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| History of Afghanistan |
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This article on the history of Afghanistan covers the period from the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992 to the end of the international military presence in Afghanistan.
After the Soviet Union withdrew completely from Afghanistan in February 1989, fighting between the communist backed government and mujahideen continued. With material help from the Soviets, Mohammad Najibullah's government survived, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was overthrown on April 28, 1992. The forces of Abdul Rashid Dostum surrendered to Ahmed Shah Massoud and Kabul was left without defenses and soon fell to Massoud. At the time, Doustum had 1,500 militia in Kabul airport.
Seeking to resolve these differences, the leaders of the Peshawar-based mujahideen groups established an interim Jamiat-e Islami in mid-April to assume power in Kabul. Moderate leader Prof. Sibghatullah Mojadeddi was to chair the council for 2 months, after which a 10-member leadership council composed of mujahideen leaders and presided over by the head of the Jamiat-i-Islami, Prof. Burhanuddin Rabbani, was to be set up for 4 months. During this 6-month period, a Loya Jirga, or grand council of Afghan elders and notables, would convene and designate an interim administration which would hold power up to a year, pending elections.
But in May 1992, Rabbani prematurely formed the leadership council, undermining Mojaddedi's fragile authority. On June 28, 1992, Mojaddedi surrendered power to the Leadership Council, which then elected Rabbani as President. Nonetheless, heavy fighting broke out in August 1992 in Kabul between forces loyal to President Rabbani and rival factions, particularly those who supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin. After Rabbani extended his tenure in December 1992, fighting in the capital flared up in January and February 1993. The Islamabad Accord, signed in March 1993, which appointed Hekmatyar as Prime Minister, failed to have a lasting effect. A follow-up agreement, the Jalalabad Accord, called for the militias to be disarmed but was never fully implemented. Through 1993, Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami forces, allied with the Shi'a Hezb-i-Wahdat militia, clashed intermittently with Rabbani and Massoud's Jamiat forces. Cooperating with Jamiat were militants of Sayyaf's Ittehad-i-Islami and, periodically, troops loyal to ethnic Uzbek strongman Abdul Rashid Dostam. On January 1, 1994, Dostam switched sides, precipitating large scale fighting in Kabul and in northern provinces, which caused thousands of civilian casualties in Kabul and elsewhere and created a new wave of displaced persons and refugees. The country sank even further into anomie, forces loyal to Rabbani and Masud, both ethnic Tajiks, controlled Kabul and much of the northeast, while local warlords exerted power over the rest of the country.
In reaction to the warlordism prevalent in the country, and the lack of Pashtun representation in the Kabul government, the Taliban movement arose. Many Taliban had been educated in madrasas in Pakistan and were largely from rural Pashtun backgrounds. This group was made up of mostly Pashtuns that dedicated itself to removing the warlords, providing law and order, and imposing strict Islamic Sharia law on the country. In 1994 it developed enough strength to capture the city of Kandahar from a local warlord and proceeded to expand its control throughout Afghanistan, controlling Herat in September 1995, then Kabul in September 1996, and declaring the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. By this time Afghanistan was in its 17th year of war. It had the highest infant, child and maternal mortality rates in Asia. An estimated 10 million landmines covered its terrain. Two million refugees were in camps.
Pakistan recognized the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan in 1997. By the end of 2000, the Taliban controlled about 95% of the country, limiting the opposition to a small corner in the northeast Panjshir Valley. Efforts by the UN, prominent Afghans living outside the country, and other interested countries to bring about a peaceful solution to the continuing conflict came to nothing, largely because of intransigence on the part of the Taliban.
The Taliban sought to impose an extreme interpretation of Islam —based in part upon rural Pashtun tradition—upon the entire country and committed human rights violations, particularly directed against women and girls, in the process. Women were restricted from working outside the home or pursuing an education, were not to leave their homes without an accompanying male relative, and required to wear a traditional burqa.The Taliban repressed minority populations, particularly the Shia, as a retaliation in which approximately 2,500 Taliban soldiers were massacred by Abdul Malik and his Shia followers; attacked the Iranian embassy, killing eight diplomats and a television reporter, claiming them as spies.
In 2001, as part of a drive against relics of Afghanistan's pre-Islamic past, the Taliban destroyed two large statues of Buddha outside of the city of Bamiyan and announced destruction of all pre-Islamic statues in Afghanistan, including the remaining holdings of the Kabul Museum.In addition to the continuing civil strife, the country suffered from widespread poverty, drought, a devastated infrastructure, and ubiquitous use of landmines. [1] These conditions led to about a million Afghans facing starvation. [2] The February and May 1998 earthquakes killed thousands of Afghans in the northeast Badakhshan Province. [3]
From the mid-1990s the Taliban provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national who had fought with them against the Soviets, and provided a base for his and other terrorist organizations. The United Nations Security Council repeatedly sanctioned the Taliban for these activities. Bin Laden provided both financial and political support to the Taliban, as did Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, until American pressure forced them to drop their public support for the Taliban after September 11, 2001. Bin Laden and his al Qaeda group were charged with the bombing of the United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam in 1998, and in August 1998 the United States launched a cruise missile attack against bin Laden's terrorist camp in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and al Qaeda are believed responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, among other crimes.
By September 2001 the remaining opposition to the Taliban had been confined to the Panjshir Valley and a small region in the northeast. The opposition by this time had formed the Afghan Northern Alliance but controlled less than 5% of the country. Nevertheless, they held onto Afghanistan's diplomatic representation in the United Nations as only three countries in the world continued to recognize the Taliban government. On September 9, agents working on behalf of the Taliban and believed to be associated with bin Laden's al Qaeda group assassinated Northern Alliance Defense Minister and chief military commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, a hero of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets and the Taliban's principal military opponent. Following the Taliban's repeated refusal to expel bin Laden and his group and end its support for international terrorism, the United States and its partners launched an invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.
A period of bombing followed, which for about a month appeared to be having little effect. The US required the assistance of countries around Afghanistan to provide a route for the attack, but criticism increased as various mosques, aid agencies, hospitals, and other civilian buildings were damaged by US bombs. However, the Northern Alliance, fighting against a Taliban weakened by US bombing and massive defections, captured Mazari Sharif on November 9. It rapidly gained control of most of northern Afghanistan and took control of Kabul on November 13 after the Taliban unexpectedly fled the city. The Taliban were restricted to a smaller and smaller region, with Kunduz, the last Taliban-held city in the north, captured on November 26. Most of the Taliban fled to Pakistan. The war continued in the south of the country, where the Taliban retreated to Kandahar. After Kandahar fell in December, remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda continued to mount resistance.
Following the Ioya Jirga in June 2002, a transitional government was put in place to govern Afghanistan, overseen by the United Nations and the Bush administration of the United States. The assembly voted Hamid Karzai as President, a position he was reelected to in successor governments until 2014. [4]
The 2003 Ioya Jirga saw an assembly vote and approve the foundations of a new republic and constitution for Afghanistan. The Islamic Republic saw NATO troops being maintained in the country while fighting the Taliban insurgency. [5] The first election for president was held in 2004, Hamid Karzai was declared the winner and became President of the Islamic Republic. Karzai won reelection in 2009 and left office in 2014. [6] He was succeeded by Ashraf Ghani who won the 2014 presidential election and reelected in 2019. [7]
NATO troops began to slowly withdraw international troops from Afghanistan as the war continued. Concurrently in 2021, the Taliban insurgency quickly began to see success, capturing 33 of the 34 provincial capitals of Afghanistan in the span of three months. On August 15, 2021, the Taliban captured Kabul with President Ghani fleeing the country. Anti Taliban-forces along with the remnants of the Islamic Republic formed the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, launching an insurgency against the Taliban from the Panjshir Valley. [8] [9]
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan military leader and politician. He was a guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War from 1979 to 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an Afghan politician, and former mujahideen leader and drug trafficker. He is the founder and current leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin political party, so called after Mohammad Yunus Khalis split from Hezbi Islami in 1979 to found Hezb-i Islami Khalis. He twice served as Prime Minister during the 1990s.
The following lists events that happened during 1996 in Afghanistan.
The Islamic State of Afghanistan was established by the Peshawar Accords of 26 April 1992. Many Afghan mujahideen parties participated in its creation, after the fall of the socialist government. Its power was limited due to the country's second civil war, which was won by the Taliban, who took control of Kabul in 1996. The Islamic state then transitioned to a government in exile and led the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. It remained the internationally recognized government of Afghanistan at the United Nations until 2001, when the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan was created and an Afghan Interim Administration took control of Afghanistan with US and NATO assistance following the overthrow of the first Taliban government. The Transitional Islamic State was subsequently transformed into the Islamic Republic, which existed until the Taliban seized power again in 2021 following a prolonged insurgency.
Abdulrab Rasul Sayyaf is an exiled Afghan politician and former mujahideen commander. He took part in the war against the Marxist–Leninist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government in the 1980s, leading the Afghan mujahideen faction Ittehad-al-Islami.
Jamayat-E-Islami, sometimes shortened to Jamiat, is a predominantly Tajik political party and former paramilitary organisation in Afghanistan. It is the oldest and largest functioning political party in Afghanistan, and was originally formed as a student political society at Kabul University. It has a communitarian ideology based on Islamic law. During the Soviet–Afghan War and the following Afghan Civil War against the communist government, Jamiat-e Islami was one of the most powerful of the Afghan mujahideen groups. Burhanuddin Rabbani led the party from 1968 to 2011, and served as President of the Islamic State of Afghanistan from 1992 to 2001, in exile from 1996.
The Northern Alliance, officially known as the United Islamic National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, was a military alliance of groups that operated between early 1992 and 2001 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. At that time, many non-Pashtun Northerners originally with the Republic of Afghanistan led by Mohammad Najibullah became disaffected with Pashtun Khalqist Afghan Army officers holding control over non-Pashtun militias in the North. Defectors such as Rashid Dostum and Abdul Momim allied with Ahmad Shah Massoud and Ali Mazari forming the Northern Alliance. The alliance's capture of Mazar-i-Sharif and more importantly the supplies kept there crippled the Afghan military and began the end of Najibullah's government. Following the collapse of Najibullah's government the Alliance would fall with a Second Civil War breaking out however following the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan's (Taliban) takeover of Kabul, The United Front was reassembled.
The Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, also referred to as Hezb-e-Islami or Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), is an Afghan political party and paramilitary organization, originally founded in 1976 as Hezb-e-Islami and led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 1979, Mulavi Younas Khalis split with Hekmatyar and established his own group, which became known as Hezb-i Islami Khalis; the remaining part of Hezb-e Islami, still headed by Hekmatyar, became known as Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin. Hezbi Islami seeks to emulate the Muslim Brotherhood and to replace the various tribal factions of Afghanistan with one unified Islamic state. This puts them at odds with the more tribe-oriented Taliban.
The 1989–1992 Afghan Civil War, also known as the FirstAfghan Civil War, took place between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the Soviet–Afghan War on 15 February 1989 until 27 April 1992, ending the day after the proclamation of the Peshawar Accords proclaiming a new interim Afghan government which was supposed to start serving on 28 April 1992.
The 1992–1996 Afghan Civil War, also known as the Second Afghan Civil War, took place between 28 April 1992—the date a new interim Afghan government was supposed to replace the Republic of Afghanistan of President Mohammad Najibullah—and the Taliban's occupation of Kabul establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on 27 September 1996.
The 1996–2001 Afghan Civil War, also known as the Third Afghan Civil War, took place between the Taliban's conquest of Kabul and their establishing of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on 27 September 1996, and the US and UK invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001: a period that was part of the Afghan Civil War that had started in 1989, and also part of the war in Afghanistan that had started in 1978.
The Afshar Operation was a military operation in Afghanistan that took place on February 11–12, 1993 during the Afghan Civil War (1992-96). The operation was launched by Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani's Islamic State of Afghanistan government and the allied Abdul Rasul Sayyaf's Ittehad-i Islami paramilitary forces against Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezbe Islami and Abdul Ali Mazari's Hezbe Wahdat militias in the densely populated, Qizilbash-majority, Afshar district in west Kabul. The Hazara-Hezbe Wahdat together with the Pashtun-Hezbe Islami of Hekmatyar had been shelling densely populated areas in northern Kabul from their positions in Afshar, killing thousands. To counter the shelling, government forces attacked Afshar in order to capture the positions of Wahdat and its leader Mazari, and to consolidate parts of the city controlled by the government.
The Battle of Kabul was a series of intermittent battles and sieges over the city of Kabul during the period of 1992–1996.
The Afghan mujahideen were Islamist resistance groups that fought against the Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War and the subsequent First Afghan Civil War.
The Shura-e Nazar was created by Ahmad Shah Massoud in 1984 at the northern provinces of Takhar, Badakhshan, Balkh and Kunduz, during the Soviet-Afghan War. It comprised and united about 130 resistance commanders from 12 northern, eastern and central regions of Afghanistan.
The Afghan conflict refers to the series of events that have kept Afghanistan in a near-continuous state of armed conflict since the 1970s. Early instability followed the collapse of the Kingdom of Afghanistan in the largely non-violent 1973 coup d'état, which deposed Afghan monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah in absentia, ending his 40-year-long reign. With the concurrent establishment of the Republic of Afghanistan, headed by Mohammad Daoud Khan, the country's relatively peaceful and stable period in modern history came to an end. However, all-out fighting did not erupt until after 1978, when the Saur Revolution violently overthrew Khan's government and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Subsequent unrest over the radical reforms that were being pushed by the then-ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) led to unprecedented violence, prompting a large-scale pro-PDPA military intervention by the Soviet Union in 1979. In the ensuing Soviet–Afghan War, the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen received extensive support from Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia in a joint covert effort that was dubbed Operation Cyclone.
Pakistan's principal intelligence and covert action agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has historically conducted a number of clandestine operations in its western neighbor, Afghanistan. ISI's covert support to militant jihadist insurgent groups in Afghanistan, the Pashtun-dominated former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Kashmir has earned it a wide reputation as the primary progenitor of many active South Asian jihadist groups.
On 24 April 1992, the Peshawar Accord was announced by several but not all Afghan mujahideen parties: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-e Islami, had since March 1992 opposed these attempts at a coalition government.
The Islamabad Accord was a peace and power-sharing agreement signed on 7 March 1993 between the warring parties in the War in Afghanistan (1992–1996), one party being the Islamic State of Afghanistan and the other an alliance of militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The Defense Minister of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, resigned his position in exchange for peace, as requested by Hekmatyar who saw Massoud as a personal rival. Hekmatyar took the long-offered position of prime minister. The agreement proved short-lived, however, as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his allies soon resumed the bombardment of Kabul.
On 9 September 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated by two al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists in Khwaja Bahauddin District, Takhar Province, Afghanistan.
