Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

Financially, the doddering Soviet Union simply could not fight a war on such unequal terms—losing $10 million at a pop to guerillas armed with little more than huge shotguns. Gorbachev knew he would have to get his troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible in any way he could—peace and honor be damned.

The longtime chief of Parcham’s secret police was never going to convince Afghans he was a Muslim nationalist interested only in restoring the values of Old Afghanistan. The Mujahideen cleaned their guns and moved closer to the city.

In 1987, however, Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would begin withdrawing their troops the following year, come hell or high water in Afghanistan.

In 1988, the first Soviet troops did come home from Afghanistan. All that year the trickle of withdrawal continued; meanwhile, however, from the Soviet and global point of view, bigger things were happening. The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, formed popular fronts to oppose their own local Communist parties. Demonstrations broke out in Armenia, and then in Azerbaijan, and then in Georgia. The collapse of the empire had begun.

The Soviet withdrawal was complete, but few noticed because by then world attention was fixated on the wave of revolutions sweeping through Eastern Europe.

Gorbachev, on a visit to Poland, repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine and announced a new Soviet policy of noninterference in the affairs of other independent nations.

The grim regime in East Germany tried but failed to stop thousands of its citizens from escaping to the West. Hard-line East German ruler Erich Honecker was deposed, and in November the people of East Berlin began to tear down the wall separating them from the Western half of the city. Symbolically, that moment marked the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet empire.

By New Year’s Eve 1989, all the Soviet satellites had broken away. In the year that followed, the various republics that formed the core country—the Soviet Union itself—began to declare their independence. When Russia declared its independence in 1991, the end had come: there was nothing left to gain independence from.

At each checkpoint, some local strongman collected tolls from travelers happening by. The few goods that made it into the shops cost more than most people could pay. Poverty became endemic. Starvation loomed. Such was the final legacy of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

It was then, however, that Afghanistan dropped off the US foreign policy view screen. Global politics drew US attention elsewhere. Afghanistan had been a Cold War battlefield, and the Cold War was over. It didn’t officially end until 1991, but it was over effectively as soon as the Soviet Empire went into its final throes. The fall of the Soviet Empire was the defining political earthquake of the early nineties, whose aftershocks monopolized Western policy and punditry for the bulk of the decade.

Actually, for the United States, the trouble in Afghanistan was just beginning. Crucial ingredients of this trouble started to form during the Afghan-Soviet War.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, bureaucratic inertia transformed the top Communist officials into newfangled dictators. They didn’t rule as Communists anymore, just as strongmen offering their people posters and statues of themselves and national holidays commemorating their own birthdays in place of something, anything, to believe in.

Oil politics had reared its ugly head in the seventies when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries suddenly cut production in order to punish Western industrial powers for supporting Israel. Their embargo tripled the price of oil in a single year, driving the Western world into a recession. The oil embargo of 1974 sounded a warning: oil was clout.

The war began on January 17, 1991, and lasted forty-two days. The US and its partners hit Iraq with eighty-five thousand7 tons of bombs, Saddam’s army broke like a rotten reed, and his troops—mostly miserable draftees—fled back toward the city of Baghdad, with coalition jets shooting them from the air. The coalition sustained 358 casualties in that war, Iraq as many as 100,000.8 Bush then declared an abrupt cease-fire that left Saddam Hussein in place.

The stability of the world required that oil and gas sources be diversified, and because the competition for oil was sure to grow more desperate as supplies shrank, the major industrial powers had to think strategically about retaining access to whatever new oil was tapped.

The second-greatest known reserves were thought to lie in the Caspian Sea basin, from which oil had hardly been tapped.9 This region included Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, the very countries that Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey were eying hungrily. As the Persian Gulf oil diminished, the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin would become ever more precious.

That left option three: a pipeline could be run directly from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. From ports like Karachi on the Arabian Sea, tankers could take the oil anywhere in the world. Option three would be the shortest pipeline of the three. The United States certainly favored this option, because Pakistan was a long-standing ally. Pakistan, of course, favored it, not just for economic reasons but because the pipeline would give Pakistan real leverage in world politics.

There was just one problem with option three. The pipeline would have to go through Afghanistan.

Pakistan, in short, had a huge stake in stabilizing and controlling Afghanistan. And ISI had long worked to put the pieces in place to achieve this exact goal. The key to the plan was their factotum Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. ISI had hoped he would emerge as the undisputed boss of Afghanistan.

In 1994, these activists were not known as “the Taliban” or as anything else. “Getting organized” might be an exaggeration. They were hardly a group, just a handful of youngsters who had been through the cauldron of the war together and hung around with a slightly older man named Mullah Omar. They revered Omar and helped him carry out audacious actions he sometimes cooked up to protect local people from thugs.

The Arab word for student is talib, the plural of which is taliban, so this term was not the name of a party or a movement, originally. It merely described what Mullah Omar and his companions were: students.

And, the thing is, throughout this first year, the Taliban were, in fact, true to their word. Wherever they took over, they did shut down militias, confiscate arms, and introduce a fragile sense of security.

As long as the Taliban served Pakistan’s global interests, officials in Islamabad probably didn’t care what domestic policies the Taliban pursued. The Great Game was back, and Pakistan had stepped into the shoes once worn by the British.

Every other country including the United States (as well as the United Nations) held back, but, in general, attitudes about the Taliban remained ambiguous. In this period, Unocal flew top members of the Taliban’s inner council to Dallas to talk about the pipeline. The Taliban opened an office in Washington, DC, to conduct business, and Taliban well-wishers in DC hired a public relations firm to burnish the group’s image in America.

Militant anti-Western sentiment had been rising since the 1970s as the entrenched elites of Muslim countries kept getting guns and money from Western imperialist powers to help them stay entrenched.

One of these Arab Islamists was Osama Bin Laden, the seventeenth of fifty-plus children born to a billionaire Yemeni businessman who had close ties to the Saudi ruling family.

Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait and had positioned his army on the Saudi border, but Bin Laden told the Saudi government not to worry. He would lead an army of Arab Afghans in a jihad against Hussein. The Saudi government didn’t take his offer seriously. They dismissed the hero of the Afghan Jihad and then, as if to rub salt in the wound, asked the United States for help instead. They even let the American-led coalition use Saudi soil as its base. Osama cursed the Saudi royals for all this, and they responded by asking him to leave the country.

In November 1995, al Qaeda agents tested his method with a bombing at an American compound in the capital of Saudi Arabia that killed several dozen American engineers and support staff. The CIA now took notice of Bin Laden. They pressured Sudan to do something about this guy, and the Sudanese government reluctantly asked Bin Laden to go somewhere else. In 1996, Bin Laden moved back to the snake pit that Afghanistan had become, but for him it was like alighting in a nest: he was home.

Warlords allied to the Taliban gave Bin Laden a complex of irrigation tunnels at a place called Tora Bora, near the city of Jalalabad. Bin Laden retrofitted this cave complex into a formidable underground military installation not only with his own money but with covert support from rich Wahhabis around the world. Mullah Omar liked what Bin Laden was doing and gave him more land along the country’s southern border, near the border city of Khost. There, Bin Laden built a string of training camps, a West Point of terrorism, so to speak: would-be soldiers for the global jihad came here to learn the same skills taught to US Navy SEALS and Army Rangers.

A fatwa is not, as is commonly thought, an assassination order or a declaration of war. It is a religious ruling about a case not covered by existing precedents.

The CIA worked out a plan to drop a thirty-man strike team into that desert one night. The men would creep into the compound through drainage ditches, drag Bin Laden out, stuff him into a helicopter, and fly away.

On August 8, 1998, at ten thirty in the morning, al Qaeda operatives blew up a truck behind the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 213 and wounding more than 4,000, of whom 300 later died.

The strike cost $55 million. It didn’t kill any important al Qaeda figure. Bin Laden had left the camp just a few hours before the missiles struck, which is no surprise, since Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif knew about the impending strike the day before it happened.

The lower and middle ranks of the army and of ISI were Taliban loyalists just as much as they were Pakistanis. As a result, the top officers of these outfits, especially political appointees, no longer dared order their subordinates to move against the Taliban for fear that the orders would be disobeyed—because if the lower ranks realized they could disobey their superiors with impunity, all bets were off.

Just two days later, as all the world knows, twenty-two men associated with al Qaeda, four of whom had actually trained for this exact mission at one of Osama Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan that summer, hijacked four civilian jetliners and flew one of them into the Pentagon, two into the World Trade Center, and one into the ground near Pittsburgh, killing some three thousand people total. It was the most horrific single act of terrorism the world had ever seen.

September 11

In addition to the military battle, in short, a message-battle raged in the mediasphere. The West won the “ground” war, but bin Laden may have won the first stages of the “air” war, especially if his goal was to provoke a global showdown between Islam and the West and to position himself as a leader in that clash.

The pressure consisted of financial and diplomatic measures that had been available to the United States for years. As soon as they were tried, they worked. Without support from Pakistan, the Taliban turned out to be nothing. With military support from the West, the Northern Alliance proved unstoppable.

The Northern Alliance, led now by a rather ramshackle cluster of Massoud’s former aides and associates, decided not to wait for the “good Taliban” to dig in. They knew that only by taking possession of the city could they secure any say in the future of the country. If they didn’t have Kabul, they would be sidelined. On November 13, therefore, the diverse troops of the many formerly-warring Mujahideen parties marched back into the city they had abandoned five years earlier.

On December 7, just two months after the bombing of Afghanistan began, Mullah Omar and his cohorts fled their real stronghold, which wasn’t Kabul but Kandahar.

The last of them disappeared finally into the border belt where most of them had lived as refugee children during the anti-Soviet war.

In fact, everything the House of Dost Mohammed had built was in ruins. Kabul was not even the single, unquestioned capital of Afghanistan anymore.

the south and southeast, even the border was dissolving. Was Afghanistan really a country? For some people, even that question was back on the table.

But when al Qaeda used this territory as its base for attacking the Twin Towers in New York, it drew the United States into the Afghan story. The United States quickly toppled the Taliban, but what did this portend for Afghanistan? Would Kabul stage a comeback? Would the urban elite now come back from exile? Would the old technocracy rise again? Was Afghanistan back on course to becoming a centralized modern nation-state with a democratic, constitutional government? Such were the questions Afghans were facing now.

The Bonn Conference of December 2001 was, in fact, the meeting that probably should have taken place in 1992, right after the Soviet pullout. It brought together all the key players from that era (except the Communists, who were irrelevant now).

The Bonn plan might have been perfect for a country being formed from scratch. Here, however, a story was already in progress, the story of a long-standing struggle between contrary impulses that kept pulling this society in opposite directions, polarities that included city versus countryside, change versus stasis, new versus old, state bureaucracy versus tribal relationships, secular institutions versus religious establishment, national military versus spontaneously self-organized local guerillas, and a central government operating out of Kabul versus an amorphous universe of village-republics without any center, the original Afghanistan versus Abdu’Rahman’s Afghanistan.

What came out of Bonn was not a plan to reconcile these extremes but a mustering of international support for one side of the struggle. The conferees mapped out a vision of Afghanistan rebuilt as a secular nation around a core of Western values. Many Afghans would sincerely love to see that plan succeed.

The Bonn plan represented a comeback for the Afghan technocracy and the old Afghan aristocracy. It marked a resumption of the oft-interrupted Afghan project launched by Dost Mohammed, enlarged by Abdu’Rahman, and radicalized by Amanullah.

the delegates shaped their interim authority and selected a compromise candidate, Hamid Karzai, to head it up. Karzai was a logical choice for America, even though he had never done much to prove himself a leader of men.

A worldly sophisticate, Karzai understood the priorities of global business, spoke fluent English, and could be trusted not to sow social discomfort at diplomatic gatherings.

On the other hand, Hamid Karzai had some good, old-fashioned Afghan tribal cred as well. He was a Pushtoon; his father was a khan of the Popalzais, a leading (Durrani) Pushtoon tribe; the Popalzai were a leading clan in Kandahar, the most Pushtoon of Afghan cities. And although the Karzais had supported the Taliban early on, Karzai Senior was assassinated by the Taliban, which made Hamid credible as an opponent of the ousted regime.