Brief History Of Taliban, Also Afghanistan Conflict

What Led To Attack On America?

Anchor-Reporter Steve Garagiola, of Detroit affiliate WDIV, Local 4 and www.clickondetroit.com, has put together a brief history of Taliban, Osama Bin Laden, and the conflict in Afghanistan.

Jog your memory back to 1980 when President Jimmy Carter made the surprising announcement that the United States would not participate in the Olympics in the Soviet Union. Most of us didn't understand why. All we knew was that it had something to do with Afghanistan. The devastating bombings of the World Trade Center and plane attacks on those same building and the Petagon begins there.

1979: The Soviet Invasion Of Afghanistan

In December of 1979, Moscow sent troops across the border to prop up a puppet government referred to as the PDPA, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It neither represented the people, nor was it democratic. The Soviet aim was expansion, and the PDPA introduced Marxism toward the end of eradicating Islam. Afghan resistance quickly developed in the form of the Mujihadin.

Eventually a puppet leader named Najibullah was set in place by the Soviets. Najibullah's secret police, and their KGB masters, murdered tens of thousands of political opponents by having them slowly frozen in special refrigerators, burned with gasoline, electrocuted, eyes gouged out, flayed, thrown into tubs of acid, or buried alive. This inhumanity was intended to invoke terror in the Afghan people, which it did.

The West (meaning the United States), decided a direct military response was impossible to remove the Soviet influence, but Western intelligence services then decided on a fateful step: they would harness the outrage of Muslims and direct their armed fury against the Soviets.

Promoting a "jihad" (Holy War) proved astonishingly simple and successful. Afghans are a fierce, warrior people lacking neither in zeal nor patriotism. What they did lack in 1979 was arms and training. America's Central Intelligence Agency was quick to help. Nearly $2 billion worth of bazookas, rockets, shoulder-held Stinger missiles, guns and ammunition were soon on their way, brought by mules across the mountains from Pakistan. The arms were manna to the Mujihadin, the holy warriors who had embraced the fight preached by conservative Muslim teachers — with Western support.

Warlords soon set themselves up to claim control of sections of the country and take on the Soviet Union. Egyptians, Pakistanis, Saudis, Iranians and volunteers of other nationalities lived and trained with the Afghan warlords. Among these volunteers was Osama bin Laden, a young millionaire Saudi who gave up his life of ease to take up the Islamic cause. The West, for some years, poured in money and arms in the mistaken hope that these could be used to secure a democratic government in Kabul.

Bin Laden, and many others who went to Afghanistan, were transformed, spiritually and mentally. The Islamic cause became their life: and even before the Russians were driven out, they broadened the scope of their struggle. It came to encompass not just Afghanistan but all Muslim countries, which they saw as oppressed by corrupt rulers or foreign occupiers.

Eventually, Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev recognized the overwhelming fury and firepower of the Afghan rebels. Soviet forces withdrew and the communist regime, now confined to the city of Kabul, collapsed. The Mujihadin had won a great victory — and had proved the power of guerrilla warfare, tight organization, ruthlessness and Islamic fervor.

The lessons were learned not only by native Afghans: the jihad had drawn to Afghanistan thousands of pious Muslims from other countries, determined to join the fight to liberate Islamic land from the godless invader. Among the heroes of the Mujihadin was Osama bin Laden.

When the Afghan Mujihadin drove the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan in 1989 after a decade of war, Moscow’s former puppet leader, Najibullah, was left behind to defend Kabul. He held on with secret help from Russia and India, until a coalition of Mujihadin groups finally took Kabul in April 1992.

Soon after, the seven Mujihadin groups who had defeated the Soviet invaders turned on each other in a bloody civil war that destroyed what little of Afghanistan was left after Soviet occupation. The civil war, and a special KGB strategy of stirring up internal tensions, furiously inflamed Afghanistan's chronic ethnic, religious, tribal, and regional disputes. The egos and mutual hatred of the Mujihadin leaders ran unchecked.

In 1994, a mysterious movement called Taliban arose in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. Students at Islamic seminaries ('Taliban' means seminarians) suddenly took up arms that included tanks and a few jet fighters. Taliban fighters marched north, and seized five Afghan provinces. The pious seminarians advanced into battle waving Korans in one hand, and firing AK-47's with the other.

As it turns out, the Taliban had acquired its military power through ISI- Pakistan's intelligence service. Pakistan was threatened by the civil war in Afghanistan and saw the Taliban as a potentially stabilizing force to end the Afghan civil war that was destroying Afghanistan and allowing hostile neighbors - India, Iran, and Russia to re-think an assault against Afghanistan and ultimately Pakistan. The Taliban gained control and the civil war ended.

In spite of its fanatical Islamic practices, violence, and widely documented mistreatment of women, Taliban rule brought peace to a country devastated by decades of war. Taliban now controls all but the far north of the country, which is the last stronghold of resistance (formerly led by Tajik commander Ahmed Shah Masood who was recently assassinated by Taliban terrorists).

With 90 percent of the country under its control, the Taliban have continued to press claims for international recognition.

But the Afghan seat at the United Nations continues to be held by former President Burhanuddin Rabbani. The UN sanctions which have now been imposed on the country make it even less likely that the Taliban will gain that recognition. The sanctions are intended to force the Taliban to hand over the Saudi-born militant bin Laden. But he is viewed as a hero by the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban because he led the initial fight to push the Soviets from Afghanistan. The Taliban say that bin Laden is a guest in their country, and they will not take action against him.

Afghanistan has suffered 20 years of war, and this year has brought the worst drought in decades. There is little sign that sanctions will change the Taliban's policies, or weaken their position within the country.

Taliban's Beliefs

The Taliban sets as its aim to expand the world's most pure Islamic state, banning frivolities like television, music and cinema. Their attempts to eradicate crime have been reinforced by the introduction of medieval Islamic Law including public executions and amputations. A flurry of regulations forbidding girls from going to school, and women from working, has brought it into conflict with the international community. Such issues, along with restrictions on women's access to health care, have also caused some resentment among Afghans.

There are some startling and frightening parallels with the Hitler regime of Germany in the late 1930's. Like Hitler, the Taliban brought peace and stability to a country torn by years of war. Just as Hitler sought to destroy art and artifacts of previous culture, so is the Taliban set on a mission of destruction in Afghanistan's national museum in Kabul. Only fragments of the original collection of statues remain.

Three weeks ago, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the destruction of all pre-Islamic statues. The museum now holds only a handful of exhibits including a limestone inscription in Greek dating back nearly 2,000 years. Western experts now fear that the Taliban are melting down Afghanistan's fabled Bactrian treasures - 20,000 gold objects about 2,000 years old. And the most frightening parallel relates to Hitler's dream of a world dominated by a pure Aryan nation. The Taliban sets as its goal the world's most pure Islamic state.

It seeks to destroy all views and cultures that threaten that. Our culture of freedom and democracy represents the antithesis of the Taliban core beliefs.

Osama Bin Laden's Motives For U.S. Hate

Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist and the son of a Saudi billionaire, has been on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive list since 1999. The U.S. State Department has offered a $5 million reward for his arrest. Since the attack in New York, a German millionaire has offered a $10 million reward for information that leads directly to bin Laden’s arrest and conviction. U.S. prosecutors say bin Laden is the leader of al Qaeda (Arabic for "the Base"), a worldwide network blamed for both successful and failed strikes on U.S. targets. These include the millennium bombing plot, last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and the nearly simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Bin Laden's anger with the United States stems in part from the 1990 decision by Saudi Arabia to allow the U.S. to stage attacks on Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq. After the U.S. victory, the U.S. military presence became permanent. In a CNN interview with bin Laden in 1997, he said the ongoing U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia is an "occupation of the land of the holy places."

Bin Laden began forming his network in 1979, when he went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets as an Afghan resistance fighter in the Mujihadin. He used his family's connections and substantial wealth to raise money for the Afghan resistance. As the war with the Soviets drew to a close, bin Laden formed al Qaeda, an organization of ex- Mujihadin and other supporters.

Once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work for the family construction firm, the Bin Laden Group. He became involved in Saudi groups opposed to the reigning Saudi monarchy, the Fahd family. In 1991, he took with him an inheritance worth an estimated $250 million and fled to the Sudan, and eventually Afghanastan. In 1994, the Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship and froze his assets in the country.

In 1996, bin Laden issued a "fatwah," a religious ruling urging Muslims to kill U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Somalia. A second fatwah in 1998 called for attacks on American civilians.

Afghanistan under rule of the Taliban holds no recognized position in the world community. It protects bin Laden because to give him up would be to forfeit the enormous financial support from his network. That would leave the Taliban vulnerable to overthrow by the Afghan resistance (which the United States may support as a means of getting to bin Laden.).

As far as bin Laden's deep hatred of the United States, it is by most accounts not a matter of politics or personal gain. His is an ideological war. America and its citizens represent everything he hates and believes must be destroyed toward creating the pure Islamic state.

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