In three and a half years, I sat through scores of intelligence briefings on my regular visits to Helmand. Many were very good indeed. But too many showed little awareness of the situation beyond where the insurgency washed up against British forces, and thus no proper sense of the underlying factors at work in Helmand. I remember in particular several excruciatingly simplistic descriptions of the tribal politics of Helmand (once it had become fashionable for us to ‘understand the tribes’).
Afghanistan has more than its fair share of geography, both human and physical, and of history. Understanding both as best one could was necessary, but never enough, for success. I had arrived in Kabul knowing only a little about Afghanistan’s recent history, and was to leave knowing only slightly more. But that wasn’t for want of reading and listening, whenever and wherever I could. Two periods interested me most: the Soviet intervention and the rise of the Taliban.
The story of the Soviet intervention has now been told in Rodric Braithwaite’s authoritative account, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89.* As he points out, the Soviet Union sent its forces into Afghanistan in December 1979 only reluctantly, and as a last resort, in response to repeated Afghan requests. They moved in, full of foreboding. Their motives were mixed, but certainly did not include access to a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf, as Western propaganda alleged at the time. The intervention was as much as anything to stop the Afghan Communist Party – the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan – tearing itself apart. As with the Western intervention just over twenty years later, the Soviet move was meant to be temporary and limited. Inevitably, however, the Russians found that, once in, they could not easily leave, without destabilising even further a situation in which they had now become actors.
The story of the anti-Soviet jihad is relatively well known, thanks in part to films such as Charlie Wilson’s War and books such as Steve Coll’s remarkable Ghost Wars.† But much of the story is myth. The jihad was more chaotic and anarchic than many Western supporters of the resistance realised. The seven main jihadi groups were supported by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate, and by the CIA and SIS (Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service), using funds from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Often they seemed to be fighting each other almost as much as the regime in Kabul.
And that regime was bad, but perhaps slightly less bad than Western propaganda suggested. The Russians had a deeper understanding of Afghanistan than many of their Western successors. Much of the trouble they encountered was the result of misguided efforts to modernise Afghan society. In this, they had some success with the urban populations, but less with the conservative rural people. When he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev soon concluded that Afghanistan was a ‘bleeding wound’ (a sentiment echoed in 2009, by the then senior US General in Afghanistan, Stan McChrystal, in respect of the Marjah district of Helmand).
But it took the Soviet authorities another four years to extract themselves from the quagmire. They did it mainly by installing a strong Afghan leader, Dr Najibullah, and telling him to ‘forget Communism, abandon socialism, embrace Islam and work with the tribes’. This he did, with some success. Out went the hammer and sickle, in came the crescent moon. Out went the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan; in came the Watan or Nation movement. Najibullah’s former viceroy in the south, General Olumi, was Deputy Chairman of the Defence Committee of the lower house of the Afghan parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, during my time in Kabul. He used to tell me how he had been responsible for the seven provinces radiating out from the southern metropolis of Kandahar, and how he had managed to stabilise them by working with, not against, the tribes.
As the commander of the Soviet Fortieth Army, General Boris Gromov, watched his son march across the bridge over the Oxus River on 20 February 1989, as the last member of the Limited Group of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan to leave, he little guessed that the regime the Russians had left behind would not only survive for three years, but defeat the Western-backed jihad, including in an epic battle later in 1989 during which the mujahideen tried and failed to take Jalalabad from the Afghan Government. What brought the Najibullah regime down, in 1992, was the collapse of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s decision to end all support, in money and kind (mostly arms and oil, but also food), to the Government in Kabul. No Afghan government in the last 250 years has survived without massive external subvention of one kind or another, and Dr Najibullah’s government was no different.
When the Najibullah regime fell in 1992, there followed one of the darkest periods in Afghanistan’s history: a bloody and bitter civil war between different regional warlords, many of whom are still active, and even in power, today. Most of west Kabul, and many other areas of the country, were devastated in the fighting.
As the last Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, has recorded in a remarkable memoir, My Life with the Taliban,* the movement began in the villages of Kandahar province in reaction to the depredations and anarchy of the warlords. The Taliban (from the Arabic for ‘student’) were religious zealots, who preached (and delivered) austerity, justice and a fundamentalist brand of Islam resembling the Wahhabi puritanism of the tribes of central Arabia.
Moving out from rural Kandahar, the new movement gradually took control of much of the south and east of Afghanistan. By 1996 the whole country, apart from the Panjshir Valley and one or two other pockets in the north, was in the hands of the Taliban. Given what the warlords had done to the country, it was perhaps not surprising that many Afghans, including Hamid Karzai, had at first welcomed the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul in 1996. The new authorities (if that is what they were) stood for law, of a sort, and order, and against chaos and corruption. They were ignorant and primitive and naive, but they could hardly be worse than the appalling anarchy which had preceded them. Only gradually did the cruelty and incompetence of Taliban rule sink in, particularly among urban populations with a more Westernised approach to life. For the educated and enlightened women of Afghanistan’s cities and towns and villages, the new restrictions were especially appalling: a nightmare of medieval oppression, from which there seemed no escape.
One Afghan patriot, a Soviet-trained pilot who had reached a senior position in the Air Force under Communist rule, somehow stayed on through all this. He told me how much the Taliban disliked foreigners of all kinds. He saw the Taliban first and foremost as conservative religious nationalists, who stood for Islam, or at least an Afghan version thereof, and against outside influence of all kinds (except of course for that of their sponsors across the border in Pakistan). He spoke of the resentment the Taliban felt for the Arab ‘guests’ whose presence was known only to a few.
The extent to which the Taliban were aware of the horrors being plotted by Osama bin Laden and their other Arab and international guests has been much debated. For myself, I am persuaded that they were aware in general terms of bin Laden’s interest in global jihad against the West. But I wonder how much they knew about the plans for the atrocities of 9/11. All of this has been analysed in detail in a new study by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix