Sarah Bach
EDGE Final Paper
June 4, 2003
The Continuing Role of the Outside World in Afghanistan
Afghanistan has been considered a land of violence and discontent for much of its history. The government always seems to be in disorder, and its people never seem completely happy. Because of this image of being unfit to control its own affairs, the international community has long been involved in the history of Afghanistan. The world intervenes in Afghan conflicts and works to keep the country in order. Sometimes the outside assistance is advantageous to the Afghan people, but at other times it is unnecessary and only creates more problems. In this paper I will examine the prominent role of the international community throughout Afghanistan’s history. I will begin with the First Afghan War of 1838 and continue through the war on terrorism of 2001. The function of the world in each of these conflicts and their aftermaths will be the main focus. The First Afghan War was the beginning to years of international intervention in Afghanistan.
In 1838 the First Afghan War began and centered around British attempts to replace the Emir of Afghanistan because of fears of growing Russian influence. An Emir is a prince, chieftain or governor especially in the Middle East. Afghanistan’s position as a buffer state between the Russian Empire and British India meant that the British and Indian authorities were anxious to ensure that a pro-British Emir was on the throne at Kabul. A British envoy was sent to Kabul to gain support of the current Emir, Dost Mohammed, in 1837, when the British took the threat of a Russian invasion of India via the Khyber and Bolan passes very seriously The Emir was in favor of an alliance, but when the British refused to help him gain Peshawar, which the Sikhs had seized in 1834, he prepared to talk to the Russians, who also sent an envoy to Kabul. This the Governor-General of India, to conclude that Dost Mohammed was anti-British. The decision was made to replace him as Emir with a former ruler, Shah Shuja who was considered to be more impressionable.
A British-Indian force entered Afghanistan in spring 1839. Kandahar was taken without a fight and the powerful fortress of Ghazni was seized. Dost Mohammed fled from Kabul and Shash Shuja was installed as Emir. However, the British could not afford to keep troops in Kabul indefinitely, and in 1841 preparations were made to withdraw them. Meanwhile popular opposition to Shah Shuja grew into an uprising. British diplomats were murdered and the British force lost its grip on the area.
In January 1842 the Kabul garrison marched out of the city with the promise that it would be allowed to retreat to India in safety. Instead it came under immediate attack as it struggled through the cold, mountainous terrain. Only a few survivors escaped. A national uprising ensued and the British garrison at Jellalabad was besieged until they were relieved. The relief then linked up with the Kandahar garrison and marched back to India via Kabul where they rescued some British hostages. This marked the end of the war which had been a complete failure. Shah Shuja was murdered and Dost Mohammed returned to the throne. The British had been defeated by harsh conditions and strong opposition. The wars including Britain were not yet over, however.
The Second Afghan War began in 1876. The British government believed that the extension of Russian influence over central Asia constituted a legitimate threat to India. When the Emir of Afghanistan, Sher Ali, was visited by a Russian mission but refused to accept a British envoy, the British decided to replace him. In November 1878 three British convoys invaded Afghanistan. One convoy seized Kandahar, a second occupied the Khyber Pass, while the third, advanced along the Kurram Valley towards Kabul only to find their way blocked at Peiwar Kotal by an Afghan force of 18,000 men and 11 guns. The third convoy made a feint attack on the position but led the 5th Goorkha Regiment and other troops in a night flanking movement which dislodged the Afghans, inflicted heavy casualties and captured all their guns.
Yakub Khan, the son of Sher Ali, replaced his father as Emir, who signed the Treaty of Gandamak with Britain and accepted a British envoy. However, in September 1879, following a mutiny in the Afghan army, the envoy and his escort were murdered. In response to this the third convoy occupied Kabul and Yakub Khan was deposed before a popular rising forced the convoy to fall back to his base at Sherpur where he was besieged for three weeks by a huge Afghan force. Nevertheless, on December 23 it defeated a major Afghan attack and reoccupied Kabul. In May 1880 it was joined by yet another convoy, which had advanced from Kandahar and defeated an Afghan army at Ahmed Khel.
The vacant throne was offered to Abdur Rahman, a nephew of Sher Ali who agreed to abide by the terms of the treaty. However, trouble was brewing in Heart where Sher Ali’s son, Ayub Khan, launched a bid for the throne. On July 27, 1880, a British-Indian force sent to intercept him was overwhelmed by an army ten times its size at Maiwand. The survivors were pursued into Kandahar. The siege was lifted when the same third convoy led a force from Kabul to Kandahar. Despite the difficult terrain and the high temperatures they covered a large amount of land in twenty days and hardly lost a man. On September 1 it defeated Ayub Khan outside Kandahar and ended the siege. The British then left Afghanistan in the hands of Abdur Rahman, who agreed to conduct his foreign policy through the Government of India.
The third Afghan War began in April 1919, the new Emir of Afghanistan, Amanullah, decided to bolster his popularity by invading India in order to seize the old Afghan provinces west of the River Indus. He believed that the British and Indian troops would be too war-driven to resist. Although there was a shortage of artillery and machine guns, a division from Peshawar defeated a superior Afghan force in the Khyber Pass and forced them back towards Jellalabad. The main Afghan attack took place in the Tochi-Kurram valley area where the Waziristan Militia deserted to the enemy. A large Afghan force beseiged two battalions of Sikhs and Gurkhas and a squadron of cavalry in Thal. Although under constant attack for a week until they were relieved by a different convoy. In Baluchistan the British stormed the Afghan fortress of Spin Baldak on May 27th. Spin Baldak guarded the road to Kandahar and its capture reduced the chance of an Afghan invasion by that route. Amanullah’s invasion had failed but the peace treaty that brought the war to an end did recognize full Afghan independence. In the next 40 years another war was to take place on Afghan soil involving the world.
Afghanistan made its start as a constitutional monarchy in1953 when Prince Mohammoud Daoud, the cousin of King Zahir, became Prime Minister. Daoud requested the purchase of military equipment from the U.S. to modernize his army. After the U.S. rejected Afghanistan's request , Daoud turned to the Soviet Union for military aid. Khrushchev agreed to assist, commencing close ties between Afghanistan and the USSR. Hafizullah Amin also had a major role in the new government. When anarchy continued to spread through the country, Amin asked for, and received, additional Soviet aid. December 1979 provoked the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union was one of the world’s two superpowers. It had been conquering as much territory as possible. Earlier successful Soviet military interventions in the Ukraine (1945-1951), East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) and intermittent Soviet military pressure on Poland demonstrated that the stark military power of the Soviet state was an irresistible tool of Soviet political power. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a repeat of their invasion of Czechoslovakia. For months after the invasion, hardly a political or military expert in the world doubted that Afghanistan was now forever incorporated as a part of the Soviet Empire and that nothing short of a large-scale global war could alter the status quo. And global war was most unlikely as both super powers, the Soviet Union and the Unites States, intended to avoid it. Most Westerners believed that the Soviets would ultimately prevail. Some even projected that the purpose of the Soviet takeovers was to challenge Western strategic interests and disrupt Western access to critical Middle Eastern oil.
Communist power was established in Afghanistan on April 27, 1978 through a bloody military coup. The Afghans' values, faith and love of freedom enabled them to hold out against a superpower, even though they suffered tremendous casualties in doing so. The Soviet Union had diplomatic ties with Afghanistan since 1919 and extensive bilateral trade contacts since the 1930s. Soviet economic and military advisers had been a constant feature in Afghanistan since 1950. The Soviets built much of Afghanistan's road network and airfields. The Soviet concept for military occupation of Afghanistan was based on the following:
-stabilizing the country by garrisoning the main routes, major cities, airbases and logistics sites;
-relieving the Afghan government forces of garrison duties
and pushing them into the countryside to battle the resistance;
-providing logistic, air, artillery and intelligence support
to the Afghan forces;
-providing minimum interface between the Soviet occupation
forces and the local populace;
- accepting minimal Soviet casualties; and,
-strengthening the Afghan forces, so once the resistance was
defeated, the Soviet Army could be withdrawn.
Yet, their force commitment, initially assessed as requiring several months, lasted ten years and required increasing numbers of Soviet forces. It proved a bloody experience in which the Soviet Union reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced five and a half million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees(Grau 134). Another two million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country. Today, the countryside is ravaged and littered with mines. On a percentage basis, the Soviet Union inflicted more suffering on Afghanistan than Germany inflicted on the Soviet Union during World War II. The guerrilla's morale overmatched the Soviets. The Afghan Civil war was soon to follow.
The Afghan Conflict became a real Civil War when the Afghan Mujaheddin became to the power of Kabul in 1992. More than 50,000 people were killed as results of fighting among Mujaheddin fractions since 1992. From the Civil war arose the Taliban. The Taliban movement was formed in 1994 by Islamic students who took a radical approach to interpreting Islam. By February 1995, the Taliban successfully captured half of the southern provinces without any resistance and surrounded Kabul suburbs. The Taliban military campaign began after the announcement of the Pakistani government to open a trade route through Afghanistan to Central Asia. It actually created some stability after nearly two decades of conflict, but their tough interpretation of Islamic law attracted widespread criticism. The United Nations did not recognize the Taliban although it controlled 95 percent of Afghanistan. Their main opposition is the Northern Alliance. In just two years, the Taliban captured more than two-thirds of Afghanistan from the Mujahedeen warriors who had fought Soviet occupation. The Taliban's success had much to do with the unpopularity of the Mujahedeen in recent years. The Taliban were widely alleged to be the creation of Pakistan's military intelligence. Not much is known about the 35-year-old founder of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Umar, a cleric who fought as a Mujahedeen. They followed a strict Islamic doctrine. They decreed amputations and executions for criminals, and imposed severe restrictions on women. They also banned television, which they see as a symbol of Western decadence. A new conflict aggravated the Afghan problem with the capturing of Kabul by the Taliban movement in 1996.A United Nations envoy met with the Taliban Islamic administration to discuss the rebels and the purpose of their Kabul takeover. "My main message was an offer that the United Nations wants to continue the political dialogue and cooperation with Taliban," said Norbert Holl, the U.N.'s special envoy to Afghanistan. The outside world wished to remain in contact with the Taliban so that it did not feel invincible. However, many feel that the world did not do enough. One reporter wrote that, "The international community has failed to hold Afghanistan's warring factions accountable for violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Civilians are at the center of this conflict, and their well-being must be at the center of the solution”(Joost Hiltermann). The Taliban was to create more problems than the world could have ever imagined.
Not all of Afghanistan’s wars were triggered by actions on its own soil. On September 11, 2001 hijacked commercial jetliners hit the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington D.C. The first plane was hijacked at 7:45 a.m. EST. The first plane crashed into the WTC one hour later. The towers had both completely collapsed by 10:30 a.m. EST. All of the planes had been scheduled for cross-country flights, so they had plenty of fuel to cause damage upon impact. A fourth hijacked plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The United States was under attack but it did not know from whom. The United States was forever changed.
Trading on Wall Street was stopped. The Federal Aviation Administration halted all flight operations at the nation’s airports for the first time in U.S. history. The U.S. military was placed on high alert. President Bush had been in Florida visiting an elementary school at the time of the attacks. He addressed the nation from the school and vowed, “to find those responsible and bring them to justice.” Hundreds of New York City firemen and policemen were lost when the World Trade Center Twin Towers collapsed. Reaction from international leaders was swift as they reacted with outrage over the attacks. More than 3,000 people died or remain missing following the attacks. They came from more than 80 different nations, from many different races and religions.
In October of 2001, President Bush declared war on Afghanistan and the Taliban. “On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001, and enjoyed the support of countries from the United Kingdom to Australia to Japan. In the first 100 days of the war, President George W. Bush increased America’s homeland security and built a worldwide coalition that:
The Taliban was forced to
surrender major cities. The military destroyed 11 terrorist training camps and
39 Taliban command and control sites. And al-Qaeda terrorists were captured,
killed or forced to be on the run. By
mid-March 2002, the Taliban had been removed from power and the Al Qaeda
network in Afghanistan had been destroyed.
After the war, Afghanistan was left in disarray. An international convention produced the Bonn Agreement that established the post-war interim government in Afghanistan. The United Nations had to work quickly to implement a new government. Throughout November and December the UN worked closely with Afghan leaders to devise a plan that would lead to the eventual independence of the country. The UN desired that Afghanistan would be able to subsist on its own with minimal amounts of control coming from the outside world. On December 5, 2001 representatives from the Northern Alliance, the Peshawar Group representing Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the Rome delegation representing the former King, and the Cyprus group representing Afghan exiles in Iran came together under the mediation of the United Nations to sign what is known as the Bonn Agreement.
The overall goal desired by all groups involved was a sustainable peace. Initially the focuses included emergency response, basic services, displaced populations, community reconciliation, institutional capacity building, security reform, and human rights. The first order of business in the Agreement called for an interim authority to be established upon the official transfer of power to occur on December 22, 2001. Such an administration was to be made up of one Chairman, 5 Vice-Chairman, and 24 other members. The Interim Authority was to concentrate on the day to day conduct, and help to provide peace, order, and a good government in Afghanistan. It was also to establish a Supreme Court and lower court system, a central banking system, and loya jirga. A loya jirga is a traditional national gathering in which matters of national scale and importance are discussed and settled. The Bonn Agreement explicitly stated that all responsibility for providing law and order would lie with the Afghan people, but they requested the assistance of the United Nations and the international community. The UN was to advise the interim authority on establishing a politically neutral government. Also in its jurisdiction was the investigation of human rights violations, the registration of voters, the conducting of a national census, and the establishment of a fund to help the families affected by the war. Following the Bonn Agreement, the UN Security Council sanctioned the deployment of the International Security Assistance force to Kabul. Its purposes were to aid the interim government in developing national security structures, assist in the reconstruction of the country, and to assist in developing and training future Afghan security forces. The mission was solely limited to Kabul, however. In order to integrate all of the UN’s activities in the country, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was created. The UNAMA worked to promote national reconciliation, fulfill the UN’s responsibilities as outlined in the Bonn Agreement, and manage all humanitarian relief, recovery and reconstruction efforts. The government is still struggling to become independent today. This past March, the UN Security Council extended the tenure of the UNAMA until March of 2004. The role of the international community in Afghanistan’s affairs will seemingly never end as its history of conflict has left it in a state of permanent dependence.
Works Cited
Grau, Lester. The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost. Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Human Rights Watch. “Pakistan, Iran, Russia Fueling Afghan Civil War.” New York: 13 July 2001.
Maley, William. The Afghanistan Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Schofield, Victoria. Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
United States Government Press Releases: 11
September 2001.