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

anti-Soviet jihad.

The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent jihad against Soviet forces, was critical to the further radicalization of Deobandi and other militant groups. First, the jihad provided a training ground for young militants. Second, Pakistan’s ISI supervised and assisted in the development of these movements to pursue its regional policies. From the hundreds of resistance groups that sprang up, the ISI recognized approximately half a dozen and established offices for them to channel covert support. Although most had a strong religious ethos, the groups were organized primarily along ethnic and tribal lines. Significantly, three of the seven were led by Ghilzai Pashtuns and none by their rivals, the Durrani Pashtuns, who were deliberately marginalized by the ISI. Third, following the 1979 Iranian revolution, Pakistani government officials had became concerned that the Iranian government was using the Shi’ites in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a “fifth column” to pursue its interests.¹³ Consequently, Shi’ites were targeted. In 1985, for example, a Deobandi militant group sprang up called Sipah-e Sahaba-e Pakistan (Soldiers of the Companion of the Prophet in Pakistan), which pronounced all Shi’ites infidels and conducted a range of attacks against them. Several years later, another group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Army of Jhangvi) was established and waged jihad against Shi’ites.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia invested heavily in the region. It funded madrassas in Pakistan that sought to spread the conservative Wahhabi version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi money flowed to Saudi-trained Wahhabi leaders among the Pashtuns, producing a small following. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had temporarily settled in Saudi Arabia, moved to Peshawar and set up a Wahhabi party. Pakistan’s Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam also helped build a network of Deobandi madrassas to extend their influence. These madrassas would eventually serve as an important educational alternative for the refugees from the anti-Soviet jihad and the subsequent civil war, as well as for poor families along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier who could not afford the secular schools.

The Knowledge Seekers

In late 1994, a new movement emerged in southern Afghanistan. Many of its members were drawn from madrassas that had been established in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan during the 1980s. Their primary objectives were to restore peace, enforce sharia law, and defend the integrity and Islamic character of Afghanistan. Since most were part-time or full-time students at madrassas, they chose a name for themselves that reflected their status. A talib is an Islamic student who seeks knowledge, which is different from a mullah, or member of the Islamic clergy, who gives knowledge. The new movement, called the Taliban, began by seizing control of Kandahar before expanding to the surrounding provinces.

The Taliban leaders who emerged in the mid-1990s were an odd lot. As Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid pointed out, the organization’s leadership could “boast to be the most disabled in the world today and visitors do not know how to react, whether to laugh or to cry. Mullah Omar lost his right eye in 1989 when a rocket exploded close by.”¹⁴ In addition, Nuruddin Turabi, who became justice minister, and Muhammad Ghaus, who became foreign minister, also had lost eyes. Abdul Majid, who became the mayor of Kabul, had lost a leg and two fingers. Mullah Dadullah Lang, a Taliban military commander (who was killed by U.S. forces in May 2007), lost a leg when fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The early Taliban were deeply disillusioned with the factionalism and criminal activities of the Afghan mujahideen leadership. They saw themselves as the cleansers of a war gone astray and a social and political system that had become derailed. Taliban leaders also sought to overturn an Islamic way of life that had been compromised by corruption and infidelity to the Prophet Muhammad.¹⁵ Indeed, Mullah Omar’s act of wrapping himself in the Prophet’s cloak symbolized the return to a purer Islam. The Taliban recruited primarily from Deobandi madrassas between Ghazni and Kandahar, as well as in Pakistan. These madrassas had become politicized and militarized during the war, but many were linked to the centrist conservative parties of the Afghan resistance, such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami. The Afghanistan- Pakistan border became ever more porous as Afghan Taliban studied in Pakistan, Afghan refugees enrolled in Pakistani madrassas, and Pakistani volunteers eventually joined the Taliban.¹⁶

Beginning in late 1994, Taliban forces advanced rapidly through southern and eastern Afghanistan, capturing nine out of thirty provinces by February 1995. In September 1995, the Taliban seized Herat, causing great concern in nearby Iran.¹⁷ The Taliban then cut off Hekmatyar’s supply route to Jalalabad before zeroing in on his fortress base at Charasyab, south of Kabul. After a last-ditch attempt to rally his forces, Hekmatyar was forced to flee. In 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul and, despite temporary setbacks, conquered the northern cities of Kunduz and Taloqan in 1998. As the Taliban closed in on the gem of the north, Mazar-e-Sharif, Iran helped Hekmatyar travel there to negotiate with the Taliban. But this effort failed and the city fell.¹⁸

FIGURE 4.1 Taliban Conquest of Afghanistan

The Taliban’s strategy was innovative and ruthlessly effective. Unlike the Soviets, they focused their initial efforts on bottom-up efforts in rural Afghanistan, especially the Pashtun south. They approached tribal leaders and militia commanders, as well as their rank-and-file supporters, and attempted to co- opt them with several messages. Taliban leaders claimed to provide moral and religious clarity, since they advocated the return to a purer form of Islam; they offered to restore Pashtun control of Kabul, which was run by the Tajik Rabbani; and they tried to capitalize on their momentum by convincing locals that resistance was futile. They used their knowledge of tribal dynamics to appeal to Pashtuns and, when they didn’t succeed in co-opting locals, they often resorted to targeted assassination to coerce the rest. It was a strategy accomplished on a very personal level: Taliban leaders who spoke the local dialect traveled to the Pashtun villages and district centers. In addition, the Taliban didn’t need to deploy forces throughout the countryside, and in any event didn’t have enough forces to do so. The brilliant part of their strategy was that even while they focused on securing urban areas, they successfully cut deals with local commanders—or removed and appointed new ones—in rural areas.¹⁹

At first, the Taliban represented a rise to power of the mullahs at the expense of tribal leaders and mujahideen commanders, even though a number of mujahideen commanders later joined them. War-weary Afghans initially welcomed the Taliban. The group promoted itself as a new force for honesty and unity and many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, saw the Taliban as the desperately needed balm of peace and stability. The Taliban immediately targeted warlords who were deemed responsible for much of the destruction, instability, and chaos that had plagued the country since the outbreak of the civil war. The Taliban, however, took Deobandism to extremes that the school’s founders would not have recognized. They instituted a brutal religious police force, the Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice (Amr Bil Maroof Wa Nahi An al- Munkar), to uphold its extreme and often unorthodox interpretations of Islam. “Throw reason to the dogs,” read a sign posted on the wall of the office of the police. “It stinks of corruption.”²⁰

Girls were not permitted to attend schools, most women were prohibited from working, and women were rarely permitted to venture out of their homes—and even then could not do so without wearing a burqa, an outer garment that cloaks the entire body. The Taliban decreed: “Women you should not step outside your residence. If you go outside the house you should not be like women who used to go with fashionable clothes wearing much cosmetics and appearing in front of every man before the coming of Islam.” It concluded: “Islam as a rescuing religion has determined specific dignity for women” and women “should not create such opportunity to attract the attention of useless people who will not look at them with a good eye.”²¹

The U.S. State Department characterized the Taliban as “harsh and oppressive. We continue to receive reports that the Taliban detain Tajiks, Panjshiris, and others indiscriminately, shipping at least some to a prison in Kandahar. Women are not seen as frequently on the streets” out of “fear of being accosted.”²² Zalmay Khalilzad wrote in an essay with fellow RAND analyst Daniel Byman that “Afghan women face a horrifying array of restrictions, among the most repressive in the world.” These problems, they argued, would only worsen. “‘Talibanism’—a radical, backward, and repressive version of Islam similar to the Saudi “Wahhabi’ credo but rejected by the vast majority of Muslims worldwide—is gaining adherents outside Afghanistan and spreading to other countries in the region.”²³

The Taliban enforced a stringent interpretation of the Islamic dress code for men as well. They were forced