The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
in Afghanistan, a war of warlords had erupted after the removal of the country’s socialist government. As the former proxies of the United States battled one another for control of the capital, destabilizing the country and driving it into further ruin, they gradually set the stage for another American intervention.
The legacy of the CIA’s program in Afghanistan was not only the unraveling of the Soviet Union, but also the systematic destruction of a country. By 1994, half of Kabul lay in ruins thanks to the vicious power struggle that erupted between some of the CIA’s main proxies after they successfully dislodged Najibullah’s Soviet-backed government.
Much of the destruction was the handiwork of Hekmatyar, the ruthless warlord and now heroin kingpin who had received some $600 million in CIA support over the years. Flush with rocket-propelled grenades, munitions supplied by Washington through Pakistan, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami released thousands of violent convicts to rampage through enemy-controlled areas and rocketed entire neighborhoods. Kabul was left without electricity, water or functioning telephones—a total reversal from the fleeting period of development during communist rule.
After the ousting of Najibullah, Burhanuddin Rabbani, one of the mujahedin’s founding fathers and a Reagan administration favorite, took over the government. He explicitly opposed democracy and sought to install an Islamic State that governed under strict Sharia law.
With Hekmatyar’s militia at the outskirts of Kabul, Rabbani relied on his defense minister, Ahmad Shah Massoud—the guerrilla tactician regarded by the CIA during the anti-Soviet jihad as a kind of pro-Western Che Guevara—to repel the assault. For years, Massoud and Hekmatyar waged a battle of all against all that reduced half of the city to rubble. Hekmatyar’s brutality knew no limits; when journalist Leslie Cockburn arrived in 1993 to interview him, he had just beheaded five political opponents—and would later kill Cockburn’s translator. The post-communist regime had been reduced to the squabbling of despotic warlords with no political vision or bureaucratic competence. Its agenda was focused entirely on battling for power.
Abdullah Mirzoy served as a diplomat in Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry in Kabul under successive governments from 1979 to 1994. He described himself as an Afghan nationalist who supported any government that was committed to his country’s development, irrespective of its ideology. When the former mujahedin commanders entered power, Mirzoy watched in agony as his country was systematically plunged into despotism. Today, like many of Afghanistan’s brightest minds, he resides far from his homeland, in the city of Lafayette, Indiana.
“I was in Kabul and I saw with my eyes the fighting there, how they destroyed the city,” Mirzoy recalled to me. “The city was not destroyed before, it was a nice city, and [Massoud and Hekmatyar] completely ruined it.”
Mirzoy recalled the day a delegation of European diplomats arrived in Kabul to discuss ending the civil war with Massoud. “He didn’t even have a logical explanation why he fought,” he said. “I had some discussion with Massoud and his people and they didn’t have any vision for the country. All they wanted was power. They had no economic plan, nothing. They even destroyed a very strong army and took all of the tanks to Pakistan, sent all the weapons away. In the end, we had nothing.”
Mirzoy said he pleaded with the government to salvage what was left of the country. “If you would have seen the children in the city you would have cried. But they didn’t care,” he said of the warlords. “They were all fighting for somebody else, they were slaves for outside powers without thinking about their own country and what is human dignity. Sure, you have to have money but not at the expense of the other people.”
In the areas that Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami controlled, Mirzoy said the warlord attempted to impose a de facto Islamic state on the local population. During a bus trip from Peshawar to Kabul, the vehicle was stopped at a Hezb-i-Islami checkpoint in the Surobi district east of the Afghan capital. He said militiamen demanded as a matter of policy that each passenger leave the bus to recite the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.
“I told the commander, ‘I’m already Muslim, why are you trying to convert me?’” Mirzoy said. “‘How is it logical to force people to say the shahada and convert to Islam?’ I asked him. ‘Why should I say if I’m Muslim or not, it’s my problem, not yours.’” Thanks to Mirzoy’s protests, he and his fellow travelers were allowed to go without reconverting to Islam.
“It was a really bad situation there,” Mirzoy remembered. “Out of all my friends in the [Foreign] ministry, I was the only one who didn’t have fear. One of them passed me in the office and asked why I even bothered showing up to work in a suit.”
Hekmatyar’s rampage ultimately led to the collapse of his popular base. His support of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait also lost him the patronage of Saudi Arabia and bin Laden. As his influence faded, Pakistan shifted its support to a little known group of religious zealots known as the Taliban. Educated in Saudi-funded religious schools in Pakistan’s northwest frontier region, the Taliban’s founders modeled themselves after the Saudi morality police. With powerful allies in the West, they were poised to suffocate Afghanistan’s tradition of diverse Islamic scholarship and practice beneath a uniformly fundamentalist, ruthlessly enforced theocracy.
For many average Afghans driven into ruin under the rule of former mujahedin commanders, the Taliban were a welcome change. “Nobody had ever imagined that the situation could get this bad,” reflected Mullah Mohammad Omar, a famed Afghan war veteran who helped found the Taliban. “Nobody thought it could be improved, either.”
By September 1995, with Kabul under siege by the Taliban, Washington backed a secret Pakistani-Saudi plan to replace the Rabbani government with a coalition that included the Taliban. The Pakistani government of Benazir Bhutto wanted to go further and made installing the Taliban in sole power a top priority. Pakistan then helped to set up a wireless network for Taliban commanders, repairing its airports and fleet of captured Soviet jets, providing it with a communications network to advance its radio propaganda, while the Saudis directly armed the movement with Datsun pickup technicals that provided its forces with superior mobile warfare capacity.
In contrast, the Clinton administration’s considerations were guided largely by a plan from petroleum company Unocal to build a pipeline through Afghanistan that would break Russia’s control over oil from the Caspian Sea and marginalize Iran. As Ahmed Rashid, a leading journalistic chronicler of the Taliban’s rise to power, wrote, “There was not a word of US criticism after the Taliban captured [the Afghan city of] Herat in 1995 and threw out thousands of girls from schools. In fact the USA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, considered Herat’s fall as a help to Unocal and tightening the noose around Iran.”
That same year, a Unocal executive named Chris Taggart publicly volunteered his opinion that the Taliban would ensure the most secure environment for the pipeline. His employer had even bribed warlords like Hekmatyar with “bonuses” in exchange for guarding of the pipeline.
With the backing of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Taliban bristled with firepower that left its foes stunned. Human Rights Watch documented a white-painted C-130 Hercules transport aircraft identified by journalists as Saudi Arabian on the tarmac at Kandahar airport in 1996 unloading artillery and small-arms ammunition to Taliban soldiers. With its superior firepower and political discipline, the Taliban drove the Rabbani government from Kabul in 1996 and announced the birth of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that same year.
To secure the Taliban’s theocratic stronghold, Saudi Arabia kicked in millions for its own morality police: the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The sister organization of the Saudi service that bore the same name and meted out similarly harsh punishments to those who violated Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia law, this ministry was the most generously funded and powerful of all the Taliban’s government agencies.
Draconian rule descended on Afghanistan, with women forbidden from attending school and required to wear full facial and head-to-toe covering. Music was banned and public executions in stadiums became the order of the day, with walls bulldozed atop accused homosexuals. Forced out of jobs in the civil service and education system, many women turned to begging in the street. An entire generation