Taliban and the United Front

The Taliban (Pashto: طالبان‎ ṭālibān “students”), alternative spelling Taleban,[7] is an Islamic fundamentalist political movement in Afghanistan. It spread throughout Afghanistan and formed a government, ruling as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from September 1996 until December 2001, with Kandahar as the capital. However, it gained diplomatic recognition from only three states: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Mohammed Omar has been serving as the spiritual leader of the Taliban since 1994.[8]
While in power, it enforced its strict interpretation of Sharia law,[9] and leading Muslims have been highly critical of the Taliban’s interpretations of Islamic law.[10] The Taliban were condemned internationally for their brutal treatment of women.[11][12] The majority of the Taliban are made up of Afghan Pashtun tribesmen.[13][14] The Taliban’s leaders were influenced by Deobandi fundamentalism,[15] and many also strictly follow the social and cultural norm calledPashtunwali.[16]
From 1995 to 2001, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence[17] and military[18] are widely alleged by the international community to have provided support to the Taliban. Their connections are possibly through Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a terrorist group founded by Sami ul Haq.[19] Pakistan is accused by many international officials of continuing to support the Taliban; Pakistan states that it dropped all support for the group after 9/11.[20][21][22] Al Qaeda also supported the Taliban with regiments of imported fighters from Arab countries and Central Asia.[23][24][25] Saudi Arabia provided financial support.[26] The Taliban and their allies committed massacres against Afghan civilians,[27][28][29] denied UN food supplies to 160,000 starving civilians[30] and conducted a policy of scorched earth, burning vast areas of fertile land and destroying tens of thousands of homes during their rule from 1996 to 2001.[31][32] Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee to United Front-controlled territory, Pakistan, and Iran.[32]
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Taliban were overthrown by the American-led invasion of Afghanistan. Later it regrouped as an insurgency movement to fight the American-backed Karzai administration and the NATO-ledInternational Security Assistance Force (ISAF).[33] The Taliban have been accused of using terrorism as a specific tactic to further their ideological and political goals.[34][35] According to the United Nations, the Taliban and their allies were responsible for 75% of Afghan civilian casualties in 2010, 80% in 2011, and 80% in 2012.[36][37][38] It is widely believed that the city of Quetta in Pakistan serves as Quetta Shura’s headquarter
Role of the Pakistani military
The Taliban were largely founded by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in 1994.[16][63][64][65][66][67][68][69] The ISI used the Taliban to establish a regime in Afghanistan which would be favorable to Pakistan, as they were trying to gain strategic depth.[39][70][71][72] Since the creation of the Taliban, the ISI and the Pakistani military have given financial, logistical and military support.[17][73][74][75]
According to Pakistani Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, “between 1994 and 1999, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in Afghanistan” on the side of the Taliban.[76] Peter Tomsen stated that up until 9/11 Pakistani military and ISI officers along with thousands of regular Pakistani armed forces personnel had been involved in the fighting in Afghanistan.[77]

In 2001 alone, according to several international sources, 28,000-30,000 Pakistani nationals, 14,000-15,000 Afghan Taliban and 2,000-3,000 Al Qaeda militants were fighting against anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan as a roughly 45,000 strong military force.[23][24][78][79] Pakistani PresidentPervez Musharraf – then as Chief of Army Staff – was responsible for sending thousands of Pakistanis to fight alongside the Taliban and Bin Laden against the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud.[24][60][80] Of the estimated 28,000 Pakistani nationals fighting in Afghanistan, 8,000 were militants recruited in madrassas filling regular Taliban ranks.[23] A 1998 document by the U.S. State Department confirms that “20–40 percent of [regular] Taliban soldiers are Pakistani.”[60] The document further states that the parents of those Pakistani nationals “know nothing regarding their child’s military involvement with the Taliban until their bodies are brought back to Pakistan.”[60] According to the U.S. State Department report and reports by Human Rights Watch, the other Pakistani nationals fighting in Afghanistan were regular Pakistani soldiers especially from the Frontier Corpsbut also from the army providing direct combat support.[19][60]
Human Rights Watch wrote in 2000:
Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting [in Afghanistan], Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban’s virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and … directly providing combat support.[19]
On August 1, 1997 the Taliban launched an attack on Sheberghan the main military base of Abdul Rashid Dostum. Dostum has said the reason the attack was successful was due to 1500 Pakistani commandos taking part and that the Pakistani air force also gave support.[81]
In 1998, Iran accused Pakistan of sending its air force to bomb Mazar-i-Sharif in support of Taliban forces and directly accused Pakistani troops for “war crimes at Bamiyan”. [82] The same year Russia said, Pakistan was responsible for the “military expansion” of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan by sending large numbers of Pakistani troops some of whom had subsequently been taken as prisoners by the anti-Taliban United Front.[83]
In 2000, the UN Security Council imposed an arms embargo against military support to the Taliban, with UN officials explicitly singling out Pakistan. The UN secretary-general implicitly criticized Pakistan for its military support and the Security Council stated it was “deeply distress[ed] over reports of involvement in the fighting, on the Taliban side, of thousands of non-Afghan nationals.”[84] In July 2001, several countries including the United States, accused Pakistan of being “in violation of U.N. sanctions because of its military aid to the Taliban.”[85] The Taliban also obtained financial resources from Pakistan. In 1997 alone, after the capture of Kabul by the Taliban, Pakistan gave $30 million in aid and a further $10 million for government wages.[86]
In 2000, British Intelligence reported that the ISI was taking an active role in several Al Qaeda training camps.[87] The ISI helped with the construction of training camps for both the Taliban and Al Qaeda.[87][88][89] From 1996 to 2001 the Al Qaeda of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiribecame a state within the Taliban state.[90] Bin Laden sent Arab and Central Asian Al-Qaeda militants to join the fight against the United Front among them his Brigade 055.[90][91]
After the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan claimed to have ended its support to the Taliban.[92][93] But with the fall of Kabul to anti-Taliban forces in November 2001, ISI forces worked with and helped Taliban militias who were in full retreat.[94] In November 2001, Taliban, Al-Qaeda combatants and ISI operatives were safely evacuated from Kunduz on Pakistan Army cargo aircraft to Pakistan Air Force bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s Northern Areas in what has been dubbed the “Airlift of Evil”[95] Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf wrote in his memoirs that Richard Armitage, the former US deputy secretary of state, said Pakistan would be “bombed back to the stone-age” if it continued to support the Taliban,[96][97][98][99] although Armitage has since denied using the “stone age” phrase.[100]
The role of the Pakistani military has been described by international observers as well as by the anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud as a “creeping invasion”.[76] Yet the “creeping invasion” proved unable to defeat the severely outnumbered anti-Taliban forces.[76]
Pakistan has been accused of continuing to support the Taliban since 9/11, an allegation Pakistan denies.[21][22]
Anti-Taliban resistance under Massoud
Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum, former enemies, created the United Front (Northern Alliance) against the Taliban that were preparing offensives against the remaining areas under the control of Massoud and those under the control of Dostum. The United Front included beside the dominantly Tajik forces of Massoud and the Uzbek forces of Dostum, Hazara troops led by Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq and Pashtun forces under the leadership of commanders such as Abdul Haq and Haji Abdul Qadir. Notable politicians and diplomats of the United Front includedAbdul Rahim Ghafoorzai, Abdullah Abdullah and Masood Khalili. From the Taliban conquest of Kabul in September 1996 until November 2001 the United Front controlled roughly 30% of Afghanistan’s population in provinces such as Badakhshan, Kapisa, Takhar and parts of Parwan, Kunar,Nuristan, Laghman, Samangan, Kunduz, Ghōr and Bamyan.
After longstanding battles especially for the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, Abdul Rashid Dostum and his Junbish forces were defeated by the Taliban and their allies in 1998. Dostum subsequently went into exile. Ahmad Shah Massoud remained the only major anti-Taliban leader inside Afghanistan who was able to defend vast parts of his territory against the Taliban.
In the areas under his control Massoud set up democratic institutions and signed the Women’s Rights Declaration.[101] In the area of Massoud, women and girls did not have to wear the Afghan burqa. They were allowed to work and to go to school. In at least two known instances, Massoud personally intervened against cases of forced marriage.[24]
It is our conviction and we believe that both men and women are created by the Almighty. Both have equal rights. Women can pursue an education, women can pursue a career, and women can play a role in society – just like men.[24]
—Ahmad Shah Massoud, 2001
fghan traditions would need a generation or more to overcome and could only be challenged by education, he said.[24] Humayun Tandar, who took part as an Afghan diplomat in the 2001 International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, said that “strictures of language, ethnicity, region were [also] stifling for Massoud. That is why … he wanted to create a unity which could surpass the situation in which we found ourselves and still find ourselves to this day.”[24]This applied also to strictures of religion. Jean-José Puig describes how Massoud often led prayers before a meal or at times asked his fellow Muslims to lead the prayer but also did not hesitate to ask a Christian friend Jean-José Puig or the Jewish Princeton University Professor Michael Barry: “Jean-José, we believe in the same God. Please, tell us the prayer before lunch or dinner in your own language.”[24]
Human Rights Watch cites no human rights crimes for the forces under direct control of Massoud for the period from October 1996 until the assassination of Massoud in September 2001.[19] 400,000 to one million Afghans fled from the Taliban to the area of Massoud.[80][102] National Geographic concluded in its documentary “Inside the Taliban”:
The only thing standing in the way of future Taliban massacres is Ahmad Shah Massoud.[80]
—National Geographic, Inside the Taliban
The Taliban repeatedly offered Massoud a position of power to make him stop his resistance. Massoud declined. He explained in one interview:
The Taliban say: ‘Come and accept the post of prime minister and be with us’, and they would keep the highest office in the country, the presidentship. But at what cost?! The difference between us concerns mainly our way of thinking about the very principles of the society and the state. We can not accept their conditions of compromise, or else we would have to give up the principles of modern democracy. We are fundamentally against the system called ‘the Emirate of Afghanistan”.[103]
—Ahmad Shah Massoud, 2001
The United Front in its Proposals for Peace demanded the Taliban to join a political process leading towards nationwide democratic elections.[103] In early 2001 Massoud employed a new strategy of local military pressure and global political appeals.[104] Resentment was increasingly gathering against Taliban rule from the bottom of Afghan society including the Pashtun areas.[104] Massoud publicized their cause “popular consensus, general elections and democracy” worldwide. At the same time he was very wary not to revive the failed Kabul government of the early 1990s.[104] Already in 1999 he started the training of police forces which he trained specifically in order to keep order and protect the civilian population in case the United Front would be successful.[24] Massoud stated:
The Taliban are not a force to be considered invincible. They are distanced from the people now. They are weaker than in the past. There is only the assistance given by Pakistan, Osama bin Laden and other extremist groups that keep the Taliban on their feet. With a halt to that assistance, it is extremely difficult to survive.[105]
—Ahmad Shah Massoud, 2001
From 1999 onwards a renewed process was set into motion by the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Pashtun Abdul Haq to unite all the ethnicities of Afghanistan. While Massoud united the Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks as well as some Pashtun commanders under his United Front command, the famed Pashtun commander Abdul Haq received increasing numbers of defecting Pashtun Taliban as “Taliban popularity trended downward”.[77] Both agreed to work together with the exiled Afghan king Zahir Shah.[77] International officials who met with representatives of the new alliance, which Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll referred to as the “grand Pashtun-Tajik alliance”, said, “It’s crazy that you have this today … Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara … They were all ready to buy in to the process … to work under the king’s banner for an ethnically balanced Afghanistan.”[104][106] Senior diplomat and Afghanistan expert Peter Tomsen wrote: “The ‘Lion of Kabul’ [Abdul Haq] and the ‘Lion of Panjshir’ [Ahmad Shah Massoud] … Haq, Massoud, and Karzai, Afghanistan’s three leading moderates, could transcend the Pashtun—non-Pashtun, north-south divide.”[77] The most senior Hazara and Uzbek leader were also part of the process. In late 2000, Massoud officially brought together this new alliance in a meeting in Northern Afghanistan among other things to discuss “a Loya Jirga, or a traditional council of elders, to settle political turmoil in Afghanistan”.[107] That part of the Pashtun-Tajik-Hazara-Uzbek peace plan did eventually materialize. An account of the meeting by author and journalist Sebastian Junger says: “In 2000, when I was there … I happened to be there in a very interesting time. … Massoud brought together Afghan leaders from all ethnic groups. They flew from London, Paris, the USA, all parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. He brought them all into the northern area where he was. He held a council of … prominent Afghans from all over the world, brought there to discuss the Afghan government after the Taliban. … we met all these men and interviewed them briefly. One was Hamid Karzai; I did not have any idea who he would end up being …”[108]
In early 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud with ethnic leader from all of Afghanistan addressed the European Parliament in Brussels asking the international community to provide humanitarian help to the people of Afghanistan.[109] He stated that the Taliban and Al Qaeda had introduced “a very wrong perception of Islam” and that without the support of Pakistan and Bin Laden the Taliban would not be able to sustain their military campaign for up to a year.[110] On this visit to Europe he also warned that his intelligence had gathered information about a large-scale attack on U.S. soil being imminent.[111] The president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine, called him the “pole of liberty in Afghanistan”.[112]
On September 9, 2001, Massoud, then aged 48, was the target of a suicide attack by two Arabs posing as journalists at Khwaja Bahauddin, in the Takhar Province of Afghanistan.[113][114] Massoud, who had survived countless assassination attempts over a period of 26 years, died in a helicopter taking him to a hospital. The first attempt on Massoud’s life had been carried out by Hekmatyar and two Pakistani ISI agents in 1975, when Massoud was only 22 years old.[46] In early 2001, Al-Qaeda would-be assassins were captured by Massoud’s forces while trying to enter his territory.[104] The funeral, though in a rather rural area, was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourning people.
The assassination of Massoud is believed to have a connection to the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil, which killed nearly 3000 people, and which appeared to be the terrorist attack that Massoud had warned against in his speech to the European Parliament several months earlier.[115] John P. O’Neill was a counter-terrorism expert and the Assistant Director of the FBI until late 2001. He retired from the FBI and was offered the position of director of security at the World Trade Center (WTC). He took the job at the WTC two weeks before 9/11. On September 10, 2001, O’Neill told two of his friends, “We’re due. And we’re due for something big…. Some things have happened in Afghanistan. [referring to the assassination of Massoud] I don’t like the way things are lining up in Afghanistan…. I sense a shift, and I think things are going to happen … soon.”[116] O’Neill died on September 11, 2001, when the South Tower collapsed.[116]
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Massoud’s United Front troops and United Front troops of Abdul Rashid Dostum (who returned from exile) ousted the Taliban from power in Kabul with American air support in Operation Enduring Freedom. From October to December 2001, the United Front gained control of much of the country and played a crucial role in establishing the post-Taliban interim government under Hamid Karzai.
American-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan, Taliban overthrow and insurgency
Main article: War in Afghanistan (2001–present)
Prelude
After the September 11 attacks on the U.S. and the PENTTBOM investigation, the United States made the following demands of the Taliban,[117]
1. Deliver to the U.S. all of the leaders of Al-Qaeda
2. Release all foreign nationals that have been unjustly imprisoned
3. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers
4. Close immediately every terrorist training camp
5. Hand over every terrorist and their supporters to appropriate authorities
6. Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps for inspection
The U.S. petitioned the international community to back a military campaign to overthrow the Taliban. The U.N. issued two resolutions on terrorism after the September 11 attacks. The resolutions called on all states to “[increase] cooperation and full implementation of the relevant international conventions relating to terrorism” and specified consensus recommendations for all countries. The Security Council did not authorize military intervention in Afghanistan of any kind, and nowhere in the U.N resolutions did it say military operations in Afghanistan were justified or conformed to international law.[118] Despite this, NATO approved a campaign against Afghanistan as self-defense against armed attack.[119]
The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salem Zaeef, responded to the ultimatum by demanding “convincing evidence”[120] that Bin Laden was involved in the attacks, stating “our position is that if America has evidence and proof, they should produce it.”[121][122] Additionally, the Taliban insisted that any trial of Bin Laden be held in an Afghan court.[123] Zaeef also claimed that “4,000 Jews working in the Trade Center had prior knowledge of the suicide missions, and ‘were absent on that day.'”[122] This response was generally dismissed as a delaying tactic, rather than a sincere attempt to cooperate with the ultimatum.[120][124][125]
On September 22, the United Arab Emirates, and later Saudi Arabia, withdrew recognition of the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legal government, leaving neighbouring Pakistan as the only remaining country with diplomatic ties. On October 4, the Taliban agreed to turn bin Laden over to Pakistan for trial in an international tribunal[126] that operated according to Islamic Sharia law, but Pakistan blocked the offer as it was not possible to guarantee his safety.[127] On October 7, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan offered to detain bin Laden and try him under Islamic law if the U.S. made a formal request and presented the Taliban with evidence. A Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, rejected the Taliban offer, and stated that the U.S. would not negotiate their demands.[128]
Coalition attack
On October 7, less than one month after the September 11 attacks, the U.S., aided by the United Kingdom, Canada, and other countries including several from the NATO alliance, initiated military action, bombing Taliban and Al-Qaeda-related camps.[129][130] The stated intent of military operations was to remove the Taliban from power, and prevent the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations.[131]
The CIA’s elite Special Activities Division (SAD) units were the first U.S. forces to enter Afghanistan (noting that many different countries intelligence agencies were on the ground or operating within theatre before SAD, and that SAD are not technically military forces, but civilian paramilitaries). They joined with the Afghan United Front (Northern Alliance) to prepare for the subsequent arrival of U.S. Special Operations forces. The United Front (Northern Alliance) and SAD and Special Forces combined to overthrow the Taliban with minimal coalition casualties, and without the use of international conventional ground forces. The Washington Post stated in an editorial by John Lehman in 2006:
What made the Afghan campaign a landmark in the U.S. Military’s history is that it was prosecuted by Special Operations forces from all the services, along with Navy and Air Force tactical power, operations by the Afghan Northern Alliance and the CIA were equally important and fully integrated. No large Army or Marine force was employed.[132]
On October 14, the Taliban offered to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country in return for a bombing halt, but only if the Taliban were given evidence of bin Laden’s involvement.[133] The U.S. rejected this offer, and continued military operations. Mazar-i-Sharif fell to United Front troops of Ustad Atta Mohammad Noor and Abdul Rashid Dostum on November 9, triggering a cascade of provinces falling with minimal resistance.
In November 2001, before the capture of Kunduz by United Front troops under the command of Mohammad Daud Daud, thousands of top commanders and regular fighters of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agents and military personnel, and other volunteers and sympathizers in the Kunduz airlift, dubbed the Airlift of Evil by US military forces around Kunduz and subsequently used as a term in media reports, were evacuated and airlifted out of Kunduz by Pakistan Army cargo aircraft to Pakistan Air Force air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s Northern Areas.[95][134][135][136][137][138]
On the night of November 12, the Taliban retreated south from Kabul. On November 15, they released eight Western aid workers after three months in captivity. By November 13, the Taliban had withdrawn from both Kabul and Jalalabad. Finally, in early December, the Taliban gave up Kandahar, their last stronghold, dispersing without surrendering
Human trafficking
Several Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders ran a network of human trafficking, abducting women and selling them into sex slavery in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[158] Time Magazine writes: “The Taliban often argued that the brutal restrictions they placed on women were actually a way of revering and protecting the opposite sex. The behavior of the Taliban during the six years they expanded their rule in Afghanistan made a mockery of that claim.”[158]
The targets for human trafficking were especially women from the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other ethnic groups in Afghanistan. Some women preferred to commit suicide over slavery, killing themselves. During one Taliban and Al-Qaeda offensive in 1999 in the Shomali Plains alone, more than 600 women were kidnapped.[158] Taliban as well as Arab and Pakistani Al-Qaeda militants forced them into trucks and buses.[158] Time Magazine writes: “The trail of the missing Shomali women leads to Jalalabad, not far from the Pakistan border. There, according to eyewitnesses, the women were penned up inside Sar Shahi camp in the desert. The more desirable among them were selected and taken away. Some were trucked to Peshawar with the apparent complicity of Pakistani border guards. Others were taken to Khost, where bin Laden had several training camps.” Officials from relief agencies say, the trail of many of the vanished women leads to Pakistan where they were sold to brothels or into private households to be kept as slaves.[158]
Some local Taliban commanders were opposed to the human trafficking ordered and conducted by their leaders. One Taliban commander, Nuruludah, is quoted as saying that he and his men freed some women which were being abducted by Pakistani members of Al-Qaeda.[158] A few local Taliban in Jalalabad also freed women that were being held by other Taliban and members of Al-Qaeda in a camp.[158]