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By Root 1353 0

ethnic Pashtun named Mohammad Omar—Mullah Mohammad Omar, who had made recent overtures to the Pakistani government to grant him aid in building a national-level Afghan party that he claimed would quell all intra-Afghan fighting (easing the draining refugee problem in Pakistan by allowing the Afghans to move back to their homes). His fervor for strict national control of the populace and his location along the transit corridor between Turkmenistan and Pakistan cast the one-eyed Omar as the perfect candidate around which to build a force that would ensure the safe passage of the vital cotton crop. The Bhutto regime and the ISI supported him with arms, money, training, and most importantly, the procurement of personnel: talibs (students) of extremist Pakistani madrassas. These students weren’t intellectual aspirants, however; they were disaffected, hopeless, and angry youths drawn into viciously anti-Western institutes of indoctrination that preached violence against any of those who strayed from their extremist ideologies—even other Muslims. But . . . they excelled at keeping the highway open for road trains of Pakistani cotton lorries; Pakistan got its cotton and Mullah Omar got his army of “students.” In the wake of swarms of diminutive flies, the Taliban burgeoned into a regional force of reckoning.

Harshly enforcing the most draconian interpretations of Islamic law, the ruthless Taliban, many of whom claimed that they had organized to fight the rampant brutality of warlords against civilians, themselves raped women, children, and even men, plundered villages, and placed a vise grip on Afghan society. Pakistan, once again exerting influence over Afghanistan, continued to fund and aid the Taliban through much of the nineties, drawing on the execrable group and their hangers-on as they needed. Of course, just as they denied aiding the mujahideen in the 1980s, the Pakistanis staunchly maintained that they had no connection to the Taliban in the 1990s. In 1996, another base of funding and support for the Taliban arrived, this time on a large private jet landing at the dusty town of Jalalabad: Osama bin Laden and his extensive entourage. Exchanging money for protection (very large sums of the money he’d inherited from his father’s construction conglomerate), the Saudi Arabian nihilist had grown increasingly bold and determined in his new brand of shadowy international terror, financing a number of terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan including many in the Kunar province, where he, by some reports, gained familial ties through marriage—and where by some accounts, he ordered the 9/11 attacks.

While effective against other internal armed factions and warlords, the Taliban didn’t stand a chance against the U.S. forces who invaded Afghanistan as a swift response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Within weeks, U.S. forces and their indigenous Afghan allies crushed the Taliban, decimating the group even faster than they had risen under Pakistan’s nurture. And while bands of fighters aligned with the ideals of Mullah Omar would reassemble and call themselves Taliban, the movement was for the most part completely decimated by December of 2001, as most of their leadership and many of their underlings had been killed or captured and their bases of support had vanished.

The decades of violent, wrenching upheaval had left an intricate and perplexing “enemyscape” throughout the Kunar province. On two large marker boards in his office at ⅔’s Combat Operations Center (COC) at Jalalabad Airfield, Scott Westerfield listed the broad mishmash of extremist groups that the Marines of ⅔ would face: al-Qaeda terrorists from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, western China, Egypt, Chechnya, and beyond; surviving and aspiring “Taliban” fighters; members of HIG and other Islamist groups based along the border region; and local timber smugglers and small-time criminal gangs occasionally aiding and abetting the extremists out of opportunism as fighters-for-hire. In all, twenty-two distinct groups, collectively termed anticoalition