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

power.”²²

Indian support for Rabbani and Massoud was primarily motivated by a desire for balance against Pakistan. The 1995 cable was blunt: as “has been the case since Indian independence, New Delhi’s primary foreign policy objective in Afghanistan is to counter Pakistan.” U.S. intelligence understood that India’s assistance to northern commanders would likely trigger an increase in Pakistani aid to the rival Pashtun groups.²³

In the face of such entrenched resistance, Pakistan adopted an increasingly anti-Rabbani, anti-Indian, anti- Russian, and anti-Iranian stance. Even during the Clinton years, the United States understood that the Pakistan government “ha[d] contacts with all the major opponents of Rabbani and Massood and has encouraged cooperation among them.”²⁴ The main Pakistani message, it concluded, was to unite opposition against the Kabul regime. Another State Department memo characterized the Pakistan government as “following a ‘Rabbani must go at any price’ policy.” A major motivation, it continued, was “Pakistan’s fear of an emerging “Tehran-Moscow-New Delhi axis’ supporting Kabul.”²⁵ In his 1991 RAND paper, Zalmay Khalilzad had interviewed senior Pakistan officials, including Lieutenant General (retired) Shamsur Rehman Kallue, head of the ISI, and General Assad Durrani, head of Army Intelligence. They told him that the ISI continued to subcontract directly with key commanders, such as Hekmatyar, “for specific military operations, allowing Pakistan to increase its direct control over military operations…. This control remained within ISI.”²⁶

Saudi Arabia also provided assistance to the Pashtun groups. “The Saudis supported the Sunnis against the Shia,” recalled Robert Oakley, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. “They continued to push the Wahhabi version of Islam into Afghanistan and Pakistan, and built madrassas [religious schools] and mosques in places like Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North West Frontier Province. As Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, used to tell me, ‘We are simply doing Allah’s work.’” ²⁷

Waning U.S. Interest

The official U.S. position was to back UN mediation efforts, but the Clinton administration had generally lost interest in Afghanistan. The Cold War had ended, and U.S. officials saw little geostrategic value in Afghanistan; it had become a backwater of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin had agreed to end arms shipments to the Afghan government and rebel groups by January 1, 1992, and the CIA’s legal authority to conduct covert action in Afghanistan had effectively been terminated.

Some U.S. policymakers, such as Peter Tomsen, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, frantically tried to keep U.S. assistance alive. In a classified cable, he wrote that “U.S. perseverance in maintaining our already established position in Afghanistan—at little cost—could significantly contribute to the favorable moderate outcome, which would: sideline the extremists, maintain a friendship with a strategically located friendly country, help us accomplish our other objectives in Afghanistan and the broader Central Asian region.” And he prophetically warned: “We are in danger of throwing away the assets we have built up in Afghanistan over the last 10 years, at great expense.”²⁸ But Tomsen’s effort failed. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which had been officially closed since January 1989, would not be reopened until December 2001.

The U.S. interest in neighboring Pakistan also waned with the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union. To make matters worse, growing Pakistani efforts to build a nuclear weapon —a process monitored by the CIA—triggered an American law known as the Pressler Amendment. Named after Larry Pressler, a deft Republican senator from South Dakota, it banned the sale or transfer of military equipment and technology to Pakistan unless the U.S. president could annually certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device. In October 1990, President George H. W. Bush was unable to issue this certification. As Robert Oakley recalled, “I had the unfortunate pleasure of handing President Bush’s letter to the Pakistanis.” The result, Oakley believed, was devastating: “The Pakistan military accused us of betraying them and leaving them defenseless against the Indians. And we lost any possibility of working with Pakistan in Afghanistan, even if we wanted to.”²⁹ The United States declined to be a major player in the region.

Through the mid-1990s, Afghanistan remained under the control of various warlord commanders. In the north, the militias of Sayyid Mansur Nadiri and Abdul Rashid Dostum controlled vital roads and economic facilities. The Afghan government in Kabul did not have enough loyal troops or party members to defeat them. Nadiri’s forces dominated the area north of the Salang Tunnel, and Dostum’s forces guarded the natural-gas fields and the roads along the Uzbek steppe around Mazar-e-Sharif. Ismail Khan controlled the western provinces around Herat, and the areas to the south and east of Kabul were in the hands of mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar. The eastern border with Pakistan was held by a council of mujahideen, and the south was split among scores of mujahideen and bandits who used their control of the roads to extort money from the cross-border trade with Pakistan.

In 1992, a collection of mujahideen groups led by Burhanuddin Rabbani overthrew Afghan President Muhammad Najibullah. Shortly afterward, Beirut-style street fighting erupted in the city, especially between the Pashtun Hezb-i-Islami and the Tajik Jamiat-e-Islami. Kabul, which was left virtually untouched under Soviet occupation, was savagely bombarded with rockets, mortars, and artillery by Hekmatyar. Entire neighborhoods, including mosques and government buildings, were destroyed, reducing Kabul to shambles. In Kandahar, fighting among mujahideen groups resulted in the destruction of much of the traditional power structures. In the rural areas, competition among warlords, drug lords, and criminal groups triggered a state of emerging anarchy as the tribal leadership system began to unravel.

In 1993 and 1994, the fighting continued around Kabul and throughout the rest of Afghanistan, and a vagabond government in Kabul shifted among surviving buildings. At one point during the heaviest fighting, the government operated from Charikar, the capital of Parwan Province in northern Afghanistan, roughly forty miles from Kabul. On January 1, 1994, Hekmatyar, Dostum, and Abdul Ali Mazari launched one of the most devastating assaults against Kabul to date. Their attack took several thousand lives and reduced Kabul’s population—which had numbered more than two million late in the Soviet War—to under 500,000.³⁰ During the first week, government units lost ground in both southwestern and southeastern Kabul, but they soon regained most of their positions. In June, Massoud led an offensive that drove Hekmatyar’s rocket units off two strategic hills.

As the fighting settled into a stalemate, several peace initiatives were attempted. The United Nations renewed its peacemaking role in April 1994. Ismail Khan hosted a conference in July 1994 that pushed for a transition to a new government, but Hekmatyar, Dostum, Mazari, and other commanders blocked the move. Iran and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) hosted a poorly attended peace conference in Tehran in November. On December 28,1994, Rabbani’s presidential term lapsed. But with no resolution of conflict and no consensus reached on a mechanism for transferring authority, he kept the office by default, pending a new political settlement engineered by the United Nations.³¹

The View from Afar

By the mid-1990s, Afghanistan was in tatters. Viewed from afar, the reports were troubling. In 1994, Ronald Neumann watched the civil war unfold from Algeria, where he had just been named U.S. ambassador. “The city of Kabul, which I had visited and where my father had been ambassador, was reduced to rubble,” he told me. The city no longer had the splendor of the “compact and handsome” city described in the nineteenth century by Mountstuart Elphinstone, a Scottish statesman and historian:

The abundance and arrangement of its bazaars have been already a theme of praise to a European traveller. The city is divided by the stream which bears its name, and is surrounded, particularly on the north and west, by numerous gardens and groves of fruit trees…. The charms of the climate and scenery of Caubul have been celebrated by many Persian and Indian writers. The beauty and abundance of its flowers are proverbial, and its fruits are transported to the remotest parts of India.³²

As Kabul crumbled during the fighting, Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, became perturbed at the waning U.S. interest in the region. “America has not helped Afghans and our friends in the region make the right decisions,” Khalilzad wrote in a scathing 1996 opinion piece in the Washington Post. “After the fall of the Soviet Union we stopped paying attention. This was a bad decision. Instability and war in Afghanistan provided fertile ground for terrorist groups to train and hide,” he noted cryptically. And he concluded by arguing that, “given the sacrifices made by the Afghans in the Cold War’s final struggle, we had a moral obligation to assist them in achieving peace. We did not.”³³ The sheer chaos in Afghanistan provided a window of opportunity for a new force to emerge, and a group of young religious zealots from southern Afghanistan seized the moment.