9
The Rise and Fall of the
Rabbani Government,
1992–1996
The period from 1992 to 1996 is one of the more misunderstood in
modern Afghan history. It is all too frequently depicted as a period
of unmitigated despair during which undisciplined ‘warlords’,
seemingly determined to establish that they were even less appetis-
ing than the communist regime, battered each other for no obvious
purpose at hideous cost to the civilian population. In more recent
times, this has been developed into an argument that post-Taliban
Afghanistan runs a grave risk of encountering a similar fate, since
some of the personalities are the same. The vocabulary of ‘tribal
warfare’, of ‘honour’ and ‘revenge’, and of the ‘blood feud’ is
deployed to give a semblance of anthropological respectability to
such claims.
These images are in need at very least of careful qualification, and
in some respects should be discarded altogether. To a considerable
extent they are the product of an urban bias in reporting. The south-
ern suburbs of Kabul were largely destroyed during this period, but
in rural areas, the kinds of bombardments which caused such mas-
sive casualties during the 1980s largely ceased: as a result, the aver-
age levels of mortality in the post-communist period across the
country as a whole were sharply lower than those of the 1980s – and
no reputable scholar has ever sought to argue to the contrary. But the
popular images also reflect a failure to understand the politics of this
period in a wider context. It was indeed a misfortune that Massoud