Afghan conflict

• 1. Introduction

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  The Afghan conflict is the name given to a series of wars that have kept Afghanistan in a near-continuous state of armed conflict since the 1970s. By one accounting, somewhere between 1.4 million and 2 million people had been killed by 2014. Five to ten million Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran alone. An entire generation grew up knowing little else but war. What drove this extraordinary accumulation of violence? And why did so many outside powers pour weapons, money, and soldiers into a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central Asia? The answers trace back to a royal coup, a communist revolution, a superpower invasion, the rise of a militia that called itself students of religion, and a terrorist attack on the other side of the world that pulled in yet another superpower for another two decades.

• 2. The Kingdom Falls

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  From 1933 to 1973, Afghanistan experienced what the source calls a lengthy period of peace and relative stability under King Zahir Shah, who belonged to the Musahiban Barakzai dynasty. That stability ended in July 1973, when Shah was overthrown by his own cousin, Mohammad Daoud Khan, in a largely non-violent coup while the king was abroad. Droughts, corruption charges, and poor economic policies had eroded support for the monarchy in Afghanistan's cities. Khan abolished the monarchy, declared the Republic of Afghanistan, and named himself its first president.

  Khan drew early support from a faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the country's communist party, which had been founded in 1965 and enjoyed close ties to the Soviet Union. The relationship between Khan and the PDPA deepened Soviet involvement in the country. But by 1976, Khan grew alarmed by how much influence the party had accumulated inside the government and military. He dismissed PDPA members from their posts, replaced them with conservative officials, and eventually announced the party's dissolution, arresting its senior members. The PDPA's response came on the 27th of April 1978, when party loyalists in the military launched the Saur Revolution. They chose a weekend holiday to strike, when many government employees were off duty, making it harder for Khan to mobilize the army units still loyal to him. Khan, his immediate family, and his bodyguards were killed during the fighting to seize Kabul.

• 3. A Revolution Devours Itself

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  The PDPA formed a revolutionary council and tried to balance its two main internal factions, the radical Khalq and the more moderate Parcham. The Khalqist wing won out. Its leader, Nur Muhammad Taraki, became chairman and pushed a program of land reform, the abolition of feudal and tribal structures, and expanded rights for women. These policies had support in cities and in the army but ran directly against the traditional, religious, and tribal customs of rural Afghanistan, producing armed uprisings across the countryside.

  Hafizullah Amin rose within the Khalq faction to undermine Taraki, purge the Parchamites from positions of power, and impose a hostile doctrine against any political dissent. Taraki, who had ruled for only about a year, was assassinated by Amin. Amin then took formal control of the country. The Soviet Union considered his government illegitimate and expected it to collapse into civil war. Amin was accused of killing tens of thousands of Afghan civilians at Pul-e-Charkhi prison and other sites; reports documented 27,000 politically motivated executions at Pul-e-Charkhi alone.

  The Soviet Union, preferring the more moderate Parchamite faction, secured an alliance with Babrak Karmal. Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan on the 24th of December 1979, and on the 27th of December, Amin and 200 of his guards were killed during Operation Storm-333 by Soviet Army Spetsnaz. Karmal replaced him. Locals called the Soviet soldiers Shuravi, and what followed was a protracted counterinsurgency that Soviet officers compared internally to the Vietnam War, noting from early reports how poorly trained their forces were for fighting in mountainous terrain.

• 4. Operation Cyclone and Its Aftermath

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  Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia joined forces in a covert effort known as Operation Cyclone to arm and fund the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen. The United Kingdom, China, and Iran also contributed support. The conflict became a proxy war on a massive scale. Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province served as an organizational and networking base for the anti-Soviet resistance, with the province's Deobandi religious scholars playing a supporting role in promoting the jihad.

  Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union removed Karmal and installed Mohammad Najibullah, a fellow Parchamite, who pursued a policy called National Reconciliation. Najibullah abolished the one-party system, restored Islam as the state religion, replaced the Revolutionary Council with a republican presidency and a bicameral parliament, and offered amnesty to mujahideen fighters. The 1988 elections were the first in Afghan history to allow competing political parties; the mujahideen boycotted them, and Najibullah ordered 50 seats left vacant in case they wished to join later. The only insurgent group that fully reconciled with the government was the Shia-dominated Afghan Hizbullah.

  Soviet troops withdrew under the Geneva Accords, with the last soldier to leave being Lieutenant General Boris Gromov. In total, 14,453 Soviet soldiers died during the Soviet-Afghan War, and 523 more were killed during the withdrawal itself, which was completed in February 1989. The United States then reneged on its agreement and continued funding the insurgent groups. The death toll among Afghans from the Soviet war has been described by a number of sources as a genocide. Another 2 million Afghans were displaced within the country, on top of the 5-10 million who had fled abroad, amounting to roughly a third of the prewar population.

• 5. Civil War and the Northern Alliance

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  After the Soviets left, Najibullah's government held on longer than American and Pakistani policymakers expected. The Afghan army defeated a major mujahideen assault on Jalalabad in 1989, inflicting more than 3,000 losses. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, foreign aid to Najibullah ended. Russian president Boris Yeltsin had neither the resources nor the will to continue support. Without fuel, the Afghan Air Force was effectively grounded, making it almost impossible to supply army units across the country's harsh geography. Desertions surged.

  General Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of the leading army commanders, switched sides and allied with the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, taking more than 40,000 previously pro-government soldiers with him. Kabul fell to Massoud and Dostum's forces in 1992. Najibullah was granted safety by the UN office in Kabul; he had obtained political asylum in India but was prevented from leaving by forces loyal to Massoud, Dostum, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was forced to remain in the UN building for years. He was eventually captured by the Taliban, castrated, and executed.

  The 1992 Peshawar Accord created the Islamic State of Afghanistan and established an interim government. But Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami refused to recognize it and launched attacks on Kabul. Pakistan backed Hekmatyar's bombardment despite opposition from virtually all other mujahideen commanders. The ISI had already devised plans as early as October 1990 for Hekmatyar to conduct a mass bombardment of Kabul. One commander, Nabi Mohammad, warned that Kabul's 2 million civilians could not escape and there would be a massacre. An estimated 25,000 people died during the most intense period of bombardment by Hekmatyar's forces and those of Dostum, who had temporarily allied with Hekmatyar in 1994. Half a million people fled Afghanistan during this phase.

• 6. The Taliban Emirate

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  In 1994, Mullah Omar founded the Taliban movement with fewer than 50 armed students from Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam religious schools for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. When the Taliban took control of Kandahar in 1994, they forced dozens of local Pashtun leaders who had presided over lawlessness and atrocities to surrender. The movement spread rapidly through southern and central provinces.

  According to Pakistani Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, between 1994 and 1999, an estimated 80,000-100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban. A 1998 U.S. State Department document confirmed that 20-40 percent of regular Taliban soldiers were Pakistani nationals, and it noted that the parents of those fighters knew nothing of their children's military involvement until their bodies were returned. In 2001 alone, international sources estimated that 28,000-30,000 Pakistani nationals, 14,000-15,000 Afghan Taliban fighters, and 2,000-3,000 al-Qaeda militants were fighting against anti-Taliban forces, making up a roughly 45,000-strong military force. In 1997 alone, after the Taliban captured Kabul, Pakistan gave $30 million in aid and a further $10 million for government wages.

  On the 27th of September 1996, the Taliban seized Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Physicians for Human Rights noted that, to their knowledge, no other regime in the world had methodically and violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest. Women were required to wear the all-covering burqa, denied access to health care and education, and forbidden from laughing in a way that could be heard by others. The UN documented 15 massacres between 1996 and 2001. Upon taking Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, around 4,000 civilians were executed by the Taliban. Among those killed there were several Iranian diplomats, triggering a hostage crisis that at one point saw 150,000 Iranian soldiers massed on the Afghan border.

• 7. Massoud, 9/11, and the American War

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  Ahmad Shah Massoud became the only leader who remained inside Afghanistan and was able to defend large areas against the Taliban. In the parts of Afghanistan under his control, Massoud set up democratic institutions and signed a Women's Rights Declaration. He personally intervened in at least two known cases of forced marriage. He addressed the European Parliament in Brussels, warning that his intelligence had gathered information about a large-scale attack on U.S. soil being imminent. The president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine, called him the pole of liberty in Afghanistan.

  On the 9th of September 2001, two Arabs posing as journalists carried out a suicide attack on Massoud at Khwaja Bahauddin in Takhar Province. He died in a helicopter taking him to a hospital. The assassination is believed to have a strong connection to the September 11 attacks two days later, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began on the 7th of October 2001 as Operation Enduring Freedom. The United Front, with American air support, ousted the Taliban from Kabul. The Afghan Transitional Administration, chaired by Hamid Karzai and numbering 30 leaders, was installed on the 22nd of December 2001.

  During the Battle of Tora Bora, the American-led coalition failed to capture Osama bin Laden, who relocated to Pakistan and remained there until U.S. SEAL Team Six killed him in Abbottabad in 2011. The war that followed lasted 20 years. International donors provided approximately 30 billion dollars for reconstruction, with $10.5 billion committed at the 2006 London Conference and $11 billion from the United States in early 2007. The World Bank Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, financed by 24 donor countries, spent more than $1.37 billion as of 2007. Despite these investments, reconstruction results were described as mixed.

• 8. Withdrawal and Return

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  The 2020 Doha Agreement, struck between the Trump Administration and the Taliban, provided for a full U.S. withdrawal in exchange for Taliban pledges not to allow al-Qaeda to re-establish itself and to engage in talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban launched more than 4,500 attacks on government forces during the 45-day period following the agreement's signing, a 70% increase compared to the same period the previous year. The Afghan government eventually agreed to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners; a loya jirga was called to decide the fate of 400 prisoners accused of serious crimes against civilians, and it ruled in favor of releasing them all.

  In April 2021, President Joe Biden announced that all U.S. troops would withdraw by the 11th of September 2021, the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, later moving the deadline to the 31st of August. By the 15th of August, the Taliban had encircled Kabul. President Ashraf Ghani fled to Tajikistan. The political and military apparatus of the Islamic Republic collapsed the same day. Coalition forces destroyed or damaged most of what was left at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, including 75 aircraft and over 100 vehicles, before leaving on the 30th of August.

  The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, formed in the Panjshir Valley by Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, launched a small-scale uprising in August 2021 that briefly ousted the Taliban from three districts. By the 3rd of September, the Taliban claimed to have defeated the resistance and established control over the entirety of Afghanistan for the first time in the country's history. The Islamic State-Khorasan Province conflict with the Taliban, which began in 2015, continues. Cross-border fighting between Afghanistan and Pakistan has also taken place since 2021, tied to Afghanistan's continued support for the Pakistani Taliban.