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WSWS : News & Analysis : The US War in Afghanistan
The Taliban, the US and the resources of Central Asia
Part 1
By Peter Symonds
24 October 2001
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The following is the first article in a two-part series on the
history of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The concluding part
will be published tomorrow.
The target of the latest US military aggression in Afghanistan is the
Taliban. However, one searches in vain in the extensive media
coverage of the “war on terrorism” for any coherent explanation of
the origins of this Islamic extremist organisation, its social and
ideological base, and its rise to power. The omission is no accident.
Any serious examination of the Taliban reveals the culpability of
Washington in fostering the current theocratic regime in Kabul.
The Bush administration rails against the Taliban for harbouring the
Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation. But
throughout the 1980s, successive US administrations spent billions of
dollars funding the Islamic holy war or jihad by Mujaheddin fighters
against the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul in order to undermine the
Soviet Union. Moreover, until the late 1990s, the US turned a blind
eye to the Islamic fundamentalism and regressive social policies of
the Taliban, which was backed and funded by two of Washington’s
closest allies in the region—Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The primary factor in determining the twists and turns of
Washington’s orientation in Afghanistan has not been the threat from
Islamic extremism but how best to exploit the new opportunities that
opened up in Central Asia following the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991. Throughout the last decade, the US has been vying with
Russia, China, the European powers and Japan for political influence
in this key strategic region and for the right to exploit the world’s
largest untapped reserves of oil and gas in the newly formed Central
Asian republics—Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan.
The key to the huge potential profits in Central Asia was
distribution—how to transport the oil and gas from this isolated,
backward and landlocked region to the world’s main energy markets.
The only existing pipelines were those of the old Soviet distribution
network through Russia. As the scramble for resources in the region
intensified, the US aims were clear. It wanted to undermine Russia’s
economic monopoly while at the same time making sure that other
rivals were kept out of the race. The pipelines therefore had to run
through countries over which the US could exert substantial political
influence, which excluded China and Iran.
The Central Asian republics were previously part of the Soviet Union
and had long borders with both China and Iran. So a pipeline that
excluded Russia, China and Iran left two alternatives. One was a
convoluted route under the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus via
Azerbaijan and Georgia, and then across Turkey. The second through
Afghanistan and Pakistan was shorter, but immediately raised
difficult political questions. With whom was one to negotiate in
Afghanistan and how could the political stability necessary to
construct and maintain pipelines be guaranteed?
Following the fall of the Soviet-backed regime of Mohammad Najibullah
in 1992, Kabul had been turned into a battleground by competing
Mujaheddin militia. The nominal head of government was Professor
Burhanuddin Rabbani, who presided over a highly unstable and shifting
coalition, based mainly on ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks from northern
Afghanistan. The rival Hizb-e-Islami militia, drawn from the Pashtun
majority in southern Afghanistan, was also entrenched in the suburbs
of Kabul. Led by Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, it was subjecting government
positions in the capital to withering rocket barrages.
Arrayed on either side of the conflict, which was reducing the
capital to rubble and producing wave after wave of refugees, were
other militia groups reflecting the country’s myriad of ethnic and
religious divisions. The rivalries reflected not only local
animosities but the interests of various sponsor states, each seeking
to establish its own predominance. Pakistan supported Hikmetyar, Iran
backed the Shiite Hazaras, and Saudi Arabia financed a number of
groups, particularly those sympathetic to its brand of
Islam—Wahabbism. The Central Asian republics had connections to the
ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan and, in the background, India,
Russia and the US all had a hand in Afghani political affairs.
The situation in Kabul was a microcosm of the country as a whole. The
Rabbani government exercised no real authority beyond the areas under
its immediate military control. The country was carved up among rival
militia, the economy was in ruins and the social fabric in tatters.
Over a million people died in the war against the Soviet-backed
regime in the 1980s and many more were refugees. By the mid-1990s,
life expectancy was just 43-44 years and a quarter of all children
died before the age of five. Only 29 percent of people had access to
health care and a mere 12 percent to safe water.
The Pashtun areas in the south, where the Taliban emerged in 1994,
were among the most chaotic. Kandahar, the country’s second largest
city, was divided between three rival warlords, and the surrounding
areas were subject to the arbitrary and often brutal rule of dozens
of militia commanders. The region, which was one of Afghanistan’s
most economically backward and socially conservative, had
traditionally provided the country’s royal rulers. Local resentment
towards Kabul’s new Tajik and Uzbek leadership was intertwined with
desperation produced by the intolerable economic and social
conditions.
Southern Afghanistan was, however, also the preferred route for a
number of proposed pipelines from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. An
Argentinean corporation, Bridas, was the first to enter the race. The
company obtained rights in Turkmenistan in 1992 and 1993 to explore
and exploit the country’s gas fields, and in 1994, opened up
discussions with the Turkmen and Pakistani governments over the
construction of a gas pipeline, leading to the signing of an
agreement for a feasibility study in early 1995. Bridas initially
attempted to involve US energy giant, Unocal, in the project. Unocal
had plans of its own and later that year signed a separate pipeline
agreement, triggering sharp rivalry and a legal battle between the
two companies.
All of the pipeline plans assumed that a political solution could be
found to the chaotic conditions that existed along the proposed
route. Other lesser business interests were also keen to clear out
the petty warlords and militia. The road from Quetta in Pakistan
through Kandahar and Herat to Turkmenistan offered the only
alternative transport route to the northern road to Central Asia
through embattled Kabul. The transport companies and truck owners
involved in the profitable Central Asian trade and smuggling rackets
were compelled to pay large tolls to each militia commander as their
vehicles crossed his turf—a situation they wanted to end.
The origins of the Taliban
In the midst of these discussions, the Taliban movement appeared as a
possible solution. That is not to say that the Taliban—students or
“talibs” drawn from Islamic schools or “madrassas”—was simply a
creation of governments and business interests. The sudden emergence
of this new movement in 1994 and the rapidity of its growth and
success was the product of two factors—firstly, the social and
political quagmire that produced a ready supply of recruits, and
secondly, external aid from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and, in all
likelihood, the US, in the form of finance, arms and advisers.
Although a number of Taliban leaders had fought in the US-sponsored
“jihad” against the Soviet Union, the movement was not a breakaway
from, or an amalgamation of, other Mujaheddin factions. It was
largely based on a new generation who had not been directly involved
in the fighting of the 1980s. They were hostile to what they saw as
the corrupt rule of petty Mujaheddin despots who had brought nothing
but misery to the lives of ordinary Afghanis in the wake of
Najibullah’s fall. Their own lives had been torn apart by war. Many
of them had grown up in the refugee camps inside Pakistan and
received a rudimentary education in the madrassas run by various
Pakistani Islamic extremist parties.
One author provided the following description: “These boys were a
world apart from the Mujaheddin whom I had got to know during the
1980s—men who could recount their tribal and clan lineages,
remembered their abandoned farms and valleys with nostalgia and
recounted legends and stories from Afghan history. These boys were
from a generation who had never seen their country at peace—an
Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself... They were
literally the orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless, the
jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge...
“Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been
drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they
had to hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained
for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers
such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what
Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan’s lumpen proletariat”
[Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, Ahmed
Rashid, I.B Tauris, 2000, p.32].
The Taliban’s ideology was a jumble of ideas that had evolved to
appeal to these social layers. From the very outset, the movement was
profoundly reactionary. It looked backward for its social solutions
to a mythical past when the precepts of the prophet Mohammad were
strictly observed. It was deeply imbued with the virulent anti-
communism that had been generated by the brutality and repression of
successive Soviet-backed regimes in Kabul, which had falsely ruled
under the banner of “socialism”.
Like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban reflected the suspicion
and hostility of oppressed rural layers towards urban life, learning,
culture and technology. Its leaders were semi-educated village
mullahs, not learned Islamic scholars versed in the scriptures and
religious commentaries. They were hostile to other Islamic sects,
particularly the Shias, and to non-Pashtun ethnic groups. The
Taliban’s regressive social code drew as much from Pashtun tribal
laws, or Pashtunwali, as from any Islamic tradition. In as much as
its ideology had an Islamic base it was Deobandism—an influential
19th century reform movement—but in a form that was stripped of
anything remotely progressive.
The Taliban emerged in war-ravaged Afghanistan as a type of clerical
fascism. It reflected the despair and desperation of uprooted and
declassed layers of the rural petty bourgeoisie—the sons of mullahs,
petty officials, small farmers and traders—who could see no
alternative to the social evils that abounded in Afghanistan other
than through the imposition of a dictatorial Islamic regime.
The Taliban’s own account of its origins provide an insight into its
appeal. In July 1994, the Taliban’s top leader Mohammad Omar, then a
village mullah, responded to pleas for assistance in freeing two
girls who had been kidnapped by a local militia commander and raped.
Omar, who had fought in one of the Mujaheddin organisations, gathered
together a group of his supporters among the religious students of
the local madrassas. Armed with a handful of rifles, the group
released the girls, captured the commander and hung him from the
barrel of his tank.
Whatever the truth of the story, the Taliban portrayed themselves as
religious vigilantes, intent on righting the wrongs inflicted on
ordinary people. Its leaders insisted that the movement, unlike the
Mujaheddin organisations, was not a political party and not out to
form a government. They claimed to be clearing the way for a true
Islamic administration and, on that basis, demanded great sacrifices
from their recruits, who received no pay, only weapons and food.
Pakistani assistance
There was always, however, a large gulf between the image and
reality. If the Taliban were to be more than a group of armed
religious zealots engaged in hit-and-run guerrilla warfare, the
movement required large amounts of money, arms and ammunition, as
well as considerable technical and military expertise—none of which
would be forthcoming from its impoverished recruits.
>From the outset, the Taliban’s most prominent sponsor was Pakistan.
Pakistan’s powerful Interservices Intelligence (ISI), which had been
the principal conduit for US money, arms and expertise to the
Mujaheddin groups throughout the 1980s, was deeply enmeshed in
Afghani politics. By 1994, the government of Benazir Bhutto had held
talks with the Argentinean company Bridas, but was no closer to
clearing a route through southern Afghanistan. Pakistan’s main proxy,
Hikmetyar, was bogged down in the fighting in Kabul and was unlikely
to provide a solution.
Casting around for an alternative, Bhutto’s Interior Minister
Naseerullah Babar hit upon the idea of using the Taliban. In
September 1994, he organised a team of surveyors and ISI officers to
survey the road through Kandahar and Herat to Turkmenistan. The
following month, Bhutto flew to Turkmenistan where she secured the
backing of two key warlords—Rashid Dostum, who controlled areas of
Afghanistan near the Turkmen border, and Ismail Khan, who ruled over
Herat. In a bid to attract international financial support, Pakistan
also flew a number of foreign diplomats based in Islamabad to
Kandahar and Herat.
Having secured a measure of support for his plan, Interior Minister
Babar organised a trial convoy of 30 military trucks, manned by ex-
army drivers under the command of a senior ISI field officer and
guarded by Taliban fighters. The trucks set off on October 29 1994,
and, when the path was blocked, the Taliban dealt with the militia
responsible. By November 5, the Taliban had not only cleared the road
but, with minimal fighting, taken control of Kandahar.
Over the next three months, the Taliban took control of 12 of
Afghanistan’s 31 provinces. At least some of its “victories” were
secured with large bribes to local militia commanders. After
suffering military reversals in mid-1995, the Taliban rearmed and
reorganised with Pakistani assistance and in September 1995 entered
Herat, effectively clearing the road from Pakistan to Central Asia.
The following month, Unocal signed its pipeline deal with
Turkmenistan.
Pakistan has always been cautious about admitting any direct support
for the Taliban, but the links are quite open. The Taliban has close
connections with the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI), a Pakistani-based
Islamic extremist party, which ran its own madrassas in the border
areas with Afghanistan. The JUI has provided the Taliban with large
numbers of recruits from its schools, as well as a communication
channel into the upper echelons of the Pakistani military and ISI.
The most telling sign of outside involvement was the military success
of the Taliban. In little more than a year, it had grown from a
handful of students to a well-organised militia that could muster up
to 20,000 fighters, backed by tanks, artillery and air support,
controlling large swathes of southern and western Afghanistan.
As one writer observed: “It is also inconceivable that a force
composed mostly of former guerrillas and student amateurs could have
operated with the degree of skill and organisation which the Taliban
showed almost from the outset of their operations. While there were
undoubtedly former members of the Afghani armed forces among their
numbers, the speed and sophistication with which their offensives
were conducted, and the quality of such elements as their
communications, air support and artillery bombardments, lead to the
inescapable conclusion that they must have owed much to a Pakistani
military presence, or at least professional support” [Afghanistan: A
New History, Martin Ewers, Curzon, 2001, pp182-3].
Pakistan was not the only source of assistance. Saudi Arabia also
provided substantial financial and material aid. Shortly after the
Taliban took control of Kandahar, JUI head Maulana Fazlur Rehman
began to organise “hunting trips” for royalty from Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf States. By mid-1996, Saudi Arabia was sending funds,
vehicles and fuel to support the Taliban’s push on Kabul. The reasons
were two-fold. On the political plane, the Taliban’s fundamentalist
ideology was close to the Saudi’s own Wahabbism. It was hostile to
the Shiite sect and thus to Riyadh’s major regional rival—Iran. On a
more prosaic level, the Saudi oil company, Delta Oil, was a partner
in the Unocal pipeline and was pinning its hopes on a Taliban victory
to get the project off the ground.
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