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.