Afghanistan  in  Conflict  

(The following was adapted from Felton, John. The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History. New York: Sage Publishing, 2008 and Anderson E.W. and Anderson, LD. An Atlas of Middle East Affairs. New York: Routledge, 2013)

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Afghanistan certainly would have appeared on any list of the world's most conflicted countries. Since a political coup in 1973, Afghanistan has experienced almost unending political turmoil, foreign occupation, and civil war. Something of a break arrived early in the twenty-first century, when a new, democratically elected government under Hamid Karzai took office and obtained international support for reconstruction of the country. A resurgence of violence in 2006, however, raised new doubts about whether Afghanistan could escape the demons of its past. From Alexander the Great in ancient times to the British and the Soviets more recently, Afghanistan has been the target of empire builders, not for its natural resources—of which it has none of significant commercial value—but because of its location at the intersections of Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. For a century, between the mid-1700s and the mid-1800s, Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia stood at the center of the “Great Game,” a geopolitical contest between Britain and czarist Russia. The Russians looked to expand to the south, in part to reach warm-water ports, and the British wanted to protect India, the recently acquired crown jewel of their empire. The Russians gained some control over most of Central Asia—the area now consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—but the British held much of Afghanistan into the early twentieth century, punctuated by three bloody Anglo-Afghan wars. Despite, or perhaps partly because of, its geographic desirability, Afghanistan developed a well-deserved reputation as a place that most rulers, especially outsiders, found difficult to control. In recent times, nearly everyone who tried to govern Afghanistan ultimately came to grief. Only the local Pashtun kings, the Durrani, who created Afghanistan as an independent country in the mid-eighteenth century, endured for long. The last Durrani king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, ruled for forty years until ousted by his cousin Mohammad Daoud in 1973.

US-funded, Islamic extremist Mujahideen fighters in front of a destroyed Soviet tank (1980)

The 1973 coup that send Zahir Shah into exile in Italy proved to be the beginning of Afghanistan's most recent descent into tragedy. Daoud was himself pushed from power five years later by local communist leaders under the strong influence of Moscow. After these leaders turned against one another in 1979, the Soviet Union intervened to save the teetering communist regime on its southern flank. In what turned out to be the last gasp of the cold war, Kremlin leaders sent tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan, where they became mired in a hopeless conflict to save an unpopular government that became known as the Soviet War in Afghanistan. The United States and an unlikely array of allies, including China, India, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, provided weapons and logistical support to thousands of Afghan guerrillas who battled the Soviet army to a standoff, known as the Mujahideen. This conflict is an example of a proxy war because rather than fighting the Soviet directly, the United States were fighting against their enemy through another group.

Many of these guerrillas were radical Islamists who accepted the outside aid as a matter of necessity and later turned on their benefactors, particularly the United States. Amongst them was Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda (which means “the base”) and the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack. Moscow withdrew its last soldiers from Afghanistan in defeat in February 1989, two years later to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. The Soviet withdrawal, however, brought more war, not peace, to Afghanistan. The communist government that Moscow had propped up for eight years managed to hold on for three more years, largely with Soviet economic and military assistance. A divided coalition of Afghan guerrillas pushed the communists from Kabul, the capital, in 1992, only to create another period of civil war in which various factions battled for power and territory. Though unified in their opposition to Soviet forces and the communist regime, the Mujahideen was hopelessly divided along multiple lines of cleavage: ethnic, religious and ideological. This became evident in 1992 when different Mujahideen factions entered Kabul from different directions and began to struggle for control of the capital. Hekmatyar’s Hezbi Islami force entered Kabul first, but was subsequently driven out by other factions and resorted to shelling Kabul with artillery. The complete inability of the various Mujahideen factions to cohere together into an effective governing force meant that Afghanistan was plunged into anarchy for the next two years, which paved the way for the emergence of the disciplined and fanatical Taliban (literally “students”) as Afghanistan’s dominant political force. The ultimate victor of that conflict was perhaps the most unlikely: a group of Muslim students, many from Pakistan, known as the Taliban. United by religious fervor, and armed and guided by Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI, the Taliban scored one victory after another during 1995 and 1996 and finally succeeded in capturing Kabul in September 1996. Once in power, the Taliban imposed their extreme interpretations of Islam on the 90 percent or so of the country they ruled, barring women from working or attending school, for example, and measuring the worth—that is, piety—of a man by the length of his beard. (The Taliban considered shaving to be an expression of vanity and therefore an insult to Islam).

U.S. President Ronald Reagan meets with a group of Afghan freedom fighters to discuss Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan (1982)

A Sunni Islamist, predominantly Pashtun movement, the Taliban drew widespread support from the large Pashtun population of southern Afghanistan as well as, initially, the support of many Afghans who simply wanted an end to anarchy. In late 1994, the Taliban captured Kandahar and, within three months, had established control over roughly one-third of Afghanistan’s provinces. In September 1996, the Taliban stormed into Kabul and seized control of all government offices within a matter of hours, driving out other Mujihadeen forces in the process. Ahmad Massoud, a former Mujahiddeen leader, retreated to the north where he assembled a core of resistance to Taliban rule,. Subsequently, Dostum joined forces with Massoud to form the Northern Alliance. Between 1997 and 2001, Norther Alliance and Taliban forces clashed repeatedly, with neither side able to deliver the decisive blow against the other. However, in May 1997, the Taliban assaulted Dostum’s forces near the city of Mazare- Sharif and forced Dostum himself to seek refuge across the boundary in Uzbekistan. By September 2001, the Taliban controlled close to 95 per cent of Afghanistan’s territory and the sole barrier between the Taliban and total control was the stubborn resistance of the Northern Alliance’s 10,000 or so troops under the inspired leadership of Massoud. On 9 September 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir”, was the target of a suicide attack by two assassins posing as journalists; he died a day later from his injuries. Pakistan emerged as the key outside actor in Afghanistan's affairs during the rule of the Taliban. Military aid from Pakistan's army helped keep the Taliban in power, and Pakistan tried to use its limited influence to protect the Taliban diplomatically, notably when critics in the West questioned their adherence to contemporary human rights standards. For a time, this relationship put to rest a dispute arising from the nineteenth century, when the British drew a border that put some ethnic Pashtuns in Afghanistan and the rest of them in the northern part of India that later became Pakistan. Because the Taliban were Pashtuns, and because they were so heavily dependent on Pakistan, the old border dispute no longer seemed quite as important. Even Pakistan, however, could not protect the Taliban against the wrath of the United States. Washington first became angry at the Taliban in 1998, not so much because of the government's domestic policies, but because it allowed the al-Qaida network to operate freely on Afghan territory. In August 1998, al-Qaida members bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 250 people, most of them Africans. President Bill Clinton retaliated by ordering the bombing of al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan. The bombing destroyed camps and killed about two dozen people, but al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his top aides escaped unharmed. Two years later, on October 12, 2000, al-Qaida operatives bombed the USS Cole in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, killing seventeen American sailors and wounding thirty-seven others. U.S. officials later alleged that the bombing was, at least in part, revenge for Clinton's attack on al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.

Injured U.S. Marine Cpl. Burness Britt, who was wounded in an IED strike (2011)

Al-Qaida carried out an even bigger attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, destroying the World Trade Center towers in New York City and damaging the Pentagon outside Washington. In response, President George W. Bush ordered the Taliban to hand over bin Laden and his al-Qaida colleagues to the United States. The Taliban refused, and Bush ordered an invasion of Afghanistan, quickly forcing the Taliban from power. The invasion failed to achieve a key objective, however: bin Laden and top al-Qaida and Taliban officials, along with many of their fighters, escaped into the mountains of eastern and southern Afghanistan and into Pakistan as well. Aided by the United Nations, with financing from the United States and other countries, leaders of Afghanistan's ethnic and tribal groups in December 2001 agreed on an arrangement for an interim government, to be followed by elections for a permanent new government. Hamid Karzai, a leader of one of the most prominent Pashtun families and a man well known in Western circles, emerged as the leader of the new government, winning the presidency in 2004 in Afghanistan's first truly free elections. In balloting the following year, Afghans chose a diverse group of representatives for a new two-house parliament. When the legislators convened in December 2005, former warlords sat next to Western-educated intellectuals, several dozen women, and a few former members of the Taliban. Even with billions of dollars in Western aid, the new government struggled to overcome decades of destruction and provide the services necessary to make the society whole. Meanwhile, Taliban fighters, who had been pushed from power but not defeated in 2001, gradually regrouped. By 2006 the Taliban had reemerged as a major threat, particularly in their home base in southern Afghanistan. The United States and its NATO allies, who still provided most of Afghanistan's security, suddenly found themselves deploying more troops in an attempt to prevent the country from sliding into chaos once again.