Chronology

Darius I of Persia and Alexander the Great were the first to invade Afghanistan, using the country as a gateway to India. They were followed in the 7th century by Islamic conquerors and, in the 13th and 14th centuries, by Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. All these empire builders left their mark.

Around 1750, Ahmad Shah Duranni brought together a state recognisable as the precursor to Afghanistan. A high-point in Afghan history, his control stretched from central Asia to Delhi and from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea.

In the 19th century, Afghanistan became a battleground in the rivalry between Imperial Britain and Czarist Russia for control of Central Asia. Three Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839-42, 1878-80, and 1919) ended inconclusively, with full independence from Britain achieved only in 1919.

During the Cold War, King Mohammed Zahir Shah developed close ties with the Soviet Union, accepting extensive economic assistance from Moscow. His overthrow in 1973 was followed by a decade of instability as liberal reformists came under pressure from both radical Marxists seeking closer ties with Moscow; and from Washington-supported, armed conservatives who sought to create an Islamic state. Fearing the government was on the verge of collapse, Moscow responded with a full-scale invasion of the country in December 1979.

The Soviets were met with fierce resistance from Mujaheddin groups already invigorated by opposition to the liberal government. Initially independent and armed with outdated weapons, they soon became embroiled in the crucible of Cold War rivalry. Washington began secretly funnelling billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry into Afghanistan, with the CIA taking the lead in training and funding. Iran, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who all wished to see a weakened USSR, supplied additional military assistance. Moscow's troops were soon bogged down in a brutal, unwinnable conflict and eventually, worn out and beaten, they sued for peace. The Soviet withdrawal was completed in February 1989, leaving the pro-Soviet government of President Najibullah in precarious control of Kabul. (The cost of this decade of fighting is hard to calculate. Perhaps one million Afghans lost their lives and up to 5,000,000 were made refugees in a proxy war, fought at arms length, between the USSR and the USA. Many have argued that in funding and training the opposition to the Soviets, the CIA created the radical Islamists who were later to become the terrorists of September 11th.)

When the Mujaheddin finally captured Kabul in April 1992, fighting quickly continued as the commanders of the various factions vied for control. Anarchy ensued; tens of thousands were killed; Kabul was devastated in repeated and often random rocket attacks; and whole districts of the city were ethnically cleansed.

From murky beginnings in 1994, instigated and controlled by Pakistani Intelligence and financed by Saudi Arabia, a group calling itself the Taliban, emerged as an alternative to self-serving, Mujaheddin in-fighting. Initially popular, they swept to military victories across Afghanistan finally seizing control of Kabul in September 1996. By late 1998, the Taliban controlled some 90% of the country, with Ahmed Shah Massoud's opposition confined to a mountainous corner of the North East.

The Taliban's scorched-earth tactics, human rights abuses and ultra-hardline interpretation of Islam isolated them from the international community and oppressed ordinary Afghans. In March 2001, despite worldwide protests, the Taliban destroyed the magnificent Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, dating from the second and fifth centuries. Furthermore, the Taliban were suspected of allowing foreign terrorist organisations to run training camps in their territory. On August 20th, 1998, U.S. cruise missiles struck an Al-Qaeda training complex near the eastern town of Khost in an attempt to kill Osama Bin Laden, believed to be involved in the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7th. After the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11th 2001, Bin Laden was named chief suspect and the Taliban were accused of harbouring wanted criminals.

On October 7th, after the Taliban repeatedly refused to turn over Bin Laden, the USA (supported by the British,) began air strikes in revenge for the attacks on Sept. 11th. There followed five weeks of ferocious aerial bombardment involving everything from precision-guided weapons to cluster bombs, B-52 carpet bombings and BLU-82 ‘Daisy Cutters’. When the American attacks were over, the Northern Alliance walked into Kabul to find virtually no resistance. On December 7th, the Taliban regime collapsed entirely when its troops fled their last stronghold in Kandahar, although skirmishes continue in the mountainous east of the country.

Although there is the possibility of real democracy emerging under the new government of Hamid Karzai, it has come at a terrible price. Thousands died in the American bombardment and Afghanistan’s tattered infrastructure, wrecked by decades of war, is now utterly devastated. Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden remain at large.

S. N.
London
July 2002

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