Union. Ironically it was Babar, interior minister in the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1994, who would be instrumental in launching the Taliban.
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.
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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.”
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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 north 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.