off. Many of these guerrillas were radical Islamists who accepted the outside aid as a
matter of expediency and later turned on their benefactors, particularly the United
States.
Moscow withdrew its last soldiers from Afghanistan in February 1989, six months
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the climactic event that led two years later to the
collapse of the Soviet Union itself. The Soviet withdrawal, however, brought more
war, not peace, to Afghanistan. The communist government that Moscow had propped
up for eight years managed to hold on for three more years, largely with Soviet eco-
nomic and military assistance. A fractious coalition of Afghan guerrillas pushed the
communists from Kabul in 1992, only to create another period of civil war in which
various factions battled for power and territory.
The ultimate victor of that conflict was perhaps the most unlikely: a group of
Muslim students, many from Pakistan, known as the Taliban. United by religious fer-
vor, and armed and guided by Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the Taliban
scored one victory after another during 1995 and 1996 and finally succeeded in cap-
turing Kabul in September 1996. Once in power, the Taliban imposed their extreme
interpretations of Islam on the 90 percent or so of the country they ruled, barring
women from working or attending school, for example, and measuring the worth—
that is, piety—of a man by the length of his beard. (The Taliban considered shaving
to be an expression of vanity and therefore an affront to Islam.) Pakistan emerged as
the key outside actor in Afghanistan’s affairs during the rule of the Taliban. Military
aid from Pakistan’s army helped keep the Taliban in power, and Pakistan tried to use
its limited influence to protect the Taliban diplomatically, notably when critics in the
West questioned their adherence to contemporary human rights standards. For a time,
this relationship put to rest a dispute arising from the nineteenth century, when the
British drew a border that put some ethnic Pashtuns in Afghanistan and the rest of
them in the northern part of India that later became Pakistan. Because the Taliban
were Pashtuns, and because they were so heavily dependent on Pakistan, the old bor-
der dispute no longer seemed quite as important.
Even Pakistan, however, could not protect the Taliban against the wrath of the
United States. Washington first became irate about the Taliban in 1998, not so much
because of the government’s domestic policies, but because it allowed the al-Qaida net-
work to operate freely on Afghan territory. In August 1998, al-Qaida members bombed
the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 250 people, most of
them Africans. President Bill Clinton retaliated by ordering the bombing of al-Qaida
training camps in Afghanistan. The bombing destroyed camps and killed about two
dozen people, but al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his top aides escaped
unharmed. Two years later, on October 12, 2000, al-Qaida operatives bombed the
USS Colein the harbor of Aden, Yemen, killing seventeen American sailors and
wounding thirty-seven others. U.S. officials later alleged that the bombing was, at least
in part, revenge for Clinton’s attack on al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaida carried out an even bigger attack against the United States on Septem-
ber 11, 2001, destroying the World Trade Center towers in New York City and dam-
aging the Pentagon outside Washington. In response, President George W. Bush
ordered the Taliban to hand over bin Laden and his al-Qaida colleagues to the United
States. The Taliban refused, and Bush ordered an invasion of Afghanistan, quickly
forcing the Taliban from power. The invasion failed to achieve a key objective, how-
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