In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

Even Soviet assessments were bleak. According to a Top Secret report to the Politburo, political and economic conditions in Afghanistan were spiraling out of control: “The chief question on which depends the continuing evolution of the situation boils down to this: will the government be able to maintain Kabul and other large cities in the country, though above all the capital?”⁶

Unfortunately, the answer was no. Since Afghan state authority was too weak to provide order and deliver services, the objectives of opposition groups came to resemble those of competitive state-builders. Each mujahideen leader aspired to build an army and a financial apparatus capable of supporting it. The relative success of each group depended upon its access to resources and skills in organization and leadership.⁷ Rival ethnic and political interests splintered the anti-Soviet mujahideen coalition into competing factions, and fighting soon broke out. As a result, President Najibullah was able to cling to power for a further three years after the Soviet withdrawal. Though it held Kabul, the Najibullah government was unable to overcome its most significant challenge: to expand its reach into rural areas without the support of Soviet troops. Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin wrote, “The loss of Soviet military support, along with increased availability of arms for the resistance, led the state to lose autonomy from society in one area after another. Society, however, proved unable to organize itself to provide an alternative form of state.”⁸ The Soviets continued to provide assistance, and in the six months following the Soviet withdrawal, they flew nearly 4,000 planeloads of weapons and supplies into Afghanistan.⁹

Khalilzad, who began working at RAND in 1989, wrote a provocative paper titled Prospects for the Afghan Interim Government. The U.S. State Department had initiated and supported the report, for which Khalilzad interviewed such key Afghan figures as Sibghatullah Mujadiddi, Yunus Khalis, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Muhammad Zahir Shah. His conclusions were bleak. Despite the creation of an Afghan interim government (AIG), he argued, “its prospects are not good. It has failed to achieve its objective, and its relative importance, never great, has declined.” In addition, Khalilzad pointed out that the personal rivalries among these commanders created an untenable situation: “Instead of developing greater cohesion among the mujahedin, the AIG has intensified the political power struggle among noncommunist Afghans and therefore has had a negative effect on the struggle between the mujahedin and the regime.”¹⁰

In January 1992, Abdul Rashid Dostum turned against the disintegrating Afghan government, which had previously supplied him with arms. Born to a poor Uzbek family in Khvajeh Do Kuh in the northern Afghan province of Jowzjan, Dostum had a distinctive look, with short-cropped hair, bushy eyebrows, and a thick mustache. In 1970, he began to work in a state-owned gas refinery. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, he supported the Soviet-backed Najibullah government and led the Afghan Army’s 53rd Infantry Division against mujahideen forces. By the mid- 1980s, Dostum commanded a 20,000-strong militia controlling the northern provinces of Afghanistan. His followers gave him the title of pasha, an honor given to the region’s ancient kings. Some thought he had ambitions to emerge as the new ruler of Afghanistan, and one Western diplomat mused, “He regarded himself as a new Tamerlane.”¹¹

In April 1992, Dostum and his forces, who had deserted the Afghan Communists, took the city of Mazar-e- Sharif with assistance from Ahmed Shah Massoud. When Democratic Republic of Afghanistan troops in Herat and Kandahar began to falter, the mujahideen closed in on Kabul. Massoud and Dostum (from the north) and Hekmatyar (from the south) converged on the capital. The Soviet Union and the United States had cut off all assistance several months earlier, and Najibullah resigned in April 1992. Sibghatullah Mujadiddi, leader of the Afghanistan National Liberation Front, reached an agreement with the mujahideen forces in Pakistan and took power. After a two-month term, Mujadiddi transferred power to Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Son of the Water Carrier

There had been only two recent periods in Afghan history when the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, did not rule. The first was in 1929, when a Tajik, Habibullah Kalakani, seized power for several months. Some Pashtuns derisively referred to him as Bacha-ye Saqqow, which means “Son of the Water Carrier,” since his father supposedly had carried water in the Afghan Army.

The second began in 1992, when Burhanuddin Rabbani, also a Tajik, became president of Afghanistan. A wiry man with a flowing white beard, turban, and a soft impassive voice, Rabbani was more of a religious figure than a politician. He was born in 1940 in Badakhshan Province in northern Afghanistan, home to the mammoth Marco Polo sheep that Ronald Neumann tracked in 1967. After finishing school, he went to Darul-uloom-e-Sharia, a religious school in Kabul, then to Kabul University to study Islamic law and theology. In 1966, he moved to Cairo to attend Al-Azhar University, where Abdullah Azzam, the jihadi leader and onetime mentor of Osama bin Laden, had attended. In 1968, when Rabbani returned to Afghanistan, the high council of Jamiat-e-Islami (Islamic Society) asked him to organize university students. Considering his training, then, it was no surprise that Rabbani’s government imposed severe restrictions on women and sought to exclude them from public life.

When Rabbani took over, pandemonium ensued. Disputes erupted over the division of government posts, and fighting flared. Pashtun leaders resented the handover of power to other ethnic groups, especially Tajiks and Uzbeks.¹² The United Nations tried—and eventually failed—to broker a political settlement.¹³ Afghan commanders controlled fiefdoms, and each was supported by a neighboring country, such as Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and India.

Rabbani’s presidency symbolized northern control of the capital, since he was a Tajik. And it prompted Hekmatyar, a Ghilzai Pashtun, to unleash vicious bombardments on Kabul from the south. According to one of his commanders, “We know that non-military people will be killed today; if they are good Muslims, God will reward them as martyred and send them to heaven…. if they are bad Muslims, God is punishing them at the hands of his true believers.”¹⁴ Human Rights Watch reported that Hekmatyar’s bombardment “killed at least 2,000, most of them civilians.” Hundreds of thousands fled the city and remained in makeshift camps along roads leading to Pakistan. ¹⁵ Street battles broke out in Kabul between the forces of Hekmatyar, who had Pakistani backing, and those allied with Ahmed Shah Massoud. But Hekmatyar was ultimately too weak to seize and hold Kabul. In 1995, the State Department issued an important cable on the deteriorating security situation, “Discussing Afghan Policy with the Pakistanis.” The document explained, “The past year has seen several dramatic reversals of fortune for the armed factions in Afghanistan as well as concurrent changes or hardening of the Afghan policies of Russia, India and, not least, Pakistan.” The effect of this meddling was to lessen the prospects for success of the United Nations mediation process, increase the likelihood of internecine fighting, and continue the agony of the Afghan people.¹⁶

Interference from Neighbors

There were clear battle lines among neighboring countries. Iran, India, and Russia supported the Rabbani government and northern commanders such as Massoud. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported Pashtun opposition groups such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami. Iran, which regarded Pashtun commanders as Sunni fundamentalist and anti-Iranian, favored the northern commanders and the Rabbani government.¹⁷ A State Department cable found that “the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in February 1989 and fall of the communist regime in Kabul in April 1992, set the stage for a more or less open competition for influence in Afghanistan between Pakistan and Iran.”¹⁸

Other U.S. government reports explicitly described Iranian funding for northern groups such as Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Jamiat-e-Islami. One said, “Jamiat was receiving large amounts of cash and military supplies, mostly from Iranian government sources. The funds and supplies reportedly come from Iran to points in Tajikistan (Kulyab Airbase, for example), where they are picked up by Jamiat helicopters and ferried to the Panjshir Valley and other points.”¹⁹ The report revealed that officials from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), as well as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), were stationed with Massoud in the Panjshir Valley, where they helped unload and distribute the supplies.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, fourteen of the fifteen Soviet republics had become independent states. The newly formed Russian Federation provided what little assistance it could to Rabbani and Massoud.²⁰ U.S. intelligence thought Russia was concerned about the “spillover of Islamic militancy into Central Asia.”²¹ Consequently, Russia backed northern commanders in an effort to protect its southern flank. Following conversations with Russian government officials, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel reported that while Moscow was publicly committed to the UN mediation process, it was more interested in keeping Rabbani in power. “From Washington’s perspective,” the 1995 cable said, “Moscow appears more committed to keeping Rabbani in Kabul and, necessarily, less committed to a UN brokered transfer of