Wars and Empire | Page 7

by the hardliner Khalq
communist Hafizullah Amin. In 1979, the Soviet Spetsnaz murdered
Amin and replaced him with the Parcham follower Babrak Karmal,
who was close to the KGB. Then the Soviet army invaded.
The communist secret service Khad (KhAD), whose leaders were
Karmal and Sayid Mohammed Najibullah, was actually an Afghan
branch of the KGB. It had been preceded by the communist secret
services of Taraki and Amin (AGSA, KAM), but from 1979 onwards
this organization of terror was instructed and trained by the KGB. The
culture of terror and the horrible persecution of the civil population
continued without a pause from the communist takeover up until the
overthrowing of Najibullah's regime in 1992 when Massoud liberated
Kabul. Western minds seem to implicitly suppose that when the Cold
War was over, the communists and the structures they had created just
suddenly disappeared. This is a recurrent fatal misperception especially
of the Americans.
According to Professor Azmat Hayat Khan of the University of
Peshawar, when Ahmad Shah Massoud's mujaheddin liberated Kabul
in 1992, and Najibullah gave up power, the communist generals of the
army and of Khad agreed to prolong the Afghan civil war in order to
discredit President Burhanuddin Rabbani's mujahid government and
prevent Afghanistan from stabilizing. The Uzbek communist General
Abdurrashid Dostum continued the rebellion against Rabbani and
Massoud in Mazar-i-Sharif, massively backed by the Soviet Union and
later by Russia and Uzbekistan. Another rebellious general was
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Most of the ethnic Pashtun Khalq army generals
as well as those of the Khad defected to Hekmatyar's troops. A decisive
role was the one played by General Shahnawaz Tanai, the communist
commander of the artillery, who defected to Hekmatyar's side as early
as in 1990. Later in 1995, when Hekmatyar's rebellion was losing
strength, Tanai defected to the Taliban. So did many other communist
army and Khad officers.
It was Tanai's defection that provided the Taliban with Soviet artillery,
Soviet air force, Soviet intelligence and Soviet technical and military
knowledge. The American Anthony Arnold argued already then that
Tanai's moves were a KGB-inspired provocation. The former KGB

General Oleg Kalugin said that it was Moscow who trained most of the
terrorists the US is now chasing.
As regards the Taliban, it was nothing special when they took over
Kandahar in 1994. Kandahar was a Pashtun city and the strict
interpretation of Islam the Taliban propounds is not so much based on
the Qur'an but on the narrow-minded social norms of an agrarian
Pashtun village. Mullah Omar is often described as having the
background of a relatively simple-minded rustic mullah, although he
was also politically active in Mohammed Nabi Mohammadi's
Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami (Revolutionary Islamic Movement), which
later opposed the Taliban.
But apart from Mullah Mohammed Omar and some other leaders who
seem to have truly religious backgrounds (and no other education), the
Taliban's military and intelligence are dominated by Soviet-trained
communists.
Besides Tanai, there is for example the late first Taliban military
commander and one of its founders, "Mullah Borjan", whose real name
was Turan Abdurrahman, a prominent communist military officer.
Many Taliban "mullahs" have no religious training at all. They are
former communist military and security agents who have grown up
beards and adopted new names and identities replete with the title
"mullah". The Taliban artillery commander was the former Soviet
Army's Afghan military intelligence officer Shah Sawar. The Taliban
intelligence service chief Mohammed Akbar used to head a department
of the Khad. And the Taliban air force commander Mohammed Gilani
was a communist general, too.
Perhaps because of this immensely influential influx into the Taliban,
their interpretation of Islam is quite alien for most of the world's
Muslims, but closely resembles the interpretation of Islam that the
communists and Russia have traditionally espoused in their anti-Islamic
propaganda.
The decisive strengthening of the Taliban took place in 1995-1996,
when it was seen as a "stabilizing" force in Afghanistan. This was a
great fallacy based on the Taliban's success in Kandahar, which was
indeed their "home field". Anywhere else the Taliban did not bring
about stability, but quite the opposite. Among those with a rising
interest in the Taliban forces, were all the main players: Russia and its

satellite regimes in Central Asia, the US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
At the initiative of the Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, the
Russian energy giant Gazprom, headed by the then Russian Prime
Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the US firm Unocal, contracted to
lay a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, circumventing Iran and
crossing the Afghan territory that the Taliban had supposedly
"stabilized". For Pakistan, it has been a traditional national interest to
secure energy supplies from Central Asia, since it is sandwiched
between two vehemently hostile great powers, India and Iran. For
Russia, this was seen as a way to control Central Asian energy
resources