War and Remembrance in Afghanistan
World History Name: ______
E. Napp Date: ______
Historical Context:
“While the United States experienced anguish and frustration in Iran, the Soviet Union found itself facing even more serious problems in neighboring Afghanistan. Since World War II the Soviet Union had stayed out of shooting wars by using proxies to challenge the United States. But in 1978 the Soviet Union sent its army to Afghanistan to support a fledgling communist regime against a hodgepodge of local, religiously inspired guerrilla bands that had taken control of much of the countryside.
With the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan paying, equipping, and training the Afghan rebels, the Soviet Union found itself in an unwinnable war like the one the United States had stumbled into in Vietnam. Unable to justify the continuing drain on manpower, morale, and economic resources, and facing widespread domestic discontent over the war, Soviet leaders finally withdrew their troops in 1989. The Afghan communists held on for another three years. But once rebel groups took control of the entire country, they began to fight among themselves over who should rule.”
~ The Earth and Its Peoples
What are the main points of the passage?
Afghan’s Turbulent History:
“Afghanistan's descent into conflict and instability in recent times began with the overthrow of the king in 1973.
Zahir Shah was in Italy for an eye operation when he was deposed in a palace coup by his cousin, Mohammad Daoud.
Daoud declared Afghanistan a republic, with himself as president. He relied on the support of leftists to consolidate his power, and crushed an emerging Islamist movement.
But towards the end of his rule, he attempted to purge his leftist supporters from positions of power and sought to reduce Soviet influence in Afghanistan.
It was this that helped lead to a defining moment in Afghanistan's recent history – the communist coup in April 1978, known as the Saur, or April Revolution.
President Daoud and his family were shot dead, and Nur Mohammad Taraki took power as head of the country's first Marxist government, bringing to an end more than 200 years of almost uninterrupted rule by the family of Zahir Shah and Mohammad Daoud.
But the Afghan communist party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan – or PDPA – was divided, and splits emerged.
Hafizullah Amin, who had become prime minister, was opposed to Taraki, and in October 1979 Taraki was secretly executed, with Amin becoming the new president.
Amin, known for his independent and nationalist inclinations, was also ruthless.
He has been accused of assassinating thousands of Afghans.
To the Soviets in Moscow, he was looked upon as a threat to the prospect of an amenable communist government bordering Soviet Central Asia.
In a swift chain of events in December 1979, Amin was assassinated and the Soviet Red Army swept into Afghanistan.
Babrak Karmal was flown from Czechoslovakia, where he was Afghan ambassador, to take over as the new president, albeit as a puppet leader acceptable to Moscow.
The Soviet occupation, which lasted until the final withdrawal of the Red Army in 1989, was a disaster for Afghanistan.
About a million Afghans lost their lives as the Red Army tried to impose control for its puppet Afghan government. Millions more fled abroad as refugees.
Groups of Afghan Islamic fighters – or mujahideen – fought endlessly to try to force a Soviet retreat, with much covert support from the United States.
After nearly 10 years, the Soviet Union eventually withdrew, leaving in power President Najibullah, who had replaced Karmal as leader.
He hung on for three years after the Red Army's departure, but fell in 1992 as the United Nations was trying to arrange a peaceful transfer of power.
The mujahideen swept victoriously into Kabul. After a short interim measure, Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani became president of the new Islamic Republic.
But their victory was soon soured by infighting, as the mujahideen factions failed to agree on how to share their new power.
During the Soviet occupation it was predominantly rural areas that suffered military onslaught as the Red Army tried to flush out the mujahideen.
But when the mujahideen took over, it was the turn of urban areas to suffer from the conflict.
This was especially true of the capital, Kabul, about half of which was literally flattened. Tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives, and the country slid more and more into a state of anarchy.
It was towards the end of 1994 that the Taleban emerged in the southern city of Kandahar, heart of Afghanistan's Pashtun homeland.
Their initial appeal – and success – was based on a call for the removal of the mujahideen groups.
At first they succeeded in gaining control of Pashtun areas with little fighting. Mujahideen commanders defected to their ranks.
But as their control spread to other, especially non-Pashtun, areas, the fighting intensified.
The Taleban went on to control about 90% of the country.
It was in 1996, as they captured Kabul, that much of the outside world first reacted in dismay to the Taleban's extreme Islamic policies, especially towards the place of women in society.
As Taleban control spread, the Western world intensified pressure on the Taleban to ban the growth of opium poppies, Afghanistan being the source of most opiates reaching Europe.
The United States, in particular, also began their pressure on the Taleban to give up the militant Saudi, Osama Bin Laden, whom the Taleban described as their “guest” in Afghanistan.
Washington blamed Bin Laden for masterminding the suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001.
The following month the US and its allies began air attacks on Afghanistan which allowed the Taleban's Afghan opponents to sweep them from power. Kabul was retaken in November and by early December the Taleban had given up their stronghold of Kandahar.
On 5 December 2001 Afghan groups agreed a deal in Bonn for an interim government, at the head of which Pashtun royalist Hamid Karzai was then sworn in.
The Bonn conference, held under UN auspices, forged a political blueprint leading to elections scheduled for summer 2004.
In June 2002 a loya jirga, or grand council, elected Mr. Karzai as interim head of state. A second loya jirga in January 2004 adopted a new constitution.
In September, 2002, Mr. Karzai survived an assassination attempt in Kandahar blamed on the Taleban. There have been other near misses since. A number of his ministers and other senior figures have been less fortunate.
Mr. Karzai has been able to exert little control beyond the capital.
Turf wars between local commanders have been a feature of the post-Taleban period.
And the Taleban themselves have re-emerged as a fighting force; worsening the security situation first in the east and south-east, and then across much of the country.
Thousands have been killed in the violence in recent years, including many militants and foreign and Afghan troops, as well as large numbers of civilians.”
~ bbc.co.uk
What are the main points of the passage?
The Article: Where War Still Echoes, Recalling Earlier Battles; New York Times, Graham Bowley, December 11, 2012
HERAT, Afghanistan – For a country disfigured by decades of conflict, it seems fitting that Afghanistan should have a place set aside for reflecting on war.
The Jihad Museum on a forested hillside in the western provincial capital of Herat is many things: a temple to the mujahedeen heroes who battled the Soviets in the 1970s and ’80s, and a memorial for the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were slaughtered or fled the fighting.
It is also, for many Afghans, a not-so-veiled portrayal of a likely future: they review the museum’s dioramas of historical violence with clenching knots in their stomachs, fearing that the scenes may play out again soon, after the end of the NATO combat mission here in 2014.
“I think the worst days are yet to come,” said Obaidullah Esar, 51, a former fighter, who was touring the museum one recent afternoon.
The museum is a blue, green and white rotunda covered on the outside with the names of hundreds of victims from the war, all set in a watered garden of flower beds and fountains.
It boasts captured Soviet weaponry like tanks, a MIG fighter jet and helicopters. It has a portrait hall of fame of mujahedeen commanders.
The star attraction is a graphic diorama showing models of Afghan villagers rising up in a hellish wartime landscape to cudgel the heads of Soviet oppressors, in a triumphant if rather rosy narrative arc: Soviets commit heinous acts against poor villagers, farmers besiege Soviet tanks with sticks, Soviet soldiers are throttled, Soviet soldiers are shot. At the end, the army of the mujahedeen marches home victorious.
Still, if its view is more triumphal than strictly historical, it is one of the few accounts of the era that is easily accessible here.
What are the main points of the passage?
“Since most Afghans are uneducated and we don’t have good historians to write our histories, our children don’t know who the Russians were, why the Afghans fought against them and what was the result of their resistance,” said Sayed Wahid Qattali, a prosperous 28-year-old politician and businessman who is the son of a former jihadi commander. Mr. Qattali’s father established the museum with the help of Ismail Khan, a mujahedeen warlord and former governor of Herat.
Mr. Qattali says one of the motivations for building the museum is the reluctance of the country’s official history books to address the painful events of the past four decades. In an attempt to depoliticize the history of a country pulled in so many different ways by ethnic tensions, school textbooks tell Afghanistan’s history in depth only up until about the 1970s, skipping over major events since then like the Soviet invasion, civil war, the Taliban’s reign and the American-led invasion and military presence.
Mr. Qattali wants the museum to fill that void, in particular telling his version of the mujahedeen’s exploits – before time moves on and the next chapter of history is inevitably written.
His family has profited during the relative calm of the past 10 years, with interests from chicken farms to a security firm that guards NATO fuel convoys, and he runs his own television station.
Recently, he toured the garden of the museum, showing off the mujahedeen’s trophies, like the MIG jet.
“Afghans have very bad memories of this,” he said, shaking his head, before strolling past an 82-millimeter light-rocket launcher perched in the grass. Near a Soviet helicopter, behind some bushes, Mr. Qattali hunched his shoulders and grew even more morose. “A lot of people were killed by this kind of helicopter,” he said. “We lost a lot of relatives and loved ones. Of course, we fought to the end.”
What are the main points of the passage?
Inside the hushed museum, shoeless feet – visitors are required to remove their shoes – shuffled past glass cabinets of centuries-old rifles seized from British soldiers in earlier conflicts. The British were repelled, too, and the guns were used against the Soviets, showing an Afghan knack for taking whatever weapons invaders bring and turning them to their advantage.
A museum visitor might reflect that the arsenal of weaponry currently being supplied to Afghanistan by the American-led coalition could one day be piled here, too.
After the guns, a long corridor is lined with more than 60 iconic portraits of mujahedeen commanders who made their names during the fighting against the Soviets and, later, the Taliban: men like Ahmed Shah Massoud and Abdul Haq.
Though they share a hallway, the warlords hardly were united.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, the jihadists fought ferociously among themselves, wreaking their own devastation. That sad story is not told here, though a facet of it is implied: In the Jihad Museum, the portraits of warlords allied with Mr. Khan appear proudly front and center, while the mujahedeen of rival parties like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are bestowed only grudging prominence, virtually hidden as an afterthought in the corner.
Even as the faces of factionalism haunt this museum, they also loom over the present-day politics in the capital, Kabul. Many of the same men and their supporters uneasily share space in the halls of government. When Afghans sketch out their fears about a coming civil war, those are also the men they envision leading it.
After the hall of fame, stairs rise to the museum’s most dramatic offering – the painted landscape of chalk figurines, tanks and villagers, consumed in an inferno of war around Herat, this province where some of the early resistance to the Soviets and the Soviet-backed government came together. A loudspeaker pipes in the terrible booms and rattles of war.
The clear message here is to remind that war is horrifying, and that if it comes again it will bring destruction and force people to flee to lives of exile in Iran and Pakistan, as many in older generations did, Mr. Qattali said. He concedes, though, that there is also a message encoded for the Taliban here: If the ordinary folk of Herat once again faced an invading oppressor, they would fight.