Mujahideen commanded by Abdul Qadir, Haq’s brother, attempted to seize Jalalabad in March 1988. The Soviets left behind tanks, artillery, and ammunition for the Afghan army; left more than 200 aircraft; and supplied $300 million monthly in aid to Najibullah’s government. Infighting among the mujahideen leaders led to uncoordinated attacks, and a combination of tactical ineptness and superior firepower cost the guerrillas more than 3,000 fighters at Jalalabad. That military disaster split the AIG alliance apart. In July, Hekmatyar’s men ambushed a group of Massoud’s fighters. Massoud retaliated, capturing Hekmatyar’s responsible commander and hanging him. This caused Hekmatyar to withdraw from the alliance. While the United States was preparing for war against Iraq, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. The mujahideen forces successfully attacked Afghan government troops at Kandahar, Khowst, and Herat, but they suffered heavy casualties in a direct assault on Kabul. Khowst fell in 1990.
In northern Afghanistan, Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, who had previously led pro- Soviet forces, united with Najibullah’s Afghan army to fight the mujahideen when the Russians withdrew. However, in February 1992, Dostum changed sides and aligned with Massoud, and their combined forces captured Mazar-e-Sharif. In April 1992, the two forces reached Bagram. Fearing the imminent collapse of his government, Najibullah sought refuge in a UN compound in Kabul where he remained in asylum until September 1996. When Najibullah abandoned the government, the Afghan army disintegrated. Former Afghan army soldiers joined the advance of Dostum and Massoud toward Kabul from the north. Hekmatyar raced toward the capital from the south to beat his rivals to the prize. Although Hekmatyar’s lead elements got into Kabul, the better-organized northern forces forced Hekmatyar’s men from the city and seized control of the government buildings.
Sibghatollah Mojadeddi assumed the presidency, but Burhannudin Rabbani replaced him in June 1992. Rabbani was Tajik, as were Massoud and Ismail Khan who had fought the Russians near Herat. Suddenly, the minority Tajiks, supported by the Uzbek, Dostum, controlled the government and Kabul. Pashtun leader Hekmatyar, after surrounding the city, responded by rocketing the capital. Estimates of Afghans killed in 1993 varied from 2,000 to 30,000.
The expression “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard” aptly fit the alliance shifts among the ethnic groups in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Pashtuns controlled Kandahar, Dostum controlled Bagram, and Dostum and Massoud fought for control of Konduz. Ismail Khan, with support from Iran, controlled Herat. In 1994, Dostum, who had been ignored in all government decisions (possibly because he was Uzbek), aligned with the Pashtun, Hekmatyar, to attack the Tajik Rabbani government. Massoud had an opportunity and seized Konduz. Then he swung about and forced the Dostum-Hekmatyar alliance away from Kabul. As ethnic infighting intensified among the mujahideen warlords, a new group was added to the Afghan scorecard.
In spring 1994, local mujahideen kidnapped and raped two girls near Kandahar. From that brutal crime would spring a popular movement that was directly involved in the events of 11 September 2001 and against whom U.S. and coalition forces would fight in Afghanistan. Mohammad Omar, a talib (religious student) and former member of the Soviet resistance in Kandahar, gathered 30 fellow Taliban (religious students) to free the girls. The rescue was successful, the mujahideen commander was hanged, and the Taliban movement was born. The Taliban goal, based on a 1996 interview with Omar, was to protect women and the poor and to punish those who were guilty of crimes. “We are fighting against Muslims who have gone wrong,” Omar declared. Hamad Karzai, who was named president of Afghanistan in December 2001, initially believed that “the Taliban are good honest people . . . and were my friends from the jihad against the Soviets.” Karzai willingly provided support. The Taliban grew in strength as many young men who had been educated in the refugee madrasas (Islamic schools) of Pakistan joined the cause.
Figure 6. Hamad Karzai.
Pakistan was willing to supply more than just men who were educated in Islamic fundamentalism. President Benazir Bhutto, who had become president after Zia’s death, had two major objectives vis-à-vis Afghanistan. One objective was to find a regime that was friendly to Pakistan—support for Hekmatyar. The other was to establish a secure trade route through Afghanistan to the former Soviet republics. Fighting around Kabul had closed the eastern route north from Peshawar. Bhutto quickly focused on the western route north from Quetta. Pakistani envoys initiated discussions with Ismail Khan and Dostum to allow convoys to use the western highway. But Spin Boldak, a critical border town, was garrisoned by Hekmatyar’s forces. On 12 October 1994, 200 Taliban fighters with Pakistani support defeated the garrison and captured 18,000 rifles and artillery pieces and a large quantity of ammunition. On 29 October, a Pakistani convoy bound for Turkmenistan departed Quetta. Near Kandahar, three local commanders halted the convoy and demanded a cut of the goods. The Pakistanis asked the Taliban to help. On 3 November, Taliban soldiers rescued the convoy, killing one of the local commanders. The Taliban force immediately moved to capture Kandahar. On 5 November 1994, the city was taken, along with tanks, artillery, six MiG-21s, and six helicopters. It was rumored that Pakistani advisers had been involved in the fighting. Many of the Taliban soldiers had been refugees in Pakistan and had been taught a strict interpretation of Islam that required total acceptance of the Koran and advocated eliminating the corrupting influence of the West. By December 1994, Taliban ranks in Kandahar had swollen to 12,000 as the populace embraced the fledgling movement as a better alternative to the corrupt regime. In the midst of these activities, President Bhutto denied any involvement with the Taliban.
Historian Ahmed Rashid, who has studied Afghanistan extensively, described the young men who comprised the Taliban.
These boys were a world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the 1980s—men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages, remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia, and recounted legends and stories from Afghan history. These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, or their neighborhoods. . . . They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning.
These young men had lived in segregated refugee camps, having no contact with women. Fundamentalist mullahs taught them that women would distract them from their service to Allah. Adopting a strict interpretation of the Koran, they locked away the women, forbidding them to participate in normal society. To the Taliban, television, motion pictures, cameras, and music were corruptions that Islamic law forbade. Within days after the Taliban seized Kandahar, the women had disappeared from the streets, and the physical signs of Western influence had been eradicated.
By January 1995, the Taliban had established control of the three provinces that bordered Kandahar and Kandahar Province—Helmand, Zabol, and Oruzgan provinces—through bribery or military power. In a series of lightning moves, the Taliban seized Ghazni and were within 35 miles of Kabul by 2 February. Hekmatyar’s forces around the capital, facing the two armies of Rabbani and Massoud coming from the north, fled east toward Jalalabad when Taliban forces appeared from the south.
Figure 7. Afghan children.
Massoud also had a problem in Kabul. The Shi’a Moslem Hazaras—the minority Shi’a represented 15 percent of the population—held the southern part of the capital and resisted Massoud’s dominance. In March 1995, the “Lion of Panjshir” had launched a large-scale attack against the Hazaras. The commander, Abdul Mazari, sought help from the Taliban. Shortly afterward, he mysteriously was found dead—the possibility that the Taliban pushed