History
Excavation of prehistoric sites suggests that early humans lived in northern Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago and that farming communities in Afghanistan were among the earliest in the world. After 2000 bc successive waves of people from Central Asia moved into the area. Since many of these settlers were Aryans (speakers of the parent language of the Indo-European languages), a people who also migrated to Persia (now Iran) and India in prehistoric times, the area was called Aryana, or Land of the Aryans.
By the middle of the 6th century bc the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid dynasty controlled the region of Aryana. About 330 bc, Alexander the Great defeated the last Achaemenid ruler and made his way to the eastern limits of Aryana and beyond. After his death in 323 bc several kingdoms fought for control of his Asian empire. These kingdoms included Seleucids, Bactria, and the Indian Mauryan Empire.
A. Buddhist Period:
About the 1st century ad the Kushans, a central Asian people, won control of Aryana. Buddhism was the dominant religion from the 3rd century to the 8th century ad. Ruins of many monasteries and stupas, or reliquary mounds (structures where sacred relics are kept or displayed), from that period still remain. They line what was once a great Buddhist pilgrimage road from India to Balkh, in northern Afghanistan, and on into Central Asia.
Kushan power was destroyed at the end of the 4th century ad by a Turkic people of central Asian origin called the White Huns or Ephthalites. After the Ephthalites, the area was divided among several kingdoms, some Buddhist, some Hindu.
B. Islamic Period
In the 7th century ad Arab armies carried the new religion of Islam to Afghanistan. The western provinces of Herāt and Sistan came under Arab rule, but the people of these provinces revolted and returned to their old beliefs as soon as the Arab armies passed. In the 10th century Muslim rulers called Samanids, from Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan, extended their influence into the Afghan area. A Samanid established a dynasty in Ghaznī called the Ghaznavids. The greatest Ghaznavid king, Mahmud, who ruled from 998 to 1030, established Islam throughout the area of Afghanistan. He led many military expeditions into India. Ghaznī became a center of literature and the arts.
The Ghaznavid state grew weaker under Mahmud’s descendants and gave way in the middle of the 12th century to the Ghurid kingdom, which arose in Ghur, in the west central region of present-day Afghanistan. The Ghurids in turn were routed early in the 13th century by the Khwarizm Shahs, another central Asian dynasty. They were swept away in about 1220 by the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, who devastated the land.
Near the end of the 14th century the central Asian military leader Tamerlane (Timur Lang) conquered the region of Afghanistan and moved on into India. His sons and grandsons, the Timurids, could not hold Tamerlane’s empire together. However, they ruled most of present-day Afghanistan from Herāt.
The period from the Ghurid through the Timurid dynasty produced fine Islamic architectural monuments. Many of these mosques, shrines, and minarets still stand in Herāt, Qal‘eh-ye Bost, Ghaznī, and Mazār-e Sharīf. An important school of miniature painting flourished at Herāt in the 15th century.
A descendant of Tamerlane on his father’s side and Genghis Khan on his mother’s side, Babur (Zahiruddin Muhammad) took Kābul in October 1504 and then moved on to India, where he established the Mughal Empire.
Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Afghanistan was fought over by the rulers of the Mughal Empire, centered in India, and those of the Safavid dynasty, in Persia. Usually the Mughals held Kābul and the Persians held Herāt, with Kandahār frequently changing hands. The Pashtun tribes increased their power, but they failed to win independence.
C. An Afghan Empire:
In the 18th century, Nadir Shah, the king of Persia, employed the Abdali tribe of Pashtuns in his wars in India. Ahmad Shah, an Abdali chief who had gained a high post in Nadir Shah’s army, established himself in Kandahār after Nadir Shah’s assassination in 1747. An assembly of tribal chiefs proclaimed him shah, and the Afghans extended their rule as far east as Kashmīr and Delhi, north to the Amu Darya, and west into northern Persia.
Ahmad retired from the throne in 1772 and died in Kandahār, whereupon his son Timur Shah assumed control. The Afghan empire survived largely intact through the next 20 years. He established his capital in Kābul to draw power away from his rivals in Kandahār, as well as to be closer to his richest province, the Punjab of India. Following Timur’s death in 1793, palace rivalries and internal conflicts led to the disintegration of the empire. Two sons of Timur, Shah Shuja and Shah Mahmud, fought over the remnants of the Afghan empire, with Shuja finally going into exile in India and Mahmud withdrawing to Herāt, as a number of other small principalities emerged throughout Afghanistan.
Dost Muhammad Khan emerged as the new ruler, or emir, in Kābul by 1826. Among the most pressing problems he faced was repelling the westward encroachment of the Sikhs, who gained control of the Punjab and the region up to the Khyber Pass, including the important trading post of Peshāwar. In 1837 Dost Muhammad’s forces defeated the Sikhs at Jamrūd, but failed to recover Peshāwar. This conflict and the arrival of a new Russian envoy in Kābul made the British, who were allies of the Sikhs, extremely nervous about the security of the western frontier of their growing empire in India. These events played out during the so-called Great Game between the Russian “bear” and the British “lion,” with both empires vying for regional dominance and Afghanistan becoming caught between them. In 1838 Lord Auckland, the British governor-general of India, ordered military intervention in Afghanistan to protect British interests, thereby setting off the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842). With British and Sikh manipulation and support, Shah Shuja returned to Afghanistan to overthrow Dost Muhammad, as a British garrison was established in Kābul and elsewhere south of the Hindu Kush mountains.
A revolt by Dost Muhammad’s son Muhammad Akbar Khan led to the forced withdrawal of the British garrison from Kābul in the winter of 1842. Ambushed during the retreat, nearly all of the some 4,500 British troops and their 12,000 camp followers were killed. Dost Muhammad was able to return to Kābul, from where he spent the next 20 years reunifying parts of Afghanistan until his death in 1863.
Dost Muhammad designated his third son, Sher Ali, as his successor, but civil war erupted as rivals to Sher Ali vied for control. Sher Ali defeated his rivals, notably his brother Afzul Khan, by 1868. At the same time he tried to maintain good relations with the British Raj (British-ruled India). However, the Russian conquests in Central Asia had brought that empire to the Amu Darya river on the northern border of Afghanistan by 1847. The negotiations of a Russian envoy in Kābul renewed the unease of the British, who consequently invaded Afghanistan, instigating the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880). Sher Ali was deposed in 1879, but the British, realizing the difficulties of ruling from within Afghanistan, in 1880 invited a nephew of Sher Ali, Abdur Rahman Khan (Afzul Khan’s son), to rule at their behest. However, the British limited his power beyond the borders of Afghanistan by securing control of Afghan foreign relations.
Known as the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman recognized the threat from the expansionistic Russians and the defensive British. As a result he allowed the foreign delineation of his borders to encompass a smaller territory than he actually considered to be Afghanistan. The emergence of the present-day configuration of the country, with its narrow panhandle of the Wakhan Corridor projecting to China on the northeast, is an example of the establishment of a classic buffer state, in which, to avoid inadvertent conflict, the borders of the Russian and British empires were to have no contact points in common. Similarly, the establishment of the Durand Line, the southeastern border of Afghanistan, divided the territory of the militant Pashtun tribe into two halves, with one half under the control of the British Raj, and the other inside Afghanistan. This divide-and-rule policy allowed some nominal control of a difficult region, but problems related to the tribally unpopular (and for them, unrecognized) border have continued to the present day.
D. Modern Afghanistan:
Abdur Rahman Khan extended his control throughout the territory within the new boundaries of Afghanistan. His son, Habibullah, who reigned from 1901 until 1919, took the first steps toward the introduction of modern education and industry. Habibullah’s son and successor, Amanullah, initiated a brief war, the Third Anglo-Afghan War, in 1919 to end British control over Afghan foreign affairs. The resulting peace treaty recognized the independence of Afghanistan.
Amanullah was determined to modernize his country. In 1926 he took the title of king. His reforms, including efforts to induce women to give up the burka, or full-length veil, and to make men wear Western clothing in certain public areas, offended religious and ethnic group leaders. Revolts broke out, and in 1929 Amanullah fled the country.
Order was restored in 1930 by four brothers who were relatives of Amanullah. One of them, Muhammad Nadir Shah, became king, but he was assassinated in 1933. His son, Muhammad Zahir Shah, succeeded him. Power remained concentrated in the hands of Zahir and the royal family for the next four decades. In 1946 Afghanistan joined the United Nations (UN).
In 1953 Muhammad Daud, a nephew of Nadir Shah, became prime minister. Daud began to modernize Afghanistan rapidly with the help of economic and especially military aid from the USSR; the modern Afghan army was largely created with Soviet equipment and technical training. The United States declined to assist in this process. Social reform proceeded slowly because the government was afraid to antagonize conservative ethnic group leaders and devout Muslims. Relations with Pakistan deteriorated after Daud called for self-determination for the Pashtun tribes of northwestern Pakistan.
In 1963, hoping to halt the growth of Soviet influence and to improve relations with Pakistan, Zahir Shah removed Daud as prime minister. In 1964 Afghanistan adopted a new constitution, changing the country from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. The armed forces still depended on the Soviet Union for equipment and training. A severe drought in the early 1970s caused economic hardship, and the popularity of the regime declined.
E. End of Monarchy
In 1973 Muhammad Daud overthrew the king in a coup. He declared Afghanistan a republic with himself as president. Daud announced ambitious plans for economic development and tried to play the USSR against Western donors, but his dictatorial government was opposed both by radical left-wing intellectuals and soldiers and by traditionalist ethnic leaders. The leading leftist organization was the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which had been founded in 1965 and in 1967 split into a pro-Soviet Parcham faction and a much more radical Khalq faction. The two groups joined forces in 1976 to oppose Daud.
F. Leftist Coup and Soviet Invasion
In April 1978, after Daud launched a crackdown against the PDPA, leftist military officers overthrew him. PDPA leader Noor Muhammad Taraki became prime minister, subsequently assuming the title of president as well. Taraki and his deputy prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, both members of the Khalq faction, purged many Parcham leaders. Taraki announced a sweeping revolutionary program, including land reform, the emancipation of women, and a campaign against illiteracy. In late 1978 Islamic traditionalists and ethnic leaders who objected to rapid social change began an armed revolt against the government. By the summer of 1979 the rebels controlled much of the Afghan countryside. In September Taraki was deposed and later killed. Amin, his successor, tried vigorously to suppress the rebellion and resisted Soviet efforts to make him moderate his policies. The government’s position deteriorated, however, and on December 25, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of Kābul and other important centers. The Soviets executed Amin on December 27 and installed Babrak Karmal, leader of PDPA’s Parcham faction, as president. Karmal, whom the Soviets considered to be more susceptible to their control, denounced Amin’s repressive policies, which reportedly included mass arrests and torture of prisoners, and promised to combine social and economic reform with respect for Islam and for Afghan traditions. But the government, dependent on Soviet military forces to bolster it, was widely unpopular.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played out in the waning days of the Cold War, as the leaden economy and political repressions of the Soviet Union were just beginning to show signs of strain. Despite the Soviet Union’s own domestic difficulties and high-level internal advice against such a move, the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan’s government and eventual full military invasion was a long-considered and reasonably well-thought-out plan. From its earliest foreign aid in construction of military-quality bridges and highways, to its progressive planting of special agents within the Afghanistan bureaucracy and military, the Soviet Union displayed an unremitting interest in expanding its influence in the country and moving farther south toward the warm-water ports and hydrocarbon riches of the Persian Gulf. Afghanistan’s location along part of the Soviet Union’s southern border made the installation of a Soviet-friendly government there all the more desirable. The leftist coup of 1978 in Kābul seemingly assured that the Soviets would not lose the strategic position that they had patiently established through expensive and pervasive efforts over the prior quarter-century. Elsewhere in the country, however, there was only minimal support for the emerging Communist government in Kābul; opposition to it mounted nationwide, eventually even including significant portions of the Afghan military. The Soviet Union’s large-scale military intervention aimed to protect its interests in the region by helping the Soviet-installed government to put down this widespread opposition.
Nevertheless, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew spontaneously throughout Afghanistan so that by the mid-1980s there were about 90 areas in the country commanded by guerrilla leaders. The guerrillas called themselves mujahideen (Muslim holy warriors). They had gained prominence by their fighting prowess rather than through the customary routes within traditional social structures. The resistance was roughly organized into seven major mujahideen parties, largely of Sunni background, based in Peshāwar, Pakistan, in the 1980s. Other mujahideen parties were based in Iran. The mujahideen were sustained by weapons and money from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China. By the mid-1980s the United States was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid Afghan rebels based in Pakistan.
During the 1980s Soviet forces increasingly bore the brunt of the fighting. By 1986 about 118,000 Soviet troops and 50,000 Afghan government troops were facing perhaps 130,000 mujahideen guerrillas. Although the Soviet troops used modern equipment, including tanks and bombers, the mujahideen were also well armed, and they had local support and operated more effectively in familiar mountainous terrain. In 1986 the United States began supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles able to shoot down Soviet armored helicopters.
The effects of the war on Afghanistan were devastating. Half of the population was displaced inside the country, forced to migrate outside the country, wounded, or killed. About 3 million war refugees fled to Pakistan and about 1.5 million fled to Iran. Estimates of combat fatalities range between 700,000 and 1.3 million people. With the school system largely destroyed, industrialization severely restricted, and large irrigation projects badly damaged, the economy of the country was crippled. Despite some negative reaction, the presence of so many refugees in neighboring Pakistan and Iran actually improved Afghan relations with those countries. In addition, many of the refugees improved their lives considerably by leaving Afghanistan and the dangers of war therein. Because the majority of the refugees were religious, their fellow Muslims in Iran and Pakistan accepted them, even while the Iranian and Pakistani governments were striving to bring about the fall of the Communist regime in Kābul.
In May 1986 Karmal was replaced as PDPA leader by Mohammad Najibullah, a member of the Parcham faction who had headed the Afghan secret police. In November 1987 Najibullah was elected president.
G. Soviet Withdrawal
When Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985, he gave high priority to getting Soviet troops out of the costly, unpopular, and apparently unwinnable war in Afghanistan. In May 1988 Afghanistan, Pakistan, the USSR, and the United States signed agreements providing for an end to foreign intervention in Afghanistan, and the USSR began withdrawing its forces. The Soviet withdrawal was completed in February 1989. See also Soviet-Afghan War. H. Civil War
The mujahideen, who did not sign the agreement concerning the Soviet withdrawal, maintained their fight against the Afghanistan central government with weapons that they continued to get from the United States via Pakistan. They rejected offers from Najibullah to make peace and share power, and refused to consider participating in any national government that included Communists. Thus the civil war continued. The United States and Pakistani sponsors prompted the Peshāwar-based rebels to besiege Jalālābād, a strong point for Najibullah in southern Afghanistan. After months of fighting, however, the Afghan government scored a clear victory. A March 1990 coup attempt also failed to bring down Najibullah. He continued to receive Soviet food, fuel, and weapons to help maintain his control. However, rebels persisted in terrorizing the civilian population by rocket bombardment of Kābul and other cities. Finally in late 1991 the USSR and the United States signed an agreement to end military aid to the Kābul government and to the mujahideen rebels.
In 1992 as the resistance closed in on Kābul, the Najibullah government fell, in part because of the defection of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek from northern Afghanistan whose militia had served the PDPA government. Two mujahideen parties from Peshāwar, both considered fundamentalist, joined forces with Dostum and Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik military commander, in the north and central mountains of Afghanistan. They won control of Kābul, and Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, became interim president from July through December 1992, taking office as full president in January 1993. A strong attempt was made to keep the Pashtun leaders, who traditionally held the power in Afghanistan, out of the most important government positions. Kābul was besieged beginning in 1992, first by various mujahideen groups and then by the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, which sought to reestablish Pashtun dominance in the capital.
The Taliban emerged in the fall of 1994 as a faction of mujahideen soldiers who identified themselves as religious students. The movement started in the south and worked its way toward Herāt in the northwest and Kābul in the east. It made outstanding military gains using armor, heavy rocket artillery, and helicopters against government forces. The Taliban’s stated mission was to disarm the country’s warring factions and to impose their strictly orthodox version of Islamic law. Some experts suspected the Pakistani government of supporting the Taliban, in order to keep the combat within Afghanistan and out of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which is a major part of the Pashtun homeland. During the many vagaries of shifting alliances, as Afghans sought a new political equilibrium, one fundamentalist and one moderate party from the Peshāwar-based mujahideen groups contributed considerable personnel to the Taliban.
The term of Rabbani’s government expired in December 1994, but he continued to hold office amid the chaos of the civil war. Factional fighting since the beginning of January 1994 kept government officers from actually occupying ministries and discharging government responsibilities. Most cities outside of Kābul were administered by former resistance commanders and their shuras (councils). In June 1996 Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had resigned as prime minister in 1994 to launch a military offensive against forces loyal to Rabbani, again assumed the post, this time to help Rabbani’s government fight the Taliban threat. Despite their efforts, the Taliban took Kābul in September 1996. By that time, the capital had been devastated by the civil war.
Rabbani and Hekmatyar fled north to join the northern-based anti-Taliban alliance led by the military commanders Massoud and Dostum. The alliance was a coalition of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras who were opposed to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. The alliance took the name United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, commonly known as the United Front or the Northern Alliance. Massoud was the military commander of its chief political wing, Jamiat-i Islami (Islamic Society). The Taliban advanced north toward the mountain strongholds of the Northern Alliance and by the late 1990s had taken control of almost all of Afghanistan. Northern Alliance forces held a small portion of the country’s territory in the north. I. Taliban Regime
After taking over Kābul, the Taliban created the Ministry for Ordering What Is Right and Forbidding What Is Wrong to impose and enforce its fundamentalist rules of behavior. The Taliban’s laws particularly affected women, who were ordered to cover themselves from head to toe in burkas (long, tentlike veils), forbidden from attending school or working outside their homes, and publicly beaten if they were improperly dressed or escorted by men not related to them. The Taliban also made murder, adultery, and drug dealing punishable by death and made theft punishable by amputation of the hand. Many of the laws alarmed human-rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. Most countries did not recognize the Taliban regime as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
In 1998, after terrorist bombings struck U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States launched cruise missiles at alleged terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The camps were reportedly connected to an international terrorist ring allegedly run by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian expatriate named by U.S. officials as the mastermind behind the embassy bombings. Bin Laden was active in the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation forces during the 1980s, and toward the end of that war he established al-Qaeda (Arabic for “the Base”), an organization based in Afghanistan that, according to U.S. officials, connects and coordinates fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups around the world. Al-Qaeda also supported the Taliban regime, with its special forces, called the Arab Brigade, fighting alongside Taliban troops in the civil war against the Northern Alliance.
On September 9, 2001, pro-Taliban suicide bombers assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance. Two days later in the United States, terrorists hijacked passenger airplanes and deliberately crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, killing thousands of people (see September 11 Attacks). The U.S. government identified bin Laden as the prime suspect behind the attacks. Mullah Muhammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, refused U.S. demands that the Taliban surrender bin Laden. The U.S. government built an international antiterrorism coalition, securing the approval of many nations for a war on terrorism. American and British forces began aerial bombings of al-Qaeda camps and Taliban military positions on October 7. The Northern Alliance, meanwhile, continued its front-line offensive north of Kābul and other strategic areas. Many Afghans fled to refugee camps in border areas of Pakistan and Iran to escape the bombings, adding to the millions of Afghans already displaced from more than two decades of war.
While the United States and Britain continued the aerial bombardment in November, Northern Alliance forces captured several strategic cities, including Kābul. In late November hundreds of U.S. marines landed near Kandahār in the first major infusion of American ground troops into Afghanistan. The Taliban surrendered Kandahār, their last remaining stronghold, by December 10. The U.S.-led offensive then focused on routing out al-Qaeda forces holed up in the rugged Tora Bora cave region of eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. In March 2002 U.S. troops undertook a mission, known as Operation Anaconda, to clear Taliban and al-Qaeda forces from the Shah-i-Kot Valley, in the vicinity of Gardēz in eastern Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the whereabouts of bin Laden remained unknown.
J. Afghanistan After the Taliban
United Nations-sponsored negotiations in Bonn, Germany, resulted in agreement on December 5, 2001, among four major Afghan factions to create an interim post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, a widely respected Pashtun leader, was chosen to head the interim administration, which took power in Kābul on December 22. An international peacekeeping force maintained a measure of law and order in the capital.
J.1. Transitional Government
Karzai’s administration was given up to six months to prepare the country for the introduction of a broad-based, multiethnic transitional government. In January 2002 international donors—including more than 60 countries, major development institutions, and nongovernmental organizations—pledged more than $4.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan over a period of five years. In April deposed Afghan king Zahir Shah returned to Afghanistan, ending nearly three decades of exile, in order to serve a symbolic role in the country. In June he formally convened the loya jirga, or grand council, which was responsible for electing a transitional government to rule the country for 18 months, until general elections scheduled for 2004. The loya jirga elected Karzai interim president of Afghanistan.
J.2. New Constitution
In January 2004 the loya jirga ratified a new constitution and Karzai signed it into law. The new constitution created a strong presidency, a two-chamber legislature, and an independent judiciary. It recognized Islam as the country’s sacred religion but guaranteed protections for other religions. It also recognized equal rights for women and language rights for minorities.
The adoption of the new constitution paved the way for elections, originally scheduled for June 2004 but then postponed due to the continued lack of security in many parts of the country. The Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies, who had regrouped as a military force despite new U.S.-led offensives to combat them, were waging a sporadic guerrilla campaign against the Karzai government and the international forces stationed in the country. In March 2004 Pakistan conducted a military operation along its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to flush out the insurgents.
About 18,000 non-Afghan troops were stationed in Afghanistan in 2004 to fight Taliban forces and offer protection for the Karzai government. Of these, about 8,500 were U.S. troops, and about 3,000 soldiers came from other coalition partners. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stationed about 6,000 troops in Afghanistan. NATO took charge of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in August 2003 and for the first time played a military role outside of Europe. The ISAF was authorized by the United Nations Security Council to act as peacekeepers in the Afghan capital, Kābul, and surrounding areas. By the end of 2005, about 19,000 U.S. troops and about 9,200 ISAF troops remained in Afghanistan.
In October 2006 about 12,000 of the 20,000 U.S. troops then serving in Afghanistan became part of the ISAF forces as NATO reportedly assumed primary responsibility for international military operations in Afghanistan. The remaining 8,000 U.S. troops were assigned to counterterrorism efforts and to training Afghan security forces as part of Combined Forces Command Afghanistan. The ISAF consisted of about 31,000 troops and faced an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Taliban fighters in October 2006.
J.3. Presidential Election
Afghanistan held its first-ever presidential election on October 9, 2004. Large numbers of Afghans turned out to vote in the election, which was largely free of the violence threatened by the country’s former Taliban leaders. Karzai won 55.4 percent of the vote, easily beating 15 other candidates in the first round of voting. His victory was officially announced on November 3, following an investigation into charges of electoral fraud. According to a three-member United Nations panel set up to examine the complaints—made mostly by the losing candidates—the election’s “shortcomings…could not have materially affected the overall result.”
Karzai’s top goals after forming a new government included curbing the power of regional warlords, building an effective national security force, and pursuing national redevelopment plans. Uniting the country despite its longstanding ethnic, religious, and regional rivalries remained one of Karzai’s highest priorities.
J.4. Parliamentary Elections
Elections to the lower house of the National Assembly took place in September 2005, and in December 2005 President Karzai used his constitutional powers to appoint the members of the upper house. On December 19 Afghanistan’s first democratically elected legislature in more than 30 years officially convened. The new legislature represented a wide spectrum of the country’s political groupings and factions, including former warlords and former Taliban officials.
J.5. Continued War Against a Taliban Insurgency
Despite its initial defeat following the U.S. invasion of 2001, the Taliban regrouped, using remote areas of Pakistan for refuge and staging sporadic guerrilla attacks in areas of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. By 2007 the Taliban adopted tactics that included suicide bombings and roadside bombs, while also besieging remote U.S. and NATO outposts in the countryside. In June 2007 U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates expressed cautious optimism that the military campaign was having success against the resurgent Taliban. Defense Department officials said they believed NATO operations had helped thwart a planned spring offensive by the Taliban.
However, Afghan civilian support for the U.S. and NATO military operations waned in the spring of 2007, particularly after a series of attacks that resulted in civilian casualties. In early May, following an April ground attack and air strike on a small village in western Herāt province in which about 50 civilians were reportedly killed, Afghan president Karzai told U.S. and NATO officials that civilian deaths had reached an “unacceptable level.” About a week later lawmakers in the upper house of parliament, the Meshrano Jirga (House of Elders), passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire with the Taliban and for setting a date for the withdrawal of foreign troops. Many of the legislators cited an incident in March in which a U.S. Marine Special Operations force opened fire on civilians lining a highway as the marines fled the scene of a suicide bombing attack. The incident in the eastern Afghanistan province of Nangarhār resulted in the deaths of 19 Afghan civilians and the wounding of about 50 others. A U.S. military commander later determined that the marines had used excessive force and he referred the incident for a possible criminal inquiry.
By June 2007 the Associated Press reported a death toll of 2,300 in insurgency-related violence in 2007 alone. The International Red Cross said that violence was occurring throughout Afghanistan. The Department of Defense reported nearly 400 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, and the United Kingdom reported the deaths of 60 British soldiers during that same period.
United Nations (UN) figures showed that the death toll in Afghanistan totaled more than 8,000 people in 2007, including about 1,500 civilians. The average monthly death toll soared to 566 from an average of 465 in 2006. About 230 troops from the U.S.-NATO coalition were killed in 2007, the highest yearly number since the war began.
As 2008 began the director of national intelligence for the United States, Michael McConnell, reported that the security situation for the Afghan government had deteriorated. McConnell told the U.S. Congress that the Taliban had made inroads in the western part of Afghanistan and around the capital, Kābul, as well as in southern Afghanistan. In July 2008 the number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan exceeded those in Iraq for the second straight month, with 46 U.S. personnel killed in Afghanistan compared to 31 in Iraq. By August the total U.S. death toll for 2008 was around 100. A U.S. Defense Department report found that Taliban attacks on U.S. and NATO forces increased by 40 percent in 2008 compared with the previous year. The same report noted two distinct Taliban insurgencies, one based in Kandahār in southern Afghanistan and another in eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents often obtained refuge in neighboring Pakistan’s rugged North-West Frontier Province.
The insurgency was described as a loosely organized alliance of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, foreign fighters, and Afghan warlords. The forces operating in northeast Afghanistan and around the capital were led by former mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was believed to be allied with the Taliban but not formally part of the movement. The insurgency in the east, southeast, and southern parts of Afghanistan was thought to be led by remnants of the original Taliban, foreign fighters, and al-Qaeda.
The Taliban was also establishing shadow, or parallel, governments in regions where they exerted control or where the central government in Kābul had only a loose hold on security. In some cases the shadow governments consisted of judges and other officials, along with finance and defense councils. Some experts estimated that the insurgency controlled as much as 40 percent of Afghanistan. Many Afghans reportedly welcomed the security that the Taliban provided from criminal elements or saw the Taliban as an alternative to corruption in the central government. In some cases the Taliban provided services that the government could not. Still others gravitated toward the insurgents in response to U.S. air strikes that often mistakenly killed civilians.
In August 2008 a U.S. air strike on a suspected Taliban compound in the village of Azizabad near Herāt killed a large number of civilians. The Afghan government, backed by a United Nations investigation and accounts from independent observers, alleged that more than 90 civilians were killed in the attack. The U.S. military initially dismissed the charges, saying that at most only 6 or 7 civilians were killed, but a subsequent military investigation concluded that 30 civilians, including women and children, had died. U.S. air strikes increased 31 percent from January 2008 to September 2008 compared with the same period in 2007. During the first nine months of 2008 U.S. and NATO aircraft flew about 14,000 missions and dropped about 3,000 bombs. U.S. military officials said the air strikes were necessary because ground troops were thinly dispersed throughout the country. As of mid-November 2008, there were about 65,000 allied troops in Afghanistan, of which about 36,000 were U.S. troops.
The U.S. role in Afghanistan became an issue during the U.S. presidential election with Democratic candidate Barack Obama promising to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, in part to strengthen the ground presence and make the U.S.-NATO coalition less reliant on air strikes. Following a November air mission that mistakenly strafed a wedding party in the village of Shah Wali Kot in southern Afghanistan, killing 40 civilians, Afghan president Hamid Karzai called on President-elect Obama to cease all air strikes that might risk civilian casualties. The same month Karzai extended an invitation to Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, promising him safe passage if he agreed to negotiate a peace settlement. Omar was believed to be based in Quetta, Pakistan. However, the Taliban rejected the overture.
Once in office, Obama followed through on his promise and committed an additional 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total to 53,000. Obama said the increase was necessary due to the deteriorating security situation. He also promised a review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan while saying that he believed the conflict could not be resolved “solely” through military means. In the meantime the United Nations released figures for the civilian death toll in Afghanistan in 2008, reporting that it rose 40 percent to 2,118 from 1,523 in 2007. More than 50 percent of the deaths were caused by the insurgents, while 39 percent were caused by pro-government forces.
J.6. 2009 Presidential Elections
Afghanistan held its second presidential election in August 2009. The weeks preceding the election saw a rise in insurgent violence. The day of the election, August 20th, was one of the most violent days since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. The wave of violence contributed to a voter turnout estimated to be only 35 percent.
The preliminary results showed Karzai winning approximately 47 percent of the vote and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah winning approximately 33 percent of the vote. With no candidate winning more than 50 percent of the vote, a run-off election seemed likely. There were also numerous accusations of voter fraud leveled against Karzai and his followers. As a result, Abdullah threatened to not accept the outcome of the vote, raising the possibility of additional violence.
Contributed By:
John Ford Shroder, B.S., M.S., Ph.D.
Regents Professor of Geography and Geology, University of Nebraska. Editor, Himalaya to the Sea: Geology, Geomorphology, and the Quaternary and other books.
