Taliban - Part 1 - Overview & Background.

Afghanistan is located in a watershed region between the Indian Subcontinent, Central Asia, China and Iran. A dozen ethnic groups make up its population. The largest of these is the Pashtuns in the southern region of the country, who are subdivided into two large groups - the Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns. People of Tajik origin, the second largest group, live in the northern regions. The third of the major ethnic groups are the Hazaras who are predominantly Shia and live in the Hindu Kush mountain region of central Afghanistan

The Taliban leadership, i.e. the Shoura (Council), is dominated by Durrani Pashtuns with origins in the Kandahar area. By most estimates, the Taliban today controls over 90% of the territory of Afghanistan, although some reports suggest that it has effective control of less than 80% - with the rest of the areas being allied but not directly ruled. The main claim to fame of the Taliban is that they have re-established order and security in Afghanistan, after nearly seven years of civil war between various mujahedin groups. However, a situation of durable peace, reconstruction and rehabilitation are still questions that remain to be addressed.

However, the Taliban continues military operations against the Northern Alliance (NA), a grouping of diverse ethnic and sectarian formations opposed to the Taliban under the nominal leadership of Ahmad Shah Masood, the legendary warrior who fought undefeated against the Soviets. Masood, an ethnic Tajik known as the "Lion of Panjsher", after his home territory in the Panjsher Valley of northern Afghanistan, has been able to gather a great deal of support worldwide, which has allowed him to continue his fight against the Taliban.

On the ground, the military situation has continued to ebb and flow over the past two years with some victories for Masood and some for the Taliban. Over the years it has become quite clear that, without decisive intervention from outside, neither the Taliban nor the NA will be able to claim a total victory. But the external players are trying hard to retain the impression that they are not aiding the parties involved, because overt assistance could spark off similar aid from the opposing side and the situation could easily go out of control into a regional conflict. Thus, the battlefield situation has tended to reflect the extent of covert external support for either side.

As of early September 2001, the annual summer fighting season was coming to a close with amid deadlock. This is regarded as an unsatisfactory situation for both the Taliban, which had expected to take more territory before the onset of winter, and for the NA which had expected to recapture some territory, in particular Taloqan. Throughout the summer, in fact since the fighting began in May this year, the military actions by both sides were sporadic and apparently arbitrary. In the meantime, reports of imminent foreign intervention - by the US or Russia - against the Taliban were proven to be wrong.

The Taliban continues to be assisted by Pakistan in terms of logistics, men and material, while finances continue to flow in from private sources via the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE. On the other side, the NA is getting assistance from a wider variety of sources, including Russia, Iran, India, and West European states - and indirectly from the US. The balance of assistance has been in favour of the Taliban, however, because Pakistan - which shares a long border with Taliban-controlled Afghanistan - has provided aid in a more concentrated and effective manner.

This situation is likely change, APS sources say, as the cumulative effect of the UN Security Council resolutions on Afghanistan - 1267 (1999), 1333 (2000) and 1363 (2001) - come to bear against the Taliban. All these resolutions were imposed under Chapter VII of the charter of the UN, which allows military action to determine enforcement. Among other things, Resolution 1267 demands that the Taliban: (a) "cease the provision of sanctuary and training for international terrorists and their organizations"; and (b) "turn over Usama bin Laden without further delay to appropriate authorities".

Resolution 1333 demands that the Taliban "should act swiftly to close all camps where terrorists are trained within the territory under its control". Resolution 1363 envisages the placement of UN monitors on the borders of Afghanistan to ensure that no violation of the sanctions take place. The resolutions also envisaged an arms embargo, affecting only the Taliban. The leadership of the Taliban has blasted the resolutions as biased and reflecting Western antipathy towards Islam.

The UN move to place monitors was seen by most observers as an indirect tactic to control the flow of assistance across the Pakistani border to Afghanistan. No monitors are currently planned to be deployed on the Iranian-Afghan border, for instance. In Pakistan, political analysts and strategic commentators have been writing for some time that the issue of deploying UN monitors represents a violation of Pakistani sovereignty - since the monitors cannot be placed in Afghan territory, where the Taliban have threatened them with physical harm.

The implications of these resolutions, which can be seen in line with the scenario of the Taliban's moves towards collision with the West, are only beginning to crystallise. The real impact would be felt only in the coming months, if not years.

The Background: The conditions for the creation of the Taliban were created in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. The various mujahedin groups in the country, which had until then been fighting more or less on a united front, immediately began to fight among themselves to determine who would rule the country from Kabul. Fighting and politicking took on tribal, ethnic and sectarian overtones and the shuffling of alliances among the various groups - with backing from external players - ensured that there was no peace in the country; indeed, the situation was much worse than during the Soviet occupation.

Various attempts at peacemaking were made, backed by the UN and by a host of external players including the US and EU. To name a few there were initiatives from the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), from the Japanese, from the Swiss, and even from the Italians who came up with a plan to bring back the former King Zahir Shah, who lives in exile in that country. None of this worked out, largely because of the regional players active behind the parties in Afghanistan - initially Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on one side with Iran on the other - made sure that no attempt at a settlement that circumvented their own interests could materialise. In 1992, the regime of Najibullah fell and the mujahedin captured Kabul. But it fell to the forces of Burhanuddin Rabbani and Masood, both Tajiks then leading the Jamiat-e-Islami, and to the Uzbek fighters of Gen. Abdel Rashid Dostum. This was a major blow for the Pashtuns. Fighting continued, with Pashtun leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar targeting his archenemy Masood. Kabul faced intense shelling and Afghanistan was in a state of virtual disintegration.

By 1993, however, the seeds of the Taliban movement were being sown in Pakistan. There were three major and several subsidiary reasons why the Taliban subsequently emerged. Firstly, the powerful truck transporter mafia in Pakistan was fed up with the anarchic situation in Afghanistan, with various groups putting up checkpoints across Afghanistan to extort money. It was a serious drain on their resources and setback to efficient smuggling operations.

Secondly, the military establishment - led by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) saw the situation in Afghanistan going out of their control, as the various Islamist groups they had nurtured to fight the Soviets began to scout around for other allies. This was intolerable because Pakistan was by then using Afghanistan as a base for its jihad in Indian Kashmir - which it modelled on the anti-Soviet Jihad, and which began in 1989 - i.e. the same year as the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.

Thirdly, the government of Benazir Bhutto had ambitions at the time to turn Pakistan into a "gateway" to the Central Asian markets - a move intended to increase its strategic importance to the West at a time when the oil pipeline politics of Central Asia was getting into gear. It was assumed that a dependable road route via Afghanistan to the Central Asian states would boost Pakistani exports to the region, and oil and gas pipelines from those countries to markets worldwide could pass through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea via the client state of Afghanistan.

The only problem was that Afghanistan was in total turmoil. It is said that the idea of the Taliban originated with Pakistan's Interior Minister Gen. Naseerullah Babar, although it is more likely that he saw some peripheral developments in Kandahar and decided it was a good opportunity to introduce a new force in Afghanistan along with madrassa students in their thousands from Pakistan. Either way, it proved to be a significant tactical move with perceived benefits for Pakistan, although these proved to be short-term in the subsequent years.

Essentially, Babar's idea consisted of gathering together some local fighting groups in the Kandahar area - who had rigid notions of Islam and were guided by Mullah Omar, then a local imam - and securing a road route for the truck transporter mafia. (Mullah Omar's ragtag bunch of fighters had by then gained some local fame for rescuing a kidnapped boy whom two local warlords wanted to sodomise; and also for rescuing two girls kidnapped for molestation). In any event, Pakistani surveyors and ISI officers discreetly travelled the road from Chaman on the Pakistani border to Herat in Afghanistan, to survey the road in September 1994.

On Oct. 12, 1994 some 200 Taliban from Kandahar and Pakistani madrassas arrived at the small Afghan border post of Spin Baldak on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border just opposite Chaman. They captured Spin Baldak, an important fuelling stop for the transporter mafia, from Hekmatyar's men with Pakistan military assistance. On Oct. 28, a truck convoy drawn from the Pakistan Army's National Logistics Cell (NLC), which had been set up in the 1980s by the ISI to funnel US arms to the mujahedin, left Quetta in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province with 80 Pakistani ex-army drivers. Colonel Imam, the ISI's most prominent field officer operating in the south and Pakistan's Consul General in Herat, were also on board. The convoy was held up outside Kandahar by local warlords. They were defeated by the Taliban and Kandahar was captured, their first major victory.

Within weeks, the Taliban cleared the roads of toll booths set up by local warlords and the first Pakistani convoy of 50 trucks carrying raw cotton from Turkmenistan arrived in Quetta in December. The only tolls were paid to the Taliban. By end-December 1994, about 12,000 Afghan and Pakistani students from the madrassas in the North West Frontier Province had joined the Taliban. Among them were an unspecified number of Afghan personnel trained by the Pakistani Army as well as Pakistani ISI and regular military officers in plain clothes. Many were Afghans trained by the Frontier Force of Pakistan, who were not informed that they were from Afghanistan.

As international concern over the spread of the Taliban grew, in view of their strict Islamic measures especially against women, in February 1995, Pakistani Premier Bhutto made the first formal denial that Islamabad backed the Taliban. By mid-1995, they controlled 12 of Afghanistan's 31 provinces. As they marched north to Kabul, many commanders surrendered to the Taliban and joined their forces. This was achieved through a combination of psychological pressure, bribery of commanders with funds from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and some demonstration victories on the ground. On the dawn of September 27, 1996 , the Taliban entered into Kabul. This attracted international attention. Upon capturing the city, they promptly imposed their version of Sharia law and tortured and publicly hanged former president Najibullah who was living under protection in the UN compound.