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

CHAPTER THREE Uncivil War

IN LATE 1986, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates placed a twenty-five-dollar bet with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Michael Armacost that the Soviet Union would not pull out of Afghanistan before the end of the Reagan administration. Gates, a rising star in the administration, would go on to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George H. W. Bush and then secretary of defense under his son, President George W. Bush.

It was a win-win bet, Gates told his colleagues. “I would get twenty-five dollars or have the pleasure of paying twenty-five dollars on the occasion of an early Soviet withdrawal. A small price to pay for a large victory.”

Gates was fond of quoting an old Chinese proverb: “What the bear has eaten, he never spits out.” But he lost the bet. Mikhail Gorbachev announced in February 1988, before a nationwide audience, that Soviet withdrawals from Afghanistan would begin that May, and they were completed by December 1989.

“I paid Mike Armacost the twenty-five dollars—the best money I ever spent,” Gates said. “I also told myself it would be the last time I’d make an intelligence forecast based on fortune cookie wisdom.”¹

A Patchwork of Competing Groups

The initial U.S. reaction to the Soviet withdrawal was referred to as “positive symmetry.” According to Robert Oakley, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, this meant that “the United States would keep funding the mujahideen as long as the Soviets provided assistance to the Najibullah government.”² The Soviet withdrawal had raised hopes that an end to the conflict might be near, but the situation grew worse as Afghanistan disintegrated into a patchwork of competing groups, with Washington and Moscow backing competing sides.

“Ultimately, the insurgent forces will cause the demise of the Communist government,” reported a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the Soviet withdrawal. “The successor government will probably be an uneasy coalition of traditionalist and fundamentalist groups, and its control will not extend far beyond Kabul.”³ The CIA had reached a similar conclusion and predicted the imminent collapse of the Najibullah government: “We judge that Mohammed Najibullah’s regime will not long survive the completion of Soviet withdrawal even with continued Soviet assistance…. The regime may fall before withdrawal is complete.”⁴ Other U.S. experts on Afghanistan, such as Zalmay Khalilzad, predicted “the quick overthrow of the Najibullah government by the mujaheddin. Without the Soviets,” he wrote, “the Kabul government’s morale would plummet, the regime would disintegrate and the mujaheddin would sweep victoriously forward.”⁵

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 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.