revolutionary forces, ‘So long as the revolution has not been fully
successful, and so long as the lawful government, however adverse-
ly affected by the fortunes of the civil war, remains within national
territory and asserts its authority, it is presumed to represent the
State as a whole’ (Lauterpacht, 1948: 93). In due course the Taliban
were granted recognition by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United
Arab Emirates, but they had wanted far more.
The Taliban faced similar problems at the UN. The UN General
Assembly on 14 December 1950 had adopted Resolution 396 (v),
which provided that ‘wherever more than one authority claims to
be the government entitled to represent a Member State in the
United Nations and this question becomes the subject of contro-
versy in the United Nations, the question should be considered in
the light of the Purposes and Principles of the Charter and the cir-
cumstances of each case’. This worked to the disadvantage of the
Taliban, whose invasion of UN premises to seize Najibullah dis-
played little commitment to the purposes and principles of the
Charter, and whose treatment of women shocked many member
states. Thus, in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, the
Credentials Committee of the UN General Assembly opted to pre-
serve the status quo, which left the Rabbani Government in control
of Afghanistan’s seat, a valuable symbolic asset.
Finding friends
Of course, the Taliban’s main backer was Pakistan, aided financial-
ly by Saudi Arabia. But this did not deter the Taliban from seeking
other supporters. For the first four years of its life, the Taliban
movement was courted by a number of optimistic energy corpor-
ations. In October 1995, the US corporation UNOCAL and the
Saudi corporation Delta Oil signed a memorandum of intent with
the government of Turkmenistan, which anticipated the construc-
tion of a gas pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan. ‘The US
and Unocal’, according to Ahmed Rashid, ‘wanted to believe that
the Taliban would win and went along with Pakistan’s analysis that
they would’ (Rashid, 2000: 179). When the Taliban took Kabul, a
244 The Afghanistan Wars