Rise of the Taliban
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
After the Soviet Union withdrew its last soldiers from Afghanistan in February 1989,
observers widely assumed that the communist government in Kabul led by Muham-
mad Najibullah would collapse under the weight of the mujahidin insurgency.
Although it enjoyed little popular support, Najibullah’s government had two impor-
tant advantages: the Soviet Union continued to provide the government with a large
arsenal of military equipment (much of it recalled from Eastern European countries
after the fall of the Berlin Wall later in 1989); and one of the country’s most impor-
tant guerrilla commanders, the Uzbek leader Abdurrashid Dostum, used his militia to
help keep Najibullah in power. Early in 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union’s col-
lapse, Najibullah lost both these sources of support.
In March 1992, Najibullah announced that he was stepping down in favor of an
“interim” government, and in late April forces loyal to Ahmed Shah Massoud, one of
the most successful mujahidin commanders, took control of Kabul. The sudden col-
lapse of Najibullah’s government left mujahidin political leaders, based in Peshawar,
Pakistan, unprepared to exercise power through a united government. Instead, the
politicians and guerrilla fighters decided to alternate power through a series of interim
governments. In June 1992, Burhannuddin Rabbani took office as interim president,
a position he was supposed to hold for only a few months. In December, however,
Rabbani arranged for a council of elders to extend his term for two years—a move
that angered rival mujahidin leaders and set off a civil war among the former anti-
Soviet allies. Much of the fighting centered around ethnic loyalties. Massoud and Rab-
bani were ethnic Tajiks, for example, while many of their rivals were ethnic Pashtuns
(the largest group in Afghanistan), Uzbeks, or members of other groups.
For the better part of three years—from early 1993 through much of 1996—rival
groups, in constantly shifting alliances, battled for control of Kabul and other strate-
gic areas. By early 1994, the capital had been largely destroyed by rocket fire, much
of it from forces loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who claimed he—rather than
Rabbani—was the rightful president.
Taliban Take Power
While the rival mujahidin forces battered each other, in south-central Afghanistan, a
group of ethnic Pashtun students from Islamic schools (madaris) in Afghanistan and
Pakistan organized as a military force, with support from the governments of Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia. The students were known as the Taliban (talibmeans student), and
their promise to restore traditional, rural Islamic values to Afghanistan won them wide-
spread popularity.
In November 1994, the Taliban captured Kandahar, the country’s second-largest
city, then moved quickly to the north and west, seizing the town of Wardak, just south
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