Afghanistan

[JohnL2]

I was going through some old stacks of magazines and came across this.
As I reread the article, I thought it was an excellent summary of how things have transpired in Afghanistan to the present day.
The author is one of the few journalists out there that I consider to be "cool".
"Massoud" in the article refers to Ahmad Shah Massoud, a famous figure in Afghan history. He was assassinated by operatives believed to be allegedly working for al-Qaeda and or Pakistan.
I know we have a lot of servicemembers and veterans on the boards; and to those who may be deploying soon to the region, I thought that this perhaps may be a remedy to the "First to go, last to know" syndrome.

Excerpt from National Geographic Adventure magazine article, April 2001
Written by Sebastian Junger


Like so many fundamentalist movements, the Taliban were born of war. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, it ultimately sent in eight armored divisions, two enhanced parachute battalions, hundreds of attack helicopters, and well over 100,000 men. What should have been the quick crushing of a backward country, however, turned into the worst Soviet defeat of the Cold War. The very weaknesses of the fledgling resistance movement – its lack of military bases, its paucity of weapons, its utterly fractured command structure – meant that the Soviets had no fixed military objectives to destroy. Fighting Afghans was like nailing jelly to a wall; in the end, there was just a wall full of bent nails. Initially using nothing but old shotguns, flintlock rifles, and Lee-Enfield .303s left over from the British colonial days, the mujahidin started attacking Soviet convoys and military bases all across Afghanistan. According to a CIA report at the time, the typical lifespan of a mujahidin RPG operator – rocket propelled grenades were the antitank weapon of choice – was three weeks. It’s not unreasonable to assume that every Afghan who took up arms against the Soviets fully expected to die.
Without the support of the villagers, however, the mujahidin would never have been able to defeat the Soviets. They would have had nothing to eat, nowhere to hide, no information network – none of the things a guerilla army depends on. The Soviets knew this, of course, and by the end of the first year – increasingly frustrated by the stubborn mujahidin resistance – they turned the dim Cyclops eye of their military on the people themselves. They destroyed any village the mujahidin were spotted in. They carpet bombed the Panjshir Valley. They cut down fruit trees, disrupted harvests, tortured villagers. They did whatever they could do to drive a wedge between the people and the resistance. And still, it didn’t work. After ten years of war, the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving behind a country full of land mines and more than one million Afghan dead.
A country can’t sustain that kind of damage and return to normal overnight. The same fierce tribalism that had defeated the Soviets – “radical local democracy,” as the CIA termed it – made it extremely hard for the various mujahidin factions to get along, (It would be three years before they would be able to take Kabul from the communist regime that the Soviets left.) Moreover, the mujahidin were armed to the teeth, thanks to a CIA program that had pumped three billion dollars’ worth of weapons into the country during the war. Had the United States continued its support – building roads, repatriating the refugees, clearing the minefields – Afghanistan might have stood a chance of overcoming its natural ethnic factionalism. But the U.S. didn’t. No sooner had the Soviet-backed government crumbled away than America’s Cold War-born interest in Afghanistan virtually ceased. Inevitably, the Afghans fell out among themselves. And when they did, it was almost worse than the war that had just ended.
The weapons supplied by the U.S. to fight the Soviets had been distributed through Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence branch. The ISI, as it is known, had chosen a rabidly anti-Western ideologue named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to protect its strategic interests in Afghanistan, so of course the bulk of the weapons went to him. Now, using Hekmatyar to reach deep into Afghan politics, Pakistan systematically crippled any chance of a successful coalition government. As fighting flared around Kabul, Hekmatyar positioned himself in the hills south of the city and started raining rockets down on the rooftops. His strategy was to pound the various mujahidin factions into submission and gain control of the capital, but he succeeded merely in killing tens of thousands of civilians. Finally, in exchange for peace, he was given the post of prime minister. But his troops remained where they were, the barrels of their tanks still pointed down at the city they had largely destroyed.
While the commanders fought on, life in Afghanistan sank into a lawless hell. Warlords controlled the highways, opium and weapons smuggling became the mainstay of the economy, private armies battled one another for control of a completely ruined land. This was one of the few times that Massoud’s forces are thought to have committed outright atrocities, massacring several hundred to several thousand people in the Afshar district of Kabul. There is no evidence, however, that Massoud gave the orders or knew about it beforehand. As early as 1994, Pakistan – dismayed by the fighting and increasingly convinced that Hekmatyar was a losing proposition – began to look elsewhere for allies. Its attention fell on the Taliban, who had been slowly gaining power in the madrasahs while Afghanistan tore itself apart. The Taliban were religious students, many of them Afghan refugees in Pakistan, who were trained in an extremely conservative interpretation of the Koran called Deobandism. Here, in the tens of thousand of teenage boys who had been orphaned or displaced by the war, Pakistan found its new champions.
Armed and directed by Pakistan and facing a completely fractured alliance, the Taliban rapidly fought their way across western Afghanistan. The population was sick of war and looked to the Taliban as saviors – which, in a sense, they were, but their brand of salvation came at a tremendous price. They quickly imposed a form of Islam that was so archaic and cruel that it shocked even the ultratraditional Muslims of the countryside. With the Taliban closing in on Kabul, Massoud found himself forced into alliances with men – such as Hekmatyar and former communist Abdul Rashid Dostum – who until recently had been his mortal enemies. The coalition was a shaky one and didn’t stand a chance against the highly motivated Taliban forces. After heavy fighting, Kabul finally fell to the Taliban in early September 1996, and Massoud pulled his forces back to the Panjshir Valley. With him were Burhadnuddin Rabbani, who was the acting president of the coalition government, and a shifty assortment of mujahidin commanders who became known as the Northern Alliance. Technically, Rabbani and his ministers were the recognized government of Afghanistan – they still held a seat at the U.N. – but in reality, all they controlled was the northern third of one of the poorest countries in the world.
Worse still, there was a growing movement from a variety of Western countries – particularly the United States – to overlook the Taliban’s flaws and recognize them as the legitimate government of the country. There was thought to be as much as 200 billion barrels of untapped oil reserves in Central Asia and similar amounts of natural gas. That made it one of the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world, and the easiest way to get it out was to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan. However appalling Taliban rule might be, their cooperation was needed to build the pipeline. Within days of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, a U.S. State Department spokesman said that he could see “nothing objectionable” about the Taliban version of Islamic law.
While Massoud and the Taliban fought each other to a standstill at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley, the American oil company Unocal hosted a Taliban delegation to explore the possibility of an oil deal.