Afghan Myths

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When this interview was conducted (in 2002), Anssi KristianKullberg was employed as a researcher for the Legal and CountryIntelligence Service, Western and Central Asia Desk, at the FinnishDirectorate of Immigration. This interview represents his personalviews only and not those of his employer. On Black Tuesday, 11thSeptember, he was in Kyrgyzstan, on his way to the notoriousFerghana Valley, in a reconstruction of the late Finnish MarshalC.G.E. Mannerheim's intelligence expedition to Turkistan and Chinain 1906-1908.

Question: Was the Taliban the creation of Pakistan? Can you tell usabout its formation and how was Russia involved in it?

Answer: The Taliban was not a creation of Pakistan, althoughPakistan was among several states that contributed to the genesisand development of this peculiar movement. It is true that theTaliban (which was established only as late as in 1994 as areligious movement) had a significant influx from Pakistanimadrassas. But the Taliban is not only an extreme religiousmovement, but also an ethnic Pashtun one. The Pashtuns are a bitless than half of Afghanistan's population, but in Pakistan thereare 16 million resident Pashtuns plus 3 million as refugees. Thereare more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan nowadays. The"Pakistanis" involved in Afghanistan are in fact Afghans.

The role of the Pakistani Islamist opposition in the formation andsupport of the Taliban is widely recorded. But more important arethose who made it a military power. This is where Russia enters thegame, too. In order to understand the Taliban, we must recall thebackground situation in Afghanistan ever since the events in 1970s.

The Taliban is not monolithic. Even less so is the NorthernAlliance. Neither were the Afghan communists united. This was madeevident by the internal power struggles following the ousting ofKing Zahir Shah in 1973. Daoud was overthrown and killed bycommunists in 1978. But the communists were divided into the Khalqfaction, favored by China, and the Parcham faction, favored by theSoviet Union. In 1978 it was the Khalq faction that took over, buttheir more moderate leader Nur Mohammed Taraki was overthrown andkilled by the hardliner Khalq communist Hafizullah Amin. In 1979,the Soviet Spetsnaz murdered Amin and replaced him with the Parchamfollower Babrak Karmal, who was close to the KGB. Then the Sovietarmy invaded.

The communist secret service Khad (KhAD), whose leaders were Karmaland Sayid Mohammed Najibullah, was actually an Afghan branch of theKGB. It had been preceded by the communist secret services ofTaraki and Amin (AGSA, KAM), but from 1979 onwards thisorganization of terror was instructed and trained by the KGB. Theculture of terror and the horrible persecution of the civilpopulation continued without a pause from the communist takeover upuntil the overthrowing of Najibullah's regime in 1992 when Massoudliberated Kabul. Western minds seem to implicitly suppose that whenthe Cold War was over, the communists and the structures they hadcreated just suddenly disappeared. This is a recurrent fatalmisperception especially of the Americans.

According to Professor Azmat Hayat Khan of the University ofPeshawar, when Ahmad Shah Massoud's mujaheddin liberated Kabul in1992, and Najibullah gave up power, the communist generals of thearmy and of Khad agreed to prolong the Afghan civil war in order todiscredit President Burhanuddin Rabbani's mujahid government andprevent Afghanistan from stabilizing. The Uzbek communist GeneralAbdurrashid Dostum continued the rebellion against Rabbani andMassoud in Mazar-i-Sharif, massively backed by the Soviet Union andlater by Russia and Uzbekistan. Another rebellious general wasGulbuddin Hekmatyar. Most of the ethnic Pashtun Khalq army generalsas well as those of the Khad defected to Hekmatyar's troops. Adecisive role was the one played by General Shahnawaz Tanai, thecommunist commander of the artillery, who defected to Hekmatyar'sside as early as in 1990. Later in 1995, when Hekmatyar's rebellionwas losing strength, Tanai defected to the Taliban. So did manyother communist army and Khad officers.

It was Tanai's defection that provided the Taliban with Sovietartillery, Soviet air force, Soviet intelligence and Soviettechnical and military knowledge. The American Anthony Arnoldargued already then that Tanai's moves were a KGB-inspiredprovocation. The former KGB General Oleg Kalugin said that it wasMoscow who trained most of the terrorists the US is now chasing.

As regards the Taliban, it was nothing special when they took overKandahar in 1994. Kandahar was a Pashtun city and the strictinterpretation of Islam the Taliban propounds is not so much basedon the Qur'an but on the narrow-minded social norms of an agrarianPashtun village. Mullah Omar is often described as having thebackground of a relatively simple-minded rustic mullah, although hewas also politically active in Mohammed Nabi Mohammadi'sHarakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami (Revolutionary Islamic Movement), whichlater opposed the Taliban.

But apart from Mullah Mohammed Omar and some other leaders who seemto have truly religious backgrounds (and no other education), theTaliban's military and intelligence are dominated by Soviet-trainedcommunists.

Besides Tanai, there is for example the late first Taliban militarycommander and one of its founders, "Mullah Borjan", whose real namewas Turan Abdurrahman, a prominent communist military officer. ManyTaliban "mullahs" have no religious training at all. They areformer communist military and security agents who have grown upbeards and adopted new names and identities replete with the title"mullah". The Taliban artillery commander was the former SovietArmy's Afghan military intelligence officer Shah Sawar. The Talibanintelligence service chief Mohammed Akbar used to head a departmentof the Khad. And the Taliban air force commander Mohammed Gilaniwas a communist general, too. Perhaps because of this immenselyinfluential influx into the Taliban, their interpretation of Islamis quite alien for most of the world's Muslims, but closelyresembles the interpretation of Islam that the communists andRussia have traditionally espoused in their anti-Islamicpropaganda.

The decisive strengthening of the Taliban took place in 1995-1996,when it was seen as a "stabilizing" force in Afghanistan. This wasa great fallacy based on the Taliban's success in Kandahar, whichwas indeed their "home field". Anywhere else the Taliban did notbring about stability, but quite the opposite. Among those with arising 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 dictatorSaparmurat Niyazov, the Russian energy giant Gazprom, headed by thethen Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the US firmUnocal, contracted to lay a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan,circumventing Iran and crossing the Afghan territory that theTaliban had supposedly "stabilized". For Pakistan, it has been atraditional national interest to secure energy supplies fromCentral Asia, since it is sandwiched between two vehemently hostilegreat powers, India and Iran. For Russia, this was seen as a way tocontrol Central Asian energy resources and to extend its influencetowards the Indian Ocean. Two Saudi Arabian oil companies were alsoinvolved.