If there's one lesson George W. Bush should have taken away from even the most cursory read-through of the history of the world's conquerors (one would expect, given his Yale B.A. in history, that he has indeed availed himself of such a read at some point), it's this: Afghanistan is unconquerable. Even a laundry list of the most bad-ass warlords to ever stalk the planet – Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlame, Babur, and Queen Victoria, among many others – includes not one name who managed to extend dominion more than a few generations after the death of the dynasty's progenitor. What's more, these folks were actually successes, compared to some would-be rulers of Afghanistan. Your Elphinstones and your Brezhnevs, for example – through truly Bush-league levels of incompetence and/or a Rumsfeldian failure to adjust to Afghan-specific circumstance – found their stays in-country much, much shorter.
Tonight, your resident historiorantologist is convening the loya jirga here in the Cave of the Moonbat – join me, if you will, for a discussion of the latest phases of the incredibly long, incredibly convoluted, incredibly violent history of Afghanistan...
Historiorant:Here's a slightly-modified, updated recap of the Afghanistan series from last week's diary - feel free to skip ahead if you're already current with the story:
Tonight sees the last steps of a journey that began either months - Ancient Afghanistan was posted on DKos on Christmas Eve – or at the very dawn of civilization, depending on your perspective. We've seen Aryans, Zoroastrians, Greeks, Hindus, Greek-Hindu hybrids, lots and lots of Turks and other Central Asian nomads pass through, finally culminating in the Mongols themselves taking up residence during Medieval times. During the Early Modern period, Afghanis vied for control of their land with various Safavid rulers from Iran and Mughals in India, leading to a brief (in Afghanistan, "brief" can mean several hundred years) period of local dominance in a time before Imperialism. Geography and a desire to own the whole frakking world eventually led to the imperialist interventions of The Great Game, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi with the British in August, 1919. This effectively granted Afghanistan's independence, and for the next 50 years, the country's politics were overseen by more-or-less authoritarian kings and powerful Prime Ministers – both of which positions learned of necessity to deal delicately with foreign policy matters, given Afghanistan's precarious perch between the Soviet Union and U.S.-backed Pakistan and Iran.
At the conclusion of last week's episode (Spring, 1978), Mohammad Daoud Khan, who had usurped his cousin five years before, was facing some problems. To get into power, he'd relied on help from leftist conspirators – specifically people from the Khalqi ("flag") faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (hereafter, the PDPA) – but Daoud turned out to be the sort of guy who wasn't averse to biting the hand that fed him. Upon assuming office, he gave Cabinet jobs to only two leftists, then began purging and reassigning other communist former supporters.
The communists were in disarray for most of the 1970s, having split in 1969 over the kind of ideological differences that always seem so much more divisive on the left end of political spectrum. The other main faction was called Pacham ("flag"); the Wikipedia entry on the PDPA gives a decent, concise breakdown on the differences between the two:
(Nur Muhammad) Taraki (leader of the Khalq faction - "Khalqis") believed that revolution could be achieved in the classical Marxist-Leninist fashion by building a tightly disciplined working-class party with a highly educated and revolutionary party leadership. The Khalqis pushed for immediate and violent revolutionary change, as prescribed in Marx's Communist Manifesto.
(Babrak) Karmal (leader of the Parcham faction - "Parchamis") felt that Afghanistan was too undeveloped for a Marxist-Leninist strategy and that a national democratic front of patriotic and anti-imperialist forces had to be fostered in order to bring the country a step closer to socialist revolution. He advocated gradual socialist development and added a more nationalist flavor to the PDPA.
Weird Historical Sidenote: Both factions took their names from publications. Taraki had published a newspaper called Khalq in the heady days of the mid-60s; Karmal had run a weekly magazine called Parcham from March, 1968, to July, 1969. I'll leave it up to the reader to determine if there's something to that "Kossack" label of ours, after all...
Daoud's five-year presidency marked a slow drift of his government away from the Soviet den, though the USSR continued to be Afghanistan's greatest international benefactor and Kabul's ambassador to the UN voted most often with the Soviet Bloc or with the non-aligned nations that tended to be borscht-friendly (Cuba, Egypt, etc.). Still, Daoud semi-rapprochement with Pakistan alienated conservative supporters of a proposed Pashtun state ("Pashtunistan"), envisioned as being situated between the two countries; his criticism of Cuba and scheduled visit to Washington angered the Soviets; and perhaps most importantly, he lost the support of the common people when his programs failed to produce the desired economic results, even as he tightened his definition of what would be considered tolerable dissent.
Daoud End
In the meantime, the Khalqis had finally reached a sort of understanding (facilitated by the Moscow) with the Parchamis. Beginning with a conclave of the factions in July, 1978, the now-united, still-suspicious-of-one-another PDPA began once again to exert its influence across the breadth of Afghanistan. Though the possibility of a overthrowing the President was already being discussed, the lopsided recruitment of Khalqis in the army led to fears among them that the outnumbered Pacham officers might tip off Daoud – hence, the timetable for the coup was advanced by as much as a couple of years.
Despite all the planning, talking, and other jibber-jabber by the communists, the coup that removed Daoud from power was a seat-of-the-pants affair, initiated more in response to the President's actions than as a result of a carefully-honed plan. In April, 1978, government agents killed prominent Parchami ideologue Mir Akbar Khyber (the Wikipedia entry on Daoud claims that the murder was committed by KGB agents who subsequently blamed the Afghan president for giving the order). Regardless of who killed him, Khyber's funeral, held on the 19th, saw between 10,000 and 30,000 mourners show up to hear impassioned speeches by Tarkaki and Karmal, then threaten to turn into the kind of anti-government riots Daoud had suppressed in September, 1988, and January, 1978. Terrified at the display of communist unity, Daoud ordered the arrest of the main PDPA leadership, but in this, he acted too slowly (and was possibly hampered by conspiratorial intrigues among his police forces). It took his people a week to catch Taraki, while security at Haffizullah Amin's house arrest was so sieve-like that later PDPA writings claimed he issued written orders for the entire coup from inside the perimeter.
On April 26, 1978, Daoud warned of an impending "anti-Islamic" coup and put the army on alert, which forced non-communist officers who were nonetheless on the outs with the Prime Minister to start making decisions based on their own survival – thus, when the insurrection finally began on the 27th, critical support eroded away as units began defecting to the side that looked like it was going to win. The fighting began in the area around Kabul International Airport, and over the next 24 hours, loyalist troops engaged in a running (and ultimately futile) defense through the streets of the capitol. On April 28th, the communists (with the support of Afghan-piloted Soviet MiGs) entered the Presidential Palace and killed Mohammad Daoud and most of his family. His usurpers announced publicly that Afghanistan's last leader of Durrani lineage had "resigned for health reasons," neglecting to mention that those "reasons" included a bad case of bullet in the brain.
Screwing Things Up for the Next Commie
According to the Library of Congress countrystudy:
The "Saur Revolution," as the new government grandiloquently labeled its coup d'etat (after the month in the Islamic calendar in which it occurred), was almost entirely the achievement of the Khalq faction of the PDPA. This success gave it effective control over the armed forces, a great advantage over its Parchami rival. Khalq's victory was partially due to Daud's miscalculation that Parcham was the more serious threat. Parcham's leaders had enjoyed widespread connections within the senior bureaucracy and even the royal family and the most privileged elite. These linkages also tended to make their movements easy to trace.
Khalq, on the other hand, had not been involved in Daud's government, had little connection with Kabul's Persian speaking elite, and a rustic reputation based on recruitment of students from the provinces. Most of them were Pashtuns, especially the Ghilzais. They had few apparent connections in the senior bureaucracy, many had taken jobs as school teachers. Khalq's influence at Kabul University was also limited.
Since Taraki's faction had done the most to secure the demise of Daoud, he got to be the new president, but the communists did try to split power more or less evenly among themselves – even as they publicly disavowed their connections to Moscow, Lenin, and/or Marx. "More or less evenly," however, in this case meant that the Khalqis always had just enough of a majority – 11-to-10 in the cabinet; Karmal given a watered-down role as co-deputy-PM, etc. – to pass legislation enabling anti-Parcham repression and a package of wildly unfocused communist reforms.
Taraki was pretty much out of the closet as a communist by the time he promulgated this banner. Click the link for more of Afghanistan's flags in the 20th century.
Appropriately enough, Taraki took power on May Day, 1978; within a few months, he was actively purging the Parchamis from his government and the newly-renamed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Many important Parchami leaders found themselves suddenly made ambassadors to far-off lands – Babrak Karmal was dispatched to Czechoslovakia, while his mistress, Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, was sent to Yugoslavia – and in Afghanistan itself, according to Human Rights Watch:
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
Unwittingly setting in motion a backlash that would give rise to the Taliban, Taraki's government attempted – almost overnight, from the position of a traditional-minded Afghani – to implement broad social reforms that were direct affronts to the country's more conservative elements. Anahita Ratebzad summed up a part of this platform in a May, 1978, editorial in the New Kabul Times:
Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country....Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention.
via Wikipedia
Historiorant: Dr. M.H. Anwar, an exile under Zahir Shah and Daoud Khan, was among many expatriates who returned help build a new, better Afghanistan. The link records how his homecoming turned out.
Getting in Bed with a Bear (but not in a Scooter Libby kind of way)
Uprisings against the Taraki regime were frequent, and in the span of only a year, his reforms had "almost completely broken the continuity of Afghanistan's leadership, political institutions and their social foundation." (source). The internal resistance pushed him more deeply into the sphere of the worldwide worker's revolution: By December, Taraki had signed the Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union that would later serve as their pretext for invasion; by March 20, 1979, he was in Moscow, making a personal appeal for Soviets troops and arms. Against their better judgment – Brezhnev himself said that full-scale intervention "would only play into the hands of our enemies - both yours and ours" – the Soviets dispatched some helicopters (complete with crews and pilots); 500 military advisors; 700 plainclothes paratroopers (disguised as technicians at Kabul International); and 300,000 tons of wheat.
Taraki wasn't worried only about external threats to his presidency; within his own party, leaders and factions emerged and gathered strength as 1979 wore on. The most significant of these challengers was Taraki's own Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin (the same guy who'd ordered the coup-d'etating of Mohammad Daoud), whom Taraki was actively trying to have murdered by September. The tables were turned during the set-up for one of these attempts, and it was Amin who emerged victorious in the presidential palace: On October 10, 1979 – nearly a month after Amin had effectively seized control of the government – the New Kabul Times reported that Taraki had passed away due to a "of serious illness, which he had been suffering for some time." Later, a government hostile to Amin would clarify the cause as acute pillow to the face.
Amin's rule was short – 104 days – but brutal, and his attempts to pacify the countryside and purge the PDPA of potential adversaries galvanized his already-considerable number of detractors. According to the LoC countrystudy:
During this period, many Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran and began organizing a resistance movement to the "atheistic" and "infidel" communist regime backed by the Soviets. Although the groups organizing in the Pakistani city of Peshawar would later, after the Soviet invasion, be described by the western press as "freedom fighters"--as if their goal were to establish a representative democracy in Afghanistan--in reality these groups each had agendas of their own that were often far from democratic.
By December, things had reached a breaking point. The Soviets were concerned that their investments were threatened, the Americans were bunged up with the brand-new Iran Hostage Crisis, and Amin was running around like a head with his chicken cut off. On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Bear lumbered southward.
Say It Ain't So, Zbigniew...Say It Ain't So
Historiorant: One of the most interesting documents I encountered while researching this piece involves the text of an interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's Condi Rice, by the French news magazine 'Le Nouvel Observateur' (Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76). The words are shocking, but I'm a tad suspect of the sourcing – couldn't find the original article online, and many of the reprints (396 Google hits) contain the following caveat, or something like it: Note: There are at least two editions of 'Le Nouvel Observateur.' With the exception of the U.S. Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States did not include the Brzezinski interview. As a researcher, I find all this a bit odd, and would welcome clarification from any Cave-dweller out there who can shed some light on veracity of the 1998 interview.
The United States may or may not have been pulling strings behind the scenes for months prior to the Spetsnaz storming the presidential palace on Christmas Day (not that that would have mattered to either country), 1979. If one is inclined toward believing in the sinister-yet-plausible, Brzezinski lays out the smoking gun:
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
via marxists.org
The U.S. may (or may not) have laid out the bait, but the Ruskies took it in a big way. 1800 T-82 tanks, 80,000 men, and 2000 armored fighting vehicles surged across the border, even as Spetsnaz and other elite units secured the Kabul airport, blew up the main communication center, and launched an attack on the Presidential Palace. Amin died as a result of gunshot wounds during this time – some sources have him falling in a hail of bullets while defending Afghan independence, others have him being captured and executed. The Soviets went with the latter story, saying that it was they who had done it, but at the behest the Afghan Central Revolutionary Committee. They then added that the Committee had instructed them to make Babrak Karmal the new leader of the country, and that they'd be flying him in from exile in Moscow to mark the occasion.
Vive le Resistance
U.S. condemnation of the invasion and establishment of a puppet government was swift; by the time of his 1980 State of the Union Address, President Carter had
identified Pakistan as a "front-line state" in the global struggle against communism. He reversed his stand of a year earlier that aid to Pakistan be terminated as a result of its nuclear program and offered Pakistan a military and economic assistance package if it would act as a conduit for United States and other assistance to the mujahidin. Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq refused Carter's package but later a larger aid offer from the Reagan administration was accepted. Questions about Pakistan's nuclear program were, for the time being, set aside. Assistance also came from China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Also forth coming was international aid to help Pakistan deal with more than 3 million fleeing Afghan refugees.
LoC countrystudy
Historiorant: Furnishing a War, a chapter from a book by Phillip Bonosky, has very different take on what was going on in Kabul in January, 1980 – let's, um, say the author disagrees with the image the U.S. press was drumming up)
In the heat of the moment (or by cunning design?), Carter issued an ultimatum: Soviet troops would withdraw by February 20th, or the United States would lead a boycott against that summer Olympic Games, slated to be held in Moscow. (Historiorant: He was probably already reasonably certain he wouldn't be around to deal with the ramifications on the 1984 Los Angeles games) When the date came and went, Carter's administration gave the Sovs another month to comply, but on March 21st, laid their bluff-cards on the table and announced that the U.S. would not be sending a team in July. Hundreds of heartbroken American athletes were later joined by those of 64 other nations which followed the U.S. lead. Many of those who attended – including our erstwhile allies, the Brits – chose to deliver symbolic snubs, as in marching under the Olympic 5-ring flag instead of that of their own nation, or of having the Olympic Anthem played at medal ceremonies. Here's a map of Olympic boycotts of that era:
While the overt and covert belligerents danced around the playing fields, the men who would do the fighting and dying in Afghanistan's resistance gathered in isolated regions along the Afghan-Pakistani border, at Peshawar, and in the northern reaches of Afghanistan itself. With generous U.S. funding (estimates vary between $3-20 billion over a 10-year period) funneled through the offices of the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence, the U.S. and other interested parties – they weren't necessarily American allies – trained and armed an estimated 100,000 men during the Soviet occupation. The CIA coordinated the operation through an operation it codenamed Cyclone, but while the U.S. steadfastly denies that it ever trained or provided money for any of the religiously-motivated foreign fighters (estimates place their number at roughly a third of the Afghani insurgents – probably in the neighborhood of 35,000) they, too, benefited from the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend zeitgeist that was sweeping Pakistan's mountains in the early 80s.
Covering the Base
For ultraconservative Wahhabis, the opportunity to fight an honest-to-goodness godless enemy must have seemed...well, a godsend. Men from all over the Islamic world responded to the call for jihad, including (you knew this already) Osama bin Laden. Though highly factionalized and often operating independently on the same battlefield, the muhajadin proved highly effective in both insurgent techniques and the logistical wherewithal to keep supplied a mobile army in the field. This was how bin Laden got his start: funneling money and constructing training camps through the Maktab al-Khandamat (MAK, or "Services Office"). The people he was involved with through the MAK went on to become some of the core constituency of al-Qaeda upon its founding after the Soviet withdrawal.
Now, I'm kinda toeing the line here regarding conspiracy theories, so I'll just go ahead and point the reader to this site (which provides some documentation to back up claims that bin Laden was a CIA protégé), and leave it at that. I will mention, though, that some of the people bin Laden hung out with – in particular, one warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – were both zealotously religious and uncompromisingly brutal. Though a solid ally of the U.S. at first, the guy had been unhinged for a long time before that:
Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West's distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury "freedom fighter". Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
After the mujaheddin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar's forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that city — killing at least 2000 civilians — until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.
greenleft.org
It doesn't end there:
Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the mujaheddin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world's single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.
ibid.
And what did Ronald Reagan have to say about it all?
"Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters."
Remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 1, 1985
A Civil War with a Civil War on Top
As the 80s wore on, the Soviet position in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan became less and less tenable, and after Mikhail Gorbachev's ascension to power in 1985, they began looking for a face-saving exit that would hopefully justify the loss of 14,000 Soviet soldiers. It took several years of Panmunjom-like "proximity" talks to reach a deal, but one was finally announced in 1988; by February, 1989, the Soviet occupation was over. LoC countrystudy has an interesting take on this particular incarnation of "Geneva Accords":
Both the format and the substance of the agreement were designed to be acceptable to the Soviet Union and the DRA. Its clauses included affirmation of the sovereignty of Afghanistan and its right to self-determination, its right to be free from foreign intervention or interference, and the right of its refugees to a secure and honorable return. But at its core was an agreement reached in May 1988 that authorized the withdrawal of "foreign troops" according to a timetable that would remove all Soviet forces by February 15, 1989.
...snip...
The accords thus facilitated a withdrawal by an erstwhile superpower, in a manner which justified an invasion. They exemplify the delicacy of UN diplomacy when the interests of a great power are engaged. In essence, the accords were a political bailout for a government struggling with the consequences of a costly error. The UN could not insist that accusations of national culpability were relevant to the negotiations. In the case of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union insisted on its own diplomatic terms as did the United States in a different manner concerning Vietnam.
Dr. Muhammad Najibullah, who had been running things since 1986, was left in place as President of the new-and improved Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, but quickly found that any conciliatory gesture he made toward the muhajadin was rejected out-of-hand by people who already tasted victory. The civil war was essentially a stalemate between resistance and government forces, especially after an early battle at Jalalabad in which a lack of ability to coordinate tactical operations among the muhajadin resulted in their retreat and a considerable buoying of the morale of the government's army.
The Soviets propped up Nabijullah's government for a couple of years, but the muhajadin – still being supplied by the US, despite a warning from Pakistani President Benhazir Bhutto to Bush the Elder that "you are creating a Frankenstein" by supporting religious fanatics – were closing in. In the end, Nabijullah's government went down with the one in Moscow; after the failure of the hardliners to win back power in Moscow in 1991, Boris Yeltsin cut a quick deal with President Bush to mutually stand down their respective aid packages.
In early 1992, the muhajadin moved in for the kill. As Nabijullah's hold on the government weakened, his military commanders began defecting to the various warlords now encircling the capitol, and by the middle of April, Nabijullah had abdicated and taken up refuge in the UN mission in Kabul (he'd spend the next 3 years there). A group of Parchami generals and officials declared themselves an interim government, and the factions threw together a nation-building conference at Peshawar – but outside the city, the leaders of several armies eyed one another, each trying to gauge the level of the other guy's ill intent.
On April 25, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of a powerful group of Persian-speaking Tajiks, moved against the forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said to be infiltrating the city. Hekmatyar was driven back out of Kabul, where several other factions allied with Massoud went ahead and implemented a complicated power-sharing plan for the running of the new government. For the next three years, alliances shifted according to expediency, personal antagonism, doctrinal differences within the same religion, and any other reason you might think of to bomb Kabul. In 1994, Hekmatyar was reported to have launched upwards of 3000 short-range, high-explosive rockets at the city every day. By the time things settled into a circular-firing-squad-type standoff (early 1995 or so), the population of Kabul had been reduced to 500,000 or so – from a high of around 2 million during the Soviet era, only a decade before.
Talibanistan
A new player on the scene emerged in 1994, in the region around Kandahar. The Taliban (from the Arabic word for "student"), an arch-conservative Sunni movement, began issuing forth from traditionalist madrassas and launching their own war against anyone who failed to see the wisdom of adhering to their Wahhabi beliefs. Areas in the south fell first, and by September, 1996, the mostly-Pashtun Taliban and their leader, the one-eyed Mullah Muhammad Omar, were on the outskirts of the capitol. By this point, infighting and political jockeying among the leaders of the Kabulled-together government left the army in disarray, and troops started defecting to the side with the clearest message.
Kabul fell to the Taliban on September 27, 1996, and very quickly Nabijullah was retrieved from the safety of the UN compound and shot. Almost as quickly, former adversaries and rivals began to coalesce in opposition to Taliban advances. The most important of these was the Northern Alliance, which was led by Ahmad Massoud and the Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum and funded by Iran and Russia, both of which were made quite nervous by the ascendant Talibanis on their borders. The Alliance fought a one-step-forward, two-steps-back war for control of the country for the next five years, complete with all the betrayals, side-switching, near-wars with Iran, dueling massacres at Mazar-i-Shariff, and desperate battles on now-forgotten fields that one might expect.
The Taliban enforced a particularly narrow minority view of sharia law – one not wholly dissimilar to the sort of legal code idealized by those who would make Americans subject to certain (read: their) interpretations of Biblical law. (a short video showing a stick-wielding Taliban enforcing some old-time religion on a burqa-clad rulebreaker is available here - u.m.). In addition to being obliged to wear the head-to-toe burqa and the return of the veil (first cast off by Queen Saroya - pdf pg. 2 - in 1927), the females of Afghanistan were further marginalized by severe restrictions on education beyond the age of 8, not to mention the overall officially-sanctioned climate of repression.
Taliban intolerance knew no boundaries. They persecuted the traditionally-repressed Hazara minority of Shias, and, in one of the more barbarous acts against history itself to occur this century (I would say the most, but there's the Baghdad Museum looting to consider – u.m.), the Taliban spent considerable time and resources on the wanton destruction of the incredible Buddhas of Bamiyan. These 100+-foot statues had been carved by the Kushans, way back in Afghanistan Diary #1, and now, due to anti-intellectual savagery in the vein of Diego de Landa, they were reduced to a pile of rubble – an allegory, perhaps, for the transitory but destructive tumults occasioned by the barbarian invasions so common in Afghanistan's history.
The Taliban never got along very well with the outside world – the only nations to ever recognize their government were (strangely?) the ones that ostensibly are now America's staunchest Arab allies in the War on Terra: the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. I'll leave it to those more knowledgeable than I to debate whether or not the Taliban financed itself with money from the opium trade, and I'll even facilitate the discussion by tossing out some contradictory pieces of red meat: the Taliban have consistently banned opium production in areas under their control, and since 2000 have employed the death penalty to discourage poppy cultivation – a fact noted by the administration of George the Lesser, which in July, 2001, presented the Taliban with a $48 million reward for reducing by more than 99% the area under their control used for opium production. After the Taliban was ousted, the poppies returned, and nowadays, Afghanistan accounts for more than 85% of the world's opium. Heckuva job, Drug Czar guy.
At times, Taliban control extended over 90% of the country, but the Northern Alliance was still stubbornly holding its own on September 9, 2001, when Ahmad Massoud presented himself for an interview with a couple of guys he'd been told were a television crew. They weren't; an al-Qaeda bomb was hidden in the camera, and now the presumptive ally of the U.S. in the invasion – the one that bin Laden and Mullah Omar knew was only a few days off – was dead.
The rest, as they say, are current events. September 11, the Bush Doctrine, the invasion, the fall of Kabul and Kandahar, Tora Bora, prison uprisings, John Walker Lynde, bombing Canadians and weddings secret deportations, Patrick Tillman and "friendly?"-fire, Hamid Karzai, a loya jirga, assassination attempts, and now...Waziristan?
Historiorant:
And so we find ourselves mired in Afghanistan, a land whose conflicts throughout history have sucked in (and proved the undoing of) many a better leader than George W. Bush; a place that's broken armies far more willing than ours to inflict the strongest of control measures. This historioranter is reminded of just one of those episodes by the writings of Frederick Engels, who in 1857 described the British experience in Afghanistan 15 years before. Funny how, as is the case in so much of its history, all it would take to describe the current day would be some re-shuffling of proper nouns:
The conquest of Afghanistan seemed accomplished, and a considerable portion of the troops was sent back. But the Afghans were noways content to be ruled by the Feringhee Kaffirs (European infidels), and during the whole of 1840 and '41, insurrection followed on insurrection in every part of the country. The Anglo-Indian troops had to be constantly on the move. Yet, McNaghten declared this to be the normal state of Afghan society, and wrote home that every thing went on well, and Shah Soojah's power was taking root. In vain were the warnings of the military officers and the other political agents.
Engels' review of JW Kayes' The Afghan War, via Marxists.org
Finally, a Special Note of Dedication: This series began seven long diaries ago, at the request of the legendary Avila, and it's my great honor to dedicate this not-so-brief history of Afghanistan to her and her blog, Never In Our Names. Para ti y su hija, mi novia!
Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Progressive Historians, Never In Our Names, and The Impeach Project
Photo Credits and Other CYA Stuff
Great collection of photos of Afghanistan under Soviet occupation can be found under the photographer's copyright here (probably even more meaningful if you can read Russian)
Other photo and image sources from the public domain at Wikipedia Commons