War in Afghanistan

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The war in Afghanistan comprises a series of interrelated armed conflicts that have raged in Afghanistan since 1978 . The conflict began in April 1978 with a coup by the Communist People's Party , which sparked an uprising among large sections of the population. In December 1979 the Soviet Union intervened militarily in the conflict and installed a new communist leadership. With the Soviet invasion began a ten-year conflict between the Soviet-backed central government and American-backed resistance groups of the Mujahedin , which devastated large parts of the country. After the Soviet withdrawal in the spring of 1989, the collapse of the regime in 1992 was followed by an internal Afghan civil war in which the American-backed Taliban movement took control of most of the country until 1996. In the fall of 2001, the Taliban government was overthrown by a US-led intervention in favor of the remaining armed opposition. The management level of the Taliban was able to hold on by withdrawing to Pakistan and has been leading an uprising against the new Afghan government with increasing intensity since 2003.

Acid Revolution 1978

Military presence at the Presidential Palace in Kabul on April 28, 1978, one day after the coup

The rival factions of Afghan communists that emerged from the split in the Democratic People's Party (DVPA) , the Pashtun-shaped Chalqis led by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin and the Partschamis under Babrak Karmal , had reunited in 1977 under Soviet pressure and have been working through since then Penetration of the army corps in the wake of a coup against the regime of Mohammed Daoud Khan . Daoud had been pursuing a non -aligned foreign policy since 1975 , which earned him the hostility of the Soviet leadership.

The coup was triggered by the murder of Mir Akbar Khyber , a communist ideologist from the Partscham wing, on April 17, 1978 by unidentified assassins. Khyber's funeral turned into a demonstration against the government and the United States. The leaders of the protests were arrested, but three days later DVPA army officers staged a coup, murdered Daoud and his family and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan . As far as we know, the Soviet Union was most likely not involved in the coup in 2017.

Soon after the coup, which the DVPA named after the Afghan month of the Saur Revolution , the conflicts within the People's Party resurfaced. The Chalqis won the power struggle within the party and purged members of the Partscham wing from the party. The regime, under the sole control of the now Amin-led Chalqis, tried brutally to carry out a revolutionary transformation of the country, especially agriculture. The radical program, accompanied by state terror, provoked uprisings in large parts of the Afghan population , which accelerated the disintegration of the already ailing state apparatus.

Amin's refusal to moderate his policies led to the loss of support from the Soviet leadership. A plan by the USSR to replace Amin with a coalition of Taraki and Karmal failed. Amin had Taraki, who had sought Soviet help in vain, killed and then sent positive signals to the United States. Alarmed by the growing chaos in Afghanistan and fearful of Amin's leaning towards the United States, the Soviet Union decided to invade the country after all. Relations between the USSR and the West were very bad at that time. The military operation was to last only a short time and install a reliable pro-Soviet government in the strategically important country. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979; a KGB special unit stormed the presidential palace and killed Amin.

Soviet intervention from 1979 to 1989

Islamist fighters in a destroyed Afghan village in 1986

The Soviet Union installed Babrak Karmal as its new president and declared - based on the Soviet intervention in the Czechoslovak Republic in 1968 - that it would withdraw its troops within a few months after the restoration of public order. In fact, the invasion marked the beginning of a ten-year occupation that killed around a million Afghans and left four million people in neighboring Iran and Pakistan.

In response to the Soviet invasion, the resistance gained a mass base, and the popular uprising against the communist government became an ideological jihad against the Soviet occupiers. Although the opposition to the Soviet invasion comprised a wide range of different groups - royalists, nationalists, and left-wing parties not affiliated with the DVPA - the military resistance was dominated by Islamist groups with little popular support. They alone had access to the predominantly American and Saudi financial and arms aid, which reached a value of up to one billion dollars a year. The deliveries were smuggled into Afghanistan by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI , which passed them on exclusively to Islamist-oriented Sunni parties that had been established as Pakistani clients before the Soviet invasion.

The Soviet leadership reacted with a military escalation regardless of the increasing unpopularity of their occupation, but despite extensive bombing and the depopulation of large parts of rural Afghanistan, they did not succeed in eliminating the resistance of the Islamist guerrillas , who call themselves mujahideen . Conversely, the insurgents were unable to overthrow the government, so that a bloody stalemate had developed in the mid-1980s.

Under the new leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev , the Soviet Union distanced itself from a purely military solution to the conflict and tried to enter into negotiations with leaders of the mujahideen parties. At the same time, Gorbachev prepared the withdrawal of the Soviet troops. Babrak Karmal was replaced by Muhammid Nadschibullāh , whose central role was the preparation of the withdrawal and the time afterwards under the heading of National Reconciliation . In November 1987 a Loya Jirga adopted a new constitution and renamed the state back to the Republic of Afghanistan. The Geneva Accords , signed in April 1988 by Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Soviet Union and the United States , finally established a full withdrawal of Soviet troops by February 1989.

Civil war from 1989 to 2001

Destruction in Kabul in 1993

The Geneva Accords were drawn up to the exclusion of the mujahideen parties and did not provide for a mechanism for transferring power to a cross-camp government. After the conclusion of the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989, the fighting between the insurgents and the central government, which was still supported by Soviet supplies, continued. Contrary to the expectations of most observers, the Najibullāh government, supported by semi-autonomous regional militias, was able to hold on to power for three years. It was not until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the associated end of Soviet aid that the central government quickly collapsed. In the spring of 1992, a loose coalition of non-Pashtun-influenced mujahiddin parties and former government militias took over Kabul.

The parties, which had already quarreled during the Soviet-Afghan war, began to fight each other in changing alliances after the fall of the capital, while a government led by Burhānuddin Rabbāni controlled the remaining state apparatus. The ongoing power struggles were mainly concentrated in Kabul, while reconstruction began in the rural areas. The city, which was hardly affected by the fighting in the Soviet-Afghan war, was largely destroyed, and the Afghan refugee crisis was exacerbated by the mass exodus from the capital. Internationally, the conflict disappeared from the political stage, but the regional powers, especially Pakistan, tried increasingly to influence developments in Afghanistan in their favor.

From 1994 the Taliban movement began to form in the province of Kandahar , which, with the support of Pakistan, gained control over most of the country within two years. In September 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul, whereupon the remaining military opposition formed the United Front against the Taliban . The alliance was pushed back to the far northeast of the country by summer 1998. The Taliban established a puritanical order based on an extreme interpretation of the Islamic Sharia , which was best known for its repressive measures against Afghan women. Internationally, the Rabbāni government, overthrown by the Taliban, continued to be recognized as the representative of Afghanistan. While the Taliban movement continued to radicalize under the influence of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida he led, the fighting between the de facto Taliban government and opposition forces continued at a lesser intensity.

Conflict since the US-led intervention in 2001

US special forces with United Front forces in November 2001

In response to the September 11, 2001 attacks carried out by members of al-Qaeda , a US-led coalition intervened on behalf of the United Front in October after the Taliban refused to take action against al-Qaeda , despite violations of the UN Charter proceed. The intervention quickly led to the overthrow of the Taliban government and ushered in a new phase of direct foreign participation in the Afghan civil war with the stationing of NATO troops. As part of the Petersberg process , a new constitution was drawn up and the way to a government with democratic legitimacy for the first time since 1964 was paved.

However, although the majority of the Afghan population initially welcomed the intervention, the newly formed Taliban movement in the Pakistani refuges managed to regain a foothold in Afghanistan since 2003. Due to the unwillingness of the participating states to provide a larger number of troops, the new state was dependent on the regional rulers who had been disempowered by the Taliban and discredited among the population, and the country was again fragmented. In addition, the underfunding of the reconstruction work, the concentration of US efforts on the parallel war in Iraq since 2003 and the ongoing interference by Pakistan prevented long-term stabilization of the state.

The Taliban leaders who fled to Pakistan managed to form a new movement that was more closely integrated into the international jihadist networks. While isolated raids in the first year after the fall of the Taliban government were still attributed to the Taliban struggling for survival, the first coordinated attacks on state institutions and foreign troops began in late 2002. Despite the subsequent increase in the number of NATO troops, the rebels' areas of operation expanded to the entire south of the country over the next four years.

further reading

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Maley: The Afghanistan Wars. Palgrave Macmillan 2002, ISBN 978-0-230-21313-5 , pp. 19-21 (English).
  2. ↑ Martin Deuerlein: The Soviet Union in Afghanistan: Interpretations and Debates 1978-2016. In: Tanja Penter, Esther Meier (Ed.): Sovietnam. The USSR in Afghanistan 1979-1989 . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2017, ISBN 978-3-506-77885-7 , p. 298 .
  3. ^ Barnett R. Rubin: The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System . Yale University Press , New Haven 2002, ISBN 978-0-300-09519-7 , p. 111 (English).
  4. ^ Barnett R. Rubin: The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System . Yale University Press, New Haven 2002, ISBN 978-0-300-09519-7 , p. 111 (English).
  5. ^ Thomas Barfield: Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6 , p. 234 (English).
  6. ^ Thomas Barfield: Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6 , p. 236 (English).
  7. ^ Thomas Barfield: Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6 , p. 238 (English).
  8. ^ Gilles Dorronsoro: Kabul at War (1992–1996): State, Ethnicity and Social Classes . South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 2007, § 3–8
  9. ↑ Gilles Dorronsoro: Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present . Columbia University Press \ / Center d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, New York \ / Paris 2005, ISBN 0-231-13626-9 , p. 236 (English).
  10. ^ William Maley: Looking Back at the Bonn Process in: Geoffrey Hayes, Mark Sedra (Eds.): Afghanistan: Transition under Threat . Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo 2008, ISBN 978-1-55458-011-8 , pp. 7-8 (English).
  11. ↑ Gilles Dorronsoro: Revolution unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the present , Columbia University Press, New York 2005, ISBN 978-0-231-13626-6 , p. 331 (English).
  12. ↑ Ahmed Rashid: Descent into Chaos: the United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia . Viking Penguin, 2008, ISBN 978-0-670-01970-0 , pp. LIII – LV (English).
  13. ↑ Antonio Giustozzi: Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2007 . Hurst Publishers, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-231-70009-2 , pp. 8-11 (English).