Blood Washing Blood: Afghanistan's Hundred-Year War

by Phil Halton

Overview

A clear-eyed view of the conflict in Afghanistan and its century-deep roots.

The war in Afghanistan has consumed vast amounts of blood and treasure, causing the Western powers to seek an exit without achieving victory. Seemingly never-ending, the conflict has become synonymous with a number of issues — global jihad, rampant tribalism, and the narcotics trade — but even though they are cited as the causes of the conflict, they are in fact symptoms.

Rather than beginning after 9/11 or with the Soviet “invasion” in 1979, the current conflict in Afghanistan began with the social reforms imposed by Amanullah Amir in 1919. Western powers have failed to recognize that legitimate grievances are driving the local population to turn to insurgency in Afghanistan. The issues they are willing to fight for have deep roots, forming a hundred-year-long social conflict over questions of secularism, modernity, and centralized power.

The first step toward achieving a “solution” to the Afghanistan “problem” is to have a clear-eyed view of what is really driving it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459746640
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Publication date:	05/25/2021
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Phil Halton has worked around the globe as a soldier and security consultant, including in Afghanistan. He is the author of the novel This Shall Be a House of Peace. He lives in Toronto.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 16: Guilt by Association

In early 1998 the United Nations ceased operations in Kandahar after senior Taliban officials beat and threatened several staff members. The Taliban also made operations in other parts of the country more difficult when they ordered all female United Nations staff to be accompanied by their husband or a male blood relative whenever they left their homes. This was clearly impossible for the international staff. The restriction hit the mission especially heavily because the United Nations had greatly increased the proportion of female staff members in the country in order to better access the women of Afghanistan. This edict was closely followed by the Taliban order to close all offices of non-governmental organizations across the country, as the Taliban felt they were undermining their rule. This created a humanitarian crisis, as more than half of the 1.2 million people living in Kabul relied on food aid to survive.

Largely ignored by the Taliban government, the Afghan economy was a shambles. Average salaries, for those who found employment, were between one and three U.S. dollars per month. Surgeons at the government hospitals in Kabul were paid $5 per month, not enough to survive on. The World Food Program was importing 750,000 tonnes of wheat a year in 1998, which was still not enough to feed the population. Donors had begun to ask hard questions, worried that the aid that they were providing was sustaining the war rather than meeting humanitarian needs. Many wondered if the Taliban would be forced to reckon with the humanitarian situation and negotiate a peace settlement, if not for the support provided to the Afghan people by the international community.

Nonetheless, the Taliban retained their focus on defeating their enemies, attacking again from Herat in an effort to seize Mazar. Weakened by infighting, Dostum’s soldiers were routed, and the Taliban captured eight hundred Uzbek militia whom they massacred near Maimana. They also captured nearly a hundred tanks, which they used to sustain their offensive. Once again, several of Dostum’s key subordinates took bribes from the Taliban and betrayed their leader. Dostum again fled to Turkey.

The Taliban attacked Mazar on August, 8, 1998. The fighting was intense, as both sides knew that defeat meant certain death. Of the fifteen hundred Hazara defenders of the city, only one hundred survived to be captured. With the memory of their loss the previous year still fresh, the Taliban took brutal revenge on the city, looting and killing for days. Whereas before they had been chased and trapped in unfamiliar streets, this time they recruited guides from HIG who knew the city. Thousands of Hazara civilians were locked in sea containers and left in the Dasht-e Leili to die. Tens of thousands more fled the city on foot, and were attacked by the Taliban from the air.

In all, five or six thousand people were killed in Mazar, and perhaps as many more in the villages and towns along the route from Herat. Mullah Dost Mohammed entered the Iranian consulate with a group of Taliban soldiers and murdered 11 staff. The Taliban ignored Iranian government protests and took no action against the mullah, though he was later jailed after his wife complained that he had brought a Hazara concubine home with him to Kandahar. It is believed that four hundred Hazara women were taken by Taliban as sex slaves during the destruction of the city.

The Taliban had long considered the Shi’a not to be true Muslims, and in Mazar they put this theory into practice. They declared that all Shi’ites in the city had three choices: to convert to Sunni Islam, to immediately leave for Iran, or to be killed. The result was a massacre. Long-standing tensions between the Sunni and Shi’a communities in Afghanistan had subsided during the anti-Soviet jihad, as much of the rural population united against the foreigners and the government in Kabul. And for years before that, the PDPA had been promoting the equality of all ethnicities. The Taliban brand of Islam, however, borrowed from Salafists the idea that the Shi’a were not Muslims, leaving them open to horrible atrocities. While many previous Afghan governments had also targeted the Shi’a, this was often for practical reasons such as to seize land or other valuables. In the case of the Taliban, it was for ideological and religious reasons.

In August 1998 the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in attacks that killed 224 people and wounded 4,500. Although bin Laden did not direct the attacks, they were perpetrated by alumni of his training camps, and he may have funded and encouraged them as well. The American response was swift. Dozens of cruise missiles were launched into Afghanistan, targeting six camps associated with al Qaeda. It was hoped that bin Laden might be among those killed, but he survived. Most of the dead were Pakistanis being trained for operations in Kashmir.

The American attacks raised the question of whether the Taliban should continue to shelter bin Laden. Doing so prevented them from gaining recognition from the United States, which they desperately wanted. Many Afghans opposed his presence in the country, seeing Wahhabism as an alien version of their religion, and the Afghan-Arabs as arrogant and difficult to work with. Bin Laden had provided a force of Afghan-Arabs to fight alongside the Taliban, known as 555 Brigade. They were unpopular for the way in which they treated Afghans, and were likely behind some of the more extreme behaviour exhibited on the battlefield, such as the torture and murder of Shi’ites. Bin Laden’s ideas of a global jihad did not generally resonate among Afghans, whose interests largely lay within the borders of their own country. They had no interest in assisting the Kashmiris or the Palestinians or any other group fighting jihad.

Although bin Laden did have supporters among the Taliban leadership, such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, it was his friendship with Mullah Omar that mattered most. As the amir’s personal guest, he was well-nigh untouchable. Within the Pashtunwali is the concept of melmastia, which obligates a host to protect and shelter a guest. Even when pressure on the regime mounted, Mullah Omar stubbornly cited this precept as the reason why bin Laden was allowed to remain. In November the United States began to communicate directly with Mullah Omar via a satellite phone provided to him by the ISI. It offered a $5 million reward and international recognition if he would hand over bin Laden, but he refused. Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia flew to Kandahar to try to convince Mullah Omar to hand bin Laden to him, but to no avail. Mullah Omar insulted the prince so badly that the Saudis immediately suspended diplomatic relations with the Taliban, although they did not suspend their funding.

By early 1999 even Mullah Omar recognized that bin Laden had become a liability, and encouraged him to disappear discreetly from Kandahar to live elsewhere in the country. Mullah Omar wrote to President Clinton that year, saying: “whatever we are — even if we are as you say fundamentalists — we are far from you and we do not intend to harm you and cannot harm you either.” The letter did little to change American perceptions of the Taliban. Yet the Taliban still hoped for international recognition. When the Hazarajat fell to a three-pronged Taliban attack that year, the Taliban largely refrained from massacring civilians, possibly fearing that to do so would strain relations with the United States even further.

Table of Contents

Provinces and Cities of Afghanistan xv

Pashtun Tribes xvi

Barakzai Dynasty 1826-1978 xvii

1 1919 1

2 Early Reforms 11

3 Rebellion on All Sides 27

4 The Water Carrier's Boy 43

5 The Shadow of God 57

6 The Boy King 69

7 Pashtunistan 81

8 The Strong Hand of the Prime Minister 95

9 The Last Amir 107

10 An Amir by Any Other Name 121

11 Bloody April 137

12 A Godless and Alien Regime 151

13 With Neither The Soviets Nor Goo 167

14 The Students 183

15 The Commander of the Faithful 197

16 Guilt by Association 209

17 Infinite Justice 223

18 Opportunity Lost 237

19 The Neo-Taliban 257

20 Left to Stand Alone 275

21 Fraying at the Edges 291

22 Faint Hope for the Future 309

Conclusion 319

Acknowledgements 327

Glossary 329

Source Notes 335

Selected Bibliography 347

Index 363

About the Author 395

Editorial Reviews

Understanding Afghanistan and its evolution necessitates a grounding in its political history. In this volume, Phil Halton has taken a complex topic and woven a detailed, highly readable narrative that makes the topic easily accessible to anyone interested in the region, and how it became what it is today. The events of 9/11 created a resurgence in our interest in Afghanistan. In Blood Washing Blood, author Phil Halton has shown that path to 9/11, and beyond, actually began much earlier. Tracing the last century of twists and tumult in Afghan history, he has created a narrative which makes a very complicated history readily accessible to the contemporary student of the religion.

Colonel Tod Strickland

Halton has an easy style, which he uses to effect in this well-researched and highly readable history, while endeavouring to untangle a highly complex subject. The author wisely goes back more than a century in order to establish that the current animosities had their roots long before the Soviets or the West found themselves fighting in Afghanistan. This book is a necessary read for any outsider wishing to gain any appreciation of the many factions, tribes, leaders, families, and individual actors and their loyalty-based and highly complex interactions. Further, Halton has done a good job of presenting the history from an Afghan perspective. He rightly concludes that while most observers may wrongly trace the current troubles to the September 2001 attacks (or even the Soviet invasion in 1979), in fact, this misunderstanding "... fails to recognize that the conflict is an internal one between elements of Afghan society, and that Western actors — military, humanitarian, and political — merely exacerbate the conflict... " This book is at once both a warning and required reading for any who would insert expeditionary military forces into parts of the world that they do not fully comprehend.

Colonel (Ret’d) Charles S. Oliviero

Afghanistan's history and evolution is often as mysterious as it is complex to many outsiders, but Halton has expertly unpacked it for the reader in this richly detailed and easily readable overview of its past hundred years. Combining extensive research and sources with first-hand experience on the ground, he has given us an invaluable primer for unlocking the reasons behind much of the recent conflict taking place there.

LCol. Andrew B. Godefroy

Blood Washing Blood is an extremely readable account of a century of unending Afghan warfare. It provides valuable context and understanding to the human dimensions of a conflict in which the West has been mired for the last two decades.

Dr. Howard G. Coombs

Phil has done an impressive job of objectively chronicling and making unique sense of the devilishly complicated subject of contemporary political and social upheaval from an Afghan perspective. The conflicts between Afghanistan's strategic partners and adversaries, the international community, the coalition, and governments of the day are a backdrop to the "Afghan way" of personal, tribal, and ethnic influences and loyalties that have shaped domestic power struggles. Something that is exceedingly difficult for outsiders to grasp. It is one thing to see the continuing saga as an outcome of The Great Game, but Phil nuances this by additionally portraying how Afghan leaders have consistently levered the Great Powers to their particular purposes. This is a very credible and readable work that resets the narrative around 100 years of upheaval, progress, and setback.

Michael J. Ward

I wish Blood Washing Blood had been available to read before my first deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2007 or even my second tour to Kabul in 2012. I would have made it compulsory reading for my whole combat team or task force. It provides a detailed but easily understood analysis of the complicated, convoluted intricacies of Afghan history, politics, tribal relations, and power struggles.

The Royal Canadian Regiment Colonel (retired) Alex Ruff

Through this sweeping and grand political history of Afghanistan, Halton proves himself to be one of Canada's leading warrior-scholars. Blood Washing Blood combines meticulous scholarly research and ground-level field experience in a compelling story about Afghanistan's enduring war.

Dr. Aisha Ahmad

Blood Washing Blood is a good overview of the costly cycle of errors over the last 100 years ... celebrating grassroots, women-led responses to war-weariness that signal the potential for reconciliatory change.

Quill & Quire

A curious fact about the Afghan war is that many soldiers we sent to fight the Taliban — a movement whose names translates as "students" — themselves became students, educating themselves about the history and peoples of South Asia. Some of these warrior-scholars read deeply, and could hold their own in any room of grey-bearded tribal leaders. Phil Halton is an exemplary part of that tradition, a careful historian who knows the facts about Afghanistan but also knows the limits of any foreigner's understanding. His sweeping narrative is foundational reading for any student of the war, or anyone curious about why our armies fared no better than their predecessors.

Emmy-winning journalist and bestselling author of Graeme Smith

Halton depicts the tensions that have driven Afghanistan's history for the past century. The country has a complex culture, but Halton's narrative makes it comprehensible.

Winnipeg Free Press

The key to Halton's mastery of Afghanistan's story is his sure grasp of the interplay of administrative, agricultural, dynastic, economic, ethno-linguistic, religious, social, tribal, and regional factors — none of which can be ignored. By striking the right balance, Halton puts his book among the very few single-volume histories of Afghanistan that are indispensable.

Literary Review of Canada

Blood Washing Blood is a good overview of the costly cycle of errors over the last 100 years ... celebrating grassroots, women-led responses to war-weariness that signal the potential for reconciliatory change.-- "Quill & Quire"

Blood Washing Blood is an extremely readable account of a century of unending Afghan warfare. It provides valuable context and understanding to the human dimensions of a conflict in which the West has been mired for the last two decades.-- "Dr. Howard G. Coombs, Associate Chair War Studies, Royal Military College of Canada"

A curious fact about the Afghan war is that many soldiers we sent to fight the Taliban -- a movement whose names translates as "students" -- themselves became students, educating themselves about the history and peoples of South Asia. Some of these warrior-scholars read deeply, and could hold their own in any room of grey-bearded tribal leaders. Phil Halton is an exemplary part of that tradition, a careful historian who knows the facts about Afghanistan but also knows the limits of any foreigner's understanding. His sweeping narrative is foundational reading for any student of the war, or anyone curious about why our armies fared no better than their predecessors.-- "Graeme Smith, Emmy-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War In Afghanistan"

Afghanistan's history and evolution is often as mysterious as it is complex to many outsiders, but Halton has expertly unpacked it for the reader in this richly detailed and easily readable overview of its past hundred years. Combining extensive research and sources with first-hand experience on the ground, he has given us an invaluable primer for unlocking the reasons behind much of the recent conflict taking place there.-- "LCol. Andrew B. Godefroy, CD, PhD, Canadian Army Command and Staff College"

Halton depicts the tensions that have driven Afghanistan's history for the past century. The country has a complex culture, but Halton's narrative makes it comprehensible.-- "Winnipeg Free Press"

Halton has an easy style, which he uses to effect in this well-researched and highly readable history, while endeavouring to untangle a highly complex subject. The author wisely goes back more than a century in order to establish that the current animosities had their roots long before the Soviets or the West found themselves fighting in Afghanistan. This book is a necessary read for any outsider wishing to gain any appreciation of the many factions, tribes, leaders, families, and individual actors and their loyalty-based and highly complex interactions. Further, Halton has done a good job of presenting the history from an Afghan perspective. He rightly concludes that while most observers may wrongly trace the current troubles to the September 2001 attacks (or even the Soviet invasion in 1979), in fact, this misunderstanding "... fails to recognize that the conflict is an internal one between elements of Afghan society, and that Western actors -- military, humanitarian, and political -- merely exacerbate the conflict... " This book is at once both a warning and required reading for any who would insert expeditionary military forces into parts of the world that they do not fully comprehend.-- "Colonel (Ret'd) Charles S. Oliviero, CD, PhD"

I wish Blood Washing Blood had been available to read before my first deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2007 or even my second tour to Kabul in 2012. I would have made it compulsory reading for my whole combat team or task force. It provides a detailed but easily understood analysis of the complicated, convoluted intricacies of Afghan history, politics, tribal relations, and power struggles.-- "Colonel (retired) Alex Ruff, The Royal Canadian Regiment"

Phil has done an impressive job of objectively chronicling and making unique sense of the devilishly complicated subject of contemporary political and social upheaval from an Afghan perspective. The conflicts between Afghanistan's strategic partners and adversaries, the international community, the coalition, and governments of the day are a backdrop to the "Afghan way" of personal, tribal, and ethnic influences and loyalties that have shaped domestic power struggles. Something that is exceedingly difficult for outsiders to grasp. It is one thing to see the continuing saga as an outcome of The Great Game, but Phil nuances this by additionally portraying how Afghan leaders have consistently levered the Great Powers to their particular purposes. This is a very credible and readable work that resets the narrative around 100 years of upheaval, progress, and setback.-- "Michael J. Ward, Major General (Retired), Deputy Commander NATO Training Mission Afghanistan 2009-2010"

The key to Halton's mastery of Afghanistan's story is his sure grasp of the interplay of administrative, agricultural, dynastic, economic, ethno-linguistic, religious, social, tribal, and regional factors -- none of which can be ignored. By striking the right balance, Halton puts his book among the very few single-volume histories of Afghanistan that are indispensable.-- "Literary Review of Canada"

Through this sweeping and grand political history of Afghanistan, Halton proves himself to be one of Canada's leading warrior-scholars. Blood Washing Blood combines meticulous scholarly research and ground-level field experience in a compelling story about Afghanistan's enduring war.-- "Dr. Aisha Ahmad, University of Toronto, author of Jihad & Co. Black Markets and Islamist Power"

Understanding Afghanistan and its evolution necessitates a grounding in its political history. In this volume, Phil Halton has taken a complex topic and woven a detailed, highly readable narrative that makes the topic easily accessible to anyone interested in the region, and how it became what it is today. The events of 9/11 created a resurgence in our interest in Afghanistan. In Blood Washing Blood, author Phil Halton has shown that path to 9/11, and beyond, actually began much earlier. Tracing the last century of twists and tumult in Afghan history, he has created a narrative which makes a very complicated history readily accessible to the contemporary student of the religion.-- "Colonel Tod Strickland, CD. Commandant, Canadian Army Command and Staff College"

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