‘another world’ compared to May. Reconstruction projects were
beginning to get underway, and amongst aid agencies, there was
a sense of considerable optimism. As it turned out, this period
represented the calm before the storm. It came to an end when
the Taliban made their way back to the outskirts of the city and
began to rocket it in a fashion indistinguishable from that of the
Hezb-e Islami(Davis, 1998: 64). But it showed that there was an
alternative to Taliban power as a way of bringing a better life to
the people of Kabul.
BEYOND KABUL
Thus far, I have concentrated on the situation in Kabul, for its
symbolic importance made it the focal point of struggle. With
the collapse of Najibullah’s regime and the fragmentation of the
Afghan Army, new power centres emerged in different parts of
the country (although in the Hazarajat, the situation remained
much as it was before the regime collapsed). In some places, local
commanders struggled for influence or exercised control over lim-
ited tracts of territory; while in other parts regional ‘strongmen’
emerged, either from the ranks of the Mujahideen or from the
wreckage of the Kabul regime, who benefited from the autonomy
which the disorder in Kabul indirectly conferred on them. Where
‘strongmen’ emerged, they tended to appropriate the surviving
‘trenches’ and ‘dispersed field offices’ of the state in order to
administer state functions. In Pushtun areas, the assets of the old
state were more likely to be divided as booty between different
groups. ‘Among Pashtuns,’Rubin writes, ‘the only modernized
military force that survived was Hikmatyar’s, precisely because it
had no regional or tribal base to fragment it’ (Rubin, 1995a: 275).
Where local commanders jostled for power, there was a sharp
increase in predatory warlordism, as ‘taxing’ – in effect, robbing–
those using the roads became a key income source to sustain the
commanders’ patronage networks. This was particularly a problem
in southern Afghanistan.
The Rise and Fall of the Rabbani Government, 1992–1996 207