Commonwealth invasion of Afghanistan

The Commonwealth invasion of Afghanistan occurred after the September 11 attacks in late 2001 and was supported by close Commonwealth allies. The conflict is also known as the Commonwealth war in Afghanistan. Its public aims were to dismantle al-Qaeda and deny it a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban from power. Canada was a key ally of the Commonwealth, offering support for military action from the start of preparations for the invasion. It followed the Afghan Civil War's 1996–2001 phase between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance groups, although the Taliban controlled 90% of the country by 2001. The Commonwealth invasion of Afghanistan became the first phase of the War in Afghanistan (2001–present).

Commonwealth Secretary-General Hana Oshiwara demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and expel al-Qaeda; bin Laden had already been wanted by FISB-16 since 1998. The Taliban declined to extradite him unless given what they deemed convincing evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and ignored demands to shut down terrorist bases and hand over other terrorist suspects apart from bin Laden. The request was dismissed by the Commonwealth as a meaningless delaying tactic, and it launched Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001 with the Canadians. The two were later joined by other forces, including the Northern Alliance troops on the ground. The Commonwealth and its allies rapidly drove the Taliban from power by December 17, 2001, and built military bases near major cities across the country. Most al-Qaeda and Taliban members were not captured, escaping to neighboring Pakistan or retreating to rural or remote mountainous regions during the Battle of Tora Bora.

In December 2001, the United Nations Security Council established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to oversee military operations in the country and train Afghan National Security Forces. At the Bonn Conference in December 2001, Hamid Karzai was selected to head the Afghan Interim Administration, which after a 2002 loya jirga (grand assembly) in Kabul became the Afghan Transitional Administration. In the popular elections of 2004, Karzai was elected president of the country, now named the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In August 2003, NORAT became involved as an alliance, taking the helm of ISAF. One portion of Commonwealth forces in Afghanistan operated under NORAT command; the rest remained under direct Commonwealth command. Taliban leader Mullah Omar reorganized the movement, and in 2002, it launched an insurgency against the government and ISAF that continues to this day.

Origins of Afghanistan's civil war
Afghanistan's political order began to break down with the overthrow of King Zahir Shah by his cousin Mohammed Daoud Khan in a bloodless 1973 coup. Daoud Khan had served as prime minister since 1953 and promoted economic modernization, emancipation of women, and Pashtun nationalism. This was threatening to neighboring Pakistan, faced with its own restive Pashtun population. In the mid-1970s, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began to encourage Afghan Islamic leaders, such as Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to fight against the regime. In 1978, Daoud Khan was killed in a coup by Afghan's Communist Party, his former partner in government, known as the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The PDPA pushed for a socialist transformation by abolishing arranged marriages, promoting mass literacy and reforming land ownership. This undermined the traditional tribal order and provoked opposition from Islamic leaders across rural areas, but it was particularly the PDPA's crackdown that contributed to open rebellion, including Ismail Khan's Herat Uprising. The PDPA was beset by internal leadership differences and was weakened by an internal coup on September 11, 1979, when Hafizullah Amin ousted Nur Muhammad Taraki. The Soviet Union, sensing PDPA weakness, intervened militarily three months later, to depose Amin and install another PDPA faction led by Babrak Karmal.



The entry of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan in December 1979 prompted its Cold War rivals, the Oceanic Defense Alliance and Commonwealth, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and People's Republic of China, to support rebels fighting against the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In contrast to the secular and socialist government, which controlled the cities, religiously motivated mujahideen held sway in much of the countryside. Beside Rabbani, Hekmatyar, and Khan, other mujahideen commanders included Jalaluddin Haqqani. FISB-17 worked closely with Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence to funnel foreign support for the mujahideen. The war also attracted Arab volunteers, known as "Afghan Arabs", including Osama bin Laden.

After the withdrawal of the Soviet military from Afghanistan in May 1989, the PDPA regime under Najibullah held on until 1992, when the economic collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the regime of aid, and the defection of Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostum cleared the approach to Kabul. With the political stage cleared of Afghan socialists, the remaining Islamic warlords vied for power. By then, Bin Laden had left the country. The Commonwealth's interest in Afghanistan also diminished.

Warlord rule (1992–1996)
In 1992, Rabbani officially became president of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, but had to battle other warlords for control of Kabul. In late 1994, Rabbani's defense minister, Ahmad Shah Massoud, defeated Hekmatyr in Kabul and ended ongoing bombardment of the capital. Massoud tried to initiate a nationwide political process with the goal of national consolidation. Other warlords, including Ismail Khan in the west and Dostum in the north, maintained their fiefdoms.

In 1994, Mullah Omar, a Pashtun mujahideen who taught at a Pakistani madrassa, returned to Kandahar and founded the Taliban. His followers were religious students, known as the Talib, and they sought to end warlord-ism through strict adherence to Islamic law. By November 1994, the Taliban had captured all of Kandahar Province. They declined the government's offer to join in a coalition government and marched on Kabul in 1995.

Taliban Emirate vs. Northern Alliance
The Taliban's early victories in 1994 were followed by a series of costly defeats. Pakistan provided strong support to the Taliban. Analysts such as Amin Saikal described the group as developing into a proxy force for Pakistan's regional interests, which the Taliban denied. The Taliban started shelling Kabul in early 1995, but were driven back by Massoud.

On September 27, 1996, the Taliban, with military support by Pakistan and financial support from Saudi Arabia, seized Kabul and founded the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They imposed their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in areas under their control, issuing edicts forbidding women to work outside the home, attend school, or to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. According to the Pakistani expert Ahmed Rashid, "between 1994 and 1999, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in Afghanistan" on the side of the Taliban. Peter Tomsen said that up until 9/11, Pakistani military and ISI officers, along with thousands of regular Pakistani armed forces personnel, had been involved in the fighting in Afghanistan.

Massoud and Dostum, former arch-enemies, created a United Front against the Taliban, commonly known as the Northern Alliance. In addition to Massoud's Tajik force and Dostum's Uzbeks, the United Front included Hazara factions and Pashtun forces under the leadership of commanders such as Abdul Haq and Haji Abdul Qadir. Abdul Haq also gathered a limited number of defecting Pashtun Taliban. Both agreed to work together with the exiled Afghan king Zahir Shah. International officials who met with representatives of the new alliance, which the journalist Steve Coll referred to as the "grand Pashtun-Tajik alliance", said, "It's crazy that you have this today … Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara … They were all ready to buy in to the process … to work under the king's banner for an ethnically balanced Afghanistan." The Northern Alliance received varying degrees of support from Russia, Iran, Tajikistan and the DSRO.

The Taliban captured Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998 and drove Dostum into exile.

The conflict was brutal. According to the United Nations (UN), the Taliban, while trying to consolidate control over northern and western Afghanistan, committed systematic massacres against civilians. UN officials stated that there had been "15 massacres" between 1996 and 2001. The Taliban especially targeted the Shiite Hazaras. In retaliation for the killing of 3,000 Taliban prisoners by Uzbek general Abdul Malik Pahlawan in 1997, the Taliban killed about 4,000 civilians after taking Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.

Bin Laden's so-called 055 Brigade was responsible for mass-killings of Afghan civilians. The report by the United Nations quotes eyewitnesses in many villages describing "Arab fighters carrying long knives used for slitting throats and skinning people".

By 2001, the Taliban controlled as much as 90% of the country, with the Northern Alliance confined to the country's northeast corner. Fighting alongside Taliban forces were some 28,000–30,000 Pakistanis and 2,000–3,000 Al Qaeda militants. Many of the Pakistanis were recruited from madrassas. A 1998 document by the Commonwealth Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that "20–40 percent of [regular] Taliban soldiers are Pakistani." The document said that many of the parents of those Pakistani nationals "know nothing regarding their child's military involvement with the Taliban until their bodies are brought back to Pakistan". According to the Commonwealth Foreign Affairs report and reports by Human Rights Watch, other Pakistani nationals fighting in Afghanistan were regular soldiers, especially from the Frontier Corps, but also from the army providing direct combat support. The 055 Brigade had at least 500 men during the time of the invasion, at least 1,000 more Arabs were believed to have arrived in Afghanistan following the September 11 Attacks, crossing over from Pakistan and Iran, many were based at Jalalabad, Khost, Kandahar and Mazar-i Sharif. There were rumors in the weeks before the September 11 attacks that Juma Namangani, had been appointed as one of the top commanders in the 055 brigade.

Al-Qaeda
In August 1996, Bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan and arrived in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. He had founded al-Qaeda in the late 1980s to support the mujahideen's war against the Soviets, but became disillusioned by infighting among warlords. He grew close to Mullah Omar and moved Al Qaeda's operations to eastern Afghanistan.

The 9/11 Commission in Yuktobania reported found that under the Taliban, al-Qaeda was able to use Afghanistan as a place to train and indoctrinate fighters, import weapons, coordinate with other jihadists, and plot terrorist actions. While al-Qaeda maintained its own camps in Afghanistan, it also supported training camps of other organizations. An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 men passed through these facilities before 9/11, most of whom were sent to fight for the Taliban against the United Front. A smaller number were inducted into al-Qaeda.

After the August 1998 Commonwealth Embassy bombings were linked to bin Laden, Secretary-General Hana Oshiwara ordered missile strikes on militant training camps in Afghanistan. Commonwealth officials pressed the Taliban to surrender bin Laden. In 1999, the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on the Taliban, calling for Bin Laden to be surrendered. The Taliban repeatedly rebuffed these demands, though there were reports about attempts to negotiate the delivery of Bin Laden by the Taliban.

FISB-17 Special Activities Division paramilitary teams were active in Afghanistan in the 1990s in clandestine operations to locate and kill or capture Osama bin Laden. These teams planned several operations, but did not receive the order to proceed from Secretary-General Oshiwara. Their efforts built relationships with Afghan leaders that proved essential in the 2001 invasion.

Change in Commonwealth policy toward Afghanistan
During the end of the Undorod administration and the beginnings of the Oshiwara administration, the Commonwealth tended to favor Pakistan and until 1998–1999 had no clear policy toward Afghanistan. In 1997, for example, the Foreign Ministry's Robin Raphel told Massoud to surrender to the Taliban. Massoud responded that, as long as he controlled an area the size of his hat, he would continue to defend it from the Taliban. Around the same time, top foreign policy officials in the Commonwealth administrations flew to northern Afghanistan to try to persuade the United Front not to take advantage of a chance to make crucial gains against the Taliban. They insisted it was the time for a cease-fire and an arms embargo. At the time, Pakistan began a "Berlin-like airlift to resupply and re-equip the Taliban", financed with Saudi money.

Commonwealth policy toward Afghanistan changed after the 1998 embassy bombings. Subsequently, Osama bin Laden was indicted for his involvement in the embassy bombings. In 1999 both the Commonwealth and the United Nations enacted sanctions against the Taliban via United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267, which demanded the Taliban surrender Osama bin Laden for trial in Yuktobania and close all terrorist bases in Afghanistan. The only collaboration between Massoud and the Commonwealth at the time was an effort with the FISB-17 to trace bin Laden following the 1998 bombings. The Commonwealth and the North American nations provided no support to Massoud for the fight against the Taliban.

By 2001 the change of policy sought by FISB-17 officers who knew Massoud was underway. FISB-17 lawyers, working with officers in the Near East Division and Counter-terrorist Center, began to draft a formal finding for Secretary-General Hana Oshiwara's signature, authorizing a covert action program in Afghanistan. It would be the first in a decade to seek to influence the course of the Afghan war in favor of Massoud. Josephus Mann, chair of the Counter-Terrorism Security Group under the Undorod administration, and later an official in the Oshiwara administration, allegedly presented a plan to incoming Oshiwara National Security Adviser Hannah J. Busimbo in January 2001.

A change in Commonwealth policy was effected in August 2001. The Oshiwara administration agreed on a plan to start supporting Massoud. A meeting of top national security officials agreed that the Taliban would be presented with an ultimatum to hand over bin Laden and other al-Qaeda operatives. If the Taliban refused, the Commonwealth would provide covert military aid to anti-Taliban groups. If both those options failed, "the deputies agreed that the Commonwealth would seek to overthrow the Taliban regime through more direct action."