BACKGROUNDER ON AFGHANISTAN: HISTORY OF THE WAR

The U.S- led military intervention in Afghanistan marks the fourth phase in the country’s
twenty-three-year-old civil war. In every phase foreign powers have intensified the
conflict by supporting one side against another.

The First Phase: The Saur Revolution and Soviet Occupation

Before civil war erupted in 1978, Afghanistan was a monarchy under Muhammad Zahir
Shah, who had come to power in 1933. After World War II, both the U.S. and the Soviet
Union used economic assistance to compete for influence. After the US established
military ties with Pakistan in 1954, Afghanistan increasingly turned to the Soviet Union
support.

In 1964 Zahir Shah convened a Loya Jirga, or Grand Council, of tribal leaders to debate a
draft constitution that would provide for a more representational government. However,
Zahir Shah did not relinquish any power; political parties were permitted to organize but
not to contest elections. Zahir Shah was overthrown by his cousin Daoud Khan in 1973;
the king has remained in exile in Rome ever since. In staging the coup, Daoud had allied
himself with the Parcham faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA), a Marxist- Leninist party that had been formed in 1965. In 1967 the PDPA split
into two factions, Parcham (“flag”) which drew its support from urban, educated
Pashtuns along with other ethnic groups, and Khalq (“masses”) which had the support of
educated rural Afghans, also predominantly Pashtun.

(Pashtuns comprise the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and have dominated the
government for centuries. Other major ethnic groups in Afghanistan include Tajiks,
Hazaras and Uzbeks. For more on Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, see Human Rights Watch
backgrounder, Armed Conflict Poses Risk of Further Ethnic Violence.)

After gaining power, Daoud tried to marginalize the Parchamis and distance the
government from the Soviet Union. The two factions of the PDPA reunited in 1977 and
launched a coup on April 27, 1978, killing Daoud and seizing power.

The PDPA government, under Khalq leadership, then embarked on a campaign of radical
land reform accompanied by mass repression in the countryside that resulted in the arrest
and summary execution of tens of thousands. Those targeted included political figures,
religious leaders, teachers, students, other professionals, Islamist organizations, and
members of ethnic minorities, particularly the Hazaras, a Shi’a minority that has long
been subject to discrimination by Afghanistan’s ruling elite. The government's repressive
measures, particularly its attempt to reform rural society through terror, provoked
uprisings throughout the country.

Alarmed by the deteriorating situation, especially the collapse of the army and the
prospect that a disintegrating Afghanistan would threaten its security on its southern
border, the Soviet Union airlifted thousands of troops into Kabul on December 24, 1979.
The Khalq president, Hafizullah Amin, was assassinated after Soviet intelligence forces
took control of the government and installed Babrak Karmal, a Parchami, as president.

The Soviet occupation force of some 115,000 troops and the Karmal government sought
to crush the uprisings with mass arrests, torture, and executions of dissidents, and aerial
bombardments and executions in the countryside. Some one million Afghans died during
this period, most in aerial bombardments. These measures further expanded the resistance
to the communist government in Kabul and fueled a flow of refugees out of the country
that soon reached five million out of a population of about sixteen million.

Islamist organizations that became the heart of the resistance – and collectively became
known as the jihad fighters or mujahidin – based themselves in Pakistan and Iran.. Seeing
the conflict as a cold war battleground, the United States and Saudi Arabia, in particular,
provided massive support for the resistance, nearly all of it funneled through Pakistan.
The arms pipeline gave Pakistan a tremendous ability to bolster parties in Afghanistan
that would serve its own interests.

Joining the resistance forces were thousands of Muslim radicals from the Middle East,
North Africa and other Muslim countries. Most fought with Pashtun factions that had the
strongest support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Hizb- i Islami of Gulbuddin
Hikmatyar and Ittihad- i Islami of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Among them was Osama bin
Laden, who came to Pakistan in the early 1980s and built training facilities for these
foreign recruits inside Afghanistan.

The Second Phase: From the Geneva Accords to the Mujahidin’s Civil War

Negotiations to end the war culminated in the 1988 Geneva Accords, whose centerpiece
was an agreement by the Soviet Union to remove all its uniformed troops by February
1989. With substantial Soviet assistance, the communist government held on to power
through early 1992 while the United Nations frantically tried to assemble a transitional
process acceptable to all the parties. It failed. In the aftermath, the U.S. and its allies
abandoned any further efforts toward a peace process until after the Taliban came to
power. The UN effort continued. but suffered from the lack of international engagement
on Afghanistan. Donor countries, including the U.S., continued to support the relief
effort, but as the war dragged on, aid donor fatigue and the need to respond to other
humanitarian crises left the assistance effort in Afghanistan chronically short.

In early 1992, the forces of Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, Gen. Abdul Rashid
Dostum, head of a powerful Uzbek militia that had been allied with Najibullah, and the
Hazara faction Hizb- i Wahdat, joined together in a coalition they called the Northern
Alliance. On April 15, non-Pashtun militia forces that had been allied with the government
mutinied and took control of Kabul airport, preventing President Najibuillah from leaving the
country and pre-empting the UN transition. Najibullah took refuge in the UN compound in
Kabul, where he remained for the next four years. On April 25, Massoud entered Kabul, and
the next day the Northern Alliance factions reached an agreement on a coalition
government that excluded the Hizb- i Islami led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar—the protégé of
Pakistan. Rejecting the arrangement, Hikmatyar launched massive and indiscriminate
rocket attacks on Kabul that continued intermittently until he was forced out of the Kabul
area in February 1995. (For more on the Afghan parties, see Human Rights Watch
backgrounder, Poor Rights Record of Opposition Commanders).

In June 1992 Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Tajik leader of Jamiat- i Islami, became president
of the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA), while Hikmatyar continued to bombard Kabul
with rockets. In fighting between the Hazara faction, Hizb- i Wahdat, and Sayyaf's Ittihad-
i Islami, hundreds of civilians were abducted and killed. After ensuring that the
governing council (shura) was stacked with his supporters, Rabbani was again elected
president in December 1992. In January 1994, Hikmatyar joined forces with Gen. Abdul
Rashid Dostum, head of a powerful Uzbek militia that had been allied with Najibullah
until early 1992, to oust Rabbani and his defense minister, Ahmad Shah Massoud,
launching full-scale civil war in Kabul. In 1994 alone, an estimated 25,000 were killed in
Kabul, most of them civilians killed in rocket and artillery attacks. By 1995, one-third of
the city had been reduced to rubble.

The Third Phase: The Taliban’s Conquest of Afghanistan

During this period, the rest of the country was carved up among the various factions, with
many mujahidin commanders establishing themselves as local warlords. Humanitarian
agencies frequently found their offices stripped, their vehicles hijacked, and their staff
threatened. [It may be worth emphasizing that this fragmentation was especially
characteristic of southern Afghanistan, much less so of the north and west, which were
governed more or less as mini-states by Ismail Khan, Dostum, and Hizb- i Wahdat]. It
was against this background that the Taliban emerged. Former mujahidin who were
disillusioned with the chaos that had followed their victory became the nucleus of a
movement that coalesced around Mullah Mohammad Omar, a former mujahid from
Qandahar province. The group, many of whom were madrasa (Islamic school) students,
called themselves taliban, meaning students. Many others who became core members of
the group were commanders in other predominantly Pashtun parties, and former Khalqi
PDPA members. Their stated aims were to restore stability and enforce (their
interpretation of) Islamic law. They successfully attacked local warlords and soon gained
a reputation for military prowess, and acquired an arsenal of captured weaponry.

By October 1994 the movement had attracted the support of Pakistan, which saw in the
Taliban a way to secure trade routes to Central Asia and establish a government in Kabul
friendly to its interests. Pakistani traders who had long sought a secure route to send their
goods to Central Asia quickly became some of the Taliban's strongest financial backers.

In September 1995, the Taliban took control of Herat, thereby cutting off the land route
connecting the Islamic State of Afghanistan with Iran. The Taliban's innovative use of
mobile warfare appeared to indicate that Pakistan had provided vital assistance for the
capture of Herat. In September 1996, the Taliban took control of Kabul after Massoud
was forced to retreat to the north. Sometime after Massoud's loss of Kabul, he began to
obtain military assistance from Russia as well as Iran. The Northern Alliance was
reconstituted in opposition to the Taliban.

Osama bin Laden, who had left Afghanistan in 1990, returned in 1996, living first under
the protection of the Jalalabad shura (tribal council), until the Taliban took control of
Jalalabad and Kabul. In 1997 bin Laden moved to Qandahar where he developed a close
relationship to Mullah Muhammad Umar, the head of the Taliban. His fighters fought
alongside Taliban troops.

In 1997, the Taliban renamed the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan; Mullah
Omar assumed the title amir-ul momineen (commander of the faithful). In areas under
their control, Taliban authorities enforced their version of Islamic law, enacting policies
prohibiting women from working outside the home in activities other than health care,
and requiring corporal punishment for those convicted of certain crimes. They prohibited
women from attending universities and closed girls' schools in Kabul and some other
cities, although primary schools for girls continued to operate in many other areas of the
country under Taliban control. The Taliban also enforced a strict dress code for women,
and required men to have beards and to refrain from Western haircuts or dress. Arguably
the most powerful agency within the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban
renamed the country, is the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (al-
Amr bi al-Ma'ruf wa al-Nahi `an al-Munkir), which is responsible for the enforcement of
all Taliban decrees regarding moral behavior.

Through 1997 and 1998, the Taliban made repeated attempts to extend their control to the
north of Afghanistan, where Dostum had carved out what amounted to a mini-state
comprising five provinces which he administered from his headquarters in Shiberghan,
west of the important city of Mazar-i Sharif. In Mazar- i Sharif, Dostum’s forces
controlled the city through an uneasy alliance with Hizb- i Wahdat, which had a
stronghold in the large Hazara population in Mazar-i Sharif. On May 19, 1997, one of
Dostum's deputies, Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan (generally known as "Malik"), who had
a grievance against Dostum, struck an agreement with the Taliban and arrested a number
of Dostum’s commanders and as many as 5,000 of his soldiers.

As the Taliban entered Mazar- i Sharif, Pakistan was quick to seize the opportunity to
recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, as was Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates. But the alliance with Malik quickly disintegrated when the
Taliban attempted to disarm local Hazaras. Hundreds of Taliban soldiers were killed in
the streets of Mazar-i Sharif, and some 3,000 were taken prisoner by Malik, and allegedly
also by Hizb- i Wahdat, and summarily executed. In August 1998 Taliban finally took
control of Mazar-i Sharif and massacred at least 2,000 people, most of them Hazara
civilians, after they took the city. In the aftermath, Dostum left Afghanistan for exile in
Turkey; Malik also fled and has reportedly lived in exile in Iran since 1997. Shortly after
taking control of Mazar-i Sharif, the Taliban took control of the town of Bamian, in the
Hazara-dominated central highlands. Some time after this the erstwhile Northern Alliance
enlisted the support of factions from outside their ethnic constituencies, including the
Council of the East, a Pashtun group led by formers members of the Jalalabad shura
(council), and renamed themselves the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of
Afghanistan, or United Front, for short. Rabbani remained the president of the Islamic
State of Afghanistan. Dostum continues to command forces within the United Front; as
does Muhammad Karim Khalili, head of Hizb- i Wahdat. Harakat- i Islami, anothe r Shi’a
party with significant Hazara support, is also part of the United Front. Sayyaf retains a
leadership position within the United Front; many of his forces are believed to have
joined the Taliban.

In August 1998, the United States launched air strikes against bin Laden’s reputed
training camps near the Pakistan border. The strikes came in the wake of the bombings of
the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam. In October 1999 the U.N. imposed
sanctions on the Taliban to turn over bin Laden, banning Taliban-controlled aircraft from
takeoff and landing and freezing the Taliban's assets abroad. The Taliban's failure to hand
over bin Laden led to an expansion of the sanctions regime on December 19, 2000,
including an arms embargo on the Taliban, a ban on travel outside Afghanistan by
Taliban officials of deputy ministerial rank, and the closing of Taliban offices abroad.

Through 2000 and 2001, fighting continued in the northeast between Massoud’s forces
and the Taliban, with the Taliban taking control of Taloqan in September 2000, and
driving the United Front further east to Faizabad. Fighting in the area, combined with the
effects of a severe drought across the country, drove thousands of civilians into relief
camps and into Pakistan. In the central province of Bamian, the forces of Hizb- i Wahdat
and Harakat- i Islami, briefly took control of the town of Yakaolang in late December
2000, but lost it to the Taliban on January 8, 2001. After retaking the town, the Taliban
massacred at least 178 civilians in reprisal. The town changed hands several times
between January and June; during their last retreat from the area, Taliban troops burned
down the town and many other villages in the district. In early 2001, Dostum returned to
Afghanistan to meet with Massoud; his forces resumed guerrilla operations against the
Taliban in mid-2001. At about the same time, the forces of Ismael Khan, the former
Jamiat- i Islami governor of Herat who escaped from Taliban custody in 2000, also
undertook guerrilla action against the Taliban in the center-west of the country.

On September 9, 2001, Massoud was assassinated when suicide bombers disguised as

journalists detonated a device hidden in a video camera. United Front leaders have
claimed that the assassins were linked to bin Laden, and many observers believe that the
assassination was designed to deprive the United Front of its most effective leader in the
aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Other sources:

Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Olivier Roy, Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in
the International System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

William Maley, ed. Fundamentalism Reborn: Afghanistan and the Taliban (Lahore,
Pakistan: Vanguard Books, 1988).