Civil war and the Taliban emirate, 1992–2001

From 1992 to 2001 no Afghan government held the whole country. Najibullah's government fell in April 1992, the parties that replaced it fought each other for Kabul for four years, and a movement of religious students from Kandahar took the capital in September 1996. Its leaders called their state the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Three states recognised it, the Security Council sanctioned it, and a US-led campaign that began in October 2001 ended it. Pashtuns stood on every side of these events, as commanders, victims, refugees and opponents of the Taliban. The wider history is in Pashtun history and Pashtuns today.

The Peshawar Accord and the fight for Kabul, 1992–1996

Najibullah announced his resignation on 18 March 1992 under pressure from the UN negotiator Benon Sevan. [9] On 15 April militia stopped his car on the way to Kabul airport, and he took refuge in the UN compound, where he stayed for four years. [7] Pashtun officials in the interior and defence ministries began to let in forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i Islami. On 24 April Ahmad Shah Massoud's Jamiat-i Islami and Abdul Rashid Dostum's Junbish entered Kabul and pushed Hezb-i Islami south. [7] On 26 April the mujahidin leaders still in Pakistan announced the Peshawar Accords: Sibghatullah Mujaddidi would be president for two months and Burhanuddin Rabbani of Jamiat for four more, then a council would choose an interim government, and Massoud would be defence minister. Hekmatyar was left out. [7] Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the city had "suffered a few days of fighting, but was generally intact". [7]

HRW calls Hekmatyar's Hezb-i Islami and Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf's Ittihad-i Islami, which Saudi Arabia supported, predominantly Pashtun, and the Iran-backed Hezb-i Wahdat predominantly Hazara. [7] Hekmatyar refused to recognise the government. HRW documented that his forces fired rockets and artillery into Kabul from the south in attacks that were often aimed at the city as a whole, not at specific military targets, and that Jamiat, Ittihad and Wahdat forces also fired into civilian areas of west Kabul. [7] A UN estimate quoted by HRW says about 500,000 people left Kabul by the end of the summer of 1992, mainly because of Hekmatyar's rocket and artillery attacks. [7] In west Kabul, Ittihad and Wahdat abducted civilians of each other's communities. A journalist told HRW: "Sayyaf's men would look for Hazaras. Hizb-e Wahdat forces would look for Pashtuns." [7]

The war widened in January 1994, when Hekmatyar and Dostum joined forces against Rabbani and Massoud. [8, 9] HRW's 2001 report cites Amin Saikal for an estimate of 25,000 people killed in Kabul in 1994 alone, most of them civilians, and for one third of the city reduced to rubble. [9] HRW's 1998 report summarises 1993–1995 differently: the battles "destroyed at least one-third of the city, killed thousands of civilians, and drove a half million refugees to Pakistan". [8] Its 2005 report puts civilian deaths and injuries in 1992–1993 at "tens of thousands". All of these are estimates, and HRW states that complete documentation of the period has yet to be done. [7]

The south and the first Taliban, 1993–1994

In the south, HRW describes Kandahar in 1994 as a city divided among several forces, where civilians had "little security from murder, rape, looting, or extortion" and aid agencies found their offices stripped. [9] Dozens of local Pashtun leaders, it says, "presided over a situation of complete lawlessness". [8] The city's earlier history is in Kandahar, city of Ahmad Shah.

The movement that answered this took the name ṭālibān (طالبان), meaning students, and its centre was Kandahar (کندهار, Kandahār). HRW says it formed around Mullah Mohammad Omar, a former mujahid who returned in 1992 to his village, Singesar, and became its mullah and the head of its madrasa. [9] A digest of the 1995 press by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada says the group appeared in 1993 as 30 to 50 students, that the first Taliban were young men from refugee camps and madrasas in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, and, quoting the Far Eastern Economic Review, that most Taliban soldiers belonged to the southern clans of the Durrani, described in The Durrani confederation. [13] HRW adds that the core also included commanders of other predominantly Pashtun parties and former Khalqi communists. [9] UNHCR notes that some boys who grew up as refugees in Pakistan and studied in private madrasas became leading members. [6]

The founding story varies. HRW says that in early 1994 the Taliban attacked the headquarters of a commander responsible for rapes, murders and looting, an operation that "has acquired mythic status in Taliban ranks". The Canadian digest places the episode in July 1994, when a Kandahar commander allegedly raped and killed three women and Omar's students executed him. [9, 13] HRW gives the Taliban's stated aims as "to restore stability and enforce (their interpretation of) Islamic law". [9] The digest notes that Taliban leaders were reluctant to set out a political philosophy, and collects aims that Taliban officials and outside observers variously stated in 1995, without the digest saying which came from whom: to "take Kabul and sweep away all the mujahideen factions", to "cleanse Afghanistan in the name of Islam" and to bring "a new era of peace and good government". The same digest records Taliban leaders in January 1995 claiming that they "do not receive any aid from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or any third country". [13]

Kandahar, Herat and Kabul, 1994–1996

The sources differ on the order of the first victories. HRW dates the capture of the Pasha munitions depot and Spin Boldak to October 1994 and the release of a Pakistani trade convoy two weeks later; the digest puts both in early November. HRW gives no day for the fall of Kandahar, and the digest dates it to 5 November 1994, with about fifty dead in four days, according to the Review. HRW says the local commander, who was loyal to the Rabbani government, ordered his forces not to resist. [9, 13] HRW also says Pakistan supported the movement by October 1994, seeing a way to secure trade routes to Central Asia and a friendly government in Kabul. [9]

The Taliban advanced on Kabul in January 1995. In the late summer the Taliban defeated the government's forces in the west and held Herat by 3 September 1995. [9] The Taliban took Jalalabad on 11 September 1996 and Kabul at the end of the month; most of the forces holding it withdrew north intact. [9]

Amnesty International issued a statement on 27 September 1996, after the capture of Kabul and the killing of Najibullah. It said that around five Taliban reportedly entered the UN compound and took him and his companions out, and that "the manner in which Dr Najibullah was killed defies all norms of international law". [11] Under Mullah Omar the Taliban declared themselves the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. [10]

Taliban rule: decrees and the treatment of women

The Taliban governed through edicts enforced by the Amr bil-Maroof wa Nahi An il-Munkir, the ministry for the enforcement of virtue and suppression of vice, whose squads punished offenders by beating or detaining them. [8] HRW printed translations of several notices in 2001. One notice listed eight rules, the first of them: [10]

"No exit and travelling of sisters without escort of legal close relative (Mahram)." [10]

A letter from the religious police dated 1375 in the Afghan calendar (1996–97) also ordered the arrest of men with shaved or cut beards and the removal of pictures from shops and vehicles. On music it said: [10]

"In shops, hotels, vehicles and rickshaws cassettes and music are prohibited. ... If any music cassette is found in a shop, the shopkeeper should be imprisoned and the shop locked." [10]

HRW reported that women were barred from work outside health care and girls over eight from school. [10] It also found the rules applied unevenly. In Kandahar some girls' schools still worked and male doctors could treat women under strict conditions, and enforcement was "less a problem for Afghans living in rural Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan than for those in cities like Herat and Kabul", where the Taliban were wary of the non-Pashtun urban population. [8] The Security Council named "discrimination against women and girls" among its concerns in 1999 and 2000. [1, 2]

Hazaras, Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan

In May 1997 the Taliban entered Mazar-i Sharif with the help of Dostum's deputy, Malik Pahlawan. When they began disarming local forces, fighting broke out, and HRW reports that hundreds of Taliban were killed in the streets and at least 2,000 captured and executed. [8] HRW's 2001 report gives about 3,000 and attributes the executions to Junbish forces under Malik; its 1998 report said that most analysts blamed Malik for many of them and that many Taliban were also shot by Hezb-i Wahdat. [8–10]

On 8 August 1998 the Taliban retook the city. HRW found that they shot at random in the streets for the first hours, then searched house by house for Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek men, with Hazaras the main target. [8] "Based on interviews with survivors and other informed sources," HRW wrote, "at least 2,000 may have been killed in the city and possibly many more." [8] The Taliban governor, Mullah Manon Niazi, spoke at mosques; HRW reports him as saying, "Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shi'a. They are kofr [infidels]. The Hazaras killed our force here, and now we have to kill Hazaras." [8] HRW also reported that Pashtuns from Balkh, who had belonged to a militia aligned with Hezb-i Islami, entered with the Taliban and joined the searches, and that the officers sorting prisoners at the jail were Taliban from Kandahar or other southern Pashtun areas. [8] The Security Council stated that the Taliban's capture of Iran's consulate-general in the city and the murder of Iranian diplomats and a journalist there "constituted flagrant violations of established international law". [1]

HRW reports that in January 2001 the Taliban killed 176 civilians, mainly Hazaras, after retaking the town of Yakaolang in the Hazarajat. [9] The General Assembly's draft resolution of 7 March 2001 refers to a "Taliban edict of 26 February 2001, ordering the destruction of all statues and non-Islamic shrines in Afghanistan". [3] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that Mullah Omar's order, broadcast on Taliban radio, said "Because God is one God and these statues are there to be worshipped, and that is wrong", that the foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, said that foreign countries should not interfere in what he described as an "internal issue", and that on 1 March the Taliban said the destruction of statues, including the Bamiyan Buddhas, had begun. Kofi Annan, in a statement of 27 February, said that "destroying any relic, any monument, any statue will only prolong the climate of conflict in Afghanistan". [14]

Recognition, sanctions and bin Laden

Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognised the Taliban government, and the last two withdrew recognition after 11 September 2001. [10] Resolution 1267, adopted on 15 October 1999, names "the Afghan faction known as the Taliban, which also calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan". It demanded that they hand Usama bin Laden over to a country where he had been indicted and, from 14 November 1999, banned Taliban aircraft from landing or taking off in member states and froze Taliban funds. [1] Resolution 1333 of 19 December 2000 added an arms embargo, ordered the closure of Taliban offices and Ariana Afghan Airlines offices abroad, froze bin Laden's assets and demanded that the Taliban close the camps where, in the resolution's words, terrorists were trained. [2]

The 9/11 Commission reports that bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, lodged first in Jalalabad with the mujahidin leader Younis Khalis, and "cemented his ties" with the Taliban after Jalalabad and Kabul fell. After a CNN interview in March 1997 Mullah Omar invited him to Kandahar and, the Commission concluded, "would stand by him even when other Taliban leaders raised objections". [12]

Pakistan and the other outside powers

Each side described its own part differently. HRW records that Pakistan's interior minister said on 3 May 2001 that his government gave Afghanistan neither weapons nor funds and that Afghanistan was a sovereign state over which Pakistan had no control. [9] HRW wrote that Pakistan's efforts for the Taliban included "bankrolling Taliban operations", "arranging training for Taliban fighters", "planning and directing offensives" and "providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel", and that Saudi Arabia was a major financial supporter of the Taliban from 1996 to 1998, after which official aid reportedly stopped and private contributions continued. [9] The 9/11 Commission judged that Pakistan's rulers saw the Taliban as a way to bring order to Afghanistan and to gain what its officers called "strategic depth". [12] On the other side, HRW says Iran and Russia supplied Massoud, whose spokesman denied that rocket attacks on Kabul in September 1998 targeted civilians. [9]

General Pervez Musharraf told the UN General Assembly on 10 November 2001 that "Pakistan tried its utmost, up to the last moment, to work with the Afghan Government so as to avert military action in Afghanistan". Of the years after the Soviet withdrawal he said Pakistan had been "left in the lurch in 1989" and got in return "3 million refugees, a shattered economy, drugs and a Kalashnikov culture". [5]

Refugees, and what the period meant for Pashtun communities

UNHCR counted 6.3 million Afghan refugees in 1990, 3.25 million of them in Pakistan, mostly Pashtuns living in Pashtun-dominated parts of that country. Its tables show 1.63 million in Pakistan and 2.9 million in Iran at the end of 1992, and 1.2 million and 1.33 million at the end of 1999. About four million Afghans were repatriated in the 1990s, and Iran's refugees were mostly Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. [6] Musharraf told the General Assembly that more than 3 million refugees were in Pakistan in 2001; neither source explains the gap with UNHCR's end-1999 table. [5, 6] After 11 September 2001, HRW reported, tens of thousands more Afghans fled, mostly towards Pakistan, and many thousands were stranded at closed borders. [10]

Pashtuns were victims as well as fighters. HRW describes Pashtuns abducted by Wahdat in Kabul in 1992 and a Wahdat operation to drive Pashtuns from Balkh before the 1998 offensive; abuses in areas briefly held by United Front factions after 1997 that targeted mainly ethnic Pashtuns suspected of supporting the Taliban; and the killing of at least 86 civilians by Taliban troops retreating in the north in September 1997. [7–9] HRW says the Taliban draw their support "primarily" from the Pashtuns, and its reports name Pashtun commanders in the other camps too. [10]

Hekmatyar became "one of the Taliban's most militant opponents", the 9/11 Commission says, while HRW says a number of his commanders had defected to the Taliban by 1996. [8, 12] Abdul Haq, a Pashtun commander based in Peshawar who had fought the Soviets, crossed into eastern Afghanistan in October 2001 to turn Pashtuns away from the Taliban. Dawn reported that the Taliban executed him on 26 October, hours after capture, and that a Taliban spokesman said the ulema had ruled that anyone who helped the United States could be killed. [15]

11 September 2001 and Bonn

After the attacks of 11 September the United States made seven requests of Pakistan, including an end to fuel shipments to the Taliban, and Musharraf agreed to all of them. Pakistan's intelligence chief, Mahmud Ahmed, took the US demands to Mullah Omar, whose reply the Commission calls "not negative on all these points", though US officials expected the Taliban not to hand bin Laden over. Air strikes began on 7 October, Mazar-i Sharif fell on 9 November, and the Taliban left Kabul four days later. [12]

On 5 December 2001 the participants in the UN talks signed the Bonn Agreement, "determined to end the tragic conflict in Afghanistan". It set 22 December for the transfer of power to an Interim Administration chaired by Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun leader from Kandahar. [4, 12]