Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (42 page)

The Taliban, Bamiyan, and Mazar-i Sharif

During this period, one of several regions of Afghanistan where the Taliban focused its attention was the city and province of Bamiyan where a very high percentage of the population is ethnic Hazara. The majority of Hazaras are Shiites and they speak Hazaragi, a Persianized language with a large number of Mongol words, which is different from Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns.63 A high percentage of the Hazaras live within the rugged central mountainous core of Afghanistan which covers approximately 50,000 square kilometers, inside and outside of Bamiyan province. This large region, which covers or touches on several of Afghanistan’s provinces, is called the Hazarajat or the Land of the Hazaras. Approximately 9 percent of Afghanistan is Hazara, while 42 percent is comprised of Pashtuns.64 Also, during and after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the mujahideen intentionally excluded the Hazaras from their group for largely religious reasons; virtually all of the members of the mujahideen were Sunnis and these Sunnis viewed the Shiites, including the Hazaras, as Muslim heretics, who could not be permitted to hold any kind of political power.65

In addition, many Hazara women played a significant role in various aspects of professional life in Hazarajat, to which the Taliban vociferously objected based on their much more conservative interpretation of Islamic texts. For example, several members of the Hazara Hizb-i Wahadat political party were women, while Hazara women played significant roles in the United Nations, worked as university professors, and had fought alongside of Hazara men against the Taliban. The Hazaras, while Muslim, were proud that their region had been a center of Buddhist religion and culture in ancient times and had also been an active point on the silk road. These historic, cultural, linguistic, religious, ethnic, and regional differences were some of the factors that played an enormous role in the hostile relationships between the majority-Pashtun Taliban and the Hazaras as the Taliban attempted to capture Bamiyan and the rest of Hazarajat during the late 1990s.66

As the Taliban began its siege of Bamiyan beginning in August 1997, many Hazaras were starving. They frequently raided Taliban convoys for wheat, while living meagerly on foods such as roots, berries, and potatoes that grew on the stony and mountainous land of Hazarajat, only 10 percent of which was cultivable.67 As part of its siege, the Taliban had closed all the roads leading to Bamiyan from the south, west, and east. The Hazaras could not receive any relief from the north because of the warfare in which the Taliban was engaged there, added to the fact that the heavy snows made those roads impassable to Bamiyan, a city that stood at an elevation of 7,500 feet. Because of the Taliban’s blockade, approximately one million Hazaras in most of Hazarajat were hungry and suffering near-catastrophic

food shortages. As had been the Taliban’s policy and practice during most of its rule, its leadership refused the United Nations’ offers of assistance, in this case to provide food supplies to the Hazaras, on the grounds that the United Nations was a Western, anti-Islamic puppet that was attempting to assist the Taliban’s enemies while seeking to destroy the Taliban and all of Islam.68

On August 8, 1998, the Hazara forces in Mazar-i Sharif, which is roughly 150 miles north of Bamiyan, found themselves surrounded by the Taliban. The Taliban then moved into Mazar-i Sharif and engaged in a two-day massacre of possibly thousands of Hazaras in that city. The massacre was catalyzed by the hostility that the Sunni Taliban had against the Shiite Hazaras and by the Taliban’s desire to exact revenge against the Hazaras who had, until early August 1998, largely succeeded in defending themselves against the Taliban.69 While the vast majority of Sunni Muslims in the world utterly con- demn the killing of Shiites, according to the Taliban’s interpretation of the Quran and Hadith their killing of the Hazara Shiites was justified because, in the Taliban’s view, the Shiites are heretics.70 At the same time, the Iranian gov- ernment had been providing their fellow-Shiite Hazara neighbors in Afghanistan military and other forms of aid to support them in their struggles against the Taliban. The Taliban, through their massacre of the Hazaras, could have also intended to send the Iranians the message that the Taliban were prepared to deliver brutal punishment to their Shiite enemies.71

The Taliban wanted to cleanse northern Afghanistan, and eventually the entire country, of Shiite Muslims. Soon after the Taliban captured Mazar-i Sharif, the Taliban’s mullahs declared from several of that city’s mosques that the Shiites had three choices: they could convert to Sunni Islam, leave for Iran, or be killed. The Taliban also prohibited Shiite mullahs from leading prayer services in any of the mosques in territories under the Taliban’s control. In the midst of the Taliban’s killing of thousands of Hazara Shiites in the areas in and around Mazar-i Sharif, sometime in August or early September 1998, the Taliban killed nine Iranian diplomats who were working in the Iranian Consulate in Mazar-i Sharif.72 These acts by the Taliban, which almost led to a war between Iran and the Taliban, were reli- giously motivated (i.e., against Shiites) and also constituted the Taliban’s revenge against Iran for its continued support of the Hazaras and other Afghan enemies of the Taliban.73

The Taliban and al-Qaida under American Attack

As the Taliban was making its military advances, some members of al-Qaida (two of whose leaders, Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were in Afghanistan) staged massive, violent militant attacks against the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, which killed

and wounded large numbers of people. As a result of that aggression, on August 20, 1998 the United States launched missile attacks against Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and al-Qaida’s training camps in Afghanistan. The United States’ attacks were largely ineffectual in that they did not succeed in killing Bin Laden, Zawahiri or, apparently, any important leaders within al-Qaida. In addition, the damage to the training camps was limited and most or all of the al-Qaida members in those camps may have escaped unscathed.74 The attacks against these sites in Afghanistan also stoked the existing frustrations of many Muslims against the United States.75

The Taliban, who were already vehemently anti-American, were deeply angered about the United States’ attacks on their soil, which they viewed as heinous encroachments on Afghanistan, 90 percent of which they controlled at the time. In this spirit, the Taliban organized large anti-American street demonstrations protesting the United States’ attacks on al-Qaida and the United States’ foreign policy toward the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Mullah Omar criticized United States President Bill Clinton per- sonally, “If the attack on Afghanistan is Clinton’s personal decision, then he has done it to divert the world’s and the American people’s attention from that shameful White House affair [with Monica Lewinsky] that has proved Clinton is a liar and man devoid of decency and honor.”76 Mullah Omar also stated that Bin Laden and al-Qaida were guests of the Taliban and the Afghan people and that the Taliban would never surrender Bin Laden to the United States, adding, “America itself is the biggest terrorist in the world.”77 On September 13, 1998, roughly three weeks after the American missile attacks on Afghanistan, the Taliban launched a series of military operations in its successful bid to conquer Bamiyan. Most likely in an effort to improve the Taliban’s battered image outside of Afghanistan, Mullah Omar ordered the Taliban soldiers to restrain themselves against Hazara civilians. In spite of this, numerous Hazara civilians were killed in Bamiyan.78 Soon after that, the Taliban destroyed two large and historic statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan that may have been 2,000 years old. The Taliban stated that it was compelled to destroy these statues because Islam forbids all images and any

representations that could lead to idolatry or idol-worship.79

The Taliban’s conquest of Bamiyan and the fact that it had come to control 90 percent of Pakistan by that point, together with the negative perceptions of the Taliban on the part of most people outside the country, led to a regional escalation of pressures within Afghanistan. First, there was danger of war between Iran and the Taliban, while there emerged an increased risk of Taliban-style Islamism spreading into various other parts of the region, including Central Asia. Second, many governments outside of Afghanistan were opposed to the Taliban’s treatment of women, as the United States government tried to focus on the killing or capture of Bin Laden, while repeatedly failing to persuade the Taliban government to

surrender him to the United States. Third, in the wake of the Taliban’s brutality, even the Saudi government, which had been a strong supporter of the Taliban, withdrew its diplomatic representatives from Afghanistan and ended its official funding of the Taliban.80

The Taliban, Conflict in Afghanistan, and the United Nations

Partly as a result of the member governments of the United Nations Security Council being frustrated with the Taliban’s refusal to create a broad-based government that would include Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns and a larger representation of various ethnic and religious groups within Afghanistan, the Taliban’s exclusionary policies toward Afghanistan’s women, and its continued use of substantial amounts of physical force in much of Afghanistan, the Security Council passed Resolution 1214 with respect to the Taliban government in early December 1998.81 This resolution raised the distinct possibility of future sanctions against the Taliban, because (1) the Taliban’s actions violated the United Nations’ understanding of Human Rights; (2) the Taliban promoted the trafficking of drugs, especially opium and heroin; and (3) the group did not accept a cease-fire, which it had previously been urged to do. This resolution was ratified after two other resolutions condemning the Taliban had been passed earlier that year, which were Resolutions 1189 and 1193. These resolutions together with the strong criticism from many other governments in the world – with the exception of Pakistan’s government – demonstrated the Taliban government’s alienation from a wide variety of other governments.

This level of condemnation exacerbated several other hardships that the Taliban government was already facing, such as a massive drought and dissension within the Taliban’s ranks. The hunger that the drought in Afghanistan had caused led to enormous problems for the Taliban as it attempted to rule the country in that it increased the already-existing discontent with the Taliban’s rule in different parts of Afghanistan. These hardships festered throughout much of 1999.82 During January 2000, the members of the Taliban who were assigned to guard Afghanistan’s money market stole $200,000 from it, leading to a series of events that led to its closing. In a protest against the Taliban’s drive to draft men into its ranks, its levying a sharp rise in taxes, and its appropriation of money for its own use and that of the central government instead of that of local governments, sev- eral hundred tribal leaders from eastern Afghanistan forced the Taliban to replace local governors. During the same period, more than 2,000 people held an anti-Taliban demonstration in the majority-Pashtun city of Khost. These and other events occurred while (1) international pressure on the Taliban

mounted; (2) the United Nations tried to broker a cease-fire with the Taliban;

This was largely the picture on September 11, 2001, when al-Qaida attacked New York City and Washington, DC, and subsequently on October 7, 2001, when the United States government initiated Operation Enduring Freedom within Afghanistan, whose goal was to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida and help institute a democratic government in Afghanistan that would be friendly to the United States.84 Since that time, Taliban forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan have fought vigorously against their enemies, including United States military forces, anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, as well as the Pakistani military and local anti-Taliban militias in Pakistan.85

The Mujahideen, the Taliban, and al-Qaida

The decision on the part of governments of various majority-Muslim countries to encourage Islamists from their countries to go to Afghanistan to fight as mujahideen in the war against the Soviet occupation turned the madrasahs of the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan into international universities for the teaching of Islamist ideas to Muslims of different ethnicities. These Filipino, Uzbek, Uighur, Algerian, Saudi, Egyptian, and Kuwaiti Muslims (to name just a few) came to Afghanistan with a common Islamist ideology and a desire to fight against what they considered to be the atheistic and anti-Islamic Soviets. In addition to the continued education they received in Islam, the United States’ CIA and Pakistan’s ISI trained them in a variety of military and guerrilla tactics which they used against the Soviets and which some of them used against the United States and Pakistan after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. These Islamists formed strong links which were continually reinforced by their similar Islamic beliefs and practices, their common military and guerrilla training, the large amounts of time they spent with each other, and their battles against a common enemy in the form of the Soviet Union.86

The policies of the countries that supported the gathering of Islamists in Afghanistan for the purpose of fighting the Soviets there could be considered shortsighted, since many of those Islamists – including Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri – came to oppose the very regimes that supported their war effort against the Soviets. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the United States’ National Security Adviser under President Jimmy Carter, made a statement that represents the stance of many policymakers at the time, “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”87 These priorities and the substantial