Author's note: A few days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I came across a tweet by Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary who noted (with a tinge of bitterness) that the Taliban’s past, present and future are all the same. This was in response to the militant group’s induction of sanctioned terrorists and ‘genocide perpetrators’ into the Afghan halls of power. In this series, I delve into the Taliban’s first foray into the country, the ‘who’s, the ‘what’s and the ‘where’s, contextualise it with an abridged version of Afghanistan’s history, analyse the complex ethnic dynamics that drive the country’s politics, and pose a number of questions: Is the Taliban really a Pashtun problem? How do we deal with the innate contradictions in Afghanistan’s governance systems in the national and local levels? More so, what can we learn from the Taliban of the past that we can hopefully extrapolate to a Taliban of the future?
Recommended readings:
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield
The 1747 assassination of emperor Nadir Shah Afshar, the ruler of Persia and what then included present-day Afghanistan, set in motion a chain of events that would go on to change the course of history in the sub-continent. A young, capable commander in Shah’s army, going by the name of Ahmad Shah Abdali from the Abdali Pashtun confederacy, made his way to a loya jirga—a grand national assembly of tribes in Pashtun parlance—in his native Kandahar. After weeks-long open floor deliberations, Abdali was elevated as the king of Afghanistan. Abdali, who then took on the name ‘Durrani’ and renamed the clan after himself, set his sights on the disintegrating Afsharid empire of Iran, the Khanate of Bukhara to the north and the Mughals in India to the east. By the end of his campaign which started from Kandahar, Durrani had captured Iran to his west, territory till Amu Darya river in the north, and made deep inroads into western India. This was the first concrete origins of the state of Afghanistan as we perceive it today, and Durrani is often referred to as the founder of the nation.
Durrani’s mausoleum, where visitors arrive in droves to pay their respects, is situated smack dab in the middle of Kandahar—an octagonal example of classic Islamic architecture, whose descending stairs lead to beautifully marbled chambers ensconcing the final resting place of the Pashtun emperor. Within the grounds of the mausoleum is the Kirka Sharif mosque, where prayers are often conducted on Fridays, and an ornately decorated chamber carrying a cloak believed to have been worn by Prophet Mohammed himself.
The cloak, very rarely touched, signifies another defining event in the country’s history—a moment which, in hindsight, is arguably more consequential than the crowning of Durrani in 1747.
In April 1996, at a particularly focal moment for the Taliban, the Islamist militia group’s supreme leader Mullah Omar entered the Kirka Sharif shrine and donned the Prophet’s cloak to rapturous reception from his followers. From that moment, he was conferred the title Amir-ul-Momineen (commander of the faithful). To fully appreciate the event’s historical significance is to understand the context of Omar’s act. Taliban, then an evolving group, was embarking on their first campaign to capture Kabul, which was held by the Burhanuddin Rabbani government. They had made deep advances in the Pashtun regions in the south, but was beaten back by the government forces from Herat and central Afghanistan, sustaining big losses in the process. In March, a week-long Islamic council (shura) with mullahs from across the country had commenced—the stated purpose was to legitimise the leadership of Omar, who was facing discontent within the group for damaging and unsuccessful military campaigns against Kabul, as journalist Ahmed Rashid noted in his seminal book Taliban. While the hardline faction (mainly from Kandahar) wanted the war to resume, the moderates wanted to explore the possibility of a deal with Kabul. Omar’s donning the cloak put an end to the internal rumblings once and for all—the hardliners had won. Four months later, the Taliban was to enter the capital city, victorious.
Kandahar has always had a special place in the heart of the Taliban. In the first week of 2021, in their second campaign to capture Kabul, Taliban fighters made a beeline for Kandahar. There was pitched battle between Taliban and the Afghan national security forces, as the Taliban covered the region from all sides and forced the army to its knees. Taliban also simultaneously attacked other provinces, really stretching the understaffed security forces, taking over the second largest city in the country by the first week of August. Kandahar was the first domino to fall in what would be a literal blitz across the country.
Kandahar, for different people, means different things, at different points of time. For ancient rulers, from Mughal Babar to the British in India, Kandahar evokes images of a fertile oasis along the banks of Arghandab river, producing anars (pomegranates), grapes and apricots. For the farmers who have lived through decades of strife, Kandahar means lush green orchards; orchards which outlived successive Soviet and Western-backed governments, who mercilessly dug out and mowed away the vegetation under suspicion of shielding insurgents; orchards which are, to this day, littered with live landmines used by the Taliban in their attempts to outrun and slow down government forces; orchards from which agriculturalists fled en masse during the worst of the Soviet occupation years, and returned to the sinful possibilities of a brand new crop—opium poppy.
Kandahar is neither the beginning of a circle, nor its end. In the deformed wheel of time, it is a fork—the conjunction of multiple, criss-crossing paths with tangential futures and realities looming wistfully just over the horizon. Kandahar is new beginnings; Kandahar is abrupt endings.
***
The reclusive Mullah Omar in his prime was a wiry figure, fair like most Pashtuns, with the traditional turban, a face of sculpted emaciation, and the long black beard weather-beaten with the whites of multiple winters. By most accounts, he was neither the most militarily astute nor the most rousing orator. Omar was the ideological figurehead, whose piety was beyond question, a man who communed with Allah in his nightly dreams, and one who could grant divine sanction to even the most brutal of wars.
Not much is known about his early childhood. Going by most accounts, he was a Ghilzai Pashtun born in the recesses of Uruzgan province in the south, to a family that was landless and dirt poor. He lost his father at a young age, turned Islamic preacher in the village, and found himself caught up in the fight against Soviet occupation in the 80s. He fought alongside the Hezb-e-Islami faction led by Younus Khalis. During the conflict, shrapnel blinded him in his right eye. He slid back into his mullah duties after the war, but fate had more in store. When the years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 unleashed complete anarchy, bloodshed and civil war in the nation, a group of Talibs (Islamic students) including Mullah Ghaus, Mullah Mohammad Rabbani and Mullah Hassan coalesced around Omar. As Rashid wrote in his book, their common action plan was simple—peace, disarmament, and the implementation of strict Islamic Sharia rules. This was the start of the Pashtun-majority Taliban group.
The past, present and future of Afghanistan is irrevocably intertwined with the fate of the majority Sunni Pashtuns—the Indo-Persian Pashto-speaking ethnic group that forms a plurality in the nation at over 45 per cent of the population (in the absence of census data, all numbers are estimates), and who since time immemorial have been the ruling elites in the country. They are followed in numbers by other ethnic groups like the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and the Turkmen. It was Ghilzai Pashtun confederacy’s Mirwais Khan Hotak who sowed the first seeds of revolt against the overarching Persian empire in Afghanistan, after the earliest known loya jirga in 1709. The Hotak dynasty briefly ruled over Afghanistan and Iran till the 1720s, before splintering away in the face of a Persian offensive. It was under Ahmad Shah Durrani in the 1740s that the geographical idea of Afghanistan found a sustained shape; it was solidified and expanded by the Pashtun rulers who followed, like the despotic ‘Iron Amir’ Abdur Rahman Khan who was the first to implement a provincial structure in the national level in Afghanistan.
Pashtuns, though significant, are only a small part of the rich historical tapestry of Afghanistan. The country was the birthplace of the syncretic East-West fusion in the Greco-Bactrian culture (a melting pot of Hellenistic and Buddhist ideas). From being part of the Persian Achamenid Empire in 550 BC, to conquest by Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and to the earliest Arab invasions (in what was then a predominantly Buddhist, Zoroastrian culture) in the form of Rashidun and Ummayad Caliphates (7th and 8th century AD), the country has always been vied by empires for access to the strategic Khyber Pass that cuts through the Hindu Kush for passage into India. The religion of Islam was introduced from Arabia was promoted and patronised by successive empires in the form of the Saffarids and the Samanids in the 9th and 10th centuries AD. Marauding Mongol troops led by Genghis Khan laid waste to the country in 1219 AD. The Turkic nomads in the Timurids rose to power in 1381, with emperor Timur shifting his capital from Samarkand to Herat in Western Afghanistan. Successive empires waxed and waned, fragmenting finally into the Persian Safavids taking control in the west and the south, Uzbeks under the Khanate of Bukhara consolidating in the north, and the Mughal empire in India to the east. Then, Nadir Shah was assassinated and Durrani was elevated in the 1747 loya jirga.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the military action was justified under the Friendship and Cooperation Treaty signed by the then deposed Nur Mohammad Taraki government in Kabul. The real reason, however, lay elsewhere. A Great Game (its second edition in the history of Afghanistan, in fact) was underway; the country has always been a topic of keen interest for every single global superpower at one point or another throughout history. The first Great Game was played out in the 19th century, when Britain fought three wars (1838-42, 1878-80, 1919-21) with Afghanistan, not for control of the territory per se, but to deal with the possibility that the country could be used by a rising Soviet Union in Central Asia as a launchpad for attacks into British India. A monarchy under ‘The Great Reformer’ King Amanullah Khan emerged in 1926, announcing full independence from any sort of British influence, and tried to implement top-down modernisation measures like education, employment and public visibility for women, and actions against the existing ‘feudal’ tribal structures; popular disgruntlement rose, and Amanullah was ousted in civilian rebellions. Amanullah’s reign was followed by an unprecedented four decades of peace and stability under King Zahir Shah (1933-1973). He was deposed in 1973 by his cousin and then prime minister Daoud Khan, who abolished the monarchy and announced the setting up of the Republic of Afghanistan which was firmly tied in with the Soviet Union.
The second Great Game began when the Soviets started smelling danger in the middle of the Cold War. Daoud (1973-1978) and the following Nur Taraki government (1978-1979) were both overthrown in bloody coups, and the then Hafizullah Amin regime (September 1979-December 1979) was desperately attempting to realign the country’s interests—there was popular rebellion, helmed by Islamist groups funded and trained in Pakistan, brewing against the Communist modernisation measures—and USSR premier Leonid Brezhnev feared that Amin was trying to pivot to the West. There were good reasons for Brezhnev’s paranoia. The Soviets were burnt by Anwar Sadat breaking Egypt out of their orbit and aligning firmly with the United States. Moscow was vehement not to make the same mistake in Kabul. Soviet tanks rolled into the country in 1979, and Amin was assassinated by December that year.
The decade of Soviet occupation tore the country apart in a million different ways. Islamist sentiment was on an upsurge, sparked by the spectre of “unbelievers” invading Muslim lands. Mujahideen [fighters] were being churned out in madrassas and training camps along the Pakistan side of the porous Durand Line. The US, UK, China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were disbursing finances and resources to fuel the inflamed Muslim sentiments through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence. Among the mujahideen trained in Pakistan were the Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud (who would go on to attain cult status for his guerrilla warfare against the Taliban), and the radical Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar whose Hizb-e-Islami faction was ISI’s favourite. Jihadist groups from across the world were making a beeline to Pakistan, where they were welcomed with open arms, hosted, trained and released across the border to fight the USSR.
What was Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan? Its primary concern was domestic insurgency. There are estimated to be at least twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan when compared to Afghanistan. The Pakistan state has fraught relations with their Pashtun ethnic minorities, who are settled mostly in the Khyber Paktunkhwa, or the North West Frontier Province, along the Afghan border. One reason for Pashtun discontent would be the years of repression resulting from state military action. Pakistan is also very wary of the territory of Afghanistan being used against it—successive Afghan governments in the 50s and 60s have disputed the Durand Line (the very porous, arbitrary Afghan-Pakistan border introduced by the British in 1893), and have expressed support for ‘Pashtunistan’, a homeland for Pashtun tribes carved almost entirely out of Pakistan land. Pakistan’s primary objective in Afghanistan is strategic depth. It wants a compliant government in power to prevent destabilisation within its own borders, driven by the fear of rivals like India stirring up trouble in its tribal regions, like what Islamabad is doing in Kashmir.
Battered and bruised with the endless war, the USSR withdrew in 1989. President Najibullah, who helmed the Soviet puppet regime, was overthrown in 1992—he rushed to seek refuge with the United Nations in Kabul. Tajik mujahideen forces under Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Uzbeks under General Rashid Dostum, ascended to the throne the very same year, with Rabbani as the president and Massoud as the defence minister. It looked like the mujahideen had succeeded in their objectives.
But, peace was to be a distant reality. The troubles for Afghanistan were just starting, with ugly ethnic cleavages starting to bare fangs. Pashtuns have always ruled Afghanistan, with one exception being the ill-fated regime of Habibullah Kalakani, a Tajik who became the emir for a short period of January-October 1923 in the middle of a bruising civil war. When Rabbani came to power in Kabul, the angle for the spin was very clear: The Pashtuns from the south had lost out to Tajiks and Uzbeks from the north. Leveraging those racial and regional faultlines, and egged on by Pakistan, Hekmatyar issued a rallying cry to Pashtuns, turning against the Rabbani regime and shelling rockets non-stop into Kabul with scant regard for civilian lives.
The condition of Afghanistan deteriorated into literal anarchy. The mujahideen had completely splintered. The government in Kabul was being shelled by Hekmatyar on one side, and Hazara militia Hezb-i-Wahdat from southern suburbs on the other. Warlords had taken over different provinces in the country, raping, plundering and murdering at will.
To the West in Herat, popular leader Ismael Khan held sway. The notoriously fickle Uzbek warlord Dostum—who, under the proddings of Pakistan, shifted allegiance from the Rabbani government to Hekmatyar—controlled over five provinces in the north. Hazaras held on to central Afghanistan, including the Bamiyan province. The southern parts of the nation, including Kandahar, and predominantly Pashtun, were divided amongst bickering warlords and pillagers.
In the midst of all this confusion, the first massacre happened under Massoud’s watch in February 1993. According to Human Rights Watch and other non-governmental organisations, Massoud’s troops massacred thousands of Hazara Shias in Afshar neighbourhood of Kabul, resulting in pronounced international condemnation. However, in her book Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud, author Sandy Gall claims that Massoud had nothing to do with the massacre, which was perpetrated by an erstwhile ally, and that the CIA “used this as an excuse not to back Massoud, condemning him as a bloodstained warlord”. The charges would have more repercussions than one.
Read Part 2 of the series here
Read Part 3 of the series here
Write a comment ...