Taliban fighters in Kabul on August 19, 2021 (Uncredited, via Times of India).
This article is the second installment of a Wire series on the history of Afghanistan in light of Taliban’s takeover of the country in August, 2021. You can read the first installment here.
THE RISE OF THE SEEKERS
The Soviet-Afghan War devastated the nation of Afghanistan. As the Soviet Army completed its withdrawal in February of 1989, it left behind a nation ravaged by a decade of brutal conflict. Almost one-third of Afghans had fled the country, seeking refuge in neighboring Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, and elsewhere, making Afghanistan the largest refugee population in the world. Over two million were internally displaced. After years of relentless areal bombardment, the second-largest Afghan city of Kandahar, a hotbed of the Mujahedeen, had been reduced to less than 15% of its pre-war population. Estimates of Afghan deaths range from a half-million to over 2 million, including hundreds of thousands of noncombatant civilians. Over three million were maimed or otherwise wounded, with hundreds of thousands of landmines continuing to claim victims, including 3-4% of Afghan children, to the present day.
During the war, thousands of Afghan fighters from the Pashtun tribe joined the Mujahedeen. Making up 40-45% of the population, the Pashtun are Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, and played a major role in the anti-Soviet insurgency. The American CIA worked closely with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with funding from the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate (GID), to train the mujahedeen. Many Pashtun rebels received more than military training during their time in western Pakistan, including Islamic fundamentalist educations in Deobandi madrassas[1].
After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian-backed communist government of Afghanistan eventually fell in 1992. A conglomerate of political parties, many of them comprised of former mujahedeen, formed an interim government founded on Islamic principles known as the Islamic State of Afghanistan. However, the coalition was fragile, and some of the more radical Islamic parties were disappointed in the weakness of the government, and its inability to enforce Sharia law across the nation.
It was in this context that a group of 50 Pashtuns met in Kandahar, Afghanistan in September, 1994. Many of them had been schooled and trained in the fundamentalist madrassas of Pakistan, and so they called themselves the Taliban, a bastardiazation of the Arabic word for student or seeker (talib) and the Pashto plural suffix -an. Within months, they had grown to over 15,000, drawing largely from war refugees and the poor, including other ethnic groups such as the Tajiks and Uzbeks. Their leader was Muhammad Omar, a native of Kandahar Province, who was given the title of Mullah Omar, despite his lack of a formalized education.[2] The Taliban overtook Kandahar city in a surprise attack during November, 1994. Within two months, with assistance from the Pakistani ISI, the Taliban had taken control of 12 Afghan provinces. Relying on an anti-corruption reputation, Taliban rule continued to spread quickly, combining experienced militia fighters with fundamentalist madrassa teachers.
The Taliban took the third largest Afghan city of Herat in September, 1995. One year later, the Afghan government abandoned the capital of Kabul in the face of a Taliban rout. The victorious “students” took the capital. By 1998, the Taliban had consolidated their regime across 80% of Afghanistan. Implementing a traditional practice of Sharia law, they outlawed female education, enforced draconian forms of corporal and capital punishment, such as whipping and the amputation of limbs, and expelled foreign aid agencies. The stage was set for the prominence of jihadist factions.
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The Base and the Towers
On May 18, 1996, a chartered flight landed in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. It’s most prominent passenger disembarked, returning to the war-torn nation as a man without a country, having fought in the Afghan mujahedeen a decade before. After returning to his native Saudi homeland at the end of the Soviet-Afghan War, he was eventually expelled and stripped of his citizenship in 1991 for criticism of the royal family’s decision to host American forces. Living in Sudan for several years, he used his family’s wealth and mujahedeen connections across the Middle East to build his network of global jihadists. As early as 1988, his inner circle referred to their organization as “The Base,” a reference to their days spent deployed to mujahedeen bases in eastern Afghanistan. In Arabic, the group’s name is al-Qaeda. Its leader was Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy Saudi construction magnate.
When bin Laden arrived in Jalalabad in mid-1996 with roughly 300 militants, the Taliban was already in control of most of the country. He forged close ties with the Taliban’s leader, Muhammad Omar, and began recruiting and building training camps across Afghanistan, using the state airline to transport fighters, weapons and supplies across the Middle East. More than 10,000 recruits were trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan between 1996-2001, many of which were added to the Taliban ranks, while some were recruited directly into al-Qaeda.
During the 1990’s, Bin Laden became increasingly focused on attacking the United States for its military presence in the “Land of the Two Holy Mosques”[3] and for it’s political, economic and military support of the State of Israel. Bin Laden blamed the Jewish State (and the Jewish people in general) for the world’s ills, especially in the Muslim world. Just three months after arriving in Afghanistan, bin Laden made a public “declaration of war” against the United States. This was followed by a fatwa[4] published in February, 1998, calling on all Muslims to kill North Americans and their allies until Jerusalem and his Saudi homeland were “liberated.” Just six months later, coordinated bombing attacks at the US embassies in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including 12 American citizens. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack, after which US President Bill Clinton ordered retaliatory cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda training camps. It was the first offensive military action by the United States in Afghanistan, foreshadowing a looming war, although the strike that Clinton ordered was largely ineffective at the time.
Emboldened by the embassy bombings, al-Qaeda plotted its next attack. In October, 2000, the US Navy Destroyer USS Cole was docked in the port of Aden on the coast of Yemen, when it was approached by a small fiberglass boat carrying C4 explosives and two suicide bombers. The boat detonated near the ship’s hull, creating a gaping hole on the port side, killing seventeen US sailors. A US government inquiry determined that al-Qaeda was most likely responsible for the attack. As George W. Bush took office in early 2001, his administration began to review ways to more effectively monitor and disrupt al-Qaeda. Despite this, the terror group’s greatest plot was already in its final stages.
In 1996, a disgruntled freelance jihadist named Khalid Sheik Mohammad (KSM) met with Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan. After his previous plot to destroy a dozen American passenger jets over Asia had been uncovered and foiled, Mohammad suggested to bin Laden an attack involving hijacked airliners over US airspace. Large jets full of passengers and fuel would be flown into large buildings, in order to maximize casualties in a sensational attack. After the embassy bombings in 1998, KSM officially joined al-Qaeda and received approval and funding for his plan, codenamed Holy Tuesday. The four target buildings and the team of 19 hijackers was hand-picked by bin Laden, while KSM ran the operation. The hijackers began relocating to the United States in cells from Europe and elsewhere on temporary visas, where some took commercial flying lessons. In late August, 2001, the team received confirmation for the date for their operation.
The 19 al-Qaeda operatives boarded four commercial airliners on September 11, 2001, leaving from Boston, Newark and Washington, DC. The first flight departed at 7:59 AM. Just two-and-a-half hours later, World Trade Center towers 1 and 2 lay in rubble, the Pentagon was on fire, and the wreckage of UA Flight 93 lay strewn across a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 civilians were dead. In a matter of hours, the world had changed forever.
The Longest War
The Taliban condemned the 9/11 attacks, but refused US President Bush’s ultimatum to surrender Osama bin Laden to the United States and close al-Qaeda training camps. Subsequently, US Special Forces began arriving in Afghanistan, embedding with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance militia in the northeast. US Operation Enduring Freedom was officially launched on October 7, 2001, and the Northern Alliance made quick progress with the assistance of US ground forces and air support. The Taliban and al-Qaeda melted into the mountainous Tora Bora region along the Pakistani border, and into the rural southern provinces. The US and international commitment grew throughout the following decade, as the US footprint grew to over 100,000 troops, many under the auspices of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The democratically-elected and UN-recognized Afghan government of Hamid Karzai established itself in the north and center of the country, rolling back many of the draconian Sharia reforms of the Taliban. Women were granted the right to an education, to work outside the home, to vote, and even to hold seats in parliament.
Time and again, US offensives penetrated deep into Taliban and al-Qaeda territory throughout the war. From the Tora Bora mountains along the Pakistani border, to the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, to the poppy-fields of Helmand, US forces seized weapons caches, arrested suspects, pummeled enemy positions, trained hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops, negotiated reconstruction efforts, led anti-narcotics campaigns, and established forward operating bases deep in enemy territory. As the Taliban increased the number and size of cross-border raids from Pakistan, the United States increased its military presence. A high point came in May, 2011, when US Navy SEALS raided the home of Osama bin Laden in Abbatobad, Pakistan, killing the infamous jihadist. However, a total victory over the Taliban remained elusive, as well as the eradication of al-Qaeda, which became more and more intertwined with factions of the Taliban through intermarriage.
As the US War in Afghanistan approached the end of its first decade, US policymakers became increasingly convinced that a negotiated peace between the Afghan government and the Taliban was the only viable exit strategy. Both the Karzai government and elements of the Taliban leadership appeared willing to talk. By 2014, the United States had drawn down its forces to just over 10,000, ending all ground combat operations in favor of a support, training, and advisory role. The Taliban began to resurge, despite a concerted campaign of airstrikes by US President Barack Obama. Terrorist attacks increased exponentially throughout the country, including the capital of Kabul. By 2015, the Taliban had begun slowly gaining territory in Afghanistan’s restive southern provinces.
That same year, the new global jihadist movement known as the Islamic State (IS) swept across the globe. Inspired by the reestablishment of the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, a branch of the Islamic State known as the “Khorasan Province”[5] formed from members of the Pakistani Taliban, making bay’ah[6] to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).[7] The “Khorasan Province” franchise of the Islamic State, known as ISIS-K, clashed with both the Afghan Taliban as well as US forces. President Obama ordered an offensive to clear ISIS-K from eastern Afghanistan in the summer of 2016, and a number of the group’s leaders and militants were either captured or killed. A massive airstrike in 2017 used the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal to target an extensive network of tunnels used by ISIS-K in eastern Afghanistan. As the administration of US President Donald Trump came to power in early 2017, the Caliphate’s Afghan affiliate was noticeably diminished. But like the Taliban and al-Qaeda before it, ISIS-K remained undefeated. Moreover, the Taliban resurgence continued to gain momentum, with analysts reporting that the group was active across 70% of Afghanistan by early 2018, having consolidated their hold on several districts, while conducting more brazen attacks in the central regions. President Trump signaled his willingness to return to the negotiating table with the Taliban and the Afghan government, but many doubted the Taliban’s good faith in any peace agreement. The following months would be decisive for the political, economic, and social future of Afghanistan.
However, an entirely different kind of movement was quietly beginning to gain momentum inside Afghanistan as well, having bled across the border from neighboring Iran. The Taliban, al-Qaeda and ISIS-K could not be defeated by superior American firepower, but this new spiritual phenomenon could not be defeated by the powers and principalities of the air. As the future of the US-sponsored Afghan government grew uncertain, a new Light began to appear in homes and secret meeting places across Afghanistan, offering freedom of a different kind.
[1] Deobandi Islam is a revival movement of fundamentalist Islam which originated in Deoband, India in the nineteenth century. It spread throughout the Indian subcontinent, becoming increasingly radicalized in the 1970’s and 80’s, where it played a formative role in the religious perspective of the Taliban factions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
[2] A mullah is an Islamic teacher who is supposed to have received a formal education in one of Islam’s major schools of Islamic theology.
[3] An Islamic reference to the Arabian Peninsula, and more specifically to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is the steward of the grand mosques in Mecca and Medina, the two most holy sites in Islam.
[4] A fatwa is an Islamic religious edict, pronounced by a qualified mullah, sheik, ayatollah, etc.
[5] Khorasan is a historical territory that encompasses modern Northeast Iran (where there is still a Khorasan Province) and most of the modern nation of Afghanistan. The name evokes apocalyptical fervor for jihadists, as a particular Islamic hadith states, “"If you see the black banners coming from Khorasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice; no power will be able to stop them. And they will finally reach Baitul Maqdis [Jerusalem], where they will erect their flags."
[6] Bay’ah is the act of declaring an oath of fealty to an Islamic leader, including political, military and religious leaders. The office of caliph encompasses all three.
[7] Al-Sham is the Arabic name for the region of Syria and the Upper Levant.