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Blowback From Afghanistan: The Historical Roots
International Security Studies at Yale University
February 1996
On September 11, 1996 the Taliban militia, described as "Islamic militant rebels," 1 captured the most strategically important city between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Khyber Pass, Jalalabad. The road from Jalalabad south leads to Pakistan and the Arabian sea. With this victory, the Taliban controlled two-thirds of Afghanistan, establishing on a bridge linking Arabia, Central Asia, Persia and India, the most hospitable operational base for militant Islam on the planet.
Of the hot wars of the Cold War, Afganistan remains torrid. Unpopular government forces dominate the capital, jihad-waging Holy Warriors control the provinces, foreign powers form alliances with Afghan groups, refugees flee, civilians die, and analysts worry about violent spillover into the region and beyond. Some analysts also worry about "blowback;" a term describing greatly undesired and unintended consequences in the aftermath of an intelligence operation. 2
To worry about Afghan blowback is not only to be concerned about Afghanistan collapsing into chaos. People who worry about blowback from Afghanistan are thinking about ideological violence oozing far afield. Sometimes they devise plans to prevent former allies in the struggle against the "Evil Empire" from inflicting evil on the West.
One former ally was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. In 1990, he traveled to the old command fulcrum of the Afghan-Soviet war on the Pakistan side of the Khyber Pass, Peshawar. The very militant Sheikh had channeled funds to the Afghan Mujahadin and was thus an ally of the West, at least temporarily. His two sons fought in the jihad. The Sheikh was in Peshawar to meet Arab veterans of that Afghan-Soviet war. Another participant in that meeting was Mahmoud Abouhalima, an Arab, who had recruited many Arab guerrillas to fight in the jihad and thus a de facto ally. 3 That meeting resulted in a plan to bomb the World Trade Center in New York City. 4
Other governments also worry about Afghan blowback. In November 1995, four anti-government Saudis set off a car bomb in Riyadh killing five Americans. Before beheading the suspects, Saudi officials established that they had participated in the ranks of the thousands of fanatic Wahabi sect members who had traveled from northern Saudi Arabia to fight in the Afghan jihad. During August 1996, Saudi officials confirmed that the men suspected of carrying out the bombing of the American base at Dhahran were trained in Afghanistan. From London, the Saudi dissident leader of the Movement for Islamic Reform said, "Like the group that carried out the bombing in Riyadh, last year, this new group is composed of young men who received training or spent time in Afghanistan. They are uncompromising in their determination and will probably mount other operations against other targets." 5
Blowback was certainly in the eyes of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef who on September 5, 1996, stood defiantly in a Federal District court room in lower Manhattan, guilty of conspiring to blow up American commercial airliners in East Asia. (Mr. Yousef, a 28 year old electronics engineer, was awaiting trial on separate charges that he was the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.) He had received his explosives training in Afghanistan. 6 Said one analyst, Mr. Yousef "personifies a generation: devoutly religious Mideastern operatives, many of whom like him, were trained in battle alongside the United States-backed Mujahadin during the Afghanistan war." 7
Afghanistan now nurtures ideological interests directly opposed to the United States, to the West and to moderate Islamic states. But more significantly the Afghan environment enables those interests to be operationalized. Osama Bin Laden, whose personal fortune is estimated at over $100 million and suspected of funding the attacks in Saudi Arabia, gave an interview to the British newspaper The Independent from inside Afghanistan. He said, "The safest place in the world for me is Afghanistan." 8 Former Mujahadin, fiery Wahabis from Saudi Arabia, and other "volunteers" from the Gulf to the Sudan - all Afghan war veterans - now roam loose in search of a jihad. They have a territorial base in the chaos of Afghanistan, a hospitable ideological environment, weapons, training camps, and increasingly money; money from drugs or money from radicalized Gulf Arabs with a mission. That is "blowback."
To understand how this came to be, one must look to the origins of contemporary Afghan conflict in distant and recent history. The answer does not alone lay in an otherwise successful covert operation. Long after the departure of the Red Army, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, late twentieth-century Afghanistan is a place where both history and perhaps the future, can be visited.
I. Afghanistan is a land on everyone's way to someplace else. It has long been the crossroads of nations and armies. Stretching from the Steppes of Central Asia, to the plains of British India, and bifurcated by the great peaks of the Hindu Kush. Among Afghanistan's greatest historical determinants is its geography. It stands at the meeting place of three geographic and cultural regions: the Iranian Plateau to the West; Russian Turkistan to the North; and the Indian subcontinent to the South. Afghanistan has always been subject to influences and invasions from these neighboring regions. Because of its mountainous terrain, most of Afghanistan has enjoyed local independence of any central government. This has permitted widely distinct ethnic and religious groups to retain their separate identities. To this day, the formidable distances of Afghanistan are plied by mercantile caravans, marauding bandits, and wandering nomads.
Afghanistan has always been a buffer state; a pawn in the games of others. The British sought to extend their Indian Empire into Afghanistan on three occasions beginning in 1842, and each time they were repelled. The forces of the Russian Czar had moved steadily southward toward British India. British colonial policy was to respond with diplomacy, deception, intrigue, and force. The Russian advance could only be halted by "forward policies," in other words by getting there first and creating allies and a buffer. This meddling in Afghanistan in order to gain or conserve access to India, became known as "The Great Game." 9
Britain was a "great civilizing power," 10 and by civilizing Afghan tribes and identifying their interests with British interests, India could be defended against Russia. For Britain, the "forward policy" was ". . . the policy of endeavouring to extend our influence over, and establish law and order on, that part of the border where anarchy, murder, and robbery up to the present time have reigned supreme." 11 As Lord Roberts observed in a famous speech to the House of Lords in 1898:
I can only venture to express my firm conviction that, whatever may be the cost of the measures I propose, the cost, to say nothing of the danger to the Empire, will be definitely greater if we allow matters to drift until we are obliged, in order to resist aggression in Afghanistan, to hurriedly mobilize a sufficient force to subdue the hostile tribes through whose country we should have to pass before we could reach those strategic positions which it is essential we should be able to occupy without delay if we do not intend India - that brightest jewel in Great Britain's Crown - to pass out of our safe keeping. 12
In 1842, Afghan tribesmen handed the British a defeat so severe it became known as the "Kabul Catastrophe." In its aftermath, Sir John Kaye wrote: "Across the length and breadth of the land, history . . . was written in characters of blood. Afghans were still a nation of fierce Mohammedans, of hardy warriors, of independent mountaineers, still a people not to be dragooned into peace or awed into submission by a scattering of foreign bayonets and all the pageantry of a puppet King." 13 The Afghans for once had stopped the expansion of British power northward from the Indian subcontinent, and Russian power southeast through Central Asia. Amidst growing hostility to British influence throughout Afghanistan, four thousand troops, twelve thousand followers and numerous wives and children departed Kabul in the middle of winter. They passed through territory described by Fraser's Flashman as ". . . one of the world's great awful places - the great pass of the Khyber, most of those we saw were Afghan hillmen, rangy warriors in skull caps or turbans and long coats, with immensely long rifles, called jezzails, at their shoulders, and the Khyber knife (similar to a pointed cleaver) in their belts." 14
The column was mercilessly attacked while retreating. At the fortress of Jalalabad near to India, a British garrison watched from the rampart, anxiously awaiting the retreating army. Up the Kabul Road, a lonely, wounded and bleeding horseman sauntered toward them. Except for a few Sepoys, there were no survivors. The date was January 13, 1842, the last remnant of an army, Surgeon Brydon, had arrived in Jalalabad. It was a dramatic moment in history. Rudyard Kipling was inspired to write:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plain,
And the women come out to cut up your remains,
Roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. 15
The modern independent Afghan state was born in blood. 16 On February 20, 1919, Afghanistan's Amir Habibullah was assassinated and succeeded by his youngest son, Amanullah. He immediately proclaimed the independence of Afghanistan. War with Britain again erupted when Afghan forces entered British Indian territory. Afghan forces in the Khyber Pass were quickly repulsed but those in Waziristan achieved some successes. A treaty was signed at Rawalpindi in August, 1919. If not exactly peace, the Rawalpindi Treaty brought the absence of war and established the Durand line separating Afghanistan from British India.
The 1893 Durand Line Agreement was affirmed by Afghan-British Treaties in 1919 and 1921. But much of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, including the city of Peshawar and the tribal agencies, was traditional Pathan (also called Pukhtun or Pushtun) territory. Tribes on each side of the Durand Line shared a common ethnic identity, and looked to Peshawar as their capital. Tribals called this region "Pushtunistan." At the time of Indo-Pakistani partition, Kabul had demanded these Pushtunistan areas be given independence rather than a choice between India and Pakistan. In the late twentieth century, Pushtunistan is still very much an issue for Pathans and in the eyes of the government of Pakistan. 17
In 1947, British rule ended in India and the new states of Pakistan and India were born. Afghanistan's former balancing role was eclipsed and the country inclined more towards the U.S.S.R. This new direction was urged by the reopening of the question of the tribal lands on Pakistan's North West Frontier; "Pushtunistan." The Afghans contended that Pushtun tribesmen should be given the choice of joining Pakistan or forming an independent country. The issue led to strained relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Afghanistan was increasingly isolated from the West, and Pakistan and India to the south were embroiled in their own geopolitical problems. The country became increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union. Within only one generation following the departure of the British, Afghanistan found itself in the middle of Great Game II. Peter Hopkirk was moved to write:
. . . little appears to have been learned from the painful lessons of the past. Had the Russians in December 1979 remembered Britain's unhappy experiences in Afghanistan in 1842, in not dissimilar circumstances, then they might not have fallen into the same terrible trap, thereby sparing some 15,000 young Russian lives, not to mention untold numbers of innocent Afghan victims. The Afghans, Moscow found too late, were an unbeatable foe. Not only had they lost none of their formidable fighting ability, especially in terrain of their own choosing, but they were quick to embrace the latest techniques of warfare. Those deadly, long-barreled jezzails, which once wrought such slaughter among the British redcoats, had as their modern counterparts the heat-seeking Stinger, which proved so lethal against Russian helicopter-gunships. 18
Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was supposed to be an application of the "Brezhnev Doctrine." Leonid Brezhnev had framed the doctrine this way:
When external and internal forces hostile to Socialism try to turn the development of a given Socialist country in the direction of restoration of the capitalist system, when a threat arises to the cause of Socialism in any country--a threat to the security of the socialist commonwealth as a whole--this is no longer merely a problem for that country's people, but a common problem, the concern of all Socialist Parties. 19
During December 1979, there was new Soviet activity at a major airbase northeast of Kabul called Bagram, and a coinciding logistical buildup on the Soviet side of the Amu Darya River. 20 Then, on December 25, Soviet troop movements accelerated into a major airlift transporting 5,000 soldiers into Kabul. Two days later, having secured the city, Soviet forces attacked the stronghold to which Amin had retreated. By day's end, fighting had ceased, and Kabul radio broadcast a surprise announcement by Babrak Karmal taped in Soviet Central Asia. He proclaimed an end to "the bloody apparatus of Hafizallah Amin and his minions, these agents of American imperialism" and appealed for Soviet aid. Summarily executed, Amin became the third Afghan president to die in twenty months.
Afghanistan's new president, the Parchami leader Babarak Karmal, had last been seen in Prague in September 1978 when Taraki fired him from office. In fact, Karmal did not surface in Kabul until January 1, 1980, by which time Amin was dead. Kabul was now under Soviet control and four Soviet divisions had crossed the Amu Darya River to begin garrisoning the major Afghan towns.
At first Karmal sought to moderate the internal Afghan conflict. He pledged amnesty for political prisoners; respect for Islam, its clergy and traditions; and the inclusion of the two PDPA factions to create a more benign, broad-based "second phase" of the Saur Revolution. He met with little success. Meanwhile, resistance to the Soviet presence and its regime erupted in Kabul and spread to other cities.
Within a month of intervening, Red Army forces rose to 85,000--and shortly thereafter reached an initial plateau of 105,000. Soviet strategy was first aimed at securing main cities, logistical points, and roads. The regular Afghan Army was strengthened. But the Soviet presence served only to embolden organized resistance now called the "Mujahadin." Desertions and defections from the Afghan Army accelerated. Mujahadin forces audaciously ambushed Soviet convoys and government bases, receding into the Afghan hills when the Red Army tried to respond. In areas where the Mujahadin had shown success, the Soviet response was total war.
As war spread across the countryside enormous numbers of Afghan families fled to Pakistan and Iran, or into Kabul. Kabul had a population of 600,000 when the occupation began, but tripled in size with the flow of internally displaced refugees. Some 650,000 Afghan Shiites crossed into Iran. The more populous Sunnis fled to Pakistan in numbers exceeding 2.8 million by 1983. Some settled in Baluchistan Province, while most located in a sprawling archipelago of mud-brick and tent camps on the Northwest Frontier Province. Through dislocation and outright flight, nearly five million of a population of thirteen million, became refugees. One million became internally displaced.
For the Afghan people, struggle against the Soviets acquired a religious dimension. To die in what was now a Holy War or jihad, became a path to immortality. Mujahadin resistance organizations and affiliated political parties mushroomed. By mid-1980, a general pattern had emerged--the Resistance controlled 80 percent of the country and the Karmal Regime backed by the Soviet Army held the cities. Operationally, the Red Army could move as it wished, but no non-urban territory was held for long. 21
In the mid-1980s, beyond driving Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the Reagan Administration's Afghan policy goals were unspecified. Little official attention was given to long range implications; to the question "What next?" By 1988, it was clear Washington was leaving key policy decisions to Zia ul-Haq's government in Pakistan. In July 1988, Ahmed Shah, then President of the Afghan Interim Government told this author: "Our hope is that America will not wash its hands of Afghanistan." 22 But it was already becoming clear to moderate Afghans that Washington was losing interest and consequently giving little thought to which resistance organizations were benefiting from the massive inflow of arms. Those decisions were left to Pakistani intelligence.
At the apex of the Soviet-Afghan war at least 150,000 Red Army troops occupied Afghanistan with some analysts placing the figure closer to 200,000. Initially, aerial bombardment with combined Soviet-Afghan ground operations were used against the growing Afghan resistance. Helicopter gunships became the Soviet military's workhorse. They ferreted out mountain-based guerrillas and were increasingly used against villages and refugee caravans. As the war progressed, civilians became targets of attacks. Crops were burned, fields were carpeted with anti-personnel mines, entire villages razed, and non-combatants killed. Troops in a position to distinguish between Mujahadin and civilians, were not merely failing to identify civilians, but directly attacking women and children. 23 Human rights organizations concluded three patterns had emerged in which groups of civilians were the object of attack. The first was directed to the depopulation of areas of strategic value. The second was the killing of individual civilians as part of a broader attack on the civilian population of a village. The third pattern was that of attacks on individual civilians, such as village elders or religious leaders, usually as a form of punishment or warning. 24
Heavy bombardment of the Pakistani, Iranian, and Soviet border regions was intended to protect frontiers from Mujahadin infiltration. It also prevented injured civilians from seeking refuge outside Afghanistan. One village in Kunduz Province was decimated by bombardment in order to clear the area and establish a Soviet post. The village was bombed and then surrounded at night by a mixed force consisting principally of Soviet troops who attacked the next day. Many persons were killed in the bombardment and more were killed in the land-based attack. The crops were burned, livestock killed, and most of the houses destroyed. 25 Such incidents were repeated until they became a pattern. A two kilometer-wide band was cleared along the northern Salang Highway to protect the movement of troops and equipment from the Soviet Union to Kabul. The attacks were designed to clear the areas of all persons, including civilians. 26
Frequently, individual civilians were chosen for execution by Soviet troops. In certain circumstances, persons were killed in retaliation for a nearby Mujahadin operation, especially if there were Soviet casualties or relation to a suspected Mujahadin. Just as frequently, village elders or religious leaders were rounded up and killed. In most cases these persons were shot. But there were reported cases of village leaders being burned alive. 27
Extreme and pervasive assaults upon human dignity traumatized Afghan society. Every Afghan either knew or was related to someone whose human rights had been deprived and someone who was a refugee. The very idea of human rights in the Western sense was new to Afghans, until their rights had been deprived. But the concept was not totally foreign as Afghans knew about human dignity. Traditional Afghan culture had many mechanisms for the protection of human dignity. But these mechanisms were diluted by the violence inflicted during the Soviet period, and nearly deleted owing to the violence and chaos of the post-Soviet period. This, and not Western covert operations alone, is the origin of late twentieth-century blowback.
Years after the Soviet Army had left, Afghans were experiencing fighting of unprecedented intensity. The flames of many dirty little hot wars of the Cold War had been doused, but in Afghanistan there was a new magnitude of war producing new refugees. On March 18, 1992, then President Najibullah announced that he would transfer all executive powers to an interim government organized with the assistance of the United Nations. Within a month of his announcement Najibullah was overthrown by a coalition of his own generals and Mujahadin military commanders.
In December 1992, Burhanuddin Rabbani was re-elected to an eighteen-month term as interim president of Afghanistan. Yunis Khalis and Pir Syed Ahmed, two rival contenders, dropped out of the race amidst allegations that Rabbani had bribed delegates to vote for him. In January and February 1993, Hezb-i-Islami and other factions opposed to Rabbani's Kabul-based government renewed efforts to gain control. In six weeks of fighting more than 1000 people were killed, mostly civilians. In February, the United Nations withdrew non-Afghan staff from Eastern Afghanistan after four U.N. staff members were killed when their vehicle was ambushed near Jalalabad.
In March 1993, eight rival Afghan military factions signed a peace agreement. Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the fundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami forces, agreed to share power in Kabul for an eighteen month period. By May 1993, rival factions had renewed fighting for control of Kabul despite the cease-fire. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported that 700 people were killed and 500 injured in six days. On May 20, 1993, Defense Minister Ahmed Shah Massood agreed to turn the Ministry over to a multifaction commission in yet another cease-fire agreement. In June 1993, Hekmatyar was sworn in as Prime Minister and eleven other cabinet members were inaugurated.
But for Kabul, the arrival of the Mujahadin meant more damage and more casualties. By mid-summer 1993, entire streets had been completely destroyed and once active residential areas were transformed into ghost towns. Many houses, offices, shops and schools had been abandoned with only a single well-armed family member or caretaker remaining. 28 Kabul was receiving the brunt of the new war.
A new armed conflict began when the Mujahadin victoriously reached Kabul. Before long, the Afghan capital was beleaguered by factional fighting accompanied by indiscriminate shelling, rocketing and ruthless street combat. According to international relief workers and journalists, during the first eighteen months of "liberation" from the communists, civilian casualties in Kabul alone rose to nearly 75,000 including 12,000 dead. 29 The President of Afghanistan lived in Kabul while the Prime Minister refused to enter the capital until he was assured of appropriate security conditions.
For much of this period, the battle lines were largely restricted to the southern and southwestern areas of Kabul. 30 But the shelling spread and increasingly affected most residential districts including hospitals, schools, and public places such as bazaars and mosques.
New alliances formed and power interests shifted. As one senior diplomat noted: "The latest round of fighting is of a completely different order of magnitude." 31 During the early 1990's, another called the situation "chaotic and disintegrating rapidly." 32
In January 1994, Kabul was being shelled with thunderous ferocity. Thousands were fleeing Kabul for the city of Jalalabad and the North West Frontier of Pakistan. Fighting soon engulfed the city. By early February, the ICRC estimated at least 10,000 injured and over 800 dead. An ICRC official indicated the figures were probably far higher as many casualties were unreported. 33
The fighting soon spread beyond Kabul. In early 1994, President Rabbani was receiving military support from the cities of Khost, Paktya, Kandahar and other non-Tajik areas. Ethnic tensions emerged in Mazar-e-Sharif, where Afghan Uzbeks were implicated in the deliberate killing of Tajik women and children. 34 Afghans and relief organizations feared that fighting would spread further. Many thought Afghanistan would break into provinces and regions along ethnic lines.
That Afghan political factions frequently change allegiances is not a historical anomaly. But when this new order of warfare erupted in January 1994, a radical change in alliances occurred. Resistance politician Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pushtun Islamic extremist, allied himself with General Abdul Rashid Dostam, an ethnic Uzbek and former communist militia chief from the north. Their foe was President Burnahudin Rabbani and his government forces. Rabbani was a Tajik. Rabbani's ally was the famous Panjshiri guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. Up to that point, General Dostam had been a firm supporter of the Kabul government.
Massoud's and Dostam's men became embroiled in bitter and brutal fighting at Kabul airport. Jamiat forces lost important ground in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Many Afghans this writer interviewed were convinced that the old ideals of the jihad had been replaced by a grab for power. 35 Kabul's Shiite Hazaras had earlier formed a loose front with Hekmatyar against the government. In the early weeks of the fighting they remained neutral. By February 1994, it was unclear where the Hazaras stood.
By mid-February 1994, the war had spread across the country. The break-down of law and order was nearly absolute. There were few remaining indices normally associated with a state. The Prime Minister and the President were engaged in pitched battles against one another's forces. Little was left of civil society. Even in the few existing pockets of relative tranquillity the situation was tense and unpredictable. Radical militant training camps emerged. As one foreign correspondent noted in February 1994: "There is no civil law, no government, no economy--only guns and drugs and anger." 36
Factions battled for control of Kabul airport. Throughout the city, there was an enormous fear of aerial bombardment. This was new to the capital. In Kabul during January 1994, there was a sudden and enormous movement of people. The UNHCR estimated the number to be as high as one million.
People fled south toward Jalalabad, and others fled north. The northern escape route was especially notorious for banditry and shake-down checkpoints. Drug-wracked kalashnikov-wielding teenagers often stopped refugees in flight, demanding their few remaining possessions.
There were regular reports of non-Afghan involvement in the new fighting. Dostam's forces reportedly captured three Algerians. Massoud's forces reported capturing Pakistanis fighting with Hekmatyar. The Pakistanis were quietly repatriated. 37
The heaviest fighting was occurring in Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz, Fariab and Ghazni. In Kabul, most refugees escaped eastward to Pul-e-Charkhi, site of the infamous prison on the outskirts of the city. They would then attempt to board buses or trucks for Jalalabad and the Pakistani border. No relief supplies were getting into Kabul. The airport was bombed regularly rendering air relief impossible. Occasional heavy snow would slow the fighting, but worsen the plight of escaping refugees. Refugees fled with few possessions, abandoning their houses to looters. No group in either of the alliances exercised much control over fighters. Thus, looting was rampant.
A refugee camp was quickly established outside Samakhel near Jalalabad on a dry, dusty, desert plateau. In a seventy-two hour period before the arrival of the first wave of internally displaced, United Nations de-miners removed 2,000 land mines and pieces of live ordnance. In early 1994, this writer interviewed refugees encamped in the Jalalabad Public Gardens, and on a harsh and dry, dusty plateau toward the Khyber Pass. U.N. de-miners spent 72 hours removing 2,000 mines and unexploded ordinance from a windy and dusty place thousands of people were calling home. Numerous armed groups under varying degrees of control were killing civilians, taking hostages, and engaging in indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets. 38
The Jalalabad Shura (council) 39 attempted to cope with the refugee problem, but was increasingly nervous about its own prospective role in the new war. In January 1994, Jalalabad was tense, a powder keg. The Shura was comprised of men of conflicting political and ethnic allegiances. The Shura came under pressure from the government of Pakistan to help insure that refugees remain in Afghanistan. With aid drying up, there was less advantage in building new refugee camps in Pakistan.
The Jalalabad Shura warned the government of Pakistan and the United Nations that refugee camps should be established with the long-term in mind; one or two years and not several months. The leadership was convinced that this new war was for the long haul, and would continue to produce internally displaced.
During the first weeks of 1994, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to the north of Kabul, to the west and to the east toward Jalalabad in an effort to reach the safety of Pakistan. Unwilling to absorb more refugees in addition to the 1.2 million still lingering in Pakistan, the Islamabad government closed its border to asylum-seekers. 40 Instead, it requested both the international agencies and the local resistance shura in Jalalabad to provide relief facilities for the new influxes on Afghan rather than Pakistani territory, reminiscent of refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion in January 1980. In less than one day, a tented city sheltering some 7,000 men, women and children from Kabul suddenly emerged from the stony ground of a bleak and windy wasteland at Sar Sahi on the road from Jalalabad to the Khyber Pass. A month later, the camp had swollen to 70,000 people. 41
In late-February 1994, families continued to reach Jalalabad at the rate of 200 a day with over 100,000 people seeking shelter in and around the city. The Jalalabad Shura warned the U.N. and the ICRC to establish camps with a view of staying 1-2 years rather than several months. While these Afghans were at least receiving food, shelter, and other humanitarian support from international humanitarian groups, the predicament was far worse among those who fled northwards or to the west of Kabul. One senior U.N. source estimated nearly one million people may have sought refuge in these areas. Food was seriously short with ICRC officials warning of impending catastrophe if relief convoys were not allowed to get through. Bombing of the Kabul airport rendered it difficult to send in air supplies. As of February 1994, the warring factions were still unable to agree on a temporary truce for humanitarian purposes although occasional heavy snowfalls caused temporary halts in the fighting. According to U.N. and ICRC estimates, an estimated 50,000 people who remained within the Afghan capital were in dire need of food. This writer interviewed a Kabuli refugee woman at Jalalabad. She told of four rockets hitting her home, killing her husband and four-year-old son. A second refugee from Kabul told of losing fifteen relatives to incoming mortar shells. He fled with his eight month old baby. The baby died during the night from the cold. A story recounted three times in this particular group of refugees described Mujahadin and militia firing from behind a bunker constructed of human corpses. There were house searches, round-ups and rapes. Glazed-eyed kalashnikov-wielding teenagers set up shake-down road blocks. A commander threw fourteen people from the roof of a mosque for praying incorrectly. 42 Many refugees, particularly those fleeing from Kabul to the north, fell victim to harassment by armed groups manning checkpoints along the road and demanding heavy levies to pass. Many were killed, robbed, beaten, and raped by armed bandits. Nevertheless, the fear of bombardment in Kabul was greater than the fear of insecurity along the road.
Refugees gave many of the same reasons for wishing to flee Afghanistan. At Kacha Gari camp, a badly wounded and scarred old man said "in Kunduz, there is no law and no security. Different commanders continuously fight one another. I lost my health and my property to the jihad. I thought there would be an Islamic government in Afghanistan where I could live in peace with my family. I only have a tent with holes made from rags. I do not have the two rupees a day to buy nan, so I am just walking around hungry." 43
Besides the lack of security and a stable government, a loss of interest in Afghanistan by the international community was now frustrating relief work. The international community had supplied approximately $5 billion per year of primarily military aid from 1989-1991, but was now failing to meet the U.N. target of $200 million for humanitarian and economic programs set in 1991. The total pledged was approximately $70 million.
During the second week of August 1994, violence again erupted on a massive scale. The ICRC issued a press statement urging respect for the civilian population. The statement announced that: "Aerial bombing raids and artillery exchanges have increased in frequency intensity since Thursday 11 August. Public places, civilian property and a number of hospitals have come under indiscriminate fire." 44 Diplomatic sources speaking on background reported that Hekmatyar had been wounded severely in the leg and that his son was killed. There was a worrisome prospect of extreme retaliation that could further plunge the country into chaos.
Many refugees, particularly those fleeing from Kabul to the north, fellThen something happened which no one had predicted; the rise of the Taliban. The Taliban, or students of God, are new players in the crazy quilt of Afghan power politics. They have been described in the press as "religious students," one Western diplomat requesting anonymity described them as a "men's bible study group." The Taliban movement arose in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan in 1994. They and their leader, Muhammad Omar, quickly grew in popularity and expanded their base from Kandahar. Rank and file Taliban were drawn from the madrassas; schools run by Mullahs, mostly in the refugee camps of Pakistan.
The ethnic power mix within the country had shifted since the departure of the Soviets. The Rabanni-Massoud axis is mostly Tajik and the Taliban are pushtun. Northern ethnic groups linked to the newly independent Central Asian states control the capital, and this has generated considerable resentment among the Pushtuns in the south and east of the country. 45 It fueled the rise of the Taliban movement.
Because Taliban fighters are mostly in their twenties and grew up in the refugee camps during the decade of Soviet control, they lack the fighting experience of the Mujahadin hardened by years of war. But by 1995, they were waging a holy war against the Mujahadin factions responsible for so much death and destruction in the country. And they were scoring remarkable successes.
In the summer of 1995, the Taliban controlled nearly half the country including the provincial capitals of Kandahar and Herat. The areas under Taliban control were relatively peaceful. The Taliban believe fervently in their goal of rescuing Afghanistan from its plunderers. And they believe, fervently, that rescuing Afghanistan will require strict interpretations of Islamic doctrines.
During the summer of 1995, the Taliban militia took control of western Afghanistan and then wrested the strategic hills overlooking the south of Kabul from the government. Securing the hills of south Kabul was not exactly a victory of military prowess, a commander on the other side decided he would rather switch than fight. Indeed, this has been a pattern in Taliban victories, government commanders and their units joining the movement either motivated by fear of the movement, or loathing of the government. In the closing hours of 1995, new peace talks moved into high gear. President Berhanuddin Rabbani made an unprecedented offer to faction leaders to travel to provincial strongholds for talks on forming a new broad-based administration. But a barrage of fourteen rockets were fired at the capital by Taliban militia encamped around Kabul. This had a distinctly dampening effect on the peace initiative. In the winter of 1996, this writer was in Peshawar, the Pathan city on the Pakistan side of the Hyber pass. Refugees from the latest phase of the Afghan war had escaped Kabul which was under a winter siege of the Taliban. But the Taliban had yet to face the hardest core government troops, the Mujahadin whose resolve had been strengthened by rocket attacks and bombing raids and who won the jihad against the Soviets. As the Taliban remained encamped on the outskirts of Kabul, they launched rocket salvos into the city daily, and government jets bombed Taliban positions in the south of the city. One Taliban rocket attack plunged into a busy market killing four children and leaving twenty-six civilians wounded. By September 1996, Taliban militia controlled nearly two-thirds of Afghanistan. Fighting with forces still loyal to President Burhannuddin Rabbani intensified. On September 15, 1996, the Associated Press reported of government jets nosediving towards Taliban-held Jalalabad and unloading payloads on the old Winter Palace and nearby buildings. The Jalalabad General Hospital was overwhelmed with civilian casualties, most of whom lay in the corridor.
49
Meanwhile in Kunar, Taliban and government representatives held a third day of peace talks. It is suspected that the Taliban have been receiving extensive assistance from Pakistani intelligence. Observers worried about blowback. D. Shah Khan writing in The News (Pakistan) noted, ". . . there is no reason to believe that the Taliban will keep its activities confined to Afghanistan only. . . . If the Taliban can manage to give credibility to madrassah power in Afghanistan, Pakistan can expect to see its own home-grown Taliban force marching to liberate the country from the clutches of "evil."
50
Analysts from Delhi to the Gulf began to worry about "madrassah power."
One modality for the containment of Afghan blowback is all but gone, the traditional culture. Revered and ancient institutional mechanisms for the management and containment of violence once existed. The central Afghan state has always been weak, 51 and the protections of human beings, what in the West we call "human rights," was achieved by cultural mechanisms widely regarded as authoritative. 52 These were important products of what anthropologists call "selection," and which are now largely decimated. This is very much at the root of the contemporary conflict, and in all probability it will be exported.
Afghanistan has largely been dominated by the Pathans or pushtuns, and Pushtun social organization 53 was rooted in a tribal value system called Pushtunwali. The central features of Pushtunwali were agnatic rivalry (Tarburwali) and a preservation of the honor of women, or Tor. Pushtunwali confined behavior to acceptable bounds. This was a system of tribal law considered largely complete, though subject to minor interpretations. 54 Where pushtunwali was violated, sharm, or dishonor, would fall upon the violator and even his entire family. If ostracized from the tribe, the individual or the family would become more than persona non grata . There would be the loss of the collective security system provided by the tribe. In a rough and hostile environment the individual or his family would be as good as dead.
Important features of pushtunwali have eroded to the point of extinction. Melmastia was hospitality to one's guests. Nanawatee, meaning "to go in," was an extension of melmastia. This supplication was honored by a demonstration of reciprocal magnanimity. Often one requested nanawatee with the Holy Qur'an in hand. It was traditionally recognized by the slaying of a goat or a cow. Nanawatee accorded sanctuary and protection. But in late twentieth century Afghanistan, suspicions run high and accordingly Melmastia is less readily extended.
Nang used to be the central feature of Pushtun and Afghan life. Nang meant "honor." In those Pushtun regions whose chief social organization was dictated by nang there were no political hierarchies, and thus "nang tribesmen" were always very difficult to control or subject to any sort of political domination. But there was a time when an Afghan would choose death over dishonor. Hospitality and decency were matters of honor.
Within the tribal organization, the Mullah was normally an important landowner 55 and an interpreter of the Rawaj, or customary law. Although the Mullah's activities have always been shrouded in religion, traditionally this was merely a sham in which tribesmen participated for political expediency. But with the events of current history, the societal position of the Mullahs has been elevated beyond tradition. Religion enables the exercise of power. The activities of Mullahs now have profoundly extensive political effects.
An important organizing feature of Pushtun society was the equitable distribution of power at the center of tribal social organization. Power was diffused and distributed via the jirga. A larger jirga or national assembly on a grand scale was a loya jirga . The jirga was a free-form decision-making assembly similar to a New England town meeting. A jirga was an assembly of elders which met to decide upon specific issues based on consensus and was the principle decision-making institution in Afghanistan. The jirga adopted decisions relating to the settling of disputes, or issues relating to foreign relations with other tribes or with the central government. Jirga decisions were typically based on a combination of Pushtunwali and Islamic law. Today, the balance favors Islamic law.
One pervasive customary practice derived from the Pushtunwali was badal (revenge). Badal extended to all the kin of a victim, even the most remote. This is why blood feuds have ranged across the entire country involving whole villages and entire tribes. But there was a limitation to kin. As soon as a boy achieves manhood, normally at the age of 12, he carries a weapon and becomes skilled in its use with deadly accuracy. If the young man's father or relative or great-great-great grandfather is involved in a badal, the obligation to take up the revenge cycle falls to the young boy. Still, the practice once contained arbitrary and random violence.
Islam is woven into every aspect of Afghan life, but is now the primary discourse for political action. Jihad, a collective obligation whenever the Islamic community is subjected to attack, has long been practiced. 56 Jihad is a duty imposed to serve the common interest, not individual interest. Community members dying in Allah's path, or jihad, are promised paradise even if basic Muslim duties have not been performed. 57 As a social process component, jihad historically functioned to refocus intertribal warfare by redirecting attention external to the Muslim community. 58 Thus jihad, which encompasses religious and political objectives as an end, with organized coercion or violence as a means, has become fundamental to Afghan life.
At one time jihad for Afghans was about survival. Jihad meant struggle in the way of Allah. The term was derived from the verb jahada, meaning "exerted." It was by exerting one's power in Allah's path that the devout Muslim attains salvation. 59 Jihad was always important to Muslims as their belief system recognizes no separation between the realms of politics, religion and war. But jihad has not always meant war, as exertion in the way of Allah can include peaceful means. 60 However when war is waged by a Muslim community, it must be declared a jihad in order to be bellum justum. 61
Doctrinally and traditionally, there were four basic categories of jihad. The first was waged against apostasy (al-ridda), the second form of jihad was waged against dissension (al-baghi), the third was against secession <(al-muharibun)
In Afghanistan today, cultural selection bears little relation to pushtunwali or any other traditional system of value outcomes. In his last official report to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and to the General Assembly, U.N. Special Rapporteur Felix Ermacorra referred to Afghanistan as "a country in which the power struggle creates more of an equilibrium of anarchy than an equilibrium of people's government." 64 Afghanistan was embraced in a perpetual jihad with varying targets chosen to satisfy the perceived needs of the moment.
Traditional Afghan culture had been the glue which held fractious pieces together as a whole, approaching what external observers would describe as a state. But Afghanistan was really "the land of the Afghans." To call it a state was inevitably an exercise in ascribing to a traditional culture, Western political analysis. But the sinews of the traditional culture are at the brink of extinction.
The cultural mutation and disruptions in Afghanistan are a result of prolonged war and attendant human rights abuses. In war and its aftermath, cultural mutations are deep and pronounced. Traditional Afghan values and their patterns of practice manifested as institutions had been the foundation of Afghan civil society and governance. Pushtunwali, jirgah, and nang once ensured decency and respect for human dignity. The salvation of Afghanistan may lie in the rescue and resurgence of Afghan culture. So may the prevention of "blowback."
Following the departure of Soviet troops, conflict had been localized. However the unprecedented intensity of a new armed conflict touches nearly the entire country and is resulting in the loss of life of untold numbers of innocent civilians. Political leaders have formed new alliances in attempts to retain or acquire political power. For the civilian population, these alliances have been deadly.
During the spring of 1994, the Secretary-General sent his personal envoy, Tunisian Ambassador Mahmoud Mestiri to Afghanistan in order to meet with parties to the conflict. Upon his return to New York, the Security Council called on the international community to halt the flow of weapons to the warring parties. 65 The Resolution stated in part, "The Council deplores the continuing civil war in Afghanistan which has brought death and destruction to the people of Afghanistan and has created a threat to the stability and security of other countries in the region. The Council calls on all parties to end hostilities and embark on the process of political reconciliation, reconstruction and development." 66
Now, as during the time of the Soviets, the human dignity of Afghans is under assault. Bombing of civilians is indiscriminate and at times directly targeted. There are extreme restrictions on the freedom of association, expression, on the rights of women, and an increased environment of religious intolerance. There is still no judicial system. 67 An estimated twenty million landmines continue to cause numerous and grave injuries to the civilian population. The Afghan people continue to suffer a near absolute denial of their right to self-determination. 68
The Afghan time span delimited by the Soviet occupation left scars that so jarred the society and the culture, that the turmoil of the post-Soviet period was inevitable. In this period, "chaos" would be a paramount feature. One observer identified an increasingly likely outcome: "The fury of Hekmatyar and his disciples may accomplish what Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the armies of the Raj and the tanks and helicopter gunships of the Soviet Union could not. It may destroy Afghanistan." 69
The people of Afghanistan were the last victims of the Brezhnev Doctrine. And although the Soviet army has withdrawn, the final hot war of the Cold War is still creating victims. One victim was Mir Mirwaiz Jalil. Jalil was an Afghan BBC correspondent working tirelessly to report the tragic story to the world. He had been warned to cease his reporting for the BBC. After conducting an acrimonious interview with Hekmatyar, Jalil was dragged from his car at the outskirts of Kabul and shot twenty-two times. 70 When his body was recovered it carried more holes than flesh. The Secretary-General's Representative in Islamabad, Mr. Mousouris, stated: "When Afghanistan is trying to recapture international support needed for the reconstruction of the country, the murder of a journalist who offered impartial information about the current tragedy of his country can only be considered as perpetrated by enemies of Afghanistan." 71
The humanitarian aid is now mostly gone. Military arsenals remain in Afghanistan, stockpiled during the occupation period. These are in the hands of powerful political leaders, now warlords thanks to the old friends of the Afghans. Afghanistan is now littered with millions of land mines, and it continues to produce refugees. The government of Pakistan intermittently closes its border. Much of the world views Afghanistan as yet another internal armed conflict which they hope will go away. The result is many good Afghan people exist in an internal hell, ruled by warlords, whose weapons of oppression are the legacy of external politics. III. In a disorderly, post-Cold War world characterized by chaos, pivotal states and potential clashes among civilizations, it is tempting to shelve the war in Afghanistan as another insoluble problem. But the total break down of law and order presents ethical and strategic reasons for devoting resources to what Jean-Francois Revel called in 1985 "our Afghan blind spot." 72
First, the human rights abuses are still horrific. These include indiscriminate bombing, the targeting of civilians, torture, restrictions on the freedom of association, expression, the rights of women, an increasing environment of religious intolerance, and an abridgment of the right to self-determination. There is no applicable constitution and no rational judicial system. If the protection for human rights is a principle for action in international relations, few places on the planet have a greater claim for help than Afghanistan.
A second reason for engagement in Afghanistan is that two million Afghan lives were spent in helping the West win the Cold War. The seeds of desperation which have taken root were not sown by Afghans, but by major and bit players in the geopolitics of the superpower struggle. In part, the Cold War was "won" with the blood of Afghans, the loss of at least a generation of Afghans in refugee camps, and the continuing loss of Afghans to an estimated thirty million land mines and to power hungry war lords. Afghans continue to pay for a successful Cold War foreign policy, and for this the West bears a collective responsibility. The historical origins of contemporary Afghan conflict is largely in the policies of Afghanistan's "friends." 73
The third reason for an engaged Afghan policy has to do with "blowback." This relates to my second reason in that many effects of blowback are rooted in American foreign policy on Afghanistan. But this is fundamentally about world order. Absent a well-devised U.S. Afghan policy buttressed by regional authority and power, Afghanistan will become a springboard for the projection of ideological violence cloaked in religious symbolism. The initial impact has been upon the pivotal states of the Indian subcontinent, Persia, Central Asia and the Gulf. But the projection of violence has not been limited by immediate geography. It will be less so in the future.
Until early 1996, radical Islamic training camps flourished only intermittently. But by September 1996, with the Taliban in control of two-thirds of the country, there is much greater latitude to train non-Afghans in the only skills (and ideology) left for export. As New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner writes: "The veterans of the [Afghan] jihad have taken their war abroad to Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burma, China, Egypt, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Sudan, Tadzhikstan, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Yemen - and the United States." 74
Blowback from Afghanistan is real. It has fueled the one recent United States policy development on Afghanistan; the Central Intelligence Agency will spend $55 million dollars to repurchase the Stinger missiles it gave to Mujahadin factions during the Soviet war. As the CIA associate director for covert operations from 1982 through 1986 observed: "I understand why people are exercised. I wouldn't want one to hit the airplane I'm on." 75
With history as a guide and an eye on the future, what should policy be toward Afghanistan? It should have three objectives: (i) engagement, (ii) development, and (iii) containment. The policy should be implemented with United States leadership in a coalition of Afghan frontline states with the addition of India and Russia. Most of these states have an interest in containing the kind of fluid terrorist organizations which may emerge in Afghanistan.
The first step is engagement of the moderate Afghans and Afghan organizations largely abandoned after the Soviet withdrawal. An effort must be made to engage the Afghans respectful of their traditional operational codes--via their cultural traditions rather than through any externally imposed political structure. The second step is development. This means humanitarian assistance for human and societal health. The budget for the United Nations Operation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan (UNOCHA) must be increased, and Security Council members must place their authoritative weight behind UNOCHA.
Development must include programs to enhance the rule of law, must help Afghans devise institutions and mechanisms for the protection of human dignity, and provide technical assistance for local press and media. Further, international media reporting on events in Afghanistan must be encouraged to prevent a veil of secrecy from descending over the country. Such isolation only renders Afghanistan more attractive to those looking for a launching ground for militant ideologies and violence. The final, though related, policy objective must be containment of radical elements inside Afghanistan likely to export violence. This is a policy interest shared by many states. Achieving this goal will require sharing of intelligence resources. A multilateral security force operating in Afghanistan and in the border areas of the frontline states will be critical. This should take the shape of a powerful alliance under the authority of the United Nations.
In a January 1996 conversation with the author, Peshawar Chief of Police Massoud Shah worried about containment, although he did not use the term. He expressed concern over the numbers of Afghan war veterans roaming the bazaars of Peshawar. "They have no jobs here, the jihad is over. There are terrorists amongst these people," he said. "As for the Arab fighters, many of them adopted code names for the war and are now impossible to track." 76
When visiting the United States in April 1993, President Hozni Mubarak of Egypt called on the Clinton administration to "help clean out the thousands of veterans who still live in Pakistan." He called on the U.S. to "play a tough role, because the Afghan connection was a source of problems, and not only for the Middle East." 77 By June of that year, American law-enforcement officials were learning this as they investigated the Afghan connection to a tenement on East Eighth Street in lower Manhattan and to a housing project in Brooklyn. The residents had brought their skills acquired in the various Afghan jihads to America, to terrorize New York City and to bomb the World Trade Center. 78
History has Afghans on a road "back to the future." In keeping with Afghan history the way back will be bloody, and so will the way forward absent some strong policy intervention. The historian Fernand Braudel once noted, "it is not so much time that is the creation of our own minds, as the way we break it up." 79 But Afghans have a habit of speaking in the present when they speak of the past. There is the time of Alexander, the time of the British, the time of the Soviets, and there is the chaos of now. Afghan time is a continuing present running in both directions. And inevitably, Afghan time is measured by war--triggered by events set in motion by outsiders. When future Afghans, in the words of Braudel "break up time," they may remember the time short of the Western millennium as when Afghanistan journeyed back to the future--and then exported it. We may know it as blowback.
Notes:
Note 1: The New York Times, September 12, 1996. Back.
Note 2: See Tim Weiner, "Blowback From the Afghan Battlefield," New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1994. Back.
Note 3: "Bomb Trail Leads to Afghanistan," The Guardian, April 8, 1993. Back.
Note 4: "Egyptian Says Confession Links Iran to Bombing of Trade Center," The New York Times July 16,1996, p.1. Back.
Note 5: "Saudi Rebels Are Main Suspects in June Bombing of a U.S. Base," The New York Times, August 15, 1996, p.1. Back.
Note 6: "U.S. Jury Convicts 3 In A Conspiracy to Bomb Airliners," New York Times, September 6, 1996, p. 1. Back.
Note 7: David Kocieniewski, "An Enigmatic Personality Whose Mission was to Punish America," The New York Times, September 6, 1996, B8. Back.
Note 8: "Saudi Exile Warns More Attacks Are Planned," The New York Times, August 11, 1996. Back.
Note 9: As George McDonald Fraser's Flashman observed, Afghanistan was: "the hottest, hardest, most dangerous place in the world...There was talk of nothing but Afghanistan...and of the Kabul expedition, and most of it touched on the barbarity of the natives, and the unpleasantness of the country....The reason we had sent an expedition to Kabul, which is in the very heart of some of the worst country in the world, was that we were afraid of Russia. Afghanistan was a buffer, if you like, between India and the Turkestan territory which Russia largely influenced, and the Russians were for ever meddling in Afghan affairs, in the hope of expanding southwards and perhaps seizing India itself. So Afghanistan mattered very much to us...." G.M. Fraser, Flashman, p. 76. Back.
Note 10: Lord Robert's Speech on the "Forward Policy, " to the House of Lords, March 7, 1898. Back.
Note 11: Richard Bruce, The Forward Policy, 1904, p. 325. Back.
Note 12: Lord Robert's Speech to the House of Lords in 1898, quoted in Richard Bruce, The Forward Policy, 1904. Back.
Note 13: P. Macrory, Kabul Catastrophy (1986), p. 63. Back.
Note 14: George McDonald Fraser, Flashman, p.83. Back.
Note 15: Rudyard Kipling, "The Young British Soldier," (1892). Back.
Note 16: See Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, State Formation and Collapse in the International System, Yale University Press, for an excellent account of the flow and ebb of the Afghan polity. Back.
Note 17: For an excellent discussion of the Pushtunistan issue see H.S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, (1985), p. 20. Back.
Note 18: Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game , p. 7. Back.
Note 19: Pravda 13 November 1968, pp. 1-2. Also it is evident there was concern in the Kremlin over the possible disintegration of the Afghan state. One official remarked: "To leave the Afghan revolution without internationalist help and support would mean to condemn it to inevitable destruction and to permit an access to hostile imperialist forces to the Soviet border." In 1978, there was no shortage of what the Kremlin might have perceived as hostile forces. These could have included any organized Islamic group from Iran, Pakistan or from within Afghanistan, the United States or even China. Chaos on the Southern Soviet border, was intolerable from a military point of view. Back.
Note 20: J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation, National Defense University (1986), p. 55. Back.
Note 21: Geo-strategically, the principal effect of Soviet intervention was to rekindle a United States-Pakistani security relationship that had only a month earlier, plunged to an all-time low. In the Spring of 1979, the Carter Administration had terminated aid to the Zia Regime after evidence of a Pakistani nuclear weapons program had compounded U.S. displeasure over the execution of former President Bhutto. Then, in late November, 1979, the American Embassy in Islamabad was sacked by an angry mob incited by a false rumor, emanating from the Ayatollah Khomeini, that the United States was responsible for the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Dilatory action by Pakistani authorities gravely endangered the entire U.S. Diplomatic Mission. One month later, when Soviet aggression in Afghanistan suddenly created an urgent imperative to salvage United States-Pakistani relations, the initial steps were faltering. The first American offer, of $200 million in military aid over two years, was branded "peanuts" by President Zia, who argued that the Soviet threat required a more substantial, sustained response. A year later, the new Reagan Administration agreed, and commenced an aid program of $3.2 billion (half military, half economic) over six years, together with the sales of 40 F-16 fighter aircraft. Back.
Note 22: C. Norchi, "United States Walks Away from Afghanistan Vacuum," The Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 1, 1988. Back.
Note 23: This information was detailed in a report based upon extensive fact-finding in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, and was adopted as an official United Nations document. See, Report of the Independent Counsel on International Human Rights Concerning Violations of the Laws of War in Afghanistan, U.N. Doc. A/42/667. Members of the missions were Project Rapporteur James Busuttil; Professor Francoise Hampson of Essex University; Professor Goran Melander of Lund University; Mark Miggiani an attorney in private practice in Malta; Project Director Charles Norchi; and Professor W. Michael Reisman of Yale Law School. Back.
Note 24: See, Report of the Independent Counsel on International Human Rights Concerning Violations of the Laws of War in Afghanistan, U.N. Doc. A/42/667, 1986; Helsinki Watch and Asia Watch, To Die in Afghanistan, December 1985; Jeri Laber and Barnett Rubin, A Nation Is Dying, Northwestern University Press, 1988. Back.
Note 27: Id., and see "Report on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan," United Nations Document E/CN.4/1986/24, 17 February 1986, and other the reports of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan issued to the United Nations Human Rights Commission from March 1984 through March 1988. Back.
Note 28: Interview with Edward Girardet, Editor, Crosslines Global Report, January 1994. Back.
Note 29: Edward Girardet, "Afghanistan's Mad Dog War," in Crosslines, September 1993. Back.
Note 30: Throughout much of the 1979-89 Soviet army occupation Kabul had largely been spared the wrath of war. This was at a time when an estimated half of the country's 22,000 villages are estimated to have been severely damaged or destroyed by Soviet and Afghan government forces. At least one million Afghans are believed to have died, some put the figure at 1.5 million. Back.
Note 31: Interview with American diplomat in Islamabad, Pakistan, January 1994. Back.
Note 32: Interview with a British diplomat in Islamabad, Pakistan, January 1994. Back.
Note 33: Interview with International Committee of the Red Cross official at Jalalabad, Afghanistan, January 1994. Back. Independent
Note 34: Interviews conducted at Jalalabad, Afghanistan with refugees from Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan during January 1994. Back.
Note 35: General Dostam presumed the alliance with Gulbudin Hekmatyar would be productive. They reportedly met during the last week of December 1993 to it, although contacts had been occurring previously. By all reports, Hezb-i-Islami forces have ample ammunition and weaponry at their disposal, diminishing any possibility of burn-out or running short on ammunition as a means of curbing the fighting in the near future. Old externalities continue to play a role. U.S. support of Hekmatyar was effective. At the same time, Dostam was well-supplied by the Soviets and is now receiving support from Uzbekistan. There are also reports of renewed Arab support. Back.
Note 36: Tim Weiner, "Blowback from the Afghan Battlefield," in New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1994, p. 35. Back.
Note 37: Information concerning foreigners fighting in Afghanistan was conveyed to the author during January 1994 by Afghan Mujahadin officials in Jalalabad and Peshawar. Pakistanis were actively involved with Hekmatyar. Whether these were military or civilian fundamentalists was unconfirmed. Back.
Note 38: Theoretically they are all bound by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. These groups frequently receive their weapons from international networks such as the arms market, drug trade, international Islamic organizations and renegade intelligence officers. Back.
Note 39: "Shura" is an Arabic word meaning council. Originally Shuras were councils of religious leaders. During the Soviet occupation period, with increased Arab influence in Afghanistan, there were more Shuras. These Shuras were councils of powerful political leaders, operating in temporary alliance for a fixed purpose. Certain of these Shuras became governing bodies. Back.
Note 40: People seeking to cross an international border who are unable to avail themselves of the protection of the government of their state of origin, might be characterized as "displaced persons," "asylum seekers," "aliens," "refugees," and so on, a technique which allows national elites discretion in treatment. The class characterized as "refugees" benefit from certain standards of treatment; temporary refuge, material assistance and voluntary repatriation. Refugees also benefit from the principle of non-refoulement. Simply, non-refoulement is a long standing principle of international law that no refugee is to be returned to a country in which he or she will face persecution or danger to life or freedom. This is an obligation incumbent upon states, and so long as the Pakistan-Afghan border remains closed, the principle is breached. Back.
Note 41: A feature of this new conflict was the proliferation of new, ad hoc detention centers administered by senior Mujahadin and former communist government officials including KHAD (former regime secret police) agents. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was not allowed access. The Hezb-i-Wahdat party had detained many people. Many prisoners were held in horrible overcrowded conditions in transport containers. On average there were 25 people per container. Sexual abuses of males and females was widely reported. Young men and boy prisoners were raped by soldiers. People were allowed out for five minutes a day to empty plastic bags they kept in the containers for toilet purposes. Hekmatyar reportedly held over 1000 prisoners in the first half of 1994. Back.
Note 42: Those fleeing the new phase of armed conflict in Afghanistan have a well-founded fear of persecution, within the meaning of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 28 July 1951. The repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan dramatically decreased in 1993. But with the new war, there has been a reverse movement, until the government of Pakistan closed the border at Torkham. This is contrary to the purpose and spirit of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Along with tens of thousands of refugees, this author was blocked at the Khyber Pass border when the Government of Pakistan decided to seal it. There were sixty-five truckloads of desperate, hungry and shell-shocked Afghans, technically termed "displaced persons." In the panicked rush for the border gate a little girl's ribs were crushed, a Western relief worker was bashed with the butt end of a rifle, and thousands of human beings were stranded without food, water or shelter. Three babies were born in the dirt at the side of the road. Closing the border gates conveyed that the war was no longer international. It was internal, a purely Afghan matter. Back.
Note 43: Interview with refugee at Samarkhel Camp, Jalabad, Afghanistan, January 12, 1994. Other refugees interviewed were Sawab Gul, whose house was bombed by government planes on 5 January. He blamed Massoud for the destruction. His sister and daughter were killed. He saw bodies being piled up to use as defense walls by Dostam and Hekmatyar fighters. Roshan Gul from Malalai Lycee in Karte Parwan escaped from her house to for fear of being raped by Dostam/Hekmatyar people. On 4 January, three people had entered her house and took a young girl who was visiting. She asserted there were hundreds of rapes by all groups. Nawabad (female) left her house to get tea on 5 January when three rockets struck. Six family members were killed. She said the victims were unrecognizable. She was extremely distraught when interviewed. Back.
Note 44: Press Release No. 1783, International Committee of the Red Cross, 16 August 1994. Back.
Note 45: Also there is now a struggle between Afghanistan's Shi'ia minority and certain Arab-supported groups which are virulently anti-Shi'ia. The Shi'ia, who make up about 15% of the population, control about a quarter of the capital city. Opposing them are other armed urban groups that belong to a radical Sunni movement; these two groups have skirmished repeatedly in the city. In these clashes, hundreds of people have been killed, taken hostage, and tortured on the basis of their ethnic identity. Back.
Note 46: Rahimullah Yusufzai, "Taliban enforce Islamic justice," The News (Pakistan) March 1, 1995. Mr. Yusufzai visited the three men in a local hospital following the amputations and described them as "looking depressed." Back.
Note 49: "Afghans Bomb city to Slow a Rebel Assault," The New York Times, September 16, 1996, p. A 4. Back.
Note 50: Shah Khan, The News, (Pakistan) 22 February 1995. Back.
Note 51: See two books by Barnett Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan,and The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, both 1995 Yale University Press. Back.
Note 52: Among the finest ethnographic studies of Afghanistan is Afghanistan by the late Louis Dupree. Back.
Note 53: For an excellent anthropological account, see A.S. Ahmed, Pukhtun Economy and Society: Traditional Structure and Economic Development in a Tribal Society (1980). Back.
Note 54: G.H. Vafai, Afghanistan: A Country Law Study (1988). Back.
Note 55: Land was, and still is, essential to the survival and the status of tribesmen. Typically half the land occupied by a particular tribe or kelh was left for common grazing. What remained became divided equally among subsections of the tribe. Each portion is then set aside for common grazing with the remainder divided equally, until the individual tribal family head received a portion. This portion of land was called a daftar or share. Thereafter the family head was known as a Daftari or shareholder. This was important because one's right to participate equally in tribal affairs was dependent upon his status as a Daftari. However, primogeniture was not practiced. All land was continually subdivided among sons who inherited equally. There were, and still are, tribal dependent classes called Hamsayasi, translated roughly as "one who shares the same shade," these are individuals who have been dispossessed for one reason or another and typically have been non-Pushtuns. Land rights and quarrels, or disputes involving land claims, were resolved through the customary practices collectively known as Pushtunwali, but at times resulted in blood feuds. In the past many feuds, conflicts, and full-blown tribal wars, originated over disputes involving land. Back.
Note 56: Jihad has helped keep Afghanistan from coming under the total sway of non-believers. Afghanistan has experienced numerous jihads. Jihad played an important role in mobilizing the Afghan people against the military intervention of the British in 1838-1842 and again later in 1878-1880. The Afghan leader Abdur Rahman used jihad to consolidate the power of the central government over the nomadic tribes and chiefs. Into the turn of the early twentieth century, jihad was used by Afghan leaders against the advances of the Russian czars in the North and British India from the South. In 1919, Amir Amanullah Khan declared jihad against the British in the pursuit of Afghan independence. There was the great jihad against centralized rule in Kabul stemming from the land reforms of the mid- to late- 1970s and which coalesced and grew in the face of the Soviet invasion of 1979. Back.
Note 59: From the Koran: "O ye who believe! Shall I guide you to a gainful trade which will save you from painful punishment? Believe in Allah and His apostle and carry on warfare (jihad) in the path of Allah with your possessions and your persons... He will forgive your sins and will place you in the Gardens beneath which the streams flow..." Koran LXI, 10-13. Back.
Note 60: Majid Khadduri writes that Islamic jurists concluded that jihad obligations can be concluded by heart, tongue, hands or sword. The first is personal combat with the devil to escape temptation and evil. This was regarded by the prophet as the greater jihad. The second and third have to do with supporting right versus wrong. The fourth is war, and requires fighting non-believers and enemies of the faith. War and Peace in the Law of Islam (1955), p. 57. Back.
Note 62: In Shi'ism, as contrasted with Sunnism, a Muslim who disobeys the Imam is liable to punishment by jihad. Thus there is a particular link between jihad and the doctrine of walaya, or allegiance to the Imam. See A. Querry, Receuil de lois concernant les Musulmans Schyites vol. I (1881). Back.
Note 64: ECOSOC (Commission on Human Rights) E/CN.4/1994/53, 14 February 1994, p. 16. Back.
Note 65: Security Council Resolution 5890, 11 August 1994. Back.
Note 67: Most cases and controversies are reportedly decided according to the political interests of commanders or ulama. The Shari'a law is not always applied. Back.
Note 68: Afghanistan is still party to important international human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as well as the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. However, no governmental or administrative authority exists to ensure the protection of human rights enshrined in any international instrument. There is still no applicable Constitution, and none of the relevant Afghan political accords has been implemented. Back.
Note 69: Tim Weiner, "Blowback," New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1994, p. 55. Back.
Note 70: The News (Pakistan), 5 August 1994. The Nation, (Pakistan) 4 August 1994. Back.
Note 71: Press Release, United Nations Office of the Secretary General in Afghanistan and Pakistan (OSGAP), 31 July 1994. Back.
Note 72: Jean-Francois Revel, "L'ignorance voluntaire," L'Express, September 1985. Back.
Note 73: On March 21, 1988, Afghanistan Day, President Ronald Reagan stated: "Our commitment to the freedom of the Afghan people will not end should the Soviets withdraw. We will join other nations and international organizations to help the Afghans rebuild their country and their institutions..." Many Afghans recall those words and similar sentiments, with bitterness. Back.
Note 74:Tim Weiner, "Blowback from the Afghan Battlefield," New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1994, p.53. Back.
Note 75: The New York Times, July 24, 1993, p.1. Back.
Note 76: Interview with Massoud Shah, Peshawar Chief of Police, January 1996, Peshawar, Pakistan. Back.
Note 77: "Bomb Trail Leads to Afghanistan," The Guardian, April 8, 1993. Back.
Note 78: "Afghan War's Web Encircles a Militant Islamic Movement," The New York Times, June 26, 1993. Back.
Note 79: Fernand Braudel, On History, 1980 University of Chicago Press, p 48. Back.
